Charles Xavier takes a breath as his dream begins. He's lucid dreamed before, but tonight he's experimenting. Stretching his wings to test them for flight. Seeing if he can change anything.
His rooms are just the same as he walks through them. The bloodstain. The watermark on the right corner of the ceiling. The two wing-backed chairs by the fireplace he'd had moved in after . . . no. He's always had them. No doubt. Or something could go wrong.
He steps cautiously as he fights his own mind's want and need for numbness. For sleep. For quiet.
But he is constructing. Forming. Creating. And he doesn't want to stop. He wants to finish his plans. He wants to do what he set out to do. And as he steps through the final door, the one leading into the sitting room attached to his bedroom he knows that he's doing it.
He's really doing it.
"Finally, I was wondering when you were going to show up." A tight, though for him relaxed, grin flashes over his face as blue-ice eyes pierce Charles' own blues.
"Sorry, I – no, never mind. Are you ready?" His speech is undisturbed and his heart is as light as a feather. Erik just nods as Charles takes the opposite seat.
Neither have to ask who will be which color. They already know Erik thinks himself tainted and dark. Charles white and clean.
They already know they're both liars.
At least a little bit.
The two stay quiet and Charles' mind enjoys this calm, the peace between two friends. The clean slate. As if nothing had ever happened to either of them. As if both could walk in reality.
"You are right." Charles looks up from the board and sees Erik unconsciously bending some of the metal around him. He doesn't say anything about it though. Charles tries to get a read on Dream Erik's mind, but there's nothing there.
That's the thing that screams this is a dream to him.
"I know I am, but what about this time?" Charles watches interestedly as Erik clenches his jaw in his typical fashion while his right fist also pulls in on itself.
"About . . . this afternoon. When you said . . . when you told me that violence is not the answer." Charles stares openly now. No fool smile. No cheap grin. Just eyes. "Charles?"
"Yes?" He sounds and feels out of breath. He feels like the world is falling in on him. How? How is this happening? I'm not controlling this part! This isn't my idea.
A lump threatens to kick his heart out of his chest.
"I'm s-,"
"Don't." Erik looks up into Charles' eyes. A question on the dream's lips. "Please, please don't say something like that. Let's just be friends for the night? Let's talk about this some other time, hm? Please Erik."
Maybe it's the please in his sentences that got the dream to drop the topic of conversation. Honestly? Charles never did find out. He just went on playing the game and talking of inconsequential things with the dream face of his old friend, so young now, yet so changed in reality.
Reality. That acrid, biting liquid clouding his thoughts all of the time he lies awake at night. Unable to move his legs.
Charles never liked reality much.
Not for a long while.
But, and he won't tell anyone this, he doesn't much like his dreams nowadays either.
They dredge up too much of reality now and it shouldn't be where he finds his only friend.
[A/N]
Written to Silversun Pickups – Growing Old is Getting Old.
I wanted to write another drabble. I figured Xavier would want to have some rehashing with Magneto, but he just couldn't get the guts or something to go all the way through with it.