Fic: Give up and give in (X-Men: First Class)
Self-indulgent porn wasn't the way I was going to introduce myself to the First Class fandom. Maybe I'll get points for honesty? Obviously, this also isn't a serious attempt at characterisation, although I do hope the premise of the fic excuses any liberties I've taken.
This may become a part of a series of oneshots.
Give up and give in (link to AO3)
Fandom: X-Men: First Class (2011)
Words: 2799
Rating: Explicit
Relationship: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Warnings: Dub-con
Additional Tags: Angst, PWP, Mindfuck, Sensory Deprivation, Telepathy, Post-Movie, Oneshot
Summary: A PWP featuring the forceful suppression of telepathy, consent issues and sex of the mindfuck variety.
This is real.
Charles’s bedroom, a study in warm shades of brown. The dusty spines of books stacked on the windowsill. The pane of coloured glass in the arched window.
A weight falling on the bed. Careful hands slipping a blindfold and a metal helmet over brown curls. The sound of handcuffs clicking into place.
A door, closing.
And then nothing.
Time starts again when Erik hears the first screams.
He smiles in satisfaction at a strategy well-realised. Now he knows the helmet is a weapon that works both ways. He waits for a moment, leaning against the door, and then opens it silently.
Charles is lying on the bed, curled up on himself as if he's trying to substitute the void in his head with physical contact. His lip is gnawed bloody, his face wet with tears, and dark bruising shows stark around the handcuffs at his wrists.
Erik lifts an eyebrow, slightly impressed. Gentle Charles has put up a fight after all.
Whatever fight there was in him, it has left him by now. Charles is whimpering, unintelligible words a constant stream from his lips. English words, foreign words, Erik even thinks he catches a bit of a nursery rhyme. They are bits and pieces stolen from the visitors to Charles’s mind, repeated over and over like an incantation to bring them back in, to banish the lonely darkness.
It… hurts, surprisingly, to see Charles reduced to this. Erik has too many memories in his own head of being brought down to this sort of animal desperation. Yet even stronger is the dark thread of satisfaction at seeing Charles bared to him, stripped of his carefully constructed barriers and his Oxford manners.
He wants more.
Erik crosses the room and sits in the chair by the bedside.
“Charles,” he says softly.
Charles freezes.
“Erik?” He turns to his side, trying in vain to get closer to the voice. “God, please, tell me you’re there.”
“Yes.”
Erik notices with a sort of detached interest the way Charles’s body shakes with suppressed weeping. His face is ashen, and there is sweat running down his neck as though from physical exertion. He must have been battering at the metal barrier around his head like a panicked bird until he broke his wings.
“Erik. Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone, not like this.”
It is a giddy rush to see Charles - Charles who has seen him at his absolute worst, whom Erik still can’t forgive for seeing - brought to this.
“And why should I do that? For once you can’t see inside my head, tell me to do what you say. Why should I do what you want?”
Charles stills. Were it not for the blindfold, his eyes would be so hurt, so blue.
“That’s not fair. You know I would never - please, please don’t do this.”
“You don’t even know what this is. You always think you have it all figured out, don’t you?”
Erik moves the chair, the scrape of wood loud in the stillness of the room. Charles practically throws himself at Erik, a pathetic convulsion when his hands are still cuffed to the headboard.
“No, don’t go! Please don’t go. I’ll do anything, just stay, please, Erik.”
“Anything is quite a lot to promise. But then, you’ve always made a habit of making promises you can’t keep.”
“I swear. Anything you want, just make it stop.”
It’s almost too good to know what it is Charles is unknowingly offering.
“On your knees, then.”
There’s a pause. Although Erik can’t read minds, he knows that for a brief moment Charles is wondering if he’s heard him right. Then he remembers that Erik is the one who put him here in the first place, knocked him out and placed shackles on his wrists and his mind. There is no knowing what his captor might want.
Slowly Charles gets to his knees. The position is awkward with his cuffed hands pulling him forward and down.
Erik goes to him, touches the back of his neck. His fingers brush against the helmet, and the metal hums at him in recognition. Charles has gone completely still.
“Please don’t,” he whispers. “Please don’t stop.”
Erik has no intention of doing that.
“How does it feel?” he asks, the tips of his fingers slowly stroking down Charles’s shirt-covered spine.
Charles’s voice is still tight, but the sharp edge of panic has dulled a bit now that Erik is touching him. “Like I’m falling and drowning at the same time. There’s a wall of white noise, a real wall with jagged spikes keeping me in, and inside there’s nothing, no one, the whole world is gone…”
“You had the world and lost it.” Erik’s words are as soft as his hands which calm and torment Charles in turn, offering contact and denying it. He delights in the way Charles shivers, the way he arches towards the touch. “What a tragedy.”
His hand rests heavy between Charles’s shoulder blades. “But I’ve got you now.”
Charles lets out a little choked sound.
Erik presses a light kiss on Charles’s shoulder. His lips move against the pale skin.
“And you’ll do anything for me, won’t you?”
“Anything,” Charles whispers. “Just take that thing off me.”
“Oh, not quite yet. I think you would leave if I did.”
Charles, who always, always argues a point, remains silent. Then he takes a breath and says:
“I’m afraid I’m not of much use to anyone right now. What… what do you want me to do?”
“For now, I only want you to stay there.” Erik’s hands steal under Charles’s shirt, stroke along his sides.
Charles lets out a little laugh that borders on hysterical. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Erik knows Charles is nowhere near as innocent as he looks - how could he be when he can see all the twisted things inside other people’s heads? - but he is still disoriented and thrown off his game.
The way he strains towards Erik’s touch is sweet. Even sweeter is the realisation of what the touches mean. Erik knows the exact moment Charles finally understands - when Erik slowly, carefully undoes all the metal buttons of his shirt, lays his hands possessive on Charles’s pale, beautiful throat and runs them all the way down, slow and teasing. Erik can feel the tension in Charles’s belly, the way the muscles shift slightly away from him.
“Charles,” he warns, and after a moment Charles lets out a shaky breath.
“Does this help?” Erik asks, his hands soothing gentle circles on Charles’s belly.
“No. Yes, a little. You keep me grounded, connected. But it still hurts, you can’t imagine… Erik, what are you doing?”
Erik is slipping Charles’s shirt off his shoulders, pressing himself against Charles’s back, warm and heavy.
“I’m sure you have seen this in my mind as well.”
“I - no, I don’t do that, why won’t you believe me -“
Erik cuts him off with a bite to his shoulder.
“You should have.”
Charles is quiet after that except for the occasional hitch of breath. Erik touches all of him, first on top of his clothes and then under. He lays kisses and bites on Charles’s neck and shoulders. His fingers play with Charles’s nipples through the fabric and then beneath, and Charles gasps and twists, pressing back against Erik and the hardness he will undoubtedly be able to feel. Erik pushes the shirt out of the way and licks his way down Charles’s spine, fingers slipping under the waistband of the pyjama trousers.
He stops for a moment to look at Charles, the flushed face, the slumped shoulders, caught between pain and humiliation and arousal. He would very much like to hear Charles’s thoughts at that moment - to know what it is he is anticipating with such trepidation.
He pulls Charles’s trousers and pants off, revealing an expanse of pale, freckled skin. He ghosts his fingertips along the curves, lets his fingers brush against curly hair, presses a kiss right below Charles’s spine.
“Erik…” Charles whispers, his voice cracking like dry paper.
Erik lifts a hand to stroke Charles’s neck. His thumb brushes against the edge of the helmet. The metal vibrates with the power trapped inside, distracting him so that he almost misses Charles’s next words:
“More. Erik, please touch me more.”
He does. There is no way Charles doesn’t know where this is going, but his breath is caught all the same when Erik parts his cheeks. Erik takes pride in the way his light, knowing touch makes Charles shiver and tighten up, the way the blush on Charles’s face deepens because he knows Erik can see that. Erik feels a sudden urge to kiss him, to taste that dark blush, the hurting, apple-red lips - but no, not yet.
Instead, he reaches for Charles’s half-hard cock with one hand, holds Charles open with the other, and bends down to kiss him there instead. Charles lets out a strangled sound. His whole body has gone tense. Erik can feel the strain against his arm where it’s pressed against Charles’s hip.
He surprises himself with how much he wants to do this, to tease and lick and bite and suck and learn to know Charles’s body until its vibrations are as familiar to him as those of metal. It’s not just a way to humiliate or embarrass Charles, although that is a part of it as well; he pauses stroking Charles’s cock to get a hand inside his own trousers.
Charles is gone. It’s impossible to tell if he’s forgotten the pain and disorientation or if the sensations are all getting mixed up to a point where all that matters is feeling. He’s moving restlessly under Erik’s hands and mouth, mindless with desperation. Incoherent pleas and curses spill from those polite lips. Most gratifying of all is Erik’s name, repeated over and over.
It’s easy, then, to open Charles up with lips and fingers and tongue. Despite everything Charles has seen he clearly doesn’t have much first-hand experience in this. It’s no reason to go easy on him. After all, Charles never goes easy on people. Two fingers in and then a third, just to see Charles struggle to take them, breathless and wrecked and absolutely beautiful as the minute movements of Erik’s fingers draw desperate noises and shivers from him.
“Charles,” Erik says pleasantly. “Would you like me to stop?”
He has to repeat the question to get through, and he knows how unfair it is to ask when he is already inside Charles in so many ways.
“No no no. Don’t go away. Please.”
‘Please don’t go’ isn’t quite the same as ‘please fuck me’, but for now it’s enough.
“Shh.” Erik runs his hands along Charles’s sides, feels the crazy fluttering of his heart, cards his hands through the damp curls at the back of Charles’s neck. “I’ll take care of you.”
He’s gentle as he arranges Charles the way he wants him, on his knees with his head pressed down on the pillow, and he’s careful as he pushes inside. Charles’s lips are parted in a voiceless plea or curse, and God he’s tight, tight and hot and perfect held down under Erik. He wishes he could see Charles’s face properly, but it’s not time for that yet, so he settles for draping himself against Charles’s back and taking a hold of his cuffed wrists, offering as much contact as possible. Charles is crying again - pained or overwhelmed - but he is meeting Erik’s thrusts, clumsy and hesitant at first and then with increasing urgency.
Charles is murmuring under his breath - “Yes, yes, right there, always” - and Erik doesn’t know if he’s talking about being held like this or whether he wants Erik’s cock in him, always. Either way it’s almost too much. Erik gets rougher, the grip on Charles’s wrists bruising. He wants, he wants so much - for this not to end, to kiss Charles, to hold him and to hold him down.
And Charles has given up and given in so beautifully, a creature of sensation instead of thought, his or anyone else’s. Handcuffs rattle as Erik flips Charles onto his back, because he has to see. He pushes Charles’s legs up and holds him open as he fucks into him, and the sounds Charles makes are almost enough to make him come right then and there. If it weren’t for the handcuffs, Charles would hold himself open, offer himself to Erik with his eyes gone dark like the sky at night.
His eyes. Erik needs to see his eyes. Pleasure is thrumming though him, stringing him taut, and something’s got to snap soon.
He reaches for the helmet and the blindfold and removes both at once. The sight hits him with something almost like awe.
Charles’s eyes are huge and unseeing and so blue it hurts. He convulses against Erik like in the throes of a vision or a miracle as the whole world comes rushing in; he’s wide open not only for Erik but for every straying thought and mind whose contact he’s been denied. He throws his head back, and the noises leaving his throat are not quite human. And at that moment Erik leans forward to kiss him, and they are both gone.
Silence. A distortion in the world.
Erik blinks, turns around. The room they were in has melted away.
Charles is there, impeccable in his brown suit. He always did look taller than he was when he wasn’t standing next to someone. That should have warned Erik right from the start.
In his mind, Charles can walk. And he does.
“Are you all right?” this Charles asks. His face is young, as it was when they first met, all traces of pain and bitterness smoothed away. Somehow that makes it worse.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” Erik says with caution, still reeling from the implications of this.
“No, not really.” Charles’s laugh is cold. The contrast to the previous moments is almost too much to bear.
This is exactly what Erik has feared, being swept away by a mind so much stronger than his. But it is also much more than that. For a moment, trapped in here, he had felt free. Because it all had been - not exactly what he’d always wanted, but close enough.
“I do apologise. My mind has been… straying lately.”
He wonders what Charles isn’t telling him, how bad whatever it is must be for Charles to lose control like that.
“Were you in control back there?” Erik asks.
Charles huffs, runs a hand through his hair. A tiny sign of humanity.
“What did it look like?”
“This is your mind. How could you not be in control?”
The tiny upward quirk of Charles’s mouth can almost be called a smile.
“I have always been very good at deceiving myself.”
Deception. Erik is still holding his helmet under his arm. He wonders why he hasn’t put it on, but that would be absolutely futile when Charles is controlling everything here. The metal still vibrates with the imprint of Charles, traces of trapped power and fluttering pain and the mental feel-taste of tears.
There is so much he should say, so many apologies Charles would despise him for. There is anger, too, for this and for other things. He chooses to remain silent.
“I agree. Apologies would be rather redundant at this point.”
Erik frowns, taps his temple.
“Don’t make a habit of that.”
“Why not?” Charles asks. “It’s not like this sort of situation is going to repeat itself, is it?”
And Erik can’t read him at all, this Charles with a pristine face and cold eyes, but he does know that Charles is asking. The first time might have been an accident of sorts - despite his mistrust of anything and everything these days, Erik doesn’t believe Charles would have consciously initiated anything like this. Subconscious is another animal, though, and apparently Charles’s exhibits a fierce desire to fight and to give in. Erik doesn’t want to think about what it tells about him that their minds fit together so easily, not a glitch in sight as the shared fantasy played out.
Maybe this is exactly the sort of trap he has always feared.
Maybe he’s always been a fool.
“It could, if we wanted to.”
He reaches out daringly to touch Charles’s cloth-covered wrist. There are no bruises hidden under the fabric, but Erik can remember the shape and shade of every single one. What happens here is real.
It is real, and in this reality nothing is unforgivable and Charles can walk, and here they can have… something.
“Perhaps,” Charles says. His smile may be too sharp and unsettling, but it is a smile nonetheless.
This may become a part of a series of oneshots.
Give up and give in (link to AO3)
Fandom: X-Men: First Class (2011)
Words: 2799
Rating: Explicit
Relationship: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Warnings: Dub-con
Additional Tags: Angst, PWP, Mindfuck, Sensory Deprivation, Telepathy, Post-Movie, Oneshot
Summary: A PWP featuring the forceful suppression of telepathy, consent issues and sex of the mindfuck variety.
This is real.
Charles’s bedroom, a study in warm shades of brown. The dusty spines of books stacked on the windowsill. The pane of coloured glass in the arched window.
A weight falling on the bed. Careful hands slipping a blindfold and a metal helmet over brown curls. The sound of handcuffs clicking into place.
A door, closing.
And then nothing.
Time starts again when Erik hears the first screams.
He smiles in satisfaction at a strategy well-realised. Now he knows the helmet is a weapon that works both ways. He waits for a moment, leaning against the door, and then opens it silently.
Charles is lying on the bed, curled up on himself as if he's trying to substitute the void in his head with physical contact. His lip is gnawed bloody, his face wet with tears, and dark bruising shows stark around the handcuffs at his wrists.
Erik lifts an eyebrow, slightly impressed. Gentle Charles has put up a fight after all.
Whatever fight there was in him, it has left him by now. Charles is whimpering, unintelligible words a constant stream from his lips. English words, foreign words, Erik even thinks he catches a bit of a nursery rhyme. They are bits and pieces stolen from the visitors to Charles’s mind, repeated over and over like an incantation to bring them back in, to banish the lonely darkness.
It… hurts, surprisingly, to see Charles reduced to this. Erik has too many memories in his own head of being brought down to this sort of animal desperation. Yet even stronger is the dark thread of satisfaction at seeing Charles bared to him, stripped of his carefully constructed barriers and his Oxford manners.
He wants more.
Erik crosses the room and sits in the chair by the bedside.
“Charles,” he says softly.
Charles freezes.
“Erik?” He turns to his side, trying in vain to get closer to the voice. “God, please, tell me you’re there.”
“Yes.”
Erik notices with a sort of detached interest the way Charles’s body shakes with suppressed weeping. His face is ashen, and there is sweat running down his neck as though from physical exertion. He must have been battering at the metal barrier around his head like a panicked bird until he broke his wings.
“Erik. Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone, not like this.”
It is a giddy rush to see Charles - Charles who has seen him at his absolute worst, whom Erik still can’t forgive for seeing - brought to this.
“And why should I do that? For once you can’t see inside my head, tell me to do what you say. Why should I do what you want?”
Charles stills. Were it not for the blindfold, his eyes would be so hurt, so blue.
“That’s not fair. You know I would never - please, please don’t do this.”
“You don’t even know what this is. You always think you have it all figured out, don’t you?”
Erik moves the chair, the scrape of wood loud in the stillness of the room. Charles practically throws himself at Erik, a pathetic convulsion when his hands are still cuffed to the headboard.
“No, don’t go! Please don’t go. I’ll do anything, just stay, please, Erik.”
“Anything is quite a lot to promise. But then, you’ve always made a habit of making promises you can’t keep.”
“I swear. Anything you want, just make it stop.”
It’s almost too good to know what it is Charles is unknowingly offering.
“On your knees, then.”
There’s a pause. Although Erik can’t read minds, he knows that for a brief moment Charles is wondering if he’s heard him right. Then he remembers that Erik is the one who put him here in the first place, knocked him out and placed shackles on his wrists and his mind. There is no knowing what his captor might want.
Slowly Charles gets to his knees. The position is awkward with his cuffed hands pulling him forward and down.
Erik goes to him, touches the back of his neck. His fingers brush against the helmet, and the metal hums at him in recognition. Charles has gone completely still.
“Please don’t,” he whispers. “Please don’t stop.”
Erik has no intention of doing that.
“How does it feel?” he asks, the tips of his fingers slowly stroking down Charles’s shirt-covered spine.
Charles’s voice is still tight, but the sharp edge of panic has dulled a bit now that Erik is touching him. “Like I’m falling and drowning at the same time. There’s a wall of white noise, a real wall with jagged spikes keeping me in, and inside there’s nothing, no one, the whole world is gone…”
“You had the world and lost it.” Erik’s words are as soft as his hands which calm and torment Charles in turn, offering contact and denying it. He delights in the way Charles shivers, the way he arches towards the touch. “What a tragedy.”
His hand rests heavy between Charles’s shoulder blades. “But I’ve got you now.”
Charles lets out a little choked sound.
Erik presses a light kiss on Charles’s shoulder. His lips move against the pale skin.
“And you’ll do anything for me, won’t you?”
“Anything,” Charles whispers. “Just take that thing off me.”
“Oh, not quite yet. I think you would leave if I did.”
Charles, who always, always argues a point, remains silent. Then he takes a breath and says:
“I’m afraid I’m not of much use to anyone right now. What… what do you want me to do?”
“For now, I only want you to stay there.” Erik’s hands steal under Charles’s shirt, stroke along his sides.
Charles lets out a little laugh that borders on hysterical. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Erik knows Charles is nowhere near as innocent as he looks - how could he be when he can see all the twisted things inside other people’s heads? - but he is still disoriented and thrown off his game.
The way he strains towards Erik’s touch is sweet. Even sweeter is the realisation of what the touches mean. Erik knows the exact moment Charles finally understands - when Erik slowly, carefully undoes all the metal buttons of his shirt, lays his hands possessive on Charles’s pale, beautiful throat and runs them all the way down, slow and teasing. Erik can feel the tension in Charles’s belly, the way the muscles shift slightly away from him.
“Charles,” he warns, and after a moment Charles lets out a shaky breath.
“Does this help?” Erik asks, his hands soothing gentle circles on Charles’s belly.
“No. Yes, a little. You keep me grounded, connected. But it still hurts, you can’t imagine… Erik, what are you doing?”
Erik is slipping Charles’s shirt off his shoulders, pressing himself against Charles’s back, warm and heavy.
“I’m sure you have seen this in my mind as well.”
“I - no, I don’t do that, why won’t you believe me -“
Erik cuts him off with a bite to his shoulder.
“You should have.”
Charles is quiet after that except for the occasional hitch of breath. Erik touches all of him, first on top of his clothes and then under. He lays kisses and bites on Charles’s neck and shoulders. His fingers play with Charles’s nipples through the fabric and then beneath, and Charles gasps and twists, pressing back against Erik and the hardness he will undoubtedly be able to feel. Erik pushes the shirt out of the way and licks his way down Charles’s spine, fingers slipping under the waistband of the pyjama trousers.
He stops for a moment to look at Charles, the flushed face, the slumped shoulders, caught between pain and humiliation and arousal. He would very much like to hear Charles’s thoughts at that moment - to know what it is he is anticipating with such trepidation.
He pulls Charles’s trousers and pants off, revealing an expanse of pale, freckled skin. He ghosts his fingertips along the curves, lets his fingers brush against curly hair, presses a kiss right below Charles’s spine.
“Erik…” Charles whispers, his voice cracking like dry paper.
Erik lifts a hand to stroke Charles’s neck. His thumb brushes against the edge of the helmet. The metal vibrates with the power trapped inside, distracting him so that he almost misses Charles’s next words:
“More. Erik, please touch me more.”
He does. There is no way Charles doesn’t know where this is going, but his breath is caught all the same when Erik parts his cheeks. Erik takes pride in the way his light, knowing touch makes Charles shiver and tighten up, the way the blush on Charles’s face deepens because he knows Erik can see that. Erik feels a sudden urge to kiss him, to taste that dark blush, the hurting, apple-red lips - but no, not yet.
Instead, he reaches for Charles’s half-hard cock with one hand, holds Charles open with the other, and bends down to kiss him there instead. Charles lets out a strangled sound. His whole body has gone tense. Erik can feel the strain against his arm where it’s pressed against Charles’s hip.
He surprises himself with how much he wants to do this, to tease and lick and bite and suck and learn to know Charles’s body until its vibrations are as familiar to him as those of metal. It’s not just a way to humiliate or embarrass Charles, although that is a part of it as well; he pauses stroking Charles’s cock to get a hand inside his own trousers.
Charles is gone. It’s impossible to tell if he’s forgotten the pain and disorientation or if the sensations are all getting mixed up to a point where all that matters is feeling. He’s moving restlessly under Erik’s hands and mouth, mindless with desperation. Incoherent pleas and curses spill from those polite lips. Most gratifying of all is Erik’s name, repeated over and over.
It’s easy, then, to open Charles up with lips and fingers and tongue. Despite everything Charles has seen he clearly doesn’t have much first-hand experience in this. It’s no reason to go easy on him. After all, Charles never goes easy on people. Two fingers in and then a third, just to see Charles struggle to take them, breathless and wrecked and absolutely beautiful as the minute movements of Erik’s fingers draw desperate noises and shivers from him.
“Charles,” Erik says pleasantly. “Would you like me to stop?”
He has to repeat the question to get through, and he knows how unfair it is to ask when he is already inside Charles in so many ways.
“No no no. Don’t go away. Please.”
‘Please don’t go’ isn’t quite the same as ‘please fuck me’, but for now it’s enough.
“Shh.” Erik runs his hands along Charles’s sides, feels the crazy fluttering of his heart, cards his hands through the damp curls at the back of Charles’s neck. “I’ll take care of you.”
He’s gentle as he arranges Charles the way he wants him, on his knees with his head pressed down on the pillow, and he’s careful as he pushes inside. Charles’s lips are parted in a voiceless plea or curse, and God he’s tight, tight and hot and perfect held down under Erik. He wishes he could see Charles’s face properly, but it’s not time for that yet, so he settles for draping himself against Charles’s back and taking a hold of his cuffed wrists, offering as much contact as possible. Charles is crying again - pained or overwhelmed - but he is meeting Erik’s thrusts, clumsy and hesitant at first and then with increasing urgency.
Charles is murmuring under his breath - “Yes, yes, right there, always” - and Erik doesn’t know if he’s talking about being held like this or whether he wants Erik’s cock in him, always. Either way it’s almost too much. Erik gets rougher, the grip on Charles’s wrists bruising. He wants, he wants so much - for this not to end, to kiss Charles, to hold him and to hold him down.
And Charles has given up and given in so beautifully, a creature of sensation instead of thought, his or anyone else’s. Handcuffs rattle as Erik flips Charles onto his back, because he has to see. He pushes Charles’s legs up and holds him open as he fucks into him, and the sounds Charles makes are almost enough to make him come right then and there. If it weren’t for the handcuffs, Charles would hold himself open, offer himself to Erik with his eyes gone dark like the sky at night.
His eyes. Erik needs to see his eyes. Pleasure is thrumming though him, stringing him taut, and something’s got to snap soon.
He reaches for the helmet and the blindfold and removes both at once. The sight hits him with something almost like awe.
Charles’s eyes are huge and unseeing and so blue it hurts. He convulses against Erik like in the throes of a vision or a miracle as the whole world comes rushing in; he’s wide open not only for Erik but for every straying thought and mind whose contact he’s been denied. He throws his head back, and the noises leaving his throat are not quite human. And at that moment Erik leans forward to kiss him, and they are both gone.
Silence. A distortion in the world.
Erik blinks, turns around. The room they were in has melted away.
Charles is there, impeccable in his brown suit. He always did look taller than he was when he wasn’t standing next to someone. That should have warned Erik right from the start.
In his mind, Charles can walk. And he does.
“Are you all right?” this Charles asks. His face is young, as it was when they first met, all traces of pain and bitterness smoothed away. Somehow that makes it worse.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” Erik says with caution, still reeling from the implications of this.
“No, not really.” Charles’s laugh is cold. The contrast to the previous moments is almost too much to bear.
This is exactly what Erik has feared, being swept away by a mind so much stronger than his. But it is also much more than that. For a moment, trapped in here, he had felt free. Because it all had been - not exactly what he’d always wanted, but close enough.
“I do apologise. My mind has been… straying lately.”
He wonders what Charles isn’t telling him, how bad whatever it is must be for Charles to lose control like that.
“Were you in control back there?” Erik asks.
Charles huffs, runs a hand through his hair. A tiny sign of humanity.
“What did it look like?”
“This is your mind. How could you not be in control?”
The tiny upward quirk of Charles’s mouth can almost be called a smile.
“I have always been very good at deceiving myself.”
Deception. Erik is still holding his helmet under his arm. He wonders why he hasn’t put it on, but that would be absolutely futile when Charles is controlling everything here. The metal still vibrates with the imprint of Charles, traces of trapped power and fluttering pain and the mental feel-taste of tears.
There is so much he should say, so many apologies Charles would despise him for. There is anger, too, for this and for other things. He chooses to remain silent.
“I agree. Apologies would be rather redundant at this point.”
Erik frowns, taps his temple.
“Don’t make a habit of that.”
“Why not?” Charles asks. “It’s not like this sort of situation is going to repeat itself, is it?”
And Erik can’t read him at all, this Charles with a pristine face and cold eyes, but he does know that Charles is asking. The first time might have been an accident of sorts - despite his mistrust of anything and everything these days, Erik doesn’t believe Charles would have consciously initiated anything like this. Subconscious is another animal, though, and apparently Charles’s exhibits a fierce desire to fight and to give in. Erik doesn’t want to think about what it tells about him that their minds fit together so easily, not a glitch in sight as the shared fantasy played out.
Maybe this is exactly the sort of trap he has always feared.
Maybe he’s always been a fool.
“It could, if we wanted to.”
He reaches out daringly to touch Charles’s cloth-covered wrist. There are no bruises hidden under the fabric, but Erik can remember the shape and shade of every single one. What happens here is real.
It is real, and in this reality nothing is unforgivable and Charles can walk, and here they can have… something.
“Perhaps,” Charles says. His smile may be too sharp and unsettling, but it is a smile nonetheless.