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This is how it starts: Charles sets the record spinning. And Erik fixes the drinks.
Then Erik makes a usual argument. His voice is low, a little irritated, but Charles can hear him even through the music that's playing as loud as ever. His eyes are hard in the lamplight. "If you're so insistent that we hide, why not just make them forget? You could, couldn't you?"
"Yes," says Charles. He can make a person do any number of things, or believe what he wills -- the sounds you hear are not that of two men fucking each other's bloody brains out, are not shouts and grunts and well-practiced swears, are not even honest admissions akin to this cannot last -- however improbable.
Charles could make them see, or not see. Again, with a smile: "Yes, but this is easier."
Actually, it's just less likely to drop out when Erik pushes into Charles in one long, agonizing motion, leaving Charles stretched and full and wanting more, anything, or maybe just for Erik to move.
It isn't as though Charles doesn't like these tunes. It's just that he doesn't like them in quite the same way the children think he does. But then, the boom of Ravel or Brahms or even Count Basie from beneath the door frame of Charles' study has become a regular, almost nightly, phenomenon at the mansion, one which unequivocally means keep out.
Tonight's record isn't a careful selection; rather, it's just one from the old stack. But then the needle hits its stride in a random, middling groove. The strings flow in heavy and loud, leave no room for the warm-up, build in a series of billowing arcs, fit the pace of their bodies like oil in an engine.
*
It's perfectly true that Charles doesn't read Erik's thoughts without permission. He wouldn't want to. Erik is too great a prize, so Charles works at him the old fashioned way, with words, with gestures, each one a dexterous twist of the lock, and every so often Erik rewards him with a glimpse of truth.
Which is this: movement, like whorled ink; expanses as vast as the plane of some far-off planet; and quiet populations of grace and knowledge and hope. These lay scattered like pebbles on a beach. And Charles memorizes their presence, or here and there pockets them.
But because Charles is only a man, and because his abilities are to him no less intuitive than a word, or a gesture, he also cannot help but notice the pieces of Erik that sit in plain sight. Some thoughts needn't be read. They simply bleed through.
To start, there are Erik's preferences. Coffee (black) over tea (with milk and two sugars, as Charles takes it) -- or tea as Charles takes it if there's no coffee to be had. Assorted wool jumpers, even if it's too warm for them, because he can't abide the cold, and a single, care-worn leather jacket that's been a companion to him when he had none.
There's Erik's need to feel. For all the times he uses his power from a distance and through will alone, so too there are those where nothing but the weight of metal in his hands, and the discernible energy it emits against his skin, will do. Charles knows that Erik thumbs the coin in his pocket just as he sums up the metallic objects of every room -- that without thought, Erik counts the nails and joints and hinges around him as one might acknowledge soldiers in a field. The steel inlay of a wooden banister may as easily be a sword at the ready.
There's Erik's need to touch other things, too: the wood of that banister (mahogany, alternately nicked and palm-smoothed); the frost-tipped lawn; and Charles' face and throat and stomach and thighs, or everything else in-between.
And there's always Erik's pain, and his relentless agenda, his plans for retribution. There's the fact that Erik longs to be known. If not cherished, then certainly feared.
This is another place where Charles, being just a man, cannot help himself. When the occasion arises, when Erik opens himself, Charles takes one of those pebbles, polishes it with the stuff of serenity, and bids it to multiply.
*
Again, they are tucked into each other, spent. The settee is showing its age -- and sounding it, too. By now the music has stopped, replaced instead with the click-click-nick of the needle's search for purchase.
"Erik?"
"It wasn't my idea," says Erik. But he still raises a hand, motioning the needle up and the arm home.
After that, it's only them, breath by breath.
And Erik's unquiet mind.
"What's troubling you, my friend?"
"Come on, Charles. Give it a rest. You just spent the last twenty minutes working your way through every permutation of the word 'fuck' -- I think you deserve one." Erik meets Charles' eye, which from this angle has him looking fully down, his eyelashes casting neat shadows on his already paling cheeks and his chin pressed against his shoulder. He isn't smiling, but Charles senses the amusement wrapped up in that annoyed drawl.
"Well, it seems a shame to not give old Prokofiev a run for his money."
"I'm sick of Prokofiev."
Charles huffs out a breath, then watches the goose-pimples rise and recede on Erik's belly before he speaks. "You don't know why it's necessary."
"No, I know why," says Erik. "I simply don't understand how you can care."
"What we-- It isn't done, Erik."
"That doesn't mean it can't be."
"Now which of us is dreaming of utopia, hmm?" Charles says. But then something softens in him; bends and threatens to break. "Oh, Erik. Of course you're right. There needn't be a reason to hide. But these things don't happen over night. The children cannot be burdened by my and your emotional lives just because we've decided to make a go of things. Not when so much else is at stake."
"You're lucky, Charles, that you can separate each part of you from the next. Believe me: with what the world has planned for mutantkind, the fact that the children are under the tutelage of a couple of queers should be the least of anyone's worry."
"In time, you may be right."
"In time," Erik scoffs. He starts to raise himself on his elbows, then lets out a little grunt at what's likely the beginnings of a kink in his back. "In time, perhaps we'll finally move this to a bed."
"What can I say, Erik. I can never seem to make it that far. You're simply too much of a temptation."
Erik laughs shortly. Then he leans in and kisses Charles, and for once it's more consolatory than fierce. "At least buy some new records."
This -- this Charles can do. And again: in time, he will do more.