By time they reached Heidelberg Charles had pale blue bags to match his eyes and was visibly wilting although he tried to keep up his energy enough to fawn over all things Heidelberg.
"Oh my goodness! It's so beautiful!" he cried with wonder, trying to suck in every view in one go.
"Calm down before you have a seizure," Erik suggested, trying to keep Charles from fluttering like a hyperactive bird around the station.
Erik knew the frenzy couldn't last: the man hadn't slept a wink on the train despite a tiredness that had about knocked him unconscious. Every time his body slumped with forced sleep it would jerk up again the next moment leaving Charles green in the face.
"Falling asleep in moving vehicles makes me sick," he explained miserably across the aisle and pulled out a book to try and keep himself awake so he wouldn't throw up on his seat partner.
The seats were set up two by two and Charles had put his foot down about Erik and Edie sitting together, lunging into his seat and white-knuckling the handrests to prevent Edie from dragging him out of it. He had finally succeeded after a bitter struggle, and Edie collapsed in exhaustion next to her son.
"Imagine not letting an old woman have her way! He's as bad as you are!"
"He understands that old women shouldn't always get what they want. Especially when they're as masochistic as you are."
Edie scoffed but eyed his boyfriend with a new sense of embittered respect.
They chatted about other things for a long while, mainly about Irena, Erik's 'aunt,' for lack of a better word. Edie had invited her to go pick Erik up at the airport, and any responsible adult would have taken Edie up on the offer no matter how early it entailed getting on the train just to keep the old woman safe, but Irena had begged off. She hadn't even had the guts to simply say no, feigning a migraine instead. Erik fully considered her a coward and a loafer and wished he could convince his mother to kick her out of this rent-free living situation.
"You've never met her," Edie chuckled, rubbing his hand. "You judge too early."
"I judge right on time. Is it my fault I haven't seen her since infancy? She was fine living off her husband till he died, then she decided she could get away with living off you."
They argued that point for the next twenty minutes before Edie turned the subject to something she probably imagined was more jovial, but was actually just more nerve-wracking. "Did you ask Charles to move in with you yet?"
Erik waved her frantically into silence, tossing Charles a look to make sure he hadn't heard any of that. Luckily that particular sentence probably wasn't very legible in English, so he thought he was safe.
He frowned petulantly and said, "I'll ask him once you tell me how to ask him and not before."
Edie eyed him curiously. "This I do not understand. Before you were always so impetuous. You'd get an idea and act on it immediately. It was maddening. Now suddenly you're nervous to take any step."
Erik sighed sadly. It was a true enough assessment of the situation. "I can't help it, Mama," he complained. "Before I never cared. If I did something wrong and it ruined everything it never really mattered. This matters..."
Edie smiled up at him and her deep brown eyes went watery.
He balked wildly: "Du mein Guete, Mama!"
"I'm sorry. I just...I'm just so happy I get to see you like this. I wish your father were still here, so he could see you so in love..."
Erik blushed scarlet and patted her hand soothingly.
"You have to ask him, kleiner. You won't ruin anything. He loves you, too, I know."
"Living together doesn't just count on loving each other. If it did we'd have moved in a long time ago. I just...I don't think that he loves me more than his sister. I don't think he'll live with me instead of her," he admitted bitterly.
His mother nodded understandingly and kissed as far up his frame as she could reach: his shoulder. "You're too pessimistic. You have to have faith, kleiner. Love is all about faith."
Erik was disappointed to learn this. Faith had never been his strong-point.
But looking at Charles now, antsy to take in all of his hometown and energetic and beaming, the task felt a little bit easier.
Erik had always been good with money. He was good at saving and better at investing and even by business school his professor had suggested that he go into investment banking. If Erik had had any interest in earning other people more money he probably would have done it, but as it was his love of money extended only towards his own. And his family's of course.
So all through school he had saved money, speculated and invested and increased his funds, thankful that he could put it towards his own desires and not paying off school thanks to his scholarships. With this blessing, he could set aside some of his money towards owning his own home, and the rest to sending home to Ireland and his parents. It was mostly unnecessary with his father receiving plenty of work in carpentry and various odd-job construction work. At the same time his mother refused to stop her odd-job tailor work, so they were doing very well. They put Erik's money into an airplane fund and with that they were able to fly him home at least once a year. They liked for him to stay home all summer, but once Erik got the internship at the brokerage firm, he had starting coming home for Hanukkah instead, which he preferred.
His money came in handy a lot more when his father died, just as Erik was turning twenty-five. He took time off his work at the time and flew to Ireland for the funeral and helped his mother go through her things. After selling or giving away bits of it, they had put the rest in storage and Erik had moved her out to live with him and Magda while she recovered from the depression of losing the man she had been married to since she was sixteen and had fathered two beautiful children with. Erik had been equally shaken. His father was only fifty-three and, at twenty-five, Erik had not been planning for the contingency of losing a parent. It made his mother all the more precious to him, and if he hadn't had her right at hand to be sure of her health he thought he might have gone mad.
He had loved living with his mother again, partly because he was scared for her and partly because she managed to make him feel so much better. Magda had only responded to the loss of his father with a tirade against patriarchy, and having his mother there to console him saved him any more of Magda's comforting lectures.
But it couldn't last forever. For one, Magda and his mother got along about as well as a cobra and a mongoose. If either of them had been able to understand the other one it probably would have blown up much earlier, but as it was they could only suspect the rudeness of the other. Erik tried to water down his translations as much as possible, too exhausted between work and mourning to intervene completely.
When Irena got a hold of Edie and tried to finagle a way into moving in with Erik and Magda also, the older woman had instead suggested they move back to Germany together. Irena, like her brother, was a Polish-German mix, although she had married a Pole and related much more to her Polish side. Still, she spoke German and was willing enough to follow anyone's plan for her.
Erik had accepted his mother's departure with much bitterness, and had insisted on getting her set up in Germany so that he could at least be sure of her comfort there. Edie had set her foot down on him buying her a house though. She didn't want a house. She wanted their home.
After two years of waiting around, Edie accepted all the money Erik insisted on giving her and had bought out the lease on the same apartment Erik had been born in all the way back in '77.
So it was with a strange sense of vague deja-vu that Erik now looked outside the taxi to see his old apartment building.
They had only lived there until he was ten, but he found that he remembered certain aspects very well.
The bakery on the ground floor was new-the area was much more commercial now. But he remembered the synagogue down the street, and its stained glass windows. The same post office was on the opposite corner, and Erik had a strange moment of wondering if the postal worker who always gave him mints was still there.
He remembered the tree planted in the sidewalk outside the apartment, although it was obviously bigger now, over twenty years later. He was surprised his mother hadn't torn it down herself after it had nearly dropped a complete branch on top of him during a windstorm when he was nine. He remembered the blue and white tiles in the foyer of the apartment building, although he didn't remember the wrought iron bannisters-hadn't they been wood when he was there?
The mail boxes like little doors were still there-he remembered playing house with the little girl from upstairs with those little doors: his astronaut figurine had inhabited 201 and her Indian along with her over-sized black widow (twice the size of the other figurines) had lived in 303, the landlady's actual apartment. Natasha-that had been her name. Or was it Natalie? She had been his first kiss, playing Truth or Dare with the other kids in the neighborhood. She had also been his first French kiss, although at the time they hadn't been sure what that entailed besides tongue and so had mostly ended up licking each other's mouths.
Overwhelmed with memories, he glanced around nearly as much as Charles, and in his distraction he lost his baggage to his mother. In retaliation he wrestled Charles for the bigger bag and won, dragging it up the stairs after Edie.
"When was the last time you were here?" Charles questioned as they made their way up.
"We moved away right before I turned eleven," Erik shrugged.
"This is so exciting! I feel like I should be filming your reaction or something," Charles laughed. Erik tried to roll his eyes but they were too busy taking everything in.
It was beautifully warm inside his old apartment, a stark change from the frigid temperatures of the street, and Erik felt all his muscles relaxing with the heat and the wonderful scent of his mother's home. It smelt just like his childhood: a sweet citrus smell, the spicy kitchen smells, and the soft sort of fabric smell that followed his mother around from her sewing and knitting, all coupled with the gentle scent of freshly-baked bread from downstairs.
"Schoen, Mama," Charles gasped, motioning to the apartment.
Edie blushed and brushed off his compliments with a few self-deprecating words.
After the short entryway was the kitchen on the left and a big closet on the right. Further inside was the living room, hemmed in on the right by a dining room table and chairs. The two doors on the right lead to the bedrooms, Erik knew, and on the left was the bathroom and his mother's all-purpose room for her computer, her sewing, and her knitting.
"You boys put your luggage in my room-Irena will keep her room and I'll take the couch," Edie said, motioning them to Edie's room.
Erik stopped in his tracks.
"Nein, Mama. Daraus wird nichts."
"What's going on?" Charles questioned, stopped up behind him in the foyer.
"We're about to have a Big, German Argument," Erik explained. And then his mother started up and he jumped in, and hoped that Charles knew enough to stay out of it.
Once all the shouting was over, Erik emerged from the rubble to discover that he had essentially won: his mother and Irena would share her queen bed, Charles would take Irena's smaller bed, and Erik would have the couch. He had tried to shove the couch to Irena, but hadn't been so set on it that he couldn't live with the current situation.
"You're taller-you should have the bed," Charles argued as he put their bags in the smaller room on the right.
"Don't you get in on this too," Erik growled. "And the couch is plenty big enough for me."
That taken care of, Edie showed them around the apartment, which really amounted to showing off all the photos she had hanging everywhere. She and Charles seemed to have similar views on architecture in that walls were not in fact for holding up the ceiling but were actually only around to shower with shrines to your family. Erik glanced around at the copious photos himself and let his mother lead Charles through them one by one, offering up translations when they were necessary.
His parent's wedding was obvious enough, Charles could figure that out, but he put his two cents in explaining the naked toddler photo of himself knocking on the neighbor's door. "She says that this was a fluke occurrence with extenuating circumstances and it hardly ever happened and she's surprised they managed to get it on paper at all since it was so fleeting a moment," he explained on top of his mother's insistent German of "He refused to put on clothes! I couldn't leave him alone for a second or it was naked time all over again-and then, once he could work door handles-he'd just run all over the apartment building naked as a jaybird! I've never seen anything like it!"
Most of the photos on the walls he recognized from having had them around all his life: baby pictures of him, of his sister who had died young-long before he was born-pictures of his father, of his mother, his grandparents, and any amalgamation of the lot of them. But there were some he was not exactly expecting.
"Where did you get this?" Erik questioned, pointing to a picture of him and Charles from Moira's son's birthday party. It was a pristine action shot thanks to Angel: Charles had just gotten Erik straight in the side of the head with a water balloon, soaking his hair even as Erik tried to block the hit and turn away. He was still smiling though, and Charles was absolutely tearful with laughter, although it could have been water: Erik had been soaking Charles to the bone for most of the day, eschewing the water balloons in favor of the garden hose.
"You emailed it to me," Edie came over to explain. Charles followed in a moment. "Michael from upstairs showed me how to print it on photo-paper. It turned out nice, yes?"
It looked very nice, and Erik scoped out for more in the same vein. They were easy to find when he was looking for them: he just had to be on the lookout for those shining blue eyes.
There was the photo from Charles' birthday, the two of them feeding each other cake sarcastically. There was another that he remembered Raven snapping of Charles curled up on him on the couch. Another was the childhood picture from Charles' office that the younger man had given him for Hanukkah last year and that he had dutifully shared with his mother.
"Hey, that's me," Charles pointed out in shock, staring at his sixteen-year-old self grinning on the beach. Erik wondered why he was just now figuring this out: it had been him four pictures ago with Erik wrapped around his torso, too, but he hadn't balked at that. But then he understood: all the other pictures could be pictures of Edie's son that his boyfriend just happened to be in. This was all Charles, all the way.
"Du bist Familie," Edie explained, patting his arm affectionately. Charles didn't need much German skills to work that out and blinked in awe at her before glancing at Erik for certainty.
"Did she...what did she..." he choked out.
Erik smiled a little condescendingly. "You're a smart kid, you know what she said."
"That's," Charles sighed, looking at Edie shyly from under his eyelashes. "Das ist süß, danke."
Edie grinned and reached up to pet Charles' cheek affectionately. Erik was surprised to see the younger man pull away.
"I should call Raven. Tell her I got in okay," the man said, but his voice sounded tight.
"What did he say?" Edie asked in surprise as Charles stalked off to the bedroom to get his phone.
Erik shook his head in confusion. Changed the subject to distract his mother from Charles' strange reaction.
"Wo ist Irena?"
"Tante Irena," Edie corrected, giving a last lingering glance at the bedroom door before taking Erik into the kitchen to stuff him full of food. "She's at the doctor's. For her migraine."
For her hypochondria, Erik wanted to correct, but accepted a fresh bagel with some herring spread and cream cheese. He hadn't had herring spread in years. He wondered if he should have warned Charles that he was essentially going to smell of salted fish for the next few weeks...