fic: Vexed and Glorious
Title: Vexed and Glorious
Author: ag_sasami
Pairing: Erik/Charles
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,120
Summary: There aren’t enough words for the anger, and fewer still for regrets.
Notes: Originally posted here on the kink meme. I have it on good authority from the OP that this is the angry makeout she wanted
---
The notion of anger came to Charles in subtle and leveling details. He had to buy a new chessboard when he realized that the curves of the wooden pawns set his teeth on edge. Replacing it didn’t help as much as he thought it would. There was a moment when he was showing a pair of new students to their rooms that he realized that only half the beds in his home were wooden. To his own dismay Charles found himself angered by metal bed frames, because they were far too reminiscent of a personal kind of violence which had nothing to do with the bullet pulled from his spine. He had spent the remainder of the day locked in the library, under the pretense of research, until the scotch bottle was dry and he’d determined there were actually three ways he could beat himself at chess.
He kept waking up to a mouth pressed against his skin like another phantom limb. Those moments were the sharpest and most blindsiding in the way they undermined his calm. Hank worried quietly to Alex about the late mornings Charles had started to keep, about how much sleep he must not be getting. It wasn’t a lack of sleep, just that those mornings he wanted to tear out his hair by the roots, felt too crowded in his own skin to want to deal with the children. It was hard to know where precisely the blinding rage came from. Perhaps the injustice that all the fantasies his mind could build had no grounding in memory, or the gaping sense of emptiness that accompanied them on waking.
Fury, he discovered, became a parody of itself given enough time to fester. It soured, turned to something bitter and biting. And it was not the loss-of his legs, of a drowning man-but the enormity of feelings, inexplicable and otherwise, left in the wake of that loss that burned when he swallowed them down; the feelings he never paid heed when they might have been more suitably meaningful. It was with self deprecation and more than just a little resentment that he laughed about the unexpected sensation of becoming a cliché.
---
The bar was loud and raucous, a buzz of minds hazy with alcohol and good spirits, and Charles in his table by the door nursed a lager amidst the revelry. It had been a trying day from the moment he woke to the sensation of breath hot against his stomach, and it had not improved. The mansion-no, the school now-felt like a prison with the tension of the day’s failures, and all he wanted was a drink surrounded by freer, lighter minds. As far as ideas went, it was one of his better.
He is warm and-if he has to put a word to it-buoyant on his return to the mansion; a sinking ship as he enters to the solid void of Magneto’s mind. A silhouette against the window of his bedroom, moonlight pours out over the grounds and spills in through the panes. “Magneto.” Not Erik. Not with something wrapped around his mind.
“Charles.” There is a tension in his voice, a hard line in his shoulders that Charles can’t classify as he makes his way from the window to the door where Charles has stopped. He thinks, why are you here, but says nothing.
Charles gestured up toward Magneto’s-Erik’s-face, fingers extended as though he could still reach him. “Take off this stupid helmet.” Strange still how such a thing is a clear order to keep out without the implicit trust that he actually will, and the implication stings. Clenched jaw and grinding teeth, and Charles thinks this visit is going to be a trial.
“Why? Feeling vulnerable without the use of your mind over me.” Magneto snarls. For a moment he is a bow string too taut and snapped, the tension in his spine shifting from indecipherable to menacing. Stalking. He is wrapping fingers around Charles’ wrist and pinning his arms down on his chair. The shock of it runs clear through to the bones he can’t feel anymore, a complicated reflex at the subtle sort of acknowledgement of Charles’ greatest losses. He fights the full body quake that threatens as Erik pushes the chair back against the wall, heedless of the door left ajar.
“No, Erik. Because you look foolish.” The timing is all wrong, too acerbic and not nearly cavalier enough. But he hasn’t backed down before and he won’t back down now, even if Magneto is eyeing him with a predator’s gaze. “Besides, you and I are beyond all this. Frankly, it’s insulting.” Charles feels the metal in the chair, what little there is, thrum in time with Erik’s grinding teeth. “Do it.” His voice is level and calm and Erik ought to recognize the suppression of an argument from the hard line of Charles’ mouth.
Erik has modified the helmet since he tore it from Shaw’s still head, metal in subtle places, and he pulls it free without touching, dropping it heavy in Charles’ open lap. The surge of thought and feeling leaves Charles gasping for all the air already in his lungs. Like a man drowning. It is pain, a terrible amalgam of loss and devastation and buried deep beneath that a bottomless regret, festering. He has felt this pain before, the kind of confused bereavement that sets a room of metal on its head. It burns blue and white hot, overwhelming, and it isn’t what Charles expected to see.
“Still insulted, Charles? Feelings still hurt now that you’ve had your way?” He hisses, and it’s too close. It’s too physical on top of the sharp edges of Erik’s mind scraping back against his again. Charles is trying to appreciate the fact that it’s Erik, that he should calm his own mind first. But they have been bickering since first sight and he doesn’t want calm. The rush of Erik’s mind against his is a crushing wave, the weight of want and regret and desire verging on need left in subtleties as the intensity of his rage recedes.
“Do not speak to me as though you know my feelings.” Charles spares a moment to be impressed with himself for not shouting. A piece of him is insulted, but for all the reasons Erik doesn’t mention. At some level and in spite of his willing forgiveness Charles blames him, but it is a slight and silent thing left obvious, bitter, unacknowledged. Erik drove him willingly from his mind and pushed a beach full of people facing down their deaths to an outcome which was easily avoidable. He counts himself another casualty of that relentlessness, a steely resolve ironically unwilling to yield.
Here though, arms pinned to the chair Erik put him in and an extra set of thoughts roaring in his mind, his blame is expansive. His anger is loud by necessity. In his head he is screaming over the volume of wrath both foreign and familiar in his mind, because Erik is still angry that his hand was forced. He is angry that Charles would have stayed him from his revenge. He’ll blame Moira until he’s blue in the face, but Charles can feel the truth of it: the guilt and the fulfillment of some deep seated paranoia and the delusion of betrayal. There are flickers of memories tangled into the rage: Charles’ fingers grasping at the edges of the helmet, aborted efforts to wedge his consciousness into Erik’s own. That is a betrayal all its own, Erik thinking so little of him after everything.
But he feels too the sense of loss greater than their collective rage. Charles wants to scream at it. To shake Erik by the shoulders. To press him down and hold him, the soft yield of bodies together and tangled limbs more effective communicators of intent and desire than any nudge of his mind against Erik’s. So it is all the usual anger with the added pain of knowing that Erik also wanted and still walked away; that his inability to even try for peace has ultimately torn them from the very thing they both want. And he is angrier still that he can’t quite bring himself to blame Erik for walking away over his ideals.
Charles is boiling, blood running hot and mind seared with a deep-seated craving that he can’t identify with certainty as his own. With his pulse loud and Erik still in his face he isn’t going to settle for loss, for anger, for pain. He leans forward, arms straining against the fingers wrapped around them and shudders out a calculated breath, harsh against Erik’s ear. “Touch me.” A heartbeat. Erik’s hand pressed against his chest, thumb slipped under the collar against the hollow of his throat. Charles’ voice a growl, raw and sharp. “Erik.”
Erik surges forward, mouths crushed together, hot and open and slick. Charles licks into his mouth, tongue drawn up against the roof in small stripes. It is pressure and heat and teeth pressed into his lower lip sharp. Perfect. His mind is a wash of rage and desire, railing at the unfairness, the inevitability of this disaster, and why it couldn’t have come sooner. Tongue behind teeth, run across lips. A flush is spreading across his face, down his neck and chest, and Erik is chasing it with greedy fingers. Charles presses words against his mouth between the swipe of tongues.
“What you left to do, Erik. You’re wrong. It won’t fix anything.” It is something he believes. It is something he means. He doesn’t know why he says it.
Erik pulls away, drags his mouth down the curve of Charles’ throat. He leverages Charles’ head back with fingers fisted tight in his hair to suck sharp over his pulse, blood pumping hard and fast and blooming purple beneath Erik’s mouth. Breath catches in his throat, and later Charles will deny that he choked back a dry sob at how right it felt to be marked like this. In anger and pain.
“And how is it on that high horse of yours, Charles? Ever get lonely up there all by yourself?” Erik snaps back, mouth hot and wet and sharp against the thin skin trying to bruise.
“Oh, you have no idea.” Charles spits back. He means it to be a caustic reply, but it is just a little too close to the truth to hold its bite. Charles tangles a fist into Erik’s shirt and pulls him back up to slot their mouths together again. “You left me bleeding on that beach. You took my sister and you left. You left.” He growls it out and it’s coming more raw than he would have planned.
“No my friend, we do not.” He mocks softly against Charles’ mouth; a weak punch rather than one pulled. “How could I stay? You all but sent me away.” Erik’s voice is an unexpectedly harsh, broken thing panted out from beneath unmistakable grief.
Even in his darkest private moments Charles is cautious to reign in and temper the sharpest edges of himself, pain and joy in equal measure. But this is need more than want--some twisted desire turned pressing--Erik's fingers still fisted in his hair, all teeth and violent tongues. It pulls from him all clarity and distance with the ease of clothing shucked off in the dark. The fine control Charles has cultivated over his emotions slips from him and it spills out with his cracking voice.
“Never.” He sees it, feels it, knows it all at once, old in Erik’s mind like it hasn’t just crested, crushed Charles against his own immeasurable longing. “Never.” Neither spoke a word of it before and now certainly holds no promise of change.
So he holds tighter, kisses sharper. If they can’t have it, if they are both going to keep washing up on opposite shores, Charles is going to mark this moment on flushed skin and swollen lips. A monument to this great travesty of their mutual silence. A reminder that this pain isn’t just some fever dream all his own. Teeth so hard one of them is bleeding-both of them-like they’re back on a foreign coast because Charles realizes he’s about to lose everything again.
Erik pulls back breathless, fingers grasping, tightening instinctively around the metal in Charles’ lap, a hunted look on his face. It is a knowing stare, and Charles is thinking Azazel.
---
The smell of sulfur lingers well into the morning. Outside the sun is rising warm and gallingly bright. Charles sits before the window sleepless, licks his split lip and hopes for a scar.
Author: ag_sasami
Pairing: Erik/Charles
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,120
Summary: There aren’t enough words for the anger, and fewer still for regrets.
Notes: Originally posted here on the kink meme. I have it on good authority from the OP that this is the angry makeout she wanted
---
The notion of anger came to Charles in subtle and leveling details. He had to buy a new chessboard when he realized that the curves of the wooden pawns set his teeth on edge. Replacing it didn’t help as much as he thought it would. There was a moment when he was showing a pair of new students to their rooms that he realized that only half the beds in his home were wooden. To his own dismay Charles found himself angered by metal bed frames, because they were far too reminiscent of a personal kind of violence which had nothing to do with the bullet pulled from his spine. He had spent the remainder of the day locked in the library, under the pretense of research, until the scotch bottle was dry and he’d determined there were actually three ways he could beat himself at chess.
He kept waking up to a mouth pressed against his skin like another phantom limb. Those moments were the sharpest and most blindsiding in the way they undermined his calm. Hank worried quietly to Alex about the late mornings Charles had started to keep, about how much sleep he must not be getting. It wasn’t a lack of sleep, just that those mornings he wanted to tear out his hair by the roots, felt too crowded in his own skin to want to deal with the children. It was hard to know where precisely the blinding rage came from. Perhaps the injustice that all the fantasies his mind could build had no grounding in memory, or the gaping sense of emptiness that accompanied them on waking.
Fury, he discovered, became a parody of itself given enough time to fester. It soured, turned to something bitter and biting. And it was not the loss-of his legs, of a drowning man-but the enormity of feelings, inexplicable and otherwise, left in the wake of that loss that burned when he swallowed them down; the feelings he never paid heed when they might have been more suitably meaningful. It was with self deprecation and more than just a little resentment that he laughed about the unexpected sensation of becoming a cliché.
---
The bar was loud and raucous, a buzz of minds hazy with alcohol and good spirits, and Charles in his table by the door nursed a lager amidst the revelry. It had been a trying day from the moment he woke to the sensation of breath hot against his stomach, and it had not improved. The mansion-no, the school now-felt like a prison with the tension of the day’s failures, and all he wanted was a drink surrounded by freer, lighter minds. As far as ideas went, it was one of his better.
He is warm and-if he has to put a word to it-buoyant on his return to the mansion; a sinking ship as he enters to the solid void of Magneto’s mind. A silhouette against the window of his bedroom, moonlight pours out over the grounds and spills in through the panes. “Magneto.” Not Erik. Not with something wrapped around his mind.
“Charles.” There is a tension in his voice, a hard line in his shoulders that Charles can’t classify as he makes his way from the window to the door where Charles has stopped. He thinks, why are you here, but says nothing.
Charles gestured up toward Magneto’s-Erik’s-face, fingers extended as though he could still reach him. “Take off this stupid helmet.” Strange still how such a thing is a clear order to keep out without the implicit trust that he actually will, and the implication stings. Clenched jaw and grinding teeth, and Charles thinks this visit is going to be a trial.
“Why? Feeling vulnerable without the use of your mind over me.” Magneto snarls. For a moment he is a bow string too taut and snapped, the tension in his spine shifting from indecipherable to menacing. Stalking. He is wrapping fingers around Charles’ wrist and pinning his arms down on his chair. The shock of it runs clear through to the bones he can’t feel anymore, a complicated reflex at the subtle sort of acknowledgement of Charles’ greatest losses. He fights the full body quake that threatens as Erik pushes the chair back against the wall, heedless of the door left ajar.
“No, Erik. Because you look foolish.” The timing is all wrong, too acerbic and not nearly cavalier enough. But he hasn’t backed down before and he won’t back down now, even if Magneto is eyeing him with a predator’s gaze. “Besides, you and I are beyond all this. Frankly, it’s insulting.” Charles feels the metal in the chair, what little there is, thrum in time with Erik’s grinding teeth. “Do it.” His voice is level and calm and Erik ought to recognize the suppression of an argument from the hard line of Charles’ mouth.
Erik has modified the helmet since he tore it from Shaw’s still head, metal in subtle places, and he pulls it free without touching, dropping it heavy in Charles’ open lap. The surge of thought and feeling leaves Charles gasping for all the air already in his lungs. Like a man drowning. It is pain, a terrible amalgam of loss and devastation and buried deep beneath that a bottomless regret, festering. He has felt this pain before, the kind of confused bereavement that sets a room of metal on its head. It burns blue and white hot, overwhelming, and it isn’t what Charles expected to see.
“Still insulted, Charles? Feelings still hurt now that you’ve had your way?” He hisses, and it’s too close. It’s too physical on top of the sharp edges of Erik’s mind scraping back against his again. Charles is trying to appreciate the fact that it’s Erik, that he should calm his own mind first. But they have been bickering since first sight and he doesn’t want calm. The rush of Erik’s mind against his is a crushing wave, the weight of want and regret and desire verging on need left in subtleties as the intensity of his rage recedes.
“Do not speak to me as though you know my feelings.” Charles spares a moment to be impressed with himself for not shouting. A piece of him is insulted, but for all the reasons Erik doesn’t mention. At some level and in spite of his willing forgiveness Charles blames him, but it is a slight and silent thing left obvious, bitter, unacknowledged. Erik drove him willingly from his mind and pushed a beach full of people facing down their deaths to an outcome which was easily avoidable. He counts himself another casualty of that relentlessness, a steely resolve ironically unwilling to yield.
Here though, arms pinned to the chair Erik put him in and an extra set of thoughts roaring in his mind, his blame is expansive. His anger is loud by necessity. In his head he is screaming over the volume of wrath both foreign and familiar in his mind, because Erik is still angry that his hand was forced. He is angry that Charles would have stayed him from his revenge. He’ll blame Moira until he’s blue in the face, but Charles can feel the truth of it: the guilt and the fulfillment of some deep seated paranoia and the delusion of betrayal. There are flickers of memories tangled into the rage: Charles’ fingers grasping at the edges of the helmet, aborted efforts to wedge his consciousness into Erik’s own. That is a betrayal all its own, Erik thinking so little of him after everything.
But he feels too the sense of loss greater than their collective rage. Charles wants to scream at it. To shake Erik by the shoulders. To press him down and hold him, the soft yield of bodies together and tangled limbs more effective communicators of intent and desire than any nudge of his mind against Erik’s. So it is all the usual anger with the added pain of knowing that Erik also wanted and still walked away; that his inability to even try for peace has ultimately torn them from the very thing they both want. And he is angrier still that he can’t quite bring himself to blame Erik for walking away over his ideals.
Charles is boiling, blood running hot and mind seared with a deep-seated craving that he can’t identify with certainty as his own. With his pulse loud and Erik still in his face he isn’t going to settle for loss, for anger, for pain. He leans forward, arms straining against the fingers wrapped around them and shudders out a calculated breath, harsh against Erik’s ear. “Touch me.” A heartbeat. Erik’s hand pressed against his chest, thumb slipped under the collar against the hollow of his throat. Charles’ voice a growl, raw and sharp. “Erik.”
Erik surges forward, mouths crushed together, hot and open and slick. Charles licks into his mouth, tongue drawn up against the roof in small stripes. It is pressure and heat and teeth pressed into his lower lip sharp. Perfect. His mind is a wash of rage and desire, railing at the unfairness, the inevitability of this disaster, and why it couldn’t have come sooner. Tongue behind teeth, run across lips. A flush is spreading across his face, down his neck and chest, and Erik is chasing it with greedy fingers. Charles presses words against his mouth between the swipe of tongues.
“What you left to do, Erik. You’re wrong. It won’t fix anything.” It is something he believes. It is something he means. He doesn’t know why he says it.
Erik pulls away, drags his mouth down the curve of Charles’ throat. He leverages Charles’ head back with fingers fisted tight in his hair to suck sharp over his pulse, blood pumping hard and fast and blooming purple beneath Erik’s mouth. Breath catches in his throat, and later Charles will deny that he choked back a dry sob at how right it felt to be marked like this. In anger and pain.
“And how is it on that high horse of yours, Charles? Ever get lonely up there all by yourself?” Erik snaps back, mouth hot and wet and sharp against the thin skin trying to bruise.
“Oh, you have no idea.” Charles spits back. He means it to be a caustic reply, but it is just a little too close to the truth to hold its bite. Charles tangles a fist into Erik’s shirt and pulls him back up to slot their mouths together again. “You left me bleeding on that beach. You took my sister and you left. You left.” He growls it out and it’s coming more raw than he would have planned.
“No my friend, we do not.” He mocks softly against Charles’ mouth; a weak punch rather than one pulled. “How could I stay? You all but sent me away.” Erik’s voice is an unexpectedly harsh, broken thing panted out from beneath unmistakable grief.
Even in his darkest private moments Charles is cautious to reign in and temper the sharpest edges of himself, pain and joy in equal measure. But this is need more than want--some twisted desire turned pressing--Erik's fingers still fisted in his hair, all teeth and violent tongues. It pulls from him all clarity and distance with the ease of clothing shucked off in the dark. The fine control Charles has cultivated over his emotions slips from him and it spills out with his cracking voice.
“Never.” He sees it, feels it, knows it all at once, old in Erik’s mind like it hasn’t just crested, crushed Charles against his own immeasurable longing. “Never.” Neither spoke a word of it before and now certainly holds no promise of change.
So he holds tighter, kisses sharper. If they can’t have it, if they are both going to keep washing up on opposite shores, Charles is going to mark this moment on flushed skin and swollen lips. A monument to this great travesty of their mutual silence. A reminder that this pain isn’t just some fever dream all his own. Teeth so hard one of them is bleeding-both of them-like they’re back on a foreign coast because Charles realizes he’s about to lose everything again.
Erik pulls back breathless, fingers grasping, tightening instinctively around the metal in Charles’ lap, a hunted look on his face. It is a knowing stare, and Charles is thinking Azazel.
---
The smell of sulfur lingers well into the morning. Outside the sun is rising warm and gallingly bright. Charles sits before the window sleepless, licks his split lip and hopes for a scar.