Anote: Hallo. Thanks to everyone who has favorited this story and wrote to tell me they couldn't put my fanfiction down. That's incredibly flattering to an amateur scribbler like myself. This chapter is a bit of a filler just so that get my bearings again. As an aside, i do love the singer Adele!

Chapter 30- In the meantime...

People talk a lot about death; about seeing lights and your life flashing before your eyes but Erik hoped that he would experience none of those things or if he did, at least he wished to see some of the more pleasant things to happen in his life. Things like growing up in his village and wasting time with his friends at the river everyday or meeting the professor and suddenly being excited about living his life again.

'Same dream?' Logan asked quietly. 'Here, drink this water. I'll go find you something stronger. Between you and me, I don't think this therapy you are taking is really helping.'

In the meantime, all Erik could manage was to lean over the bed and try not to throw up. He nodded his head in agreement as he tried to rid himself of the last vestiges of his nightmare. With a deep, pang of misery he could just spy a pair of tiny, scared eyes looking at him from underneath his dresser drawer. After weeks of dithering and making excuses as to why he didn't have time to return the kitten to the pet store, the professor had stopped asking Erik what he wanted to do and the endearing newborn remained with the man who had saved her.

'Come Ash, come…' he whispered in vain trying to lure her out. She crept out a few inches but no further. Perhaps it would be better to find her a new family; one in which she wasn't traumatized night after night.

He was relieved when Logan quickly returned with his unlabelled bottle of something brown looking and a packet of cigarettes.

'The professor's in the corridor looking shifty. He wants to know if he can come in and see you.'

'I TOLD you not to….'

'…no one said anything to him. The whole mansion could hear you screaming.'

Oh bugger! (to borrow one of the professor's profanities) Logan was right! These blasted counseling sessions that his parole officer insisted he take were NOT working! It was strange because even though he didn't actively participate, just sitting there in the group circle, listening to everyone drone on and on about their lives and what their mother and father did or didn't do, obviously seemed to have affected his unconscious on some imperative level. All it proved was that if he didn't do something, he would never be free of his past.

Erik drained his glass in a huge gulp as he stared at the closed door, 'How loud was I this time?'

'Honestly, it sounded like if you were getting your leg sawed off at the very least. You and Charles fighting again?' Logan asked sympathetically, looking down at the man who had flopped spread-eagle back onto his bed.

Erik dragged deeply on his cigarette as he stared at the ceiling, considering a reply.

'No….yes…be damned if I know.'

The handy man nodded his head in a been-there-done-that motion as he picked up his bottle of 'medicinal' whisky and the empty glass before quietly exiting the room.

'ERIK!' What are you DOING?' Charles screeched, 'Are you trying to set yourself on FIRE?!'

'Shit Xavier,' the older man snapped back, 'cant you just give it a break, for once!'

Ultimately, the professor decided to hold his tongue; he was NOT starting a fight at two o'clock in the morning. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed and placed a comforting hand on Erik's thigh which the other man promptly took in his.

'Did you hear me up on your floor?' Erik remarked in a calmer voice as if attempting to amend for his previous harsh words. 'I'm sorry that I scared you.'

'I thought Ashley was murdering you in your bed,' the professor replied lightly, responding favorably to his attempt the turn the conversation. 'Do you want to talk about it?'

However, the idea of discussing his most recent nightmare with the man at his side chilled him to the core.

'Why do you ALWAYS ask me that?' Have I EVER wanted to talk about it?' Erik yelled out loud, dropping their joined hands and waving his arms around in exasperation. The young man winced as a trail of soot from the cigarette fell on the bed clothes and the cat wisely retreated once again under the dresser drawer. Utterly irritated now by his own inconsistent responses, the larger man scrubbed at his tired face with one hand before pulling the professor up and across his chest where Charles quickly turned his head away to avoid his caress. 'Erik, please don't. I dislike the taste of cigarettes.'

This unexpected rebuke on top of everything else, naturally aggravated and flustered the older man to such a degree that he pushed him away; a gesture which made Charles gently topple of the side of the bed. 'Christ! You said I never had to ask your permission to kiss you. Why did you come? Just get out! Just GO!'

'WAIT!' Erik cried out in shocked horror, as the surprising sound of his bedroom door clicking close, had him half stumbling, half rolling off the bed.

The older man stood there feeling fifteen shades of stupid because the professor was still on his side of the door.

Charles smiled in gentle understanding. 'Calmly dearest, I think I have known you long enough to be able to distinguish cranky-Erik from angry-Erik.'

'I don't know what you are talking about,' cranky-Erik protested feebly, as he dropped heavily in a cushy armchair. He watched with hooded eyes as the professor bustled around his room in a decidedly domestic fashion, stripping the bed of its sweaty bed sheets so that it could air out quickly.

Hesitantly, the older man opened his arms and almost like it was second nature, the small man sat on his lap and offered him a fresh cigarette while holding an astray aloft in the other hand. For a few minutes Erik puffed away in silence as he wrapped his arm around the professor who was now lying peacefully against his chest. 'You're like an angel Xavier. I don't know why you put up with an animal like me.'

The small man laughed quietly, 'HA! I am sure you say that to ALL your girls. I am wise to your ways now, Romeo.'

Erik dropped a quick kiss on the top of his head in response to this bit of teasing. He knew the smaller man was initially dismayed by the number of strangers that would just walk up to Erik out of the blue and introduce themselves but after awhile the professor seemed to derive much amusement from the whole matter. According to him, watching the older man get rid of these hopeful admirers was most entertaining in no small part because of Erik's superior command of colorful obscenities and his all round antisocial tendencies.

'You're not an animal you're just having a bad night,' Charles concluded in a firm voice.

That was an understatement but due to the influence of a good drink, two cigarettes and a concerned friend, it was getting better by the second. He scowled when he suddenly realized that Charles didn't have his dressing gown over his pajamas.

'Are you warm enough, little one?'

Erik was not only grateful for Charles' mild acceptance of this incident but for his acceptance of the whole soap opera that his life had devolved into. He felt a vague sort of unease in drawing Charles into such a murky and uncertain relationship, and it would have been the honorable thing to step aside and allow the young man to get on with his life. A part of him had even briefly reflected on accepting his parole officer's offer of a room at the parole house. The semi furnished room was just standing there empty and he knew that because part of his salary went into maintaining the rent each week.

However, being self denying and unselfish were not his strengths. He didn't WANT to give up seeing the professor everyday, as Charles was now his best source of comfort and happiness as he tried to navigate the strangeness of a 'nine to five' job. If he heard Adele yodeling over the bookstore's sound system one more time he would violate his parole and cheerfully strangle someone. Knowing that Charles was there at the end of the day was sometimes the only way he could keep it all together. If he could just continue to ignore the ridiculous office politics that seemed to come to a head in the lunch room every single day, he would be alright. Usually he sat in a corner sneering at them all from behind his peanut butter sandwich while they fought and subtly insulted each other with a viciousness that at times surprised even him.

His job wasn't all a fucked up drama though. The time when he got promoted to the main floor's travel/ language section and the professor tried to cook him dinner to celebrate and they wound up buying Chinese take out food because he put too much pepper flakes in everything, stood out as one of the better memories. They had sat in Charles' kitchen and talked all night about books, music and all the countries they had visited. WHY couldn't he dream about something like THAT instead of his mum falling to the ground in an ever widening pool of dark blood?

Now more than ever, he felt the strange urge to just blurt it all out, the entire truth about him hunting Shaw all over Europe and now America, but of course he didn't. What would Charles say to something like that? He couldn't begin to imagine the subsequent conversation.

In the meantime, he tried to make the time they had left together as happy as possible. It wasn't too hard once you paid attention and he suspected that the Englishman was also thinking along the same lines. When the professor invited him to a car show, he reciprocated by attending a snore-fest of a lecture at the university. When he saw Charles cutting flowers for the table where they had their meals, he prepared huge vases of the professor's favourite orange roses for his apartment. When the small man wanted to attend some charity raising opera performance, he...er…alright, he pretended to have a migraine. (You couldn't get everything in life!)

He did wonder why Charles would actually put up with him though, a man who professed to love him but didn't do a damn thing about it. Did Xavier have no self respect at all? But as the young academic had cryptically put it as they strolled through the gardens one day before dinner, he believed that love could not be possessed like a piece of furniture, it could only be experienced. The death of his father followed closely by that of his mother a few years later, had taught him the folly of trying to hold on to people too tightly. That sort of odd thinking suited Erik's purposes just fine.

The only condition that the professor had set was that Erik would tell him when he was leaving and not vanish into thin air. He readily gave his word as the young man unexpectedly dissolved into sobs and Erik had been forced to hastily scoop him up and hide him in his room before Logan got wind of it and tried to murder him with his pruning shears. The sight of Charles curled up in a tight ball of misery in the middle of his bed was one of the few times that Erik began to think that everything was not going to work out so well in the end. But it was hard to think about that incident with a sleepy and relaxed professor wrapped up around his torso.

'Why don't you summarise for me what exactly we were disagreeing about at dinner?' Erik inquired mildly; feeling sufficiently mellowed enough to return to the earlier acrimonious topic. 'I am afraid you lost me somewhere in the middle.'

He winced as Charles neatly cuffed him in the bicep, 'what you really mean, is that you've put the argument out of your head and now you can't remember.'

While this was true, Erik didn't see the relevance of that particular distinction to the conversation at hand.

He slapped what he hoped was a penitent expression on his face and the professor seemed satisfied enough to proceed. 'What is going on with you and Hank? I have heard how you respond to him when he tries to talk to you.'

Right. Hank.

He stalled for time as he helped Ash to clamber up his pants legs and into the professor's arms. Erik shrugged, 'I am not really good at conversation Charles and you know that.'

'But you have no trouble talking to John…'

'….Logan barely speaks at all.'

'And you talk to Jean whenever she comes over. …'

'….she knows when to back the fuck off.'

Charles looked into his face and frowned at these unhelpful replies.

'Alright, alright, I am hedging the truth a bit,' Erik finally admitted, 'maybe you're not seeing it but your friend Hank is afraid of me. For YOU alone, I am willing to be civil but until he gets a grip, he shouldn't try to talk to me. You should be asking HIM what his problem is!'

The professor patted the other man's chest to soothe him as Erik was clearly becoming irritated all over again at what he considered to be the good doctor's irrational fear of him. Hank wasn't afraid, he was nervous; what homosexual man wouldn't be around a man like Erik? However, Charles couldn't give that as a possible explanation as his university colleague had not given him permission to share his orientation with others. 'I'll talk to him and I am thanking you in advance for being civil.'

Charles grinned at the unusually pleased expression on the other man's face.

'I am getting better and better at this conflict resolution stuff my counselor keeps harping on. I think I deserve a reward,' the older man finally concluded as he stood and gently deposited the other man on the edge of the unmade bed. 'Hang on a second; I think I have some chewing gum in this drawer.'

'You really want to kiss me that bad?' Charles inquired with a bored, flippant sigh.

Erik stopped rummaging in the drawer of his bedside table and slowly straightened to his full height to glare down at Xavier. The Englishman's eyes momentarily flicked to the door, carefully judging the distance as he calculated the probabilities of outrunning Erik's much longer stride.

'I am just thinking about you!' the professor cried in mock outrage at the stunned look on his face, 'don't you want to sleep at all tonight?'

What was this all about? It really sounded as if Charles didn't want him.

'You think that me, kissing you, is going to make me more awake? Erik sneered, crossing his arms defensively across his chest.

'I know it will,' the smaller man retorted with an impish grin and a suggestive eyebrow waggle.

'Why you brazen bit of British baggage!' Erik growled, suddenly catching on and with panther like quickness the older man pinned him to the mattress, 'I will make you sorry you were ever born.'

In a nearby corridor, Logan stopped dead at the garbled shriek that assaulted his hearing, but then smiled and shook his head as the sound of someone familiar being mercilessly tickled to death, followed him all the way back to his room.