He sees the words everywhere, as he travels. In tourist shops, on trinkets, on t-shirts – on cheap shit mass-produced in camps not unlike his own. In France, in Germany, even in Poland…as though anyone would want to visit a place haunted by so many fragmented spirits. For a while it means nothing, just a same way to lie in all the languages of the world. The one spirit of kindred-ship the continent still bears in face of its near-ruin.
But now that he has Charles – (who pulled him, gasping in the water, speaking in English, in his head) – he suddenly understands. Je t'aime. Te quiero. Eu te amo. Kocham cię. I love you. Everyone has their own idea of "I love you" – perhaps taken from a film (dashing movie star in black and white) or a song (grainy record, needle scratched into his brain forever). For Erik, love has best been expressed with vengeance at the barrel of a gun. He comes to understand – perhaps not the desire to buy an ugly mug with the Eiffel tower plastered on the front – but the need to be able to say those words in a way that feels new, exhilarating. Far away from pre-conceived notions and ideals with a cracked smile. He finds it in himself to begin again.
English is a thieving language – stealing verbs and slips of vowels and tucking them away to emerge suddenly as eloquence. Broken, made anew, evolved, mutated from the old world. The Germanic words (he thinks with a wry grin) are the simplest – obscenities, animals. The Latin words are the most complex – areas of study, animals.
Xavier is a Latin name, and Lehnsherr is German.
Unfortunately, there are no mugs sold at Penn Station or anywhere else that say what Erik wants to say to Charles. The round space is too small. Even if he wrote on the inside of the mug. Even if he covered it in text until it was black the flurry of words would not match the storm of feelings brewing underneath his skin.
He resorts to fashioning his feelings with the stamp of the languages he knows. Over the final dregs of a chess game he flicks his king down and asks in what he hopes is a coy voice, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?"
Charles merely laughs and takes his hand. "Don't be so gauche."
"You reduce me to clichés, mon chèri."
"You're worse than me and my genetics line," he giggles, standing as Erik pulls him up.
"Charles," Erik says gravely, locking the door with a flick of the wrist. "Nothing is worse than your genetics line."
It's the first night. After Charles had pulled him up from the black water. Disappointment dripped off him like saltwater, wrapped shivering in a corner. He can hear Charles arguing with a woman outside the cell – ("he could be dangerous" – "I don't care") and then there is a small click of the handle and Charles steps into the room.
"I'm sorry that our introduction was so hurried. And in the water, too. Rather indecorous, don't you think?"
Erik stares blankly at him. You let him get away.
"You would have died."
I was so close.
"I couldn't let you drown."
If I had gotten Shaw, my purpose would have been fulfilled.
"Oh, no," Charles says, and to Erik's dismay there is a smile there. "You have so much to live for, Erik. You are not a weapon. You are a person. And most importantly – you are not alone." Charles drops to one knee, and Erik will later remember feeling rather proposed-to. "I will always be here for you, Erik. Even if you leave and we're thousands of miles away" – he taps his temple – "you need never be alone, unless you choose to be."
For a second, Erik thinks he's been poisoned in some cruel trick of fate. His throat is closing up, his eyes are stinging – despite the chill of the water and the air his heart is bursting with an unknown fever. He has no words – knows Charles can read his mind – says it anyway, in his native tongue. "Dziękuję. Bardzo dziękuję."
Thank you.
"Fuck – fuck, yes – just like that – "
Charles is excessively wordy when they have sex. Excessively because every spark of pleasure Charles feels is already relayed directly to Erik through the flammable wick of their skin. He clings with eyes unfocused and sweat-drenched hair plastered to his forehead. For once he is dominated by his body rather than by his mind.
Erik lets out a low moan, bites the tender flesh where neck meets shoulder. His hands are sliding along Charles' slim torso, everything is taut and everything is brittle. He admires the curve of Charles' delicate neck in the lamplight, the plump, flushed lips, teeth flashing for moments, and red-stained face, the way hands are twisting in his hair and about his neck, the clean brief line of a foot on the small of his back and a hard cock is pressing against his stomach. Everything is sticky, everything is stuck.
Suddenly Charles grabs Erik by the chin and turns his face so close that all he can see is wide blue. "Stop thinking," he growls, "and fuck me."
With a laugh Erik obliges, grabs Charles' hips hard enough to bruise – the resulting groan is almost enough to make him lose it on the spot – and picks up the pace, fucking wildly, animalistic in his desire.
And now Charles is past words, and it is almost holy – the expression that steals his face, as though he were a creature made only for this. And Erik says so, says, "Your body was made to be fucked. Like this – "
"Fuck, Erik, please, I – oh!" He's cut off by orgasm, suffocating, blinding, leaving him clutching at Erik's shoulders, spine arching so that they're pressed together as his cock spurts come all over their stomachs. He tightens – one, two – and Erik's lost it as well, biting down again, eliciting a shudder.
They are lost together for a moment in a cloud, the haze over Charles' mind wraps them both in bliss. When Erik finds his bones again, he slips out of Charles' body carefully, and looks down on the silly grin all over Charles' face. Brushes the back of his fingers across pleasure-bruised lips.
There is something wild about Russian that feels right for the moment. "Izyskannyĭ," he whispers.
Exquisite.
There is one language that Erik does not understand and Charles does – and that is of the mind.
To be fair, Charles has tried and failed to explain it. Despite all his knowledge words all are too heavy for the mechanisms of Charles' mutation; a chainsaw where a scalpel would be more suited.
"It's like a clock," he always begins. "But a clock that counts time in all directions – forwards, backwards. Counts time that hasn't happened yet and time that may never happen. It counts time in directions towards emotions, like – anger. Hatred. Pain." He looks at Erik then but does not touch him. His mind is alive with open tendrils, like sunflowers. "Like friendship. Affection. Love." A brilliant smile, the sunflowers reach for the sky. "And…it's infinite. I'm not sure humans were meant to see infinity."
"Which is why," Erik says, always, "you're a post-human."
Charles sighs. "You know that word will start a talk that we've had before. If you want to have it again…"
"No," Erik says, even though he knows Charles knows he does. He wants to have this argument, and he wants to win.
"I'm so sorry it's impossible to describe." Charles sighs again, more heavily. "I don't mean to sound condescending, Erik. It's just incomprehensible to someone who hasn't seen it before."
"I understand." He knows Charles will never understand the warbling song of metal unless he feels it go through him, and Erik would never allow such a thing to happen.
Erik is roughly awakened by Charles sitting up, a shout dying on his lips.
"What is it?"
"I saw – I saw a murder," he pants, clutching at the blankets.
Erik rubs a hand over his face, looks at the clock. Three in the bloody morning. "It's over now. Go back to sleep."
Charles shakes his head violently. "I have to tell the police," he says.
"And give away our position?" Erik yells after him, but Charles is already sprinting, halfway down the hallway before Erik reaches the door.
"I have a plan!" Charles shouts back, and of course he does.
Erik comes down the stairs to the murmur of Charles' voice. "He's going to go to his friend's house now – on Lexington and third – but his friend has no idea…" He has two fingers to his temple. "He has brown hair, brown eyes, and is roughly six foot tall. I'm calling from a public phone – there is no number accessible." He presses harder to his temple, closes his eyes. "There is no number available for further communications," he says, then hangs up. Sits back in his chair. "Erik," he calls wearily.
"Charles." He moves from the shadow of the door and holds out a hand.
"It's…just a moment." Charles leans forward, takes a deep breath. "I'm having a bit of difficulty – "
Erik sits directly in front of him. "Look at me. Look at my face."
Charles tilts his head up, but his eyes slide like water on a window pane. "I'm trying – "
"Shh." Erik does it mindlessly – grasps Charles' face delicately in his hands and thinks of three hours ago (a sweet tangle of limbs and good wine as they stumble into Charles' room, a mischievous hand worming down Charles' trousers). Tries to push the warmth of that moment out much like he kept the darkness pushed in. The antithesis to his life. "Look at my face."
Finally Charles stops shivering under Erik's fingertips and grasps his wrist. "Let's go back upstairs."
They go back to bed kissing with no intent to further activity. It's slow, pleasant, calming – a way of reinforcing a connection, according to many scientific journals and Charles' personal experience. It's why whores won't kiss on the mouth. It's why sometimes that's all they want to do – feel words alive in a mouth and the metallic swipe of a pulsing tongue across teeth.
Charles falls asleep in Erik's arms, a kiss still clinging to the corner of his mouth. Erik does not dare move, instead spends an eternity of wakeful sleeping until he feels a sharpness pierce his brain.
"No," Charles mumbles. "Not the knife, no – "
He wraps his arms around the small frame, presses a frantic kiss to Charles' temple in the hope that it will chase the nightmare away. "Alles ist gut," he murmurs to Charles' damp forehead, as the sharpness subsides. "Alles wird gut. Everything's going to be all right."
His life began and ended with that sentence. "Alles ist gut. Alles wird gut." His mother's last words and prophecy.
There are other nights where Charles is seized with horror and crying – as he whines against the confines of Erik's chest sometimes a spurt of blood, a scream flashes before Erik's eyes for a moment. Charles spasms with another's pain, and Erik spends more time awake than he should, fretting, holding Charles as though he could squeeze each bullet from him. He closes his eyes to the comforting dark and croons nonsense, hoping Charles will somehow hear him – "Gelibter, bite tonnit veynen…duzalst nisht zeynder shrokn." Sweetheart, don't cry. Do not be afraid.
He doesn't know why she chose her last words in German when she'd spoken Polish and Yiddish to him all his life. It was jarring. It reminded him of exactly where he was. Perhaps she didn't want to seem any more different in front of the Nazis. Perhaps she wanted to know she was strong – that she didn't care if they knew her pain. What more could they take away from her? What is a human being without her dignity but a glorified ape? So take it away from her – torture her spawn. Her last words of comfort haunted him like a coin rusted with blood, more than the screams of any man he had killed.
Perhaps if she'd spoken in Yiddish he could have saved her.
So he whispers to Charles what he wishes her last words could have been: "Tonnit veynen, gelibter, tonnit veynen."
He's confronted with this living breathing being every day and it stuns him to know that for the last ten years he's been living in a corpse's eyes.
Ja, Mama. Ich habe ihn gefunden. Alles ist gut. Alles wird gut.
I've found him. Everything is fine. Everything will be all right.
Her prophecy fulfilled.
"I finally have a language to present to you that I am sure you don't know," Charles says triumphantly over a snifter of brandy one evening.
Erik laughs. "My friend, I doubt that is such a crowning achievement. There is so much I don't know, that one language is hardly…"
"Indulge me." Charles smiles. How could Erik refuse to indulge such a thing? "It's one of my favorite quotes, actually." He draws a deep breath, waiting for Erik's judgment before he's even said anything. Averts his eyes and begins: "Onen ì-Estel Edain, ù-chebin estel anim. I give hope to Mankind, I keep none for myself. It's Sindarin. From J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings."
Erik's jaw tightens, and he can see the shift in Charles' expression. His mouth says, "What do you think?" His eyes say, "This is not going as planned."
"Quite a noble sentiment, don't you think?" Erik drawls, leaving the disdain out in the open.
"Well, it's what I've always wanted to be," Charles says, peering into the depths of his brandy. "I've always wanted to experience true selflessness."
"How are you enjoying it so far?"
Charles looks up sharply. "You mean—?" And he has the nerve to laugh. "Oh, Erik. To give my home to this cause? To spend money on this? To feed and clothe these children?"
There is a pause where Erik's voice is too compressed to say anything rational and Charles' gaze is level.
"No." Charles' voice is abruptly hoarse. "No, I've been incredibly selfish, my friend."
"You have given more to these strangers in a week than I had my entire childhood," Erik says. He spits bitterness like a snake's poison.
"But you have given me more than I could ever have wished for," Charles says, and Erik wants to destroy his face. Crumple it like a sheet of tinfoil for this sentimental uselessness. "And I have kept it all to myself, Erik. I haven't shared you with anyone at all. That is very, very selfish."
"Don't worry." Erik knows Charles can hear the anger. He must have been broadcasting harder than Goebbels on a good day. "Someday you'll learn to give me up."
Charles wakes him again and Erik is ready with an embrace, but he merely stares out of wide blue eyes and says "But I don't want to."
"Don't want to what?"
"Give you up," Charles whispers like it's sacred. "I don't want to give hope to all men by giving it up for myself. You're my – " The sentence breaks. Erik looks back into those eyes and Charles' mind is so careful it's like looking at a stranger.
"I'm your what?" And he needs to hear it, desperately so. He needs to know it – needs to feel the silence at the back of his mind and hear Charles say it.
His mind explodes with light and color before Charles' lips open and as such he is less convinced of the words when he hears them: "You're my only hope."
"Erik," Charles asks one morning. Oblivious. In front of the world. "What do you want?"
He stays away from Charles' mind these days, prefers that he walk and telepathy run, that he can see reality. "O que você acha que eu quero?" he asks instead. Charles has gone very, very still. "Quando você chega perto de mim…fica proximo a mim…" One, two, three deliberate steps forward. "Eu nem consigo pensar, meu amor. Imagine se aqui…en frente de todos…" The kitchen is frozen with lack of understanding. Erik feels the vowels of Portuguese – flat, heavy, the language of colonists – roll off his tongue and onto Charles' skin. "Imagine se todo mundo ficou aqui, olhando, e voce perdeu todo controle."
"Desiste," Charles answers, finding the word in Erik's head.
Erik twists away from Charles' outstretched, inviting hand. It was all the proof he needed.
It's a lazy evening. Their lovemaking less frantic than usual; drawing out the electric sparks into ribbons of lightning instead. Eyes and wrists tied in absolute wonder – as though it would be their last. As if each touch were a breath and each breath an afterthought, lungs only alive with the scent of the other. As if they were living on borrowed time.
Now Charles is resting and Erik is watching life tumble in and out of his thin chest. "Wenn ich dich die Kinder lehren sehe," he says softly, "denke ich wir würden eine gute Familie abgeben."
"I can understand you, you know," Charles says sleepily.
"Du – you can?"
"Not the actual German, or what have you. But when you speak in other languages – particularly German – you broadcast ever so strongly, my friend." Charles yawns, tucks himself further into Erik's embrace. "And to your statement - yes, I think we would make an excellent family." With that he curls more deeply into Erik's arms, so that his breathing mingles with the leaping pulse point of Erik's neck.
It solves so many questions – the idea that Erik is broadcasting rather than being read.
It solves too many questions.
He looks at the sleeping figure in his arms – lashes fluttering in sleep, pink with exertion, delicate, pale, fresh, new. Thoroughly exhausted by his unnerving wantonness, by his surrender. An embodiment of peace.
Peace was never an option.
And there is one language that neither Charles nor Erik understand, and that is the language of the heart. The steady rhythm of reassurance, the magic of blood giving a smile life.
It is a fickle thing – hammering at the smallest scare and slowing even as the situation grows more dire. But that is what it is to partake in this body – to be a reactionary. To be animal when there is no higher call.
There are no words for the heart that runs hot with all-too-present desire and longing. The pain in Charles' chest nearly defeats the one in his spine, but when he looks up at Erik's face with that ridiculous helmet on – pieces of him are missing jagged and torn like fresh cuts of meat and there's a void in Erik's head and his eyes like he's dead already and it's not enough to tug his heart back to hope. In fighting for co-operation he's sacrificed the greatest teamwork he will ever see.
"Come with me," Erik urges. "We want the same thing."
"No, my friend," Charles says. "I'm afraid we don't."
He would cry for a paradise lost but he would rather spend that energy trying to forget.
Neither understands what they've done to the other. Like curses and blessings in foreign tongues – they sound the same, after all, to the untrained mind.
He doesn't understand until he returns to Xavier mansion and sees the chess board still set up from an era long past. He doesn't understand until he finds all of Erik's possessions still folded neatly and precisely in the drawers, smell still clinging—
He doesn't understand until Mystique looks at him with betrayal in her eyes the first time they go hungry.
He realizes he'll be starved for the rest of his life.
It hurts Erik to speak English, to use words tired with exaltation at Charles' feet with other people, but those are his chosen companions. He blames Charles for it, but they both know that there is no fault, only a fault-line, cracking the earth and their souls with hairline fractures no wider than a string of thought ricocheting off a metal dome.
It hurts Charles to hear all Europe speak. Flinching or showing anger at a new, young mutant's mother tongue never did anybody any good, so he shakes it off. ("Estou bem, Mama." "Me está enseñando mucho." "It's awesome, Dad, don't worry.")
Years later, he meets Kurt Wagner. "Diese Familie ist heilig," he says. This family is sacred.
"La Sagrada Familia," Charles agrees, instead of screaming and piercing his brain with glass. "The church that will take a thousand years to finish, and breaks even as it is being built."
Humans continue to make trinkets and tourist t-shirts even as mutants surge against each other, against the humans, against each other. Lovers still buy fresh "I love you" right off the shelves of the airport. Ya lyublyu tebya. Wǒ ài nǐ. Ich liebe dich. All the languages of the world as the planet breathes hard with the exertion of communication, while Erik and Charles struggle to stay apart. Magneto wears the helmet. Professor X teaches his mutants, however unwittingly, that Magneto is the enemy.
But Erik keeps the bullet, and Charles does not have the satellite dish fixed.
The only language that will capture this feeling is the only language neither understands.
It's not enough.
fin.