Hello all! Sorry for the long delay, but I had a good reason—I went to California and attended San Diego Comic Con! I technically had this ready to go before I left last week but I was in a rush so couldn't post this at the time. That's okay though because that means that you're getting another update either later today or early tomorrow!
So I hope you are pleased with this chapter, and that it satisfies your various expectations after the events last time. ;) There are a couple of books mentioned in here—the Great Gatsby, I think, doesn't need explaining, but the other two maybe deserve it (and then there's a fourth that isn't exactly a book).
The Dying Earth is a book by Jack Vance, which can now be found in a four-book collection, Tales of the Dying Earth. It's about a far-future sci-fi/fantasy world and his imagination is boundless. I recommend it, with the disclaimer that some of the views contained are a bit quaint by today's standards.
Die Verwandlung should be familiar—it's the original title of Franz Kafka's the Metamorphosis. Apparently the differences in German and English sentence structure severely impact the translation.
Lastly, thank you to my shiny new beta, LJ user idioticonion! She beta'd the last chapter too, but was not at the time officially my beta, so I shall go back and edit that.
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xxxiv.
Charles said nothing on the way back to his rooms, to the point where even Erik, to whom quiet came naturally, seemed to feel the need to fill that void.
"It's remarkably difficult to find intact records these days," he was saying, pushing Charles' chair along beside him. There was little activity in that part of the manor during the middle of the day. "Especially music suitable for dignified occasions. It never occurred to me that we might run out of records, or that I'd miss the sound of music in a room."
Charles maintained his carefully cultivated, meaningful silence. He didn't look up to see whether Erik truly appeared as nostalgic as he claimed, never mind that Charles had never before heard him admit to regretting the loss of any part of the old world.
They arrived at the door to Charles' quarters, and it swung open untouched. Drifted, just as ghostly, to a close behind them.
Erik took them into the main part of the sitting room and remained standing a discreet distance away as Charles began to tear at the chain around his neck, no longer caring which direction his shirt collars pointed, growing increasingly frenetic as the clasp slipped out from under his nails again and again.
Finally, it snapped open without Charles' help and fell into his hands. He wanted to throw it as hard as he could and hear it fall where he could never reach it again, but of course there was nowhere that Erik couldn't simply summon it back from. Instead, Charles squeezed it tight in his fist, as if he were crushing the links together into a solid lump.
"Charles…" Erik began softly. In the hall his presence had been huge and commanding; now he hung thin and tired.
The telepath pinned Erik with a tight-lipped stare, and while Charles didn't sneer or narrow his eyes or do anything other than look at him, the other man swayed back a little. "Do you think I don't know this conversation, Erik? Do you think that in all my years around other people, hearing their thoughts, even as a child, I never encountered anyone who had been hit by their—by their man, only to be told that it would never happen again? Do you honestly think you can apologize and do something sweet for me to prove your sincerity, and that it will work?"
Erik had been looking down at the amber swirls of the hardwood floor as Charles spoke, but now he glanced up to meet Charles' hard blue eyes. "I wasn't going to apologize."
Charles gaped at him, trying and failing to say any number of things before settling on, "You weren't going to—are you trying to tell me you didn't do anything wrong? Are you that far gone?"
The smile on Erik's face was grim and mirthless. "I'm not an idiot, Charles, or a child. I know what I did, and I've been crueler for worse reasons."
"You strangled me," Charles stated, as if maybe the other man had forgotten, "until I passed out."
Erik frowned. "No, I only restricted the blood flow to your brain for a moment; you weren't in any danger."
Charles flicked his hand to signal that this was beside the point. "Even if that were true—there was no way for you to know that I didn't have a weak spot in my brain that might have ruptured—what you did was a breach of my trust and my personal freedom."
Nodding slowly, Erik agreed, "Yes, it was. I didn't think I'd need to do that."
"Oh, so it's my fault, is it, Magneto? If only I'd been a better lackey, you wouldn't have had to knock me out and pin me to a table?"
Erik had the grace to wince. "You don't… It's not your fault, Charles. I shouldn't have expected you to remember, after letting you call me by my old name all this time."
Charles chuckled bitterly and turned his head away, unable to bear looking at the other man's face anymore; at the little lines of pain at the corners of Erik's eyes. "Well, I guess it's time we fixed that, isn't it?"
"No." Erik's voice was unexpectedly sharp. "Out there, I'm Magneto. I have to be; I don't have a choice. Here, with you, I can be Erik."
"You have a choice," Charles murmured, almost more to himself. "There's always a choice."
"No," Erik replied, just as quietly. "There's not."
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xxxv.
Erik didn't come to visit that night. Charles wasn't sure whether Erik was avoiding him or if it was simply that they had already seen each other earlier that day, but he was glad of the reprieve.
Charles didn't know if he had the strength for another argument.
He wanted to be furious; he wanted to hold onto that feeling of rage, the desire to throw things and deface the priceless paintings in his rooms and to thrash around on his newly sensitive legs until he hurt himself, but… But anger was Erik's thing, and he had already taken all of it that there was in the world and spent it on a war he couldn't afford.
The only thing left for Charles to feel was weariness.
Weariness for his own helplessness, weariness at always having to guess what Erik was going to do next; Charles was tired of fear and uncertainty. He was exhausted by the whole damned mess, and as he sat in the gentle gloom of his room, looking through the wood of his desk at the necklace hidden in the drawer, a decision turned slowly through his mind.
He could believe Erik. In fact, Charles did believe Erik; he could accept that the other man had a script to follow, no matter his personal inclinations. Charles could guess what would happen if Erik forgot his role in front of the Brotherhood members; some of them, he knew, followed the figure of Magneto out of genuine loyalty, but many of them truly had no better goal than furthering their own self-interests.
Charles felt that he could forgive Erik for his outburst of violence, but what Erik seemed unwilling to admit was that the entire intricate dance of deceit and intimidation in which he claimed to be trapped had been of his own design. The world was being re-built according to Erik's rules whether he wanted it that way or not, and the more of that future Charles saw, the more horrified he became.
And so, as night fell and darkness settled through his rooms, Charles sat silent and still in the golden light of his desk lamp and decided to stage a coup.
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xxxvi.
The next night, Charles was surprised to hear a knock at his door; thinking vaguely that it must have been Raven come to ask for her copy of the Dying Earth, Charles bade the knocker to enter.
Instead it was Erik, carrying a book of his own; his typically confident smile showed an edge of hesitation as he stood poised in the foyer, evidently waiting for Charles to invite him in further. This was in sharp contrast to that morning, when he had simply strode in to collect the telepath for another Brotherhood meeting, scrutinizing Charles to see that he had already put on the necklace and looked presentable.
Erik had never previously knocked, but while Charles guessed that this new development was an exaggerated attempt to allow him his privacy, he was also beginning to see the lines between Erik and Magneto. Both men wore the same clothing, but the man who lingered outside his sitting room was a vastly different person than the one who had effortlessly disregard Charles during the meeting. Charles wondered if Erik had accentuated the differences for his sake.
"Come in," Charles requested, backing away his chair as if Erik could be drawn forward by diffusion alone. The power to refuse Erik felt strange and unwieldy; for his purposes he required Erik's presence, but Charles wondered whether that control was real or illusory.
"I brought a new book," Erik explained, holding it up. "I assume you won't have waited for me to finish the other." The corners of his lips curled upward, then his gaze slid away from Charles' as if he worried that mere eye contact might be construed as a threat. As Erik unclasped his cape and slung it on the coat rack, Charles fought the urge to smile; despite his promise not to apologize, the other man seemed determined to make the attempt.
The meeting that day had been strange, even aside from the sharp memory of what the wood of the table felt like on his face. Charles had expected to be sneered at or mocked by the other Brotherhood members, but instead he had been… Ignored. Mindful of the collar around his neck, Charles had cautiously reached out from mind to mind, probing gently for an explanation.
What he'd discovered had been shocking; rather than ostracizing him, Charles' domination by Erik had made them more accepting of his presence—to their minds, he'd become a known quantity, and their blind fear had been replaced by the same wariness with which they regarded each other. In fact some of them, Zeus included, believed that Charles had gotten off lightly, proving once and for all that this was simply the way politics worked now.
This was unsettling, but Charles had not and did not plan on mentioning it to Erik, who settled himself on the couch with a stiffness that puzzled the telepath until he recalled that it had only been days since the other man's injury. At no point while he was in public had Erik allowed any sign of that wound to show in his movements.
Erik seemed content to allow Charles to remain in his chair, but the geneticist wheeled himself over, set his brakes, flipped up the footrests, and—bracing himself against the arms of the chair—pushed himself halfway to his feet, rising to an uneasy crouch before twisting and collapsing onto the cushions near Erik.
Erik had lifted his arm up from the couch when it became clear what Charles was doing, and he kept it raised for a moment to be sure Charles wouldn't shift away. Then, settling his arm back behind Charles' shoulders, Erik tilted an eyebrow at the telepath. "I had no idea you were progressing so quickly."
Charles didn't like to see the cautious pleasure that had spread over Erik's face as soon as he'd drawn near. "I would have thought you'd be harassing Badger for news each day."
Erik wore an enigmatic smirk as he leaned down slightly to peer into Charles' eyes. "I was half-worried you would make a bad pun on her name."
"And the other half?" Charles inquired absently, trying to glimpse the title of the book between Erik's fingers.
"Likes watching train wrecks," the other man concluded. He moved his hand so that Charles could make out the letters spelling the Great Gatsby. This one Charles had read before, but he nodded his approval with a small, considering hm.
"Before I begin, Charles, I wanted to ask: which languages do you speak?" Erik balanced the corner of the book on his thigh, rotating it slowly back and forth in short arcs.
"English," the geneticist replied, watching the way light ran down the pages as the slim novel turned toward and away from the lamp.
Erik lifted the corner of his mouth. "Don't play this game, Charles."
Glancing up, Charles conceded, wryly, "Okay. Latin, as well."
The book came to rest beneath the telepath's chin, lifting his face to Erik's view. "Charles," he warned. "I know for a fact that you speak some amount of Spanish, and I once saw you reading Die Verwandlung."
Charles smile was a strained mixture of embarrassment and irritation. "I don't… I'm a telepath, Erik. I speak any particular language only as well as the person I'm speaking to."
Erik withdrew the book, flipped it in his hand, and hooked the spine in behind the curve of Charles' jaw, pulling the telepath very slightly closer. "You can't commune telepathically with a book, old friend," he commented, raising the novel to touch—very carefully—against Charles' temple.
Charles communicated his growing exasperation with a look and a hand on Erik's wrist, preventing the other man from abusing the book any further. "Well, I happened to be around someone who could speak German at the time, Erik. I don't understand why this is so important to you, but I'm being entirely honest. If it weren't for the fact that I already knew it by the time my telepathy manifested, I suspect I wouldn't even know English."
"And the Latin?" Erik persisted, letting the book drop back to his lap.
The geneticist granted him another flat stare. "Boarding school," he replied shortly.
"Hm," Erik mused. He looked down at the Great Gatsby. "To answer your question, I was trying to decide what to read tomorrow."
Charles' eyebrows jumped. "We're not going to finish reading this tonight," he protested, somewhat doubtfully.
"Not tonight," Erik agreed, "but I know you'll have finished it by tomorrow evening."
This, Charles couldn't deny. Still, he grimaced. "Starting a new story every night—it's a little bit Scheherazade, isn't it?"
"Not really," Erik said. Leaning toward Charles' ear, close enough that his breath teased the telepath's neck, he murmured, "For one thing, Charles, you're no virgin."
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