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Charles's game is off again tonight. He's lost twice in a row and the third round's not looking good either.
Losing to Erik last night had been predictable after the events of the previous twenty-four hours. Shaw's attack on the CIA facility. Trying to deal with the frightened and grieving young. The loss of Darwin – his mind still winces away from that. The loss of Angel to Shaw, a different sorrow. And then coming back here to a house full of memories, after so many years away, with an impossible task and not enough time to do it in.
Anyone could be forgiven for playing badly in the circumstances.
But today has been calmer, and they're starting to find a rhythm. Hank working on the calculations for Sean's flight, Alex setting fire to things in a place that's as safe for that as anywhere can be, Sean breaking glass and bending metal with his voice. He's not sure what Raven's up to, but she seems to be occupied with something, so that's good. For the first time he's feeling a real pleasure in teaching, too, knowing that he's making a difference: that they trust him, and that they're beginning to trust themselves. A good day.
He'd thought he'd play better tonight, but it's just not happening. He wishes he didn't know why.
He calls Erik my friend and the words resonate with a meaning only Charles can hear. There's a dangerous pleasure in it, that hidden meaning he longs to be able to share with Erik. Maybe one day, or one night, he'll find a way to tell him. But time is running out and he hasn't done it yet.
“Check,” Erik says again. He sounds amused, as if it's a catchphrase that gets funnier every time.
“Gah,” Charles says, disgusted with himself.
Erik laughs. “You should see your face,” he says.
Charles doesn't want to. Bad enough he's making a fool of himself; no need to sabotage his game even more by seeing how stupid he looks to Erik. Or by dwelling on what he's done wrong, rather than focusing on what's still to play for. He's clumsy with humiliation, almost knocking his remaining bishop over in his haste to get out of check.
“You're not usually this easy,” Erik teases him. “What's got into you?”
He looks at Erik sitting there, stretching out a hand towards the chessboard, apparently relaxed but with that ruthlessness and intent that's always simmering away in him.
You, he wants to say. It's you, Erik.
“Nothing,” he says. “I'm fine.”
Erik doesn't have to say Liar; his face says it for him. He moves his knight with lazy confidence, and Charles sees the game closing in on him again.
When did you happen to me? Charles wonders. How long has this been going on?
*~*~*~*
Erik runs towards the Russian general's house, flinging nooses of barbed wire in his wake, maiming soldiers right and left without a second thought. Shaw's not there but Erik's clearly so crazed with determination to find him that nothing can stop him.
“We have to pull out,” the CIA man says urgently.
“Sorry,” Charles says to Moira, “I can't leave him.”
It's been that way all along.
*
“There's someone out there – someone in the water!”
The rush of violent emotion, so strong it feels as if his head might explode, hatred and old pain and fear and murderous rage all bound up and knotted together, a nest of furious snakes. The shock of the impact as he plunges into the ocean, knocking the breath out of him, leaving him desperate, lungs bursting as he tries to stop this man from killing himself, killing them both. Gripping Erik around the throat from behind, clinging to him, like a parody of a lovers' embrace.
That first encounter, the closest they've ever been, or are ever likely to be. He's kept his hands to himself since then. Kept his mind away from Erik's, too.
*
“What do you know about me?” Erik flings at him when Charles tries to stop him leaving the CIA facility.
“Everything,” Charles says. It's an exaggeration, but he can't resist showing off a bit.
“Then you know to stay out of my head,” Erik says furiously.
He's always done that with the ones who really matter to him.
It's frightening, how quickly Erik becomes one of them.
*
When he sees Erik standing there in the doorway the next morning, Charles is so pleased that it shakes him.
“Erik! You came back,” he says. He tries to keep the smile from his face but he feels as if he's alight with joy.
He doesn't need to think which side he's on when Erik and the CIA man disagree: “I'm with Erik.”
He'd agree to a lot more than a road trip – long days of driving without respite, dingy motels, bad food in diners, the sort of thing that usually makes him shudder just thinking about it – if it means he can keep this extraordinary man by his side.
*
They sit side by side on the bed in the strip club, drinking champagne, and Erik jokes with Angel: “We thought that we'd show you ours if you show us yours.” She gives him a pitying look (“Baby, that is not the way it works around here”), but bursts into delighted laughter when Erik summons the ice-bucket with a snap of his fingers (“More tea, Vicar?”).
Charles is so happy he's almost giddy with it, has to resist the temptation to do something really silly. He had no idea this trip would be such fun.
*
“We were hoping you could take us all the way,” Charles says to Darwin, and Erik makes the flag on the taxi meter drop, like the clash of a cymbal punctuating a corny joke.
Erik teases him a lot, which is unexpected, but Charles likes it. Maybe he shouldn't enjoy it quite this much.
Somewhere on the long drive in Darwin's cab, Charles dozes off, and wakes up to find his face pressed against Erik's chest, Erik's arm resting lightly across his back. It feels so good that it scares Charles witless; scares him so much that he insists on picking up a girl in a bar as soon as they stop. When he goes back to her hotel room, he's perturbed to find that he can't get an erection. Never happened to him before. Luckily he's good at the other things women like, so there are no complaints; quite the reverse.
He comes back late to the motel room he and Erik are sharing, knowing he smells of sex. Erik shouts at him for waking him up, but Charles is pretty sure he wasn't asleep.
*
A cigar-smoking mutant in a bar tells them to go fuck themselves. The words hang in the air, full of something that feels like a threat, or maybe a promise. Neither of them says anything about the incident.
That night, Charles lies awake till he's sure Erik really is asleep. He's afraid of what might leak from his mind into Erik's if he relaxes his guard and lets himself start to drift off. He doesn't dare touch himself for relief, though he's aching with arousal.
*
The dog goes on barking frantically, but Charles makes them invisible to the Russian soldier peering into the back of the truck. Erik clasps his knee in congratulation, and the heat of the touch lingers and spreads, muddying Charles's thoughts.
When Erik rushes into the house, Charles isn't quick enough to stop him. He's not sure he could risk that intimacy of the mind with Erik now anyway, even if he'd been more alert. All he can do is run after Erik, try again to save him from the destruction he's so constantly drawn to.
*
On the first night back in his childhood home, Charles lies awake, alone. He grips the iron frame of the bed he hasn't slept in for so many years. He imagines the metal curling around his wrists, holding him captive as Erik strips him naked and pushes into Charles with his fingers, his tongue, his cock. Everything Charles never knew he wanted, never wanted before. Now he can't stop thinking about it.
I'll show you mine if you show me yours, he imagines saying to Erik, and Erik laughs and says I thought you'd never ask. Erik's wearing nothing but a bath-towel around his waist, and he unwraps himself like an impossible, beautiful present, so magnificent and hard that Charles's mouth literally waters with desire as he sinks to his knees. He's never done this before, never imagined doing it, but in the fantasy he knows exactly what to do, licking and teasing and sucking and stroking till Erik clutches his hair and cries out and floods his mouth, coming and coming and coming.
*~*~*~*
Erik looks up from the chessboard and for a moment Charles is afraid he's caught a glimpse of the images playing behind his eyes like a string of X-rated scenes cut by the censor.
Charles reinforces the wards he's placed around his mind, the way he did last night before taking himself in hand, the way he'll do again tonight. Erik doesn't say anything; the barriers must be holding so far.
He wonders if tonight will be the night when something finally breaks through. Wonders if he wants it to. Wonders what would happen if it did.
I could make you stay, he'd told Erik, that night at the CIA facility.
The things he could make Erik do, the things he wants to do to Erik, shimmer like a heat haze in the room till everything feels blurred and pulled out of shape. He knows his game is going to hell because he's staring at Erik's hands and his eyes and his mouth rather than watching the board.
And Erik goes on calmly breaking through his defences, capturing piece after piece till Charles is cornered again and losing feels dangerously like winning.
“Your move,” Erik says. “If you're still playing, that is.”
“Sorry,” Charles says, staring ruefully at another impending checkmate. “I was – woolgathering.”
“Woolgathering?”
“Not concentrating,” Charles translates. He's not sure if the idiom's one Erik doesn't know, or if Erik's just mocking his old-fashioned phrasing.
“I can see that,” Erik says ironically. “Are you going to surrender?”
Oh god. Charles can feel the blush scalding his face. “Really, I'm fine,” he says.
“Woolgathering,” Erik says again. He grins. “Keep on like this and you'll have enough for a new pair of gloves.”
“Ha,” Charles says, squirming.
“Maybe even with fingers this time,” Erik says. “Or would that interfere with your powers?”
Cold enough first thing this morning for gloves and heavier sweaters, the first touch of autumn sharp in the air. Sitting on the grass and talking, Erik looking so much more relaxed than usual, so damn touchable that Charles could hardly resist the impulse to grab a handful, two handfuls, of that warm sweater and push Erik down onto the grass, lie on top of him and kiss him and kiss him –
“Want some more?” Erik says, breaking in on Charles's thoughts. He gestures at Charles's empty glass.
Charles is fairly sure it's a bad idea to say yes, but he does it anyway. The good burn of the Scotch makes him believe for a moment that things are possible, even when they're not.
If Erik was a girl, Charles would know what to do. He's never had to resort to mind control to persuade a woman into bed with him. The groovy mutation line is corny, sure, but it gets their attention and once he has that the rest usually follows.
Would you want him this much if you could have him?
He's not sure whose voice that is in his head, but he tells it to shut up anyway.
It's like a bad joke, isn't it? And the joke's on him. Charles Xavier, who can always get what he wants, aching with longing for the one thing he can't have.
Even if he did use his powers to get Erik into bed, it wouldn't be enough. Because Erik doesn't want him that way, that's obvious. And anyway, Charles can't bring himself to do it. He's never minded bending the rules a bit to get what he wants, what he needs, but this would be different. He can't have this without tricking someone who matters to him. His friend.
*~*~*~*
My friend.
It's unsettling to be here with Erik, in a house so full of his old loneliness and longing.
Charles would never tell Erik the real answer to his mocking question (“Such hardship, Charles, how did you survive?”). Knowing what he knows of Erik's childhood, he'd be ashamed to mention his own. But he keeps catching glimpses of that poor little rich boy, starved for affection and companionship.
Friendship with other boys had never happened, somehow: he was shy and constrained with the ones he liked, fearing the rejection he was sure would follow if he allowed himself to risk intimacy. They wouldn't want any more to do with him if they realized he wasn't normal.
He thought he'd finally found a friend in the strange small blue girl who broke into the house and pretended to be his mother. Someone like him, at last – and it was true, up to a point. (“A hardship softened by me”, Raven said to Erik.) But the mutation slowed her aging in more ways than the physical; the more time passed, the more the age gap between them seemed to widen. He felt responsible for her, and he didn't want to be responsible for anyone.
At Harvard, and still more at Oxford, all he wanted to do was immerse himself in pleasure, find a way to stop thinking all the time. To escape from being the cold clever unlovable child he still felt he was inside.
“I'm your only friend,” Raven said to him, the shock of the words like icy water dashed in his face, making him gasp.
It wasn't quite true, but he didn't correct her. He'd never told her about Reginald. He knew she wouldn't understand.
He wasn't entirely sure he understood it himself.
Reginald Blunt: his first friend at Oxford. The aesthete across the hall. The college queer. Reginald, who taught him the hidden meaning of friendship, its history as the word for love between men. Reginald who wanted something from Charles that he never asked for in words. Who longed to touch Charles, but never did.
Charles looks across the chessboard at Erik frowning with concentration as he works out his next move, and he wants Erik so much he can hardly breathe, wants him so much he thinks Erik must be able to feel it.
For the first time, he wonders if this is how Reginald felt when he looked at him.
*~*~*~*
It was sheer chance that Charles and Reginald ever met. Although they were in the same College and living on the same staircase, they had nothing else in common. Charles was in the first year of his Henry Scholarship, reading for a second B.A. in Science; Reginald was in his final year of English. Charles was gregarious, using all he'd learned at Harvard about how to pass as normal, fit in with the crowd; Reginald kept himself to himself and had a reputation for eccentricity. He dressed in the style of an 1890s dandy and collected blue china “because of Oscar Wilde”. The rumour that he was a secret absinthe drinker was probably groundless, but it was the sort of thing people thought might be true of him.
Reginald's surroundings, like his clothes, were different from everyone else's. A scholarship boy from a small town in South Wales, he furnished his College set with odd finds from Church bazaars and little second-hand shops, or from the attics of various deceased relations. It was a great-aunt's attic that had provided the bearskin rug which Reginald claimed was the nearest he could get “in these drab modern times” to keeping a live bear in his rooms like Byron at Cambridge. The wind-up gramophone came from an elderly uncle, along with a lot of the records. Charles enjoyed the music he heard drifting across the landing late in the evening, and was always sorry when it stopped.
Even though their rooms in College were opposite each other, it was half way through his first term before Charles first exchanged words with his odd neighbour. Reginald was mostly nocturnal, seldom emerging in daylight except to go to a tutorial. If Charles hadn't been up late one night in November, trying to pin down an idea that had been eluding him all day, they might never have met at all.
Charles sniffed: yes, something was definitely burning. The smell seemed to be coming from the room opposite his. There was a light under the door. He reached out with his mind and realized with surprise that the mind on the other side of the door was awake but apparently oblivious. Time to intervene: Charles pushed the door open, and saw a pale, dark-haired young man sitting bent over a book at his desk.
“Excuse me,” Charles said, “but I think something's burning.”
“Oh!” the young man said, startled. He jumped to his feet and rushed over to the gas fire, knocking away the charred objects stuck to the bars, and waving his hands in a hopeful attempt to disperse the smoke.
“Crumpets,” he explained, looking slightly embarrassed. “I was hungry but then I started reading because they were taking so long and I forgot about them. Would you like one? I don't think they're actually ruined.”
“Thank you,” Charles said. It seemed an odd time to be eating crumpets, but why not? “I'm Charles Xavier, by the way.”
“Oh,” the man said, sounding faintly surprised. “You're the Henry Scholar, aren't you? You don't seem very American. I'm Reginald Blunt. How do you do?”
The sudden return to formality made Charles laugh. Reginald looked puzzled, but then joined in.
“If you give them a bang against the plate and then scrape it should get the worst off,” Reginald said.
“Do you often set fire to things when you're reading?” Charles enquired.
“Not very often,” Reginald said consideringly, which made Charles laugh again.
“Essay crisis?” he asked, gesturing towards the desk.
Reginald's pale face flushed. “No,” he said, “it's not for an essay.”
Charles wondered what the embarrassment was about; being caught reading something frivolous, a detective story, perhaps?
“Have you heard of Edward Carpenter?” Reginald asked hesitantly.
“No,” Charles said. “Is that what you're reading?”
Reginald nodded. “Have a look, if you like.” His tone was casual, but there was a constraint under the casualness, Charles thought.
“Ioläus,” Charles read. “An Anthology of Friendship. Who's Ioläus?”
“It's in the epigraph,” Reginald said.
“Oh,” Charles said, looking at the quotation from Plutarch:
And as to the loves of Hercules it is difficult to record them because of their number. But some who think that Ioläus was one of them, do to this day worship and honour him; and make their loved ones swear fidelity at his tomb.
Charles felt slightly awkward; he thought he understood what he'd just been told, and Reginald's expression of embarrassment and defiance seemed to confirm that. He hadn't knowingly met a homosexual before, and didn't know what to say.
“Is it all about the Greeks?” he asked, feeling he'd better say something.
Reginald looked surprised and more than a little relieved. Charles wondered what response he'd been expecting, and why he'd choose to tell someone he'd only just met a secret that seemed to cause him such anxiety.
“Quite a lot of it's about the Greeks,” Reginald said, “but he does get as far as Walt Whitman.”
“O captain! my captain!” Charles said, mock-declamatory.
Reginald's face lit up. “You know Whitman – oh, but of course you do!”
“Not much,” Charles said apologetically. “But we did that one at school.”
“Oh,” Reginald said. “Oh, you must read Leaves of Grass. If you like poetry at all, that is. I know some people don't.”
Charles hadn't given the matter much thought, but he didn't want to dash Reginald's enthusiasm. He smiled in what he hoped was a vaguely encouraging way.
“You're a scientist, aren't you?” Reginald said. “What's your area?”
“Human mutation,” Charles said.
Reginald flinched. “Eugenics?”
“God, no,” Charles said. “Eugenicists want to dictate what form mutation will take. I want to understand what life forms are capable of becoming.”
“You're very tolerant for a scientist, then,” Reginald said wryly. “Most of the ones I know hate freaks of nature. Inverts, for example.”
He looked steadily at Charles, waiting for something; Charles wasn't sure what.
“Inversion – homosexuality – must be part of nature, mustn't it?” Charles said carefully. “Otherwise evolution would have got rid of it. We're all mutants of one sort or another.”
“Yes,” Reginald said sharply, “but only some of us are sent to prison for acting in accordance with our mutant nature. Or offered a 'cure' that's worse than the so-called disease.”
It's all right for you, you're normal, Charles could hear him thinking. He felt guilty at that, but he couldn't very well say Actually, I'm not normal at all. Reginald would probably think he was making fun of him.
“I'm sorry,” he said awkwardly.
“Don't be,” Reginald said. “It's I who should apologise to you. You were being perfectly nice about it and I bit your head off.”
Charles put his hands up to his head and said “Did you? No, it still seems to be attached”, which made Reginald laugh and call him a silly ass.
“I should probably go to bed,” Charles said, looking at his watch.
“You can borrow Whitman, if you like,” Reginald said tentatively. “And I'm usually up at this hour if you'd like a cup of tea.”
“Thank you,” Charles said. “On both counts. Yes, please, I'd like that.”
He thought the Whitman might be rather hard going, but it would be rude to refuse, in the circumstances. And a cup of tea might be nice.
They spent a lot of time together after that. When Charles couldn't sleep because his brain was buzzing from his latest discoveries, dropping in on Reginald was a welcome distraction. He realized early on that he was rather more than a distraction for Reginald, which made him feel vaguely guilty at first. But the guilt wore off, and he found he quite enjoyed being desired, especially by someone he knew was too shy and too gentlemanly to make a pass. It gave him a pleasant glow, like the warmth from the cranky gas-fire.
Charles would sprawl happily on the bearskin rug while Reginald talked to him about Whitman and Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds, or played him favourite records: Pierre Bernac singing Poulenc, Kathleen Ferrier singing Britten's folksong settings. He learned more than he ever expected to know about the Greeks, though he couldn't share Reginald's enthusiasm for the weirder bits of the Symposium.
“So according to this, the fact that I like girls means that I'm actually one half of an eight-limbed spherical hermaphrodite, in search of my female side,” Charles scoffed.
“It's not meant to be science,” Reginald said defensively.
“Just as well,” Charles said. “It's worse than inversion theory, all this romantic nonsense about finding your other half. As if there's only one other person in the world you could be with. What if you never meet? Are you supposed to spend the rest of your life looking for him?”
“It may be romantic nonsense,” Reginald said, flushing, “but at least he thinks that men like me are part of nature. Just as much as people like you. Maybe that's why you don't like it, because you can't feel superior.”
The suggestion made Charles uncomfortable, though he thought there was probably something in it.
“So what happens if you do meet your other half?” he asked, as the silence threatened to become awkward.
Reginald cleared his throat. “This,” he said, opening the anthology again. “'And when one of them finds his other half ... the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: they will pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.'”
“They become lovers?” Charles asked.
“It's more than that,” Reginald said. “He says it's about complete union – 'this meeting and melting in one another's arms, this becoming one instead of two'.”
Charles couldn't imagine having that, wanting that, with anyone, but he didn't say so.
“Plato's very poetic, for someone who didn't approve of poets,” he said.
“Oh, but you can tell he loves poetry, even in the Republic,” Reginald said, taking the bait.
Charles breathed a sigh of relief as the conversation moved to safer ground.
There was something almost erotic about the feeling of being the only two people in College awake at that hour. As if the intimacy was a secret, though in fact almost everyone seemed to know about it.
Malcolm Crail, the scowling bespectacled theologian in the year above Charles's, had seen him coming out of Reginald's room in the early hours of the morning, and taken it upon himself to warn him solemnly about Reginald's “unfortunate tendencies”. Charles laughed it off, saying “I can take care of myself, thank you very much.” But the glimpse he'd caught of all the confused emotions threshing around in Malcolm's own head made him feel as if he'd brushed up against an electric fence.
“Malcolm's queer himself, of course,” Reginald said when Charles told him about the warning. “He had an unhappy love affair and a sort of breakdown at school. Now he's trying to be what he calls normal. A lost cause, really. But he hates people like me who don't even try.”
“Why would he hate you for that?” Charles asked.
Reginald looked at him with mocking affection. “Dear boy,” he said, “you really don't know much about people, do you?”
It was true enough, hardly worth disputing. And anyway Charles felt too relaxed to argue. He finished the last crumpet and licked the butter off his fingers.
“What would be nice now would be some music,” he said.
Reginald glanced wistfully at the gramophone. “Can't play records at this hour,” he said. “Not even the divine Ferrier. The Dean is a philistine; he'd confiscate the lot.”
“Read to me, then?” Charles suggested.
“Yes, if you like,” Reginald said. He took up the book and began to read:
“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the sense, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend...”
Charles lay still and let the words wash over him; he liked the sound of Reginald's voice, with that very faint lilt that still betrayed his Welsh origins.
“It's a sort of code,” Reginald said. “When Pater talks about the face of one's friend, or when Wilde quotes that passage, it's a sign to the readers who know.”
Charles wondered what word they used for friendship that didn't mean love between men, in that case, but he was too drowsy to pursue the idea. He rubbed his cheek against the bearskin rug, lazily contented, stretching out his hand for another cigarette.
“You really are the most complete sensualist, Charles,” Reginald said, laughing.
“I'm sure Walter Pater would approve,” Charles said. “Judging by what you just read me.”
“I approve of you lying on that rug,” Reginald said. “Very much indeed.”
The moment stretched out between them till Charles thought surely something would happen now, and half-wondered if he wanted it to.
But Reginald only cleared his throat and said “More tea?”, and went back to talking about aestheticism.
He didn't need to read Reginald's mind to know that Reginald wanted him. But nothing ever came of it. Reginald kept his desires reined in, like Plato's charioteer. Not just with Charles, either; as far as he could see, Reginald didn't touch anyone. Charles couldn't understand why he didn't find someone who shared his inclinations – after all, there must be others in Oxford – but Reginald winced when Charles said something clumsy and well-meaning along these lines.
“Yes, there are others. That doesn't mean I want to go to bed with them. Anyway there's no reason to assume they'd want to go to bed with me.”
“Why shouldn't they?” Charles asked, genuinely puzzled.
Reginald had one of those odd faces that sometimes seemed barely human and at other times looked coldly beautiful, like a Greek statue. Right now, he looked like someone about to say Well you don't want me, do you?
“Eros is a mysterious force, Charles,” he said ironically.
Charles wasn't sure if the mockery was for Reginald or himself or the situation. Maybe it was all three.
“Wouldn't you like to have that sort of relationship with someone?” he asked.
Reginald sighed. “For a clever man, you are quite stupid sometimes.”
“If you met someone you were – attracted to,” Charles said, carefully not saying someone else, though the words hung in the air.
“I don't know,” Reginald said. “It's better this way. You don't understand, Charles, how could you?”
“Because I like girls?”
“Because of your devotion to the Pandemian Venus, yes,” Reginald said, grimacing. “Which our society sees as natural and superior. And not illegal, as long as the girls are sixteen.”
Before Reginald, he'd never thought what it would be like to want someone and know that acting on that desire would make him a criminal. He couldn't imagine what that must feel like.
“Illegality's an aphrodisiac for some, of course,” Reginald said. “There's a man I know at Christ Church who keeps a list of all the public places where he's had sex. He said the most unusual one was the top deck of a bus.”
“Oh, really!” Charles said, torn between scepticism and discomfiture.
“And that it was only afterwards he realized there was a plainclothes policeman sitting two seats in front of them.”
“He must have been pulling your leg, don't you think?” Charles asked uneasily.
“I don't think so,” Reginald said. “But even he might have to think about changing his habits, the way things are going. Between Maxwell Fyfe in the Home Office and that maniac Nott-Bower at Scotland Yard...”
He didn't have to finish the sentence: Charles knew the papers were full of news about arrests for “persistently importuning”. At least whoever had been slipping those press cuttings anonymously under Reginald's door had stopped, though only after Reginald had made a highly decorated collage of them and pinned it to the noticeboard in the JCR.
Charles knew there was pain underneath all that mockery about what Reginald called your devotion to the Pandemian Venus and Charles called picking up girls. He would have liked to tell Reginald It's really not that important, but he understood enough to know that would only make it worse.
It was true, though: picking up girls was easy because it didn't matter. The pleasure of bodies fitting together and the oblivion that followed climax were purely physical, a blessed escape from thinking. Emotion didn't come into it. On either side: he saw to that, the one bit of mind control he allowed himself in such matters. To a woman, the girls he bedded went away thinking Charles Xavier: fun to go to bed with once, but that's it. No regrets and no complications.
Romantic love served a social function, he knew that: pair bonding, child-rearing and so on. But apparently he was immune to it, and that suited him just fine. He never felt it for any of the girls and certainly not for a man. Never expected to, either.
And then Erik happened to him, and everything he thought he knew turned out to be wrong.
*~*~*~*
“One more?” Erik says. “Or do you want to go to bed?”
For a mad moment Charles almost wonders if Erik knows. That's the third time tonight he's come out with something that sounds like a sexual invitation or innuendo. Charles tells himself it's just his imagination, it must be, because even Erik wouldn't tease him about something like that.
Would he?
Erik looks as if he's teasing, but that could easily just be about how badly Charles is playing tonight. Damn it. It's bad enough feeling this way about Erik without this added humiliation.
“Yes, another!” Charles says vehemently.
“OK,” Erik says. “If you're sure.”
He looks sceptical, amused. Charles wants to tear Erik's clothes off and bend him over that bloody armchair and fuck him till neither of them can remember their own name – and God only knows where that came from because that really isn't how he thinks about this sort of thing.
“Your turn to go first,” Charles says, trying to remember how to breathe normally. Trying not to stare at Erik's hands, trying not to imagine licking and sucking those long fingers until Erik groans and swears and jerks his hips and says Now, Charles, fuck, now, I want you –
Erik is definitely staring at him. Oh god.
“Shouldn't you go first again?” Erik says mildly. “Since you lost the last one?”
The last three. Before last night he'd never lost more than twice in a row. To anyone. He makes his opening move, grimacing.
Erik's one of very few who's ever been able to beat him at all. A match, and more than a match for Charles. In this way as in others.
He's never encountered anyone before who gave off such an incredible sense of raw power. And the idea that he's the one who could help Erik free that power, so that it's no longer dependant on rage and pain, makes his head swim –
Maybe he shouldn't have had that last Scotch. He looks dubiously at his almost empty glass.
“Do telepaths have worse hangovers?” Erik asks, catching the look. “I suppose we'll find out in the morning.” He grins.
“I'm not drunk,” Charles says, indignantly, taking Erik's pawn.
“Of course not,” Erik says, retaliating.
Blast. Four defeats in a row would finish him, he's sure of that.
He tries to concentrate on the game, but he's miserably conscious that his timing couldn't possibly be worse. Even if this weren't such an obviously terrible idea, even if Erik felt the same way, to be doing this now, with the world rushing headlong to destruction –
He wonders if there's a mutant somewhere out there who could bend time out of shape, make this brief interlude last longer. For a moment he thinks longingly of Cerebro, though he knows it's impossible to go back.
And if the world had to wait till he got the courage to tell Erik how he feels – well, he's not sure any mutant would have the power to stretch time that far.
He'd thought he didn't want a sexual relationship with another man. That he just wasn't made that way, as Reginald was. Probably just as well, given how unhappy it made Reginald. But then Reginald had a melancholy streak anyway: the tragic model of the invert, a soul of one sex trapped in a body of the other, suited him only too well. Impossible to imagine him embracing those dangerous pleasures his friend at Christ Church enjoyed. (Charles still wasn't sure he believed the man's story about the double-decker bus.)
Charles never thought he'd be in Reginald's position, hopelessly yearning for something he couldn't have. He'd always thought of himself as pragmatic; if he couldn't get exactly what he wanted, he'd find something else that would do. Always assumed the difference between himself and Reginald wasn't just sexual temperament but that he wanted to be happy, and Reginald didn't.
He thinks about that young man, little more than a boy, who'd offered himself to Reginald last year. Charles had found it hard to understand at the time why Reginald said no, though he knew Reginald was afraid of blackmail, especially now he was a Fellow. They'd talked about that after seeing Victim the previous month. Four years after the Wolfenden Report and still no sign of a change in the law.
He'd wanted to reassure Reginald about the boy's motives, to say It's all right, I know he's not trying to trap you, I read his mind, and he really wants you. But he'd told himself Reginald wouldn't believe him, would probably think he was crazy. Anyway, he could hardly scold Raven for carelessness and then put both of them at risk by telling a non-mutant about his mutation, even one he knew as well as he knew Reginald. He didn't want to admit to himself how important it was to him to go on passing as normal: mutant and proud was a hollow claim.
He'd stayed silent and felt guilty, watching the ardent boy's hope fade as Reginald pushed him away.
Remembering all that, Charles thinks it wouldn't have done any good, even if he'd had the courage to tell Reginald what he'd seen. He was expecting Reginald to settle for second best with no idea what that meant. He understands it now: if some other man offered himself the way that boy did to Reginald, he'd make the same choice Reginald made. It's Erik he wants, and only Erik. Now and always. He knows this, with absolute certainty, without knowing how.
There's no explanation for it, except the one Montaigne gave for why he loved the man he did: Because it was him; because it was me. The anthology was full of things like that; he'd found it embarrassingly sentimental at the time.
Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi. He can visualize the words in Reginald's spiky italic writing, on the flyleaf of the copy of Ioläus he'd given Charles, that first year in Oxford. He'd made a joke of it, saying “I know I've read you most of this by now, but you really ought to have your own copy.”
The book sits over there on the library shelf; he can see it out of the corner of his eye, looking so innocuous in its drab cloth binding. Charles tries not to think about the centuries of love and desire between men that lie packed between its covers. But the hum of all those voices is loud in his ears, as loud as the blood that pounds in his veins when he looks at Erik.
Erik, who sits there, cool and maddening, smiling, plotting Charles's next defeat, unflappable, inexorable. Seeing every weakness Charles tries to hide; except this one, apparently.
He's not sure if Erik likes girls. Or men. Or anyone. He imagines there's no room for anything in Erik's mind except the hunt for Shaw. But even if Erik was interested in that sort of thing, it wouldn't be with someone he thinks of as naïve and arrogant, spoiled and soft, an adorable lab rat. He doesn't take Charles seriously enough to want him.
Maybe you're wrong. You could read his mind, find out what he really thinks of you.
He pushes the temptation away. It's not that much of one, actually. He's pretty sure he knows what he would find, and he's had enough humiliation for one night.
He concentrates on the game, as fiercely as he knows how, and slowly he begins to push back, not just holding his defences but starting to breach Erik's.
“Hmm,” Erik says approvingly. “That's more like it. I was starting to think you were letting me win.”
“I would never insult you by doing that,” Charles says.
“I know,” Erik says, sounding surprised. “I was joking.”
“Oh.”
“It's much more fun when you put up a fight,” Erik says.
Charles has a sudden mental image of their chess games translated into physical combat, the two of them grappling furiously, naked and oiled like wrestlers in ancient Greece. Where the hell did that come from? He can feel himself starting to blush, imagining Erik's reaction if he could read Charles's mind right now.
Though Erik is the one who keeps coming out with these remarks.
“Chess was a metaphor for sex, in the Renaissance,” Charles says experimentally.
“You do surprise me,” Erik says, grinning. “Judging by the last few games, I'd have to be on top.”
OK, that? That was not even an innuendo. That was a blatantly sexual remark by Erik Lehnsherr to Charles Xavier, which Charles absolutely did not imagine in any way, shape or form.
But it was a joke. Obviously. So Charles ignores it in favour of taking Erik's queen.
“Damn,” Erik says, laughing. “Keep playing like that and I might have to reconsider my position.”
“Shut up,” Charles says, scarlet with embarrassment.
Erik is actually doing it on purpose. Trying to put Charles off his game. Charles really doesn't want to think about why he's chosen this method, of all others.
At least he'd never mocked Reginald for wanting him. He knows he hurt Reginald sometimes, saying stupid things; knows it was hard for Reginald watching him pursuing girls he didn't even care about. But they'd managed to stay friends somehow all those years, and he'd always treated Reginald with kindness.
Erik isn't – kind. Would not be kind. Charles has never known him to show mercy to anyone.
Why did he think this would be any different?
It's part of what draws him to Erik, after all. That hardness, the sense of uncompromising force. For all Erik's elegance and sophistication, underneath he is what life and Shaw have made of him: a weapon in human form.
Charles wonders unhappily what he's done, falling in love with a weapon.
Because that is what's happened to him, isn't it?
He stares at the chessboard but his mind is full of that Britten song Reginald loved, and Kathleen Ferrier's voice, singing I little thought what love can do...
A ship there is, and she sails the sea
She's loaded deep as deep can be
But not so deep as the love I'm in
I know not if I sink or swim.
What love can do... He'd had no idea, though he'd seen it happen to others, and wondered at their folly. And now the man whose cry pulled him into the ocean sits there looking lazily amused at his plight, and he's not sure he can bear it.
He makes a move, not really thinking about the game any more, and Erik says “Charles, what are you doing?”
“You put me off,” Charles says, knowing he sounds petulant and childish. He's shrivelling inside with shame, and he looks away again, unwilling to see the contempt in Erik's eyes.
“What is it you keep looking at over there?” Erik asks.
“Nothing,” Charles says, too quickly.
He looks back at the board. Yes, that really was an exceptionally stupid move. It's left him wide open to Erik's attack and he's not even going to think about how grotesquely appropriate that is.
“Charles,” Erik says warningly, getting up and going over to the bookcase. “Don't try to lie to me, because you know I'll find you out.”
Oh, no. That's all he needs to make his humiliation complete. He makes his mind as blank as he can, nothing to see, nothing at all.
Erik's expression says I don't believe you. He turns his back on Charles and scans the shelves, then begins running his fingers slowly along the spines of the books, first one shelf, then another. Charles can't help imagining those fingers moving down his own spine, caressing him, and he shivers, feeling the tautening of desire.
Erik twists around and looks at him as if he can see right through him, as if all Charles's secrets are laid out for him to handle and possess.
“It was somewhere here, I think,” he says, turning back to the books. He's very close to it now, and Charles is finding it hard to breathe. Erik starts taking the books out and looking at them, then putting them back on the shelf. Three books away. Two books away. One –
Charles catches his breath and Erik says “Ah.” He takes down the book and comes over to Charles.
“This one?” he says, holding it out.
Charles nods; he's not sure he can speak right now. Erik opens the book and looks at the inscription.
“Montaigne,” he says thoughtfully. “Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi. That's – unexpected. To CX from RB. Who's RB?”
“Someone I knew in Oxford,” Charles says. “A friend.”
“A friend?” Erik says, leafing through the book. “Or a lover?”
“No,” Charles says, flushing.
“Why not?” Erik says.
Why not? Charles's head is spinning.
“He – would have liked to be,” he says, “but I didn't want him like that.”
There's a silence that feels as if it's going on for ever.
“Have you ever wanted a man like that?” Erik asks. Neutrally, but Charles senses the neutrality is an effort.
Charles's throat is dry and his heart is racing. “Yes,” he says.
“What happened?” Erik asks.
Oh god. “Nothing,” Charles says. He can see Erik's going to say Why not? again, so he says “I was afraid.”
I still am, he thinks. Afraid of what it means to feel this way. Afraid of what happens if you say no. Maybe even more afraid of what happens if you say yes.
“A man can live too much in books,” Erik says, putting Ioläus back on the shelf. He gives Charles a long intense look that almost takes his breath away. “If you want something to happen, you have to take action. The world's about to end, or hadn't you heard?”
Charles feels dizzy. This can't really be happening the way he thinks it is. He must be hallucinating because he wants it so much.
Erik stands in front of him, hands outstretched.
“Time to stop being afraid, Charles,” he says.
The chessboard goes flying as Charles launches himself into Erik's arms.
Erik kisses the way he plays chess, ruthlessly focused, as if nothing else exists. Breaking down Charles's last remaining defences till there's nothing left.
Charles kisses as if Erik's the only thing keeping him from drowning. He presses and twists his body against Erik's, telling him wordlessly how much he wants this, wants him.
There's a click as the key turns in the lock of the library door and Charles has a sudden vision of all the doors in the house locking at once. He's not sure if it's really happening, not even sure if it's his vision or Erik's. It doesn't seem to matter.
If this is just a very intense, very good dream, Charles hopes he never wakes up.
Erik has a little nick right at the point of his jaw. Must have cut himself shaving. Charles couldn't have dreamt that, could he? It seems to him suddenly, gloriously funny that Erik, who can command metal, should have that trivial mishap just like anyone else, and he snorts with laughter.
“If you've just been playing with me –” Erik sounds furious and baffled. He tries to pull away from Charles's embrace.
“No!” Charles says, gripping tighter. He touches the point of his tongue to the cut. This, he tells Erik silently. Just this. He licks and sucks at Erik's skin, kisses him lingeringly behind the ear, making Erik growl with pleasure. Charles wants to make him make that noise again. A lot.
Erik pulls at Charles's clothes, swearing under his breath in German at the buttons. His hands move lower, and there's a flash of stupid fucking leather belt, going to buy him one with a metal tip. Charles almost can't stand up straight at the mixture of lust and possessiveness and intent coming off Erik in waves. The belt finally yields and the metal fastenings undo of their own accord. There's another surge from Erik that feels like Mine, so strong it takes Charles's breath away, and then Erik's hand pushes into his undershorts and grasps his cock.
Charles arches up into Erik's touch, crying out at the shock of pleasure that slams through him. Erik's fingers feel impossibly good wrapped around his cock, as good as Charles imagined, better, and oh god the things they're doing to him – Charles' legs are giving way, his vision blurring as Erik bites at his neck and his shoulder and he moans, his mind a whirl of too much, too good, please don't stop.
Erik doesn't stop.
Charles can hear a voice he realizes with shock must be his own, babbling “god Erik, please, yes – that, like that – I can't – I, oh, yes – oh god, ErikErik–” He hears Erik's response, not sure if it's out loud or in his head, yes, mine, come, come now, want you to, fuck, Charles, so beautiful, now, now.
He's coming, and the force of it hurls him against Erik, leaving him barely able to stand, shaken and spent. Erik kisses him again, a kiss so nakedly triumphant Charles feels like laughing for sheer joy. He clings to Erik, panting and helpless as the aftershocks of pleasure go through him.
Erik kisses his way down Charles's chest and stomach; he sinks to his knees and Charles groans as he realizes what Erik has in mind. Nobody's ever done this to him before, and it's almost too much to bear: the sight of Erik licking him clean, the caress of Erik's tongue on his shivery oversensitive flesh. He pushes his hands into Erik's hair, not sure whether he's trying to pull him closer or hold him at a distance.
“Ahh,” Erik says. He looks up, and the expression in his eyes makes Charles catch his breath.
“Too much?” Erik asks.
Charles nods. He doesn't think he can speak.
“OK,” Erik says. He raises and twists his body so he's sitting in the armchair, and pulls Charles down into his lap. He strokes Charles's hair and his face and his neck, kisses the top of Charles's head and mutters something into his hair that sounds suspiciously like Mein Schatz. Charles leans against him, making soft incoherent noises. He'd like to stay like this for ever, he thinks.
“It's a pity the world's about to end,” Erik says, after a while. His voice is dark with arousal and Charles can feel the pressure of his erection. “I have such plans for you, Charles Xavier.”
Tell me, Charles says in his mind, still too shaken to say it out loud. Show me.
Erik's embrace tightens around him, and he sees his own image repeated over and over. Head tipped back as his orgasm approaches, panting with incredulous joy, his legs over Erik's shoulders as Erik thrusts into him again and again. Bracing himself against the tiled wall of the shower as Erik kneels and sucks him off, swallows him down and then gets to his feet to kiss him, saying See how good you taste? It's no wonder I can't get enough of you. Bound and spreadeagled, his cock hard and heavy as Erik teases him for what feels like hours, till he begs shamelessly finish me, please Erik, I can't bear it, want you so much, please let me come. Writhing face down on the bed, whimpering with pleasure, his fists twisting in the sheets as Erik holds him open and helpless and fucks him with his tongue.
“Yes,” Charles says, gasping. “Yes, all of that. Please, Erik, yes.”
“That's just the start of it, really,” Erik says, in the voice of someone saying Oh, it was nothing.
“Oh God,” Charles says. “Why didn't you tell me?”
“Why didn't I tell you?” Erik says, incredulous. “Charles, I thought you liked girls. And only girls.”
“I didn't think you liked anybody,” Charles says. He starts to laugh.
“It's not funny,” Erik says, but he's laughing as well.
“Don't you have something we ought to take care of?” Charles asks, wriggling deliberately against him.
“Not for much longer if you go on doing that,” Erik says. He groans. “Stop it – Charles, no, I can't –”
“I want to make you come,” Charles says. He turns around so he's sitting astride Erik's thighs and rocks against him.
“Not going to come in my pants like a fucking schoolboy,” Erik insists. His hands are bruisingly hard on Charles's hips, holding him still.
“OK, sorry,” Charles says. “Oh god, why are you wearing so many clothes still? Here, let me, no, wait–”
He shifts again, trying to get the right angle so he can reach Erik's belt buckle and zip.
“Lie down with me,” Erik says urgently.
Charles narrowly avoids cracking his head on the coffee-table but finally they're on the hearthrug and this is better, this is much better. Iron and velvet, he thinks, feeling the heaviness of Erik's cock in his hand at last. It's a cliché but it's true. God, you're beautiful.
He brushes his thumb across the wet tip of Erik's cock and Erik gasps. Charles tightens his fingers around Erik's shaft, thinking Show me how you like it, teach me, I want to do it right, want this to be so good for you. He lets Erik's mind guide his hand, hard and fast, should have known you'd like it like that, so impatient, my love, and Erik thrusts up into his fist again and again, shouts and tenses all over and comes so hard Charles can feel it in his teeth and his bones.
Erik's pleasure surges through his mind, wave after wave of it, till he groans, feeling himself stirring again in sympathy. He holds Erik and kisses him, murmuring nonsensical endearments Erik will probably tease him about later, too happy to care if he's making a fool of himself.
I seem to have found my vocation, and it's not what I thought it was at all.
Erik must have heard that, because he laughs.
“Do you mind if I spend the rest of my life doing this?” Charles asks.
Erik shakes his head. He looks so full of joy, so undefended for once that Charles can hardly bear it.
“I love you,” Charles blurts out. He wants to kick himself the moment he's said it, because it's too much, too soon.
“It's not too soon at all,” Erik says, as if he's heard Charles's thoughts again. “It's now or never, Charles; your timing is perfect for once.”
Charles can't ask, but he doesn't need to.
“Yes,” Erik says. “Whatever happens, yes. I love you.”
Charles's heart feels as if it might burst with joy. He presses a kiss to one corner of Erik's mouth, then the other, and runs his tongue along Erik's bottom lip. Erik nips at Charles's tongue and catches it between his lips, sucking him in, and Charles moans, feeling his cock harden at the promise of Erik's mouth.
“No-one else has ever made you feel like this, have they?” Erik says.
“No,” Charles says.
“Good,” Erik says fiercely.
Charles thinks of Reginald, knowing he's too far away to reach with his mind. He sends him a message anyway: a mixture of thank you and I'm sorry I didn't understand and I hope you find him, the one you're looking for, your other half. He's still too blissful to feel guilty about owing his happiness to Reginald's gift.
“We never finished the game,” he says, looking at the chessmen lying scattered on the floor.
“Didn't we?” Erik says. “I thought we had.” He starts laughing again.
“I'll get my revenge tomorrow night,” Charles threatens.
“Of course you will,” Erik says, with a wicked look. He brushes his fingers lightly against Charles's erection and Charles groans.
“It'll be an interesting experiment,” Erik says. “Seeing whether having sex improves your game.”
“I don't know how we're going to measure it,” Charles says. He's getting dizzy again.
“The pursuit of knowledge demands precision and thoroughness,” Erik says, caressing him insistently. “And repetition. Isn't that right, Professor?”
Repetition. The thing they can't be sure of. Charles pushes that thought away, because this is no time for fears about the future or regrets about the past. If these last few nights are all they have, he intends to make them count.
“Yes,” he says, pulling Erik close and kissing him again. Yes, my friend. Yes, my love. Yes.