An idea that I had the very first time I watched the First Class movie.
It's dedicated to my friend Areyende, love you chickadee! :P
Written whilst listening to Florence and The Machines Heavy
This is completely unbeta'd. Feel free to send me any mistakes you find. I know they'll be in there :P
The first time they had met it had been electric. Nerves unravelling so badly that both were just shivering wrecks. It had only lasted moments though.
Erik had to be strong. Never depend and only rely on himself.
Something had changed though, frayed bits around the edge of his mind that hadn't been there before, an ever steady presence thrumming softly just beside his own.
It wrecked him. Pulled him apart, piece by piece, slowly unravelling. He'd never felt so torn open, so on display for someone else before in his life.
Not even Shaw had ever made him feel this vulnerable.
Erik hated Charles Xavier.
Charles had to take charge, prove he could be trusted and relied upon.
Charles couldn't even control the shking in his own hands, he was falling apart himself. To the crew and agents around him he was steady as a rock, unmovable. Charles felt like he was the titanic and Erik was his ice.
Never before had a felt a presence so strong, it tore him apart and plunged him into the depths, only resurfacing for a last gasp before lost beneath the froth.
It had all been too much too fast, too much for his power. Smashing down walls, but still trying to be gentle as to not alarm, he'd broken something. Not Erik. His own walls, and now Erik was in there. Further than any had been before.
Charles was terrified of Erik Lensherr.
With both torn apart so completely by the other in such a short instance it was no wonder that both tried to repair themselves, fast and as ruthlessly as possible. Clashing and colliding as unavoidable as the ground in which the stood.
Erik had followed the thrum in the back of his mind, as easy has if he had a spool of thread in his hand. He found Charles waiting, deep in the bowels of the ship, shadowed in a doorway. Calm in appearance all except for a finger tapping nervously against a pant leg. It wasn't what gave him away though. Erik could feel him, as he'd never felt anyone before. Feel the panic and the uncertainty rolling off of him in waves, Charles trying his hardest to supress it in an attempt at calm. It wasn't working.
It was a long moment they stood staring at each other, barely moving an inch.
It was the longest wait of Charles life. Feeling each bend and twitch, expansion and contraction, the metal alive around him, straining and yearning, wanting to change, mould itself anew.
He knew it was dangerous, this connection, he could feel the fray, the slow unravelling in both of them. The melding. Their minds desire to just sink into each other and never return, an irreversible process, a combination that would simultaneously kill and reincarnate.
And for a moment it was too much, both unable to stay, unable to fight the connection born of accident, and suddenly they were clashing. Lips upon lips, hands gripping and tightening, never breaking contact. It was with no elegance that they found their way to an unoccupied room, both sensing the minds that occupied and the feet that weighed the steel down. They were falling, deeper and deeper, wrapped around each other and so... so heavy, sinking too far and too fast.
And then for one miraculous moment they were one. One glorious being, two bodies one mind or was it one body and two minds? Neither and nothing mattered, never had they been happier, no more 'me' or 'I'. There was only 'we' and 'us'. For a moment both forgot to worry. Both no longer feared for themselves. For their futures.
And then Erik remembered and Charles sensed everything and suddenly they couldn't do this. Not now, not with so much left and so little of themselves to give. Both too broken to be one, too scared to stay two. And it hurt to make the choice, to break what was being made. Both pulling and running, too scared to look back and see what they had missed.
Nothing had ever felt so wrong as breaking the connection they had formed.
Both panting, it was first Erik that realised he couldn't feel the minds around him anymore, Charles only moments later noticing the lack of the hum he never even knew steel had made and all of a sudden neither could look the other in the eye. Too scared of seeing what they had lost, what they could have had.
The glimpse into what could have been.
It wasn't until some months later, Charles lying in a pool of his own blood, covered in sand and Erik turning away fist clenched around shredded metal with not even a glance behind that their thoughts travelled back to that night in the bowels of a ship, where they had a chance to be whole.
The first time they let themselves dwell on the moment. Their chance.