[fic] Playing Havoc 1/1
Title: Playing Havoc 1/1
Rating: 14
Genre: fun
Pairings: implied Erik/Charles
Wordcount: 2k
Warnings: none
Summary: Alex disapproves of school car washes, despite the abundance of wet bikinis on pretty girls. Erik doesn’t approve of his son shirking money-making duties. Human AU.
Author’s Note: written for the
1stclass_kink meme prompt: high school car wash, with teacher!Charles participating.
Damn you, kink meme! Damn you to hell! As a side note, if anyone is feeling adventurous, I think the plot of the Simpsons movie (with a side-order of Stephen King's Under the Dome) would yield itself really well to an XMFC fic. No, really.
Betaed by
yami_tai. <3
“I fucking hate this school,” Alex says into his cell. “Fuck no! Forget it! What am I, a cheerleader?” He listens for a moment. “Well, tell him to fuck himself, too! I ain’t coming!” Another moment. “I know! Raven, for the love of God and his puppies, I don’t care what I said, I can’t go. I don’t know, tell him I died!”
He disconnects and the phone lands on the couch. It would have been the wall, but Erik has a policy on hurling phones at walls, and these come down to “you break it, you pay for it; you live here, the walls are your responsibility, too.”
“What now?” he asks from the chair, in which he is studying the Saturday paper and not eavesdropping on his son’s phone calls. Alex knows better then to hold confidential calls in his presence, which means that he wants to be made to do something.
Alex growls.
“I’m not getting any younger. What?”
“They are holding a car wash. A fucking car wash!”
Erik raises a brow. Unexpected. “I’d think it would be pleasing for hormonal teenagers. Don’t cheerleaders typically manage this type of endeavors?”
“Typically, yes.”
“You’re telling me this institution managed to somehow fuck up a team of wet jailbait in bikinis humping cars? If that’s the case I think I need to have words with the principal.”
“Oh, that part they got right,” Alex says, even as he kicks the coffee table and falls onto the couch. He is a teenaged boy, so the mental image has him a little slack-jawed and drooling. Erik sympathizes. He has seen some of Alex’s classmates. “There will be girls and there will be bikinis.”
“I’m not seeing the problem, then.”
“Mr Xavier insists we all participate,” Alex admits after a few moments of silence. “Everyone in his class. Even the guys. It’s for a trip.”
Erik regards his errant son, affectionately known as “condoms are my best friends, now and forever, amen,” over the newspaper. “I see. And this car wash is to be held when?”
Alex glares at the TV. “Today. Since noon.”
The clock on the wall innocently chimes one p.m. Erik watches the hands move across its white face, waiting for elaboration.
“It’s a fucking car wash! You can’t expect me to go!”
“Are you going on that trip?”
Alex grits his teeth. “Of course I’m going. Everyone is.”
“Then get your ass changed. You are going to spend a very educational afternoon soaping yourself up and bending over for the pleasure of the perverted soccer moms.”
“Dad!”
Erik grins and folds the paper. “Practice will do you good, given that you are headed straight for juvie and correctional facilities in your later years.”
“If juvies had soccer moms, I’d be there already.”
“Prisons have their fair share of soccer dads.” Erik turns a page and scans another article. Alex will go. He’s wavering already, but the poor naive sod, Mr Xavier, evidently needs all the help he can get. “Alex. I said get changed.”
“Dad, please! I’ll wash your car, here, inside and out, I’ll do the laundry, I’ll make dinner!”
“Tempting. Alright, then.” Erik abandons the paper and stand. “I’m in the mood for pasta and make it spicy. Don’t forget to separate the whites and the colors.”
Alex brightens and opens his mouth, but Erik isn’t done yet.
“Don’t worry about the car. I hear there’s a school car wash today, I’m gonna go round to contribute to whatever it is needs funding. Raven still has a crush on me, doesn’t she?”
Alex’s face is a picture-perfect likeness of the terrifying mind of Edvard Munch. Erik loves the man’s paintings. He loves them best when they are being recreated by his only son, though with the baby blue eyes and blonde fringe Alex looks more like the kid on the cover of that home alone at Christmas movie.
“Now, you can go and do damage control, or stay here and cook me dinner. Up to you.”
Alex screams, curses and kicks the banister as he goes to his room to change into his swimming shorts and a white tee. Oh yes, Erik is a fucking fantastic father, even if he says so himself.
“One day,” Alex swears as they get into Erik’s one true love, a shiny black Chevy, “One day I will maim and kill you. And yeah, I will go to prison, but fuck if it won’t be worth it!”
“Start planning, kid,” Erik tells him. “You’re not allowed to murder me, until you can get away with it. Believe me, it will take you a while.”
“I should report you to social services. This is cruel and unusual.”
“Then you should have lodged a protest in class, if you think it’s that stupid.”
Alex mumbles something into his arm.
“What was that?”
“I said I couldn’t!”
“Why the hell not? Did you skip school again?” A hundred nasty chores for Alex dance through Erik’s mind. He’s laid back about many things, Alex should damn well know and be grateful, if he’s got any sense at all, but if the punk’s skipping school, there will be hell to pay.
“No! I get it, Jesus. No skipping. Haven’t done it in over a year, get over it.”
“Then?”
Alex sighs. “It’s Xavier. He’s just so… Fuck. You try looking him in the face and saying no. It’s like kicking a puppy and cannibalizing it later.”
“You can’t cannibalize a puppy.”
“Screw you. I can cannibalize whatever I damn well please.”
“You can only cannibalize your own species. If you intend to eat puppies, I’m not stopping you, but have the good grace to tell me about it English.”
“Grammar Nazi.”
“Dictionary Nazi, thank you.”
The school looms before them, bustling with activity a Saturday shouldn’t normally inspire. There are far more cars than Erik would have expected. Either most of the town are drooling perverts (it wouldn’t be a surprise), or he got the wrong address. But no, there was a cheerful cardboard sign by the gates that made wet-bikini related promises, so Erik makes the sharp turn and rolls into the courtyard.
“It would be just my luck,” he tells Alex, stunned by the sheer amount of people, “To end up in a town full of closeted perverted lesbians.” Most of the onlookers are soccer moms. There are a few jocks, several stern fathers that Erik had pegged as perverts when they first met, but the rest…
Alex scowls and groans. “Fuck,” he just says.
“Alex!”
Erik shields his eyes from the sun with his hand and stares. A figure detached itself from the hood of a baby-blue Toyota and, still dripping, makes its way to them. He can’t help but notice that every soccer mom follows its progress.
Well, that, at least, explained away the seemingly rampant lesbianism.
“I told you it’s not mandatory,” the man -- it is a man, Erik notes, one only a little younger than he is -- says with an indulgent smile, but the smile has layers, all of them pleasant, and they are all wrapped around a core of steel, and the core is grinning in well-concealed triumph. This is a mind that knows precisely where the buttons are and which to push. Oh, he so isn’t the victim of Alex’s irreverence Erik has imagined up until now. He’s got the kid’s number, and how. “You’re welcome to sit this one out. Or fetch us all some water to drink, if you’d be so kind. I brought a few bottles with me, they’re in my car.”
“Alex is good at washing cars,” Erik says and grins. “We had a brief emergency at home. Sorry for being late.”
“Yeah. Sorry, Mr Xavier.” Alex kicks the dirt with a flip-flop clad foot and glares, but the glare dissolves as soon as he looks up and sees his teacher looking at him with that bright, innocent smile of his.
“It’s no trouble, really.” Mr Xavier smiles all the brighter and Erik has to agree, saying no to that face would be hard. “Hi, Mr Lehnsherr. I’d shake your hand, but…”
Erik watches the suds dripping down his arms. He drags his gaze up, to where the bubbles are sliding over the man’s chest, takes in the citrusy smell of detergent, the darkened waistline of Mr Xavier’s jeans and the all-knowing self-satisfied glint in his eyes, hidden under genuine fondness, which follows Alex as he waves at his chums, on his way to a sleek car parked in the shade. Erik stares, swallows, and hello, sexuality, where have you been all my life?
“So, Mr Lehnsherr. Can we help you?” Mr Xavier beams at him. “The girls will be happy to service you,” he says in a tone which is so perfectly innocent that there is no way the comment can be misconstrued as anything it isn’t, that Erik immediately knows it was carefully crafted beforehand and used on every man who’d come without a daughter, “Only I’m afraid it might take a while, we’ve been forced to make a list, the attendance is frankly astonishing.”
“I bet,” Erik says, when Mr Xavier bites his lip and half-turns towards the moms in the audience, so that the light catches in the wet patches of his skin.
“Oh, would you?”
“Absolutely.” Erik looks up to see Alex, marginally more relaxed with a two-gallon water bottle under one arm and a pack of plastic cups in the other, speaking with a redheaded kid.
Mr Xavier is watching him with an unreadable expression in his blue eyes. “Charles,” he says eventually. He grins while his head is turned so that only Erik can see, and the grin is wicked.
Erik inclines his head and offers his hand for a firm, slippery handshake. “Erik. Tell me, Charles, if your car wash is so busy, perhaps I could volunteer to help?”
“I wouldn’t presume to ask, I can tell you didn’t plan on this.”
It will mean getting the seats of the Chevy wet, on the way home, but some sacrifices need to be made. Erik isn’t terribly attached to his jeans, should the washing machine fail to save them. “I did promise Alex I would embarrass him horribly for not being here on time.”
“Well then,” Charles says, as Erik kicks off his flip-flops. “I can give you that opportunity today.” His gaze, Erik can’t help but notice, follows the shirt he discarded onto the front seat. “We really must play chess sometime.”
“How presumptuous of you, to assume I play at all.”
“I teach your son, Erik. There is very little I don’t know about you.”
“Clearly you have me at a disadvantage.”
“Not quite the disadvantage people normally are at, I notice.” Charles lowers his voice when they make the way to the blue Toyota and Erik picks up a sponge. The water in the bucket is already warm, but it is still pleasant to dip his hand in it to the elbow. He bends over the windshield and runs the sponge from top to bottom, organized and precise, while Charles polishes the hood. Their elbows brush now and then, and Erik is thoroughly wet and practically laying on his front on the car to better reach the left side of the windshield without walking to the other side, when Charles brushes his shoulder with his hand.
“Don’t look now,” he says, nearly hums, so low over the metal he is practically speaking to the car and Erik can feel it hum back underneath him, “But Mrs Cassidy just had an orgasm.”
And Alex just had a coronary arrest, judging by the look on his face. Erik grins at him and waves, spilling water from the sponge all over his chest and Charles’ head. Charles straightens and laughs and though Erik is quite unprepared for the hose, he laughs with him.
*****
Erik returns late that night. The queue was such they didn’t get around to washing the Chevy until the sun was down and then it seemed impolite to leave Charles’ car dirty, even though technically the car wash was already declared a tremendous success (over four thousand dollars, Charles said, beaming at his scantily clad students) and most kids cried off to go home.
The very next morning Alex demands therapy. Erik shrugs and tells him to email him about it, because he is late for a chess-game.
END.
Rating: 14
Genre: fun
Pairings: implied Erik/Charles
Wordcount: 2k
Warnings: none
Summary: Alex disapproves of school car washes, despite the abundance of wet bikinis on pretty girls. Erik doesn’t approve of his son shirking money-making duties. Human AU.
Author’s Note: written for the
1stclass_kink meme prompt: high school car wash, with teacher!Charles participating.
Damn you, kink meme! Damn you to hell! As a side note, if anyone is feeling adventurous, I think the plot of the Simpsons movie (with a side-order of Stephen King's Under the Dome) would yield itself really well to an XMFC fic. No, really.
Betaed by
yami_tai. <3
“I fucking hate this school,” Alex says into his cell. “Fuck no! Forget it! What am I, a cheerleader?” He listens for a moment. “Well, tell him to fuck himself, too! I ain’t coming!” Another moment. “I know! Raven, for the love of God and his puppies, I don’t care what I said, I can’t go. I don’t know, tell him I died!”
He disconnects and the phone lands on the couch. It would have been the wall, but Erik has a policy on hurling phones at walls, and these come down to “you break it, you pay for it; you live here, the walls are your responsibility, too.”
“What now?” he asks from the chair, in which he is studying the Saturday paper and not eavesdropping on his son’s phone calls. Alex knows better then to hold confidential calls in his presence, which means that he wants to be made to do something.
Alex growls.
“I’m not getting any younger. What?”
“They are holding a car wash. A fucking car wash!”
Erik raises a brow. Unexpected. “I’d think it would be pleasing for hormonal teenagers. Don’t cheerleaders typically manage this type of endeavors?”
“Typically, yes.”
“You’re telling me this institution managed to somehow fuck up a team of wet jailbait in bikinis humping cars? If that’s the case I think I need to have words with the principal.”
“Oh, that part they got right,” Alex says, even as he kicks the coffee table and falls onto the couch. He is a teenaged boy, so the mental image has him a little slack-jawed and drooling. Erik sympathizes. He has seen some of Alex’s classmates. “There will be girls and there will be bikinis.”
“I’m not seeing the problem, then.”
“Mr Xavier insists we all participate,” Alex admits after a few moments of silence. “Everyone in his class. Even the guys. It’s for a trip.”
Erik regards his errant son, affectionately known as “condoms are my best friends, now and forever, amen,” over the newspaper. “I see. And this car wash is to be held when?”
Alex glares at the TV. “Today. Since noon.”
The clock on the wall innocently chimes one p.m. Erik watches the hands move across its white face, waiting for elaboration.
“It’s a fucking car wash! You can’t expect me to go!”
“Are you going on that trip?”
Alex grits his teeth. “Of course I’m going. Everyone is.”
“Then get your ass changed. You are going to spend a very educational afternoon soaping yourself up and bending over for the pleasure of the perverted soccer moms.”
“Dad!”
Erik grins and folds the paper. “Practice will do you good, given that you are headed straight for juvie and correctional facilities in your later years.”
“If juvies had soccer moms, I’d be there already.”
“Prisons have their fair share of soccer dads.” Erik turns a page and scans another article. Alex will go. He’s wavering already, but the poor naive sod, Mr Xavier, evidently needs all the help he can get. “Alex. I said get changed.”
“Dad, please! I’ll wash your car, here, inside and out, I’ll do the laundry, I’ll make dinner!”
“Tempting. Alright, then.” Erik abandons the paper and stand. “I’m in the mood for pasta and make it spicy. Don’t forget to separate the whites and the colors.”
Alex brightens and opens his mouth, but Erik isn’t done yet.
“Don’t worry about the car. I hear there’s a school car wash today, I’m gonna go round to contribute to whatever it is needs funding. Raven still has a crush on me, doesn’t she?”
Alex’s face is a picture-perfect likeness of the terrifying mind of Edvard Munch. Erik loves the man’s paintings. He loves them best when they are being recreated by his only son, though with the baby blue eyes and blonde fringe Alex looks more like the kid on the cover of that home alone at Christmas movie.
“Now, you can go and do damage control, or stay here and cook me dinner. Up to you.”
Alex screams, curses and kicks the banister as he goes to his room to change into his swimming shorts and a white tee. Oh yes, Erik is a fucking fantastic father, even if he says so himself.
“One day,” Alex swears as they get into Erik’s one true love, a shiny black Chevy, “One day I will maim and kill you. And yeah, I will go to prison, but fuck if it won’t be worth it!”
“Start planning, kid,” Erik tells him. “You’re not allowed to murder me, until you can get away with it. Believe me, it will take you a while.”
“I should report you to social services. This is cruel and unusual.”
“Then you should have lodged a protest in class, if you think it’s that stupid.”
Alex mumbles something into his arm.
“What was that?”
“I said I couldn’t!”
“Why the hell not? Did you skip school again?” A hundred nasty chores for Alex dance through Erik’s mind. He’s laid back about many things, Alex should damn well know and be grateful, if he’s got any sense at all, but if the punk’s skipping school, there will be hell to pay.
“No! I get it, Jesus. No skipping. Haven’t done it in over a year, get over it.”
“Then?”
Alex sighs. “It’s Xavier. He’s just so… Fuck. You try looking him in the face and saying no. It’s like kicking a puppy and cannibalizing it later.”
“You can’t cannibalize a puppy.”
“Screw you. I can cannibalize whatever I damn well please.”
“You can only cannibalize your own species. If you intend to eat puppies, I’m not stopping you, but have the good grace to tell me about it English.”
“Grammar Nazi.”
“Dictionary Nazi, thank you.”
The school looms before them, bustling with activity a Saturday shouldn’t normally inspire. There are far more cars than Erik would have expected. Either most of the town are drooling perverts (it wouldn’t be a surprise), or he got the wrong address. But no, there was a cheerful cardboard sign by the gates that made wet-bikini related promises, so Erik makes the sharp turn and rolls into the courtyard.
“It would be just my luck,” he tells Alex, stunned by the sheer amount of people, “To end up in a town full of closeted perverted lesbians.” Most of the onlookers are soccer moms. There are a few jocks, several stern fathers that Erik had pegged as perverts when they first met, but the rest…
Alex scowls and groans. “Fuck,” he just says.
“Alex!”
Erik shields his eyes from the sun with his hand and stares. A figure detached itself from the hood of a baby-blue Toyota and, still dripping, makes its way to them. He can’t help but notice that every soccer mom follows its progress.
Well, that, at least, explained away the seemingly rampant lesbianism.
“I told you it’s not mandatory,” the man -- it is a man, Erik notes, one only a little younger than he is -- says with an indulgent smile, but the smile has layers, all of them pleasant, and they are all wrapped around a core of steel, and the core is grinning in well-concealed triumph. This is a mind that knows precisely where the buttons are and which to push. Oh, he so isn’t the victim of Alex’s irreverence Erik has imagined up until now. He’s got the kid’s number, and how. “You’re welcome to sit this one out. Or fetch us all some water to drink, if you’d be so kind. I brought a few bottles with me, they’re in my car.”
“Alex is good at washing cars,” Erik says and grins. “We had a brief emergency at home. Sorry for being late.”
“Yeah. Sorry, Mr Xavier.” Alex kicks the dirt with a flip-flop clad foot and glares, but the glare dissolves as soon as he looks up and sees his teacher looking at him with that bright, innocent smile of his.
“It’s no trouble, really.” Mr Xavier smiles all the brighter and Erik has to agree, saying no to that face would be hard. “Hi, Mr Lehnsherr. I’d shake your hand, but…”
Erik watches the suds dripping down his arms. He drags his gaze up, to where the bubbles are sliding over the man’s chest, takes in the citrusy smell of detergent, the darkened waistline of Mr Xavier’s jeans and the all-knowing self-satisfied glint in his eyes, hidden under genuine fondness, which follows Alex as he waves at his chums, on his way to a sleek car parked in the shade. Erik stares, swallows, and hello, sexuality, where have you been all my life?
“So, Mr Lehnsherr. Can we help you?” Mr Xavier beams at him. “The girls will be happy to service you,” he says in a tone which is so perfectly innocent that there is no way the comment can be misconstrued as anything it isn’t, that Erik immediately knows it was carefully crafted beforehand and used on every man who’d come without a daughter, “Only I’m afraid it might take a while, we’ve been forced to make a list, the attendance is frankly astonishing.”
“I bet,” Erik says, when Mr Xavier bites his lip and half-turns towards the moms in the audience, so that the light catches in the wet patches of his skin.
“Oh, would you?”
“Absolutely.” Erik looks up to see Alex, marginally more relaxed with a two-gallon water bottle under one arm and a pack of plastic cups in the other, speaking with a redheaded kid.
Mr Xavier is watching him with an unreadable expression in his blue eyes. “Charles,” he says eventually. He grins while his head is turned so that only Erik can see, and the grin is wicked.
Erik inclines his head and offers his hand for a firm, slippery handshake. “Erik. Tell me, Charles, if your car wash is so busy, perhaps I could volunteer to help?”
“I wouldn’t presume to ask, I can tell you didn’t plan on this.”
It will mean getting the seats of the Chevy wet, on the way home, but some sacrifices need to be made. Erik isn’t terribly attached to his jeans, should the washing machine fail to save them. “I did promise Alex I would embarrass him horribly for not being here on time.”
“Well then,” Charles says, as Erik kicks off his flip-flops. “I can give you that opportunity today.” His gaze, Erik can’t help but notice, follows the shirt he discarded onto the front seat. “We really must play chess sometime.”
“How presumptuous of you, to assume I play at all.”
“I teach your son, Erik. There is very little I don’t know about you.”
“Clearly you have me at a disadvantage.”
“Not quite the disadvantage people normally are at, I notice.” Charles lowers his voice when they make the way to the blue Toyota and Erik picks up a sponge. The water in the bucket is already warm, but it is still pleasant to dip his hand in it to the elbow. He bends over the windshield and runs the sponge from top to bottom, organized and precise, while Charles polishes the hood. Their elbows brush now and then, and Erik is thoroughly wet and practically laying on his front on the car to better reach the left side of the windshield without walking to the other side, when Charles brushes his shoulder with his hand.
“Don’t look now,” he says, nearly hums, so low over the metal he is practically speaking to the car and Erik can feel it hum back underneath him, “But Mrs Cassidy just had an orgasm.”
And Alex just had a coronary arrest, judging by the look on his face. Erik grins at him and waves, spilling water from the sponge all over his chest and Charles’ head. Charles straightens and laughs and though Erik is quite unprepared for the hose, he laughs with him.
*****
Erik returns late that night. The queue was such they didn’t get around to washing the Chevy until the sun was down and then it seemed impolite to leave Charles’ car dirty, even though technically the car wash was already declared a tremendous success (over four thousand dollars, Charles said, beaming at his scantily clad students) and most kids cried off to go home.
The very next morning Alex demands therapy. Erik shrugs and tells him to email him about it, because he is late for a chess-game.
END.