Work Text:
i.
Erik wakes up two hours after taking the brunt of a psionic shockwave, which really isn’t as bad as it sounds: After all, he’s still physically intact, and he wakes up surrounded by soft sheets that feel less like cloth and more like clouds.
“You’re awake!” exclaims someone, and that’s when he notices the man who’s been sitting in a chair lined crookedly along the side of the bed. Erik is startled, of course, and he reaches for the nearest metal in his presence and flings it.
The man’s arm suddenly jerks to the side, and there’s a fraction of a second’s pause before the rest of his body is being yanked along to the momentum. He sprawls to the floor in a flurry of blue and white, arm still splayed out awkwardly, and the book that was once in his lap teeters on his leg before hitting the carpet with a soft thud. It would have been comical, although Erik’s priority isn’t really comedy in that moment; he’s more concerned with the fact that the last thing he remembers is going to still in a dingy motel room and now he’s here…not in a dingy motel room.
There’s also this strange, underlying current of I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry in his thoughts and an even stranger impulse to reach out and help the man up.
“Who the fuck are you?” he hisses, and he thinks he does a pretty good job of being intimidating while still swathed in cloud-soft sheets.
The man hasn’t moved from the floor, brown hair askew and dark blue sweater ridden up to reveal the smooth skin of his hip—he looks stunned, although the slight furrow of his brows adds a sense of hurt to his expression.
Erik may have begun feeling guilty if not for a blue-skinned woman who suddenly bursts into the room with an alarmed, “Charles?”
If the name sets off something warm in his gut, Erik has no time to dwell on it.
ii.
After a considerable amount of thrown metal objects, shouting, cajoling, then more projectiles, a third man in a white coat joins them and catches Erik off-guard long enough to inject something into his arm.
“Hank, be gentle,” Charles reprimands somewhere above him.
Erik hopes he passes out with some grace.
iii.
“Please calm down, Erik,” Charles says as soon as he wakes up again, in the same room and in the same bed, and Erik wants to say how do you know my name and don’t sit by strangers’ bedsides then at the same time, but he ends up saying nothing because the sedative, no matter how mild Charles assures him it was, has left his tongue largely uncooperative. “Oh, yes,” Charles adds, as if noticing Erik’s struggle to speak, “I’m terribly sorry, but it was the only way to calm you down without me having to…” He trails off for a few seconds before apparently deciding to abandon that train of thought. “I’ve been assured that its effects will completely wear off a few minutes after you regain consciousness.”
Erik raises an eyebrow in lieu of asking how long he’s been unconscious. Charles must be a mind reader or very adept at reading expressions, because he says, “You were asleep for roughly twenty-four hours after you were first knocked out. You had bouts of consciousness in between, but they were only for two to three minutes at a time, and I couldn’t get you to talk very much, or very coherently, for that matter. You slept for another two hours after the sedative, and then…”
Charles goes on, eyes fixed on a spot below Erik’s eyes and hands periodically gesticulating. The details seem to come naturally to him, either as if he’s been rehearsing this or he has it all memorized.
It strikes Erik as an awful lot of sleep, which should be a concern, but then Charles draws his information spout to a close and just sits there with his floppy brown hair and awfully blue eyes, fiddling with his left hand. Erik glimpses a flash of gold on his finger and recognizes it as the piece of metal that he had used to fling Charles out of the chair. He immediately wants to kick his own arse, though he’s not sure why.
Out loud, he manages to string together a, “Who’re you?” He even makes an effort to sound gruff and not like he wants to listen to Charles’s voice all day or give himself a swift kick in the behind, perhaps at the same time. It must be the accent.
He wonders if there are is such a thing as a wrong question, because his words visibly make Charles’s shoulders slump.
“Ah,” Charles says delicately. He doesn’t have the book anymore, Erik notices insignificantly. “My name is Charles Xavier. I’m…” He looks like he wants to say a lot of things but can’t decide which ones to put out first. “Well, if you’re feeling up to it, I could catch you up with everything that’s happened. What’s… What’s the last thing you remember?”
Erik glowers.
“I can’t believe we’re back to this,” Charles says, like he wants to throw his hands in the air. He’s pouting a little bit. “Years of progress, and we’ve returned to you brooding. Don’t tell me I have to break out the terrible flirting again.”
Erik glowers a little less. “Flirting,” he repeats, bland but also maybe just very, very, very slightly, faintly, vaguely hopeful.
“Oh, yes,” Charles says absently, until something seems to strike him. “Don’t tell me you don’t…” He raises his left hand and brandishes the ring. “We promised ourselves to each other last week.”
iv.
“Charles,” someone’s voice floats through the darkness, “what the hell?”
Erik thinks that two things should happen: He should stop passing out, and he should stop waking up to the sound, sight, or mention of Charles. (It’s more irritating when he feels somewhat less adamant on the latter.)
“It just came out,” returns the familiar accented voice. It belatedly strikes Erik that the last thing he remembers is being in Switzerland, not England. “That was all before he could tell me what the last thing he remembered was, so I didn’t expect his reaction to be that severe.”
“He was hit by a memory-altering shockwave,” says the first voice, sounding far more American and far more unimpressed, “and you thought that divulging that piece of information was a good idea?”
“It just came out,” the second voice repeats, glum and defensive at the same time. “Also, they’re only promise rings.”
It’s the thought of a promise ring that finally provides Erik’s body with the energy jolt to fully open his eyes, though he's not sure why. He remembers it had something to do with... Before he passed out, they were talking about—
It hurts his head to think about, so Erik takes a deep breath and resolves to explore that when his skull isn't threatening to explode on him.
“Erik! You’re awake.”
Again, goes the unspoken addendum.
“Who are you people?” Erik has, for the meantime, decided that these people have picked him up unconscious somewhere and nursed him back to health, or they’re the worst kidnappers. Either way, he doesn’t think that they pose any serious threat so far. Also, he feels no overwhelming urge to escape yet, and usually his instincts can be trusted.
The blue-skinned woman is standing on the other side of his bed, and her exasperated expression softens when she turns to Erik. “I’m Raven,” she says cautiously. “That’s Charles, and— Charles, what are you doing?”
Charles is hiding his face behind what seems to be a clipboard.
“Hank advised me that some faces may trigger the same severe reaction,” he says.
“He’s already seen you,” Raven says, and she doesn’t physically roll her eyes, but Erik hears it in her voice.
He doesn’t actually remember much of the last few times he’s been briefly conscious, only the voices, but that doesn’t seem like an important thing to volunteer.
“How are you feeling, Erik?” asks Charles.
Erik blinks at the sight of his left hand curled around the clipboard; he thinks he’s looking for something that isn’t there that should be there, but he’s not sure what. “Confused.” He’s trying to look intimidating, but it’s hard when his potential captors are a body-painted woman and a man who’s speaking to him through a clipboard.
Approximately eleven minutes later, Erik has told them that the last thing he remembers is going to sleep in Switzerland (leaving out the part where he was mid-hunt for a Nazi) and Raven has finished giving him a barebones explanation of the situation. He is currently in an institution called Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (he raises an eyebrow, but it doesn’t sound like a place for incarceration, so he lets it be), and a good few years of his memory has been indefinitely compromised due to a stray wave of psionic energy that knocked him out a few days ago. (Raven mentions off-handedly that the name of the responsible mutant is Minesweep, and Erik almost steeples his fingers and looks into the distance with a hard gaze.)
At the mention of mutants, Erik’s defenses automatically go up. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourselves into,” he warns them lowly. “You should let me go, for all of our sakes.”
“Let you go? In this state?” Charles scoffs.
“Charles…” Raven begins.
She and Charles stare at each other for a few moments – at least, Erik sees her staring, he can’t really see what Charles is doing behind that clipboard – until Charles says, sagely, “I see.”
“See what?” Erik asks, because he knows that he just missed something, and forgive him if he sounds a little impatient to fully understand why he’s woken up apparently eleven years after he last remembers going to sleep.
“Erik,” Charles says, and Erik really wishes he would put that clipboard down if he’s about to say something meaningful, “Raven and I are mutants too. You’re among friends.”
Out of nowhere, Erik thinks of white walls and tall ceilings and airplanes in midair.
“Will you promise not to pass out again if I show you?” Raven says. “It’s getting exhausting, having to rearrange you on the bed.”
Erik gives a noncommittal shrug. He thinks he may be somewhere in the deep stages of shock; it’s the only reason he’s going along so easily with this.
Raven’s skin ripples, and then Erik is staring at a shorter, browner-haired, bluer-eyed, masculine version of herself that isn’t really herself.
“Raven!” Charles says sharply, and then he’s putting the clipboard down and Erik feels a little dizzy from seeing two of him.
As smoothly as she had first changed, Raven returns to her original form. “Put the clipboard away,” she snaps.
“You were the one chastising me for startling him,” Charles argues, but yes, the clipboard is on the bed now, and when Charles looks at him, Erik thinks that as incredible as Raven’s abilities are, he’ll always be able to tell that this is the real Charles because his eyes are an impossibly lovely shade of blue.
(This is the cheesiest thing Erik thinks he’s ever thought in his life.)
“And you?” He prides himself on remaining neutral-faced, addressing Charles with a voice that doesn’t betray his keen interest in the other man’s aesthetically pleasing eyes. “What can you do?”
“Telepathy,” Charles answers. “I’d show you, but your mind is in a rather fragile state at the moment.”
Erik shifts. Things are starting to settle in now, and it feels a lot like watching a silent film; dynamic, but very muted. “And…I know you two?” he hedges, and Charles face falls and Erik wants to kick himself in the ass and it feels like this has all happened before and it’s frustrating.
“Charles, why don’t you get Hank?” Raven says, apparently sensing the change, and Charles looks grateful to be leaving the room.
“Well?” Erik prompts her when they’re alone.
Raven sighs. “You and I used to work together.” She says this gingerly, and Erik senses that there is more to that than she lets on. “You and Charles…are a longer story.”
v.
As he predicts, Raven does not expand on anything. The man that Charles brings in, a fellow named Hank who is also a mutant and pulls off blue fur and a white coat surprisingly well, tells him that it’s for the best, that they’re not sure of the extent of the damage his mind has taken. The mutant who blasted him in the first place has displaced a portion of his memory but assured that her powers’ effects have always worn off after some time; the only question they have left is, Hank says, when Erik’s memory will come back.
That makes it sound like it was explained very efficiently, but actually, Charles comes back with Hank and interjects every so often with an idle comment or fascinated questions such as, “Do you think he’ll remember not remembering?” Erik is so sure that he would have found this irritating with anyone else, but Charles’s voice is almost—soothing, familiar.
All right.
“It’s just a matter of waiting,” Hank says. Contrary to Erik, he seems amused, if not fond, of Charles’s constant interruptions. Erik represses the urge to tell Charles to cover up his earnest, endearing face with the clipboard again.
“But my memories—they will come back?” Erik asks for nth time.
“Yes,” Hank answers for the nth time. “I was thinking that there might be a way to ease some memories back into you, since—“
Erik is listening intently, but he can’t help that his eyes wander over to Charles, who is nervously chewing on a reddened bottom lip.
Hank clears his throat in a manner that suggests he is uncomfortable. “You’re the only person who’s been affected by Minesweep’s abilities so profoundly – that is, no one’s ever lost so many years before. I can’t say if they’ll all return at once, or how forcefully they might return.”
Erik doesn’t like the sound of being inundated with eleven years’ worth of memories, either.
“So I propose that we start easing your mind into it,” Hank continues. “Find a way to jog your memory, maybe regain some of them early so you have less to remember later on. Charles, what do you think?”
They collectively turn to Charles, who hasn’t interrupted for some time now. He looks distracted until he notices them staring at him, and he turns to Hank with a smile that positively brightens his face. “I think it’s a great idea,” he says, and he also looks like he’s planning something.
vi.
It’s Hank’s idea to reintroduce Erik to “certain people.”
“There are more of us here now,” Hank says, “but you actually helped recruit the first ones.”
“Me?” The thought of a school just for mutants already throws him, and to think that he helped – will help? has helped? – recruit them adds an entirely new level to it.
“You and I, to be exact,” Charles chimes in, and, right, he still hasn’t left Erik’s side. Erik insisted that he would not be confined to bedrest, they are now heading to the kitchen, and Erik has since found out that the man is almost half of a foot shorter than him. It is an oddly…pleasing discovery. Erik thinks of doing something frivolous like brushing Charles’s hair back and kissing the crown of his forehead; something else stirs in him at the thought, and he dares to wonder if he’s, like, done that before.
The thoughts don’t distract him enough from gawking at the rest of the school, which he internally describes as a mansion until Charles confirms it out loud amidst chattering idly about how it used to be his family’s estate. Erik learns that they are somewhere in rural New York. As in, America.
Bewildered, Erik wonders how he ever ended up across the ocean with someone like Charles.
“You have that same look on your face,” Charles says when they’re sitting at the dining table and Hank has gone off to search for these mutants in question.
“What?”
Charles looks embarrassed; maybe he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “You look just as amazed as you did when I first brought you here,” he clarifies.
Erik raises an eyebrow curiously.
“Not—Not like that,” Charles further clarifies, and Erik doesn’t have the chance to ask what that is. “When I brought you, Hank, and the others here for the first time, I mean.”
“You make a habit of taking people home, then?” Erik says before he can help himself, and Charles flushes a satisfying shade of pink.
Erik would have had more time to admire if not for the redheaded boy that suddenly stumbles upon them with a loud, “Oh, fuck. Hank, you were serious?”
Charles is rubbing two fingers at the corner of his eye and diligently ignoring the blush on his face. “Good evening, Sean.”
Hank and Raven follow suit.
“Don’t tell me,” Sean says, turning to them, and he sounds deadly serious, “we have to witness all of their disgusting flirting again.”
“Sean,” Charles says, sounding affronted. “Disgusting?”
Once again, Erik wonders exactly what the hell Charles Xavier was to him.
vii.
“Charles can’t just go into my mind and fix me?” Erik says, contemplative, after Sean introduced himself, saluted, and marched out of the kitchen with loud proclamations for his sanity.
“Like Charles said, your mind is still fragile,” Hank says, still frowning after Sean. “We can’t risk going in there and prematurely breaking the dam.”
“I’ve thought I lost you far too many times, darling,” Charles pitches in, and he sounds completely earnest. “I’d like to avoid another instance, especially if we know we can.” He proceeds to compare Erik’s mind to a carton of damaged eggs and Erik can't even be offended because he somehow manages to make broken eggshells sound like poetry.
“All right,” Erik says after all that. “Did you call me darling?”
Charles looks startled. “Did you not retain anything after that?”
Hank has subtly excused himself from the room. Raven looks bored.
viii.
“And this is your room.”
It sounds like all Charles needs to do is add a ta-dah to the end of that. He lingers by the doorway as Erik steps inside to a room that only looks alien.
“Feel free to look around,” Charles adds. “I mean, obviously, it’s your room and you’ve got the right, just. Remember what I said about—“
“—the frailty of my mind?” Erik finishes for him. “Yes, I do remember that.”
“Swell.”
Erik takes one more look around the room and decides, “I don’t know if I can sleep here.”
“What?”
He grew up keeping to himself and building homes in his possessions, and to be standing in somebody else’s – even if it was technically his – doesn’t feel right. “It’s disconcerting.”
“Ah.”
Charles simply looks at him for a few moments, and Erik gets a sense of the wheels turning in his head. He stares back levelly.
“You have a chance to be part of something much bigger than yourself,” Charles finally says, like he’s testing out the words and doesn’t really know what he’s saying. Erik doesn’t, either. “I won’t stop you from leaving.”
“Okay,” Erik says, and the multitude of question marks is implied, hanging in the air between them.
“I could, but I won’t,” Charles says, and he’s widening his eyes and speaking more slowly, deliberately, meaningfully.
“I’ll…sleep in here after all, then?” Erik returns just as slowly, because it sounds like that’s what Charles wants to hear.
Apparently it’s not. Charles sighs, forlorn, and steps back from the doorway. “Come on, I’ll show you to another room.”
ix.
Charles has been unofficially tasked with keeping an eye on him. Erik thinks it was self-appointed. Hank seems to approve, and he leaves only with a warning to “take it easy.”
“We’re meeting Alex today,” Charles declares on the second day of Erik’s newfound life as a temporary amnesiac.
Alex’s first words to them are: “Charles, what the hell?”
“No one told you?” Charles’s eyebrows furrow endearingly.
“No, no one told me,” Alex says, but honestly, he’s not the one who’s got memory loss, has he?
Erik feels Charles’s hand settle on his back securely. “We have quite a story to tell, then. You should sit down,” he advises, despite that they’re outside and there are actually no places to sit.
Disappointingly, Charles’s recap consists of nothing new, so Erik takes the opportunity to instead admire his profile, the animation in his face and his hands when he speaks.
He remembers he’s in love with Charles Xavier when, at the end of it, Alex looks at them and says, “I thought the rumors about you continually harboring one of the government’s most wanted mutants were just rumors,” and that’s new, but Charles also replies, “Nonsense, Erik is hardly more wanted anywhere else than he is here.”
Then Charles smiles at him, sweet and brilliant and completely sincere in a way that makes Erik want to kiss him and, oh.
x.
He stews on this revelation for a while.
“Were Charles and I together?” he asks Hank bluntly one evening, because if he can trust him to monitor his brain activity, he can trust him with these kinds of questions, right? At this point, he’s given up the suspicion that he’s been kidnapped, because this would all be the most elaborate, ridiculous set up that he’s ever seen.
“I,” Hank says, verbally tripping over himself, “well, um, you two—“
Erik tries to look encouraging, but it’s hardly effective when Hank is looking at everything except him.
“I think that’s a conversation you should be having with Charles,” the younger man finally says and makes a beeline out of the room without even taking his clipboard with him.
Well, then.
xi.
“You’ve been cooped up inside for too long,” Charles announces unceremoniously one morning, which is how Erik finds himself being forced to change into outerwear and dragged towards the front doors.
They pass by some students on their way out. Said students gape, likely at the sight of one of the government’s most wanted mutants with Charles Xavier, and while Erik still hasn’t figured out if Charles is a student or a teacher or just has the school named after him, he knows that Charles doesn’t look like he should be with people like Erik.
“Don’t forget your papers are due tomorrow,” Charles reminds them pleasantly, and the students shudder again and scurry off with variations of, “Yes, Professor X.”
“Professor X?” Erik asks when they’re outside. The mansion looks just as spectacular from the outside, though Erik doesn’t feel like it’s an entirely new sight.
“A nickname that Raven once gave me. I’ve yet to figure out how it spread to the rest of the student body.” Charles is wearing a dark green button down today, and it makes his hair, combed back neatly behind his ears, look richer than usual. He leads Erik down a gravel path to the side of the mansion, where there’s a car waiting for them. “I give lectures and do most of the, ah, recruiting.”
“How does that work?” Erik finds that he is genuinely curious, knowing that he once helped with it.
Charles waits until they’re both settled in the car before answering. “This is one of those things I wish I could just show you,” he says, tapping the side of his pretty little head. He maneuvers the car back and down a dirt road. “I use one of Hank’s machines called Cerebro—I connect myself, it amplifies my powers, I pick up on mutants’ power signatures within a certain range, and Cerebro translates the coordinates. Alex, Sean, Darwin, and Angel—we found them together that way.”
“And I assume I have scheduled meetings with Darwin and Angel?”
Charles purses his lips. “They’re not with us anymore,” he says, eyes trained ahead. “That’s… That’s a story for another day.”
Erik decides to trust him—and finds that it is easy to do so.
The rest of the car ride falls into a surprisingly comfortable silence. Erik watches grass and trees and more grass blurring past them, until he realizes that they are slowing down and eventually stopping. “You’re not a serial killer after all, are you?” he asks warily when Charles shuts the engine off.
“Don’t be silly,” Charles says, good-natured as always, and it’s not even a proper answer but Erik follows him out of the car anyway. They leave the car parked off the side of the road, and Charles leads him to a seemingly random patch of grass.
“It’s…spacious,” Erik comments.
Charles sits down and pats the space next to him. “Sit, my friend.”
Erik acquiesces and wonders what other terms of endearments Charles has stored for him. “I assume this is serves a purpose towards me regaining my memories?”
“Possibly,” Charles says, and he’s looking at the horizon, at nothing in particular. The sun is halfway down the sky behind them, and Erik studies their shadows and asks himself, once again, what he has done in these last eleven years to cross paths with someone like Charles. “You’re thinking very hard.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t go into my mind.”
“I didn’t. I can practically hear you thinking, is all.”
“Is that something you’re used to?”
“With you?” Charles smiles like he’s got a secret. “I’m afraid so.” He stretches his legs out and leans back, seemingly unconcerned with his trousers touching the ground. “This is where we, the young, overconfident entrepreneurs that we were, got stranded during our first recruitment attempt, because you forgot to tell me that the gas tank was almost empty when we left.”
“You know, I’m aware that you could be feeding me false memories right now,” Erik says mildly.
“You caught me,” Charles says with a lazy lift of his shoulders. “It wasn’t too scarring, though. It was only five hours after I managed to reach the others and they found us.”
“What did we do to pass the time?”
Erik can’t feel any metal out here except the car. He can’t imagine staying here for five hours.
Charles shoots him a glance. “I could be feeding you false memories.”
“Are you?”
“You kissed me.”
Erik finds that this is not shocking at all. He feels a quiet sense of acceptance. “Was that all?”
Charles studies him and Erik studies him back, mostly the slope of his nose, the way it leads down into his philtrum and to his Cupid’s bow lips.
“Yes,” Charles says. “There was much bumbling around, but I like to think we were both generally disappointed with ourselves.”
Erik frowns. “For the kiss?”
“No.” Charles laughs, the sound soft but clear. “That there was just one.”
xii.
“Any improvements?” is Hank’s favorite question, because it allows him an opt-out when Erik tries to pry more information about his and Charles’s pre-amnesia relationship.
“I passed by Sean today. He was sitting by a window,” Erik replies truthfully this time. “I felt an odd sense of satisfaction.”
Hank pushes his glasses up his nose, mutters, “I’m sure you did,” and jots something down on his clipboard.
xiii.
“You have a habit of making yourself at home, don’t you know,” Erik says when Charles comes into his room without warning, carrying a chess set. “Also, did something in the past eleven years happen with me, Sean, and a window?”
Charles ends up laughing so hard that a few chess pieces topple to the floor. He’s helpless, honestly. Erik finds that they are metal; Charles barely holds still while Erik floats them off the floor and back on the board.
“Technically, you’re in my home,” Charles says when he’s done laughing. He sets the board down on Erik’s bed and climbs on, like this is normal. (For all Erik knows, it might have been, once.)
“And Sean?” Erik prompts.
“The first time we tried to unlock his full potential, it ended with a premature leap out of a window,” Charles explains, mirth dancing in his eyes. “The second time, you pushed him off a satellite.”
Erik considers this. “It sounds like something I would do.”
“It was effective, if you must know.” Charles is grinning, and Erik finds himself slowly smiling back.
The board is turned so that the black pieces are on his side, and Erik doesn’t know if it is coincidence, or Charles knows that he prefers the black. Something tells him that it’s the latter, and he doesn’t mind.
Charles looks at him like he’s questioning why Erik hasn’t sat down yet, so Erik sits across him, and the bed dips with their combined weight.
When Charles reaches out to make his move, Erik catches a glimpse of gold in the light. There’s a gold band around Charles’s ring finger, left hand, and its implications are wholly outstanding and Erik shouldn’t feel so— so—
“Erik?” Charles is staring, confused, until he seems to notice what Erik is looking at. With a quiet “oh,” he draws his own hand to his chest, rubbing at the ring consciously. “I forgot I was wearing it. I… Are you feeling okay? Do you want me to take it off?”
Why on earth should you do that on account of me? Erik wants to ask, but he feels like it would come out bitter and Charles doesn’t deserve that because of course he had Charles sometime in these last eleven years and lost him to someone else, and fuck. Fuck. “No, it’s. It’s okay,” Erik bites out.
Charles doesn’t notice the strain in his voice or Erik does a good job of hiding it. Either way, Charles looks relieved, dropping his hand back into his lap. The ring is out of his sight, but Erik feels its metal humming.
He could melt it off Charles’s finger right now, he thinks petulantly.
“Good,” Charles breathes. “I’m so glad, Erik, I didn’t like having to take it off around you because th—“
“It’s fine, Charles, really,” Erik says tightly. “You shouldn’t have to hide it.”
“Yes. Yes, good,” Charles says again, and Erik is angry that he took him to that place and told him about the kiss like that. “It’s your move, I believe.”
The match takes all of thirty-two minutes, and Charles wins. “Rematch?” he says like he says it all the time, but this time Erik shakes his head.
“I haven’t been feeling well today,” he says, and he’s glad that Charles has promised to stay out of his head because he’s so lying through his teeth.
“The whole day? And you let me drag you out? Erik, you really should have said so, I wouldn’t have bothered you.” Charles looks distressed as he gets to his feet and starts collecting the chess pieces in his hands. Erik wonders where he plans on putting them. Charles has apparently acknowledged that too, but then he just starts stuffing them all into his pockets, and he really is helpless.
(Erik is in love.)
“It’s fine.” It’s a little bit not, but Erik is a grown adult. He picks up the pieces that have fallen on the floor in Charles’s shuffling, and Charles shakes his head and thrusts out the board for him to put the pieces on.
“I can take it back,” he says, blue eyes wide and earnest. “You need to rest.”
“A walk down the hall will hardly kill me,” Erik replies crisply, leaving no room for argument, and he lets Charles fret the whole way to his room.
“Thank you,” Charles says when Erik even rearranges the pieces on the board for him. Then they’re standing in Charles’s room together and maybe Erik can’t remember but he can feel the history here, memories pushing insistently at the wall that’s built itself around Erik’s mind and Erik wants to remember what he’s had and lost, and Charles is stepping closer and why did he think this was a good idea again?
“Good night, Charles,” he says, and he walks out of the room.
xiv.
He’s moody, and apparently it shows.
“Trouble in paradise, you think?” he hears Sean whisper conspiratorially to Alex during lunch one afternoon, and Alex jabs him in the side with an elbow before Erik can go over and do the same.
xv.
Erik thinks he wakes up early enough to cook his own breakfast without everyone’s eyes boring into his back, but evidently not.
“Erik,” Charles says, sounding pleasantly surprised. “For all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never been a morning person.”
“I’m not,” Erik grumbles. “I’m horrible and angry in the mornings.” As if on cue, he flips the egg too hard and the yolk spills and starts spreading. He curses in German.
There is a pause, and then Charles is sidling up to him. “Erik,” he says, voice suddenly gentle, and of course Erik looks at him. “There’s so much more to you than you know, not just pain and anger.”
“Erm.”
“There’s good, too,” Charles insists. “I’ve felt it.”
Erik’s not sure how to handle Charles when he gets like this. “I’m just pissed at an egg, Charles, I’m fine.”
Charles’s solemn expression falls, and he turns away and really throws his hands into the air this time, like he’s conceding to a higher power. “Damn it!” he tells the rest of the empty kitchen. “Damn it!” He walks out of the kitchen like that, and Erik is glad that the cooking food stops him from going after Charles.
xvi.
“Any improvements?” asks Hank, this time looking like he doesn’t really want to know. Perhaps it has something to do with the scowl that has been rooted on Erik’s face for the past few days.
“Raven said I’m almost back to normal, with how much I’ve been terrifying the students lately,” he says.
Hank’s hand pauses where it was writing on the clipboard. “Well,” he says, “that’s better than nothing.”
xvii.
Charles tells him to get into the pool.
“No,” Erik says. It’s not even him being moody this time, but it’s eight o’clock in the evening and Raven is watching them from the side, snickering.
“Will you just trust me?” Charles sighs, and then he makes that face where his eyebrows knit together and upwards, pink lips parting slightly, and Erik grudgingly falls for it. He wonders if his pre-amnesia self ever got around to being immune to what he’s come to know as Charles’s puppy dog expression.
He kicks off his shoes and slides into the pool, clothes and all. Charles looks between him and his shoes, on the verge of telling him to put it back on until Erik passes him an assertive glance.
“It will do,” he hears him say. “Erik, move a little closer to the middle, please?”
Erik does. At least the water is warm, heated by the excessive sunshine that day, though he takes no pleasure in thinking of how many leaves and insects must be swirling around him.
“You’re not really going to, Charles,” Raven calls, at the same time Charles takes a running start and leaps into the water.
“Charles!” Erik promptly gets a mouthful of chlorine. He’s set on glaring at the water until he realizes that Charles hasn’t resurfaced, and a small jolt of panic sends him taking a large inhale of breath and diving underneath.
Almost immediately, he feels two pairs of arms wrap around him; he opens his eyes and sees that it’s Charles and that they’re in the middle of the deep end. Erik grunts, bubbles spewing from his mouth, and kicks.
“Let go of me!” he gasps when they break the surface. “Charles, get off!”
“Calm down,” Charles snaps, sounding equally as waterlogged. “We’re here!”
“Who are you talking to!” Erik bobs down unexpectedly and has to spit out a mouthful of water.
“My name is Charles Xavier!” Charles continues, surely not speaking to him, because Erik already knows that. “I’m like you, just calm your mind.”
Erik snarls his name, blinking water out of his eyes, finding Charles’s cardigan under water and yanking him close. Charles’s hair is shiny when it’s wet, strands plastered to the sides of his face, and his cheeks are flushed and his lips are even redder. Erik wants to tuck his hair away from his face, kiss him, and splash water on him all at once.
“You’re not alone,” Charles utters, and Erik can see his eyes clearly, even under the darkened sky. “Erik, you’re not alone.”
Erik thinks he feels the beginning of something, but it’s abruptly cut off when instinct takes over and he crashes their lips together instead, drowning out the startled noise that Charles makes.
Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to kiss while swimming, and Erik is forced to let go of Charles.
“Erik—“ Charles looks stunned and worried and besotted all at once. Erik swims to the edge of the pool and hauls himself out, ignoring the “Wait!” from behind him.
He hears Raven’s laughter the whole way back to the mansion.
xviii.
“Any improvements?” Hank asks in passing, like Erik’s not drenched and leaving a sopping wet trail in the halls. Erik is only remorseful because Charles will be able to follow and find him – not that he can’t already do that without a trail.
“I kissed Charles, and he’s married,” Erik answers brusquely. He storms off and misses the pitying but also exasperated look on Hank’s face.
xix.
“No,” Erik says when he hears Charles’s polite knocking on the other side of the door. He’s done a good job of avoiding Charles for a whole twenty-four hours since the kiss. Erik doesn’t need him coming in with a chess game, making him feel bad for kissing a married man even though he’s completely, utterly gone for Charles, and where was his supposed wife anyway, why hasn’t she been around, certainly, if Erik had been the one to promise himself to Charles, he would never leave his side—
“Please, Erik? I’ve even washed out all the chlorine,” Charles attempts lightly, and Erik catches himself before he smiles. He can’t catch himself, however, from opening the door a crack.
“What do you want?” He has every intention of talking to Charles through that two-inch gap, but of course, Charles is pushing his way inside, the same way he’s done since Erik woke up with supposedly eleven years of memories gone. Charles puts himself in the middle of Erik’s room and crosses his arms, and Erik stares.
“Are you wearing tweed pajamas?” he asks.
The world goes very, very still, and Erik’s mind goes very, very quiet.
Charles turns red alarmingly fast. “Shut the door, please.”
Erik flicks his wrist. The door shuts. “Now what?” he says, and it sounds like a challenge.
“Hank told me what you thought. That I’m—“ He’s playing with his left hand again, and Erik can feel the ring. “Didn’t I tell you? That one time you woke up, then passed out again?”
“I did a lot of that,” Erik says evenly.
Charles makes a frustrated noise, uncrossing his arms and taking quick strides to close the distance between them. “It’s our ring. This is yours.” He presses something small and metal in Erik’s palm. “I had to take it off when Hank performed an x-ray and I didn't want to startle you by giving it back—“
“Charles—“
“It’s you, it’s always been you, you idiot.” This time, Charles is the one who pulls him in and kisses him, and Erik is dizzy and trying not to think about how Charles has to push himself up on his toes to reach him. “I love you,” Charles says when he pulls away.
Erik reaches up and steadies him with a hand on the small of his back, the way he did when he first kissed Charles on that field. “I love you too,” he murmurs, and it’s nothing like Hank described; it’s slow and hazy, almost like slipping into that pool, days and months and years slipping back into place like puzzle pieces, one of them more prominent than the others—just last week, lying in his bed together, slipping the promise ring onto Charles’s finger and bringing his hand to his lips and kissing his knuckle.
In his arms, Charles stiffens, his breath quietly hitching. “Erik?” He draws away but not much, only enough to blink up at Erik inquisitively, hopefully. “You—?”
“Yes,” Erik says simply, and he kisses him in a way that he’s never really forgotten to do.
xx.
“So,” Sean says, after Charles, to everyone’s chagrin, finishes recounting last night’s events and devolves into bickering with Erik over who caused the toast to burn that morning, you distracted me, oh, I don’t remember being the one who kissed me first, “love saved the day?”
Only Hank and Raven seem happy, most likely because Charles and Erik will now be less oblivious in their mutual pining. If Sean thinks about it, he can start feeling a little happy too.
“I ought to tell you,” Erik says, leaning back in his seat as he lets Charles win this argument, “I was only finishing remembering everything by the time Charles told me he loved me.”
Charles raises an eyebrow.
“I actually started remembering when he walked in wearing tweed pajamas, because that was what he was wearing on the first night we consummated—“
“Erik,” Charles gasps, and he sounds scandalized until he leans forward purposely and preens, “you remember what I was wearing?”
To Sean’s disgust, they share one more kiss over the table, and the world spins soundly on.