Kink Fill: Needs Must 2
Title: Needs Must
Chapter: 2/?
Betaed by ima_pseudonym
Word Count: 2,031
Rating: PG-13
Warning: language
Summary: Eric is made an offer he can’t refuse.
Authors Notes: Ping-ponging POV’s, and truthfully have no idea where this will end up.
The laboratory hall was all but deserted, sound echoing off the tiled walls of the long rectangular space. Tables bisected the room, littered with Bunsen burners, beakers, and all manner of discovery equipment. At the end of one of the tables sat a solitary man, tall and resolutely focused, scribbling on a notepad. A younger blond woman petered around the lab putting different chemicals and supplies away.
Erik’s finger tapped an idle staccato on the table top as he quickly jotted down notes on the yellow pad at hand, quite absorbed in what he was doing.
“Erik.” Raven’s quiet voice broke the silence in the room.
He didn’t even spare his lab assistant a glance, just answered her with a very absent minded, “Hmm?”
“You’re doing it again.”
Reaching a point that he could easily stop, Erik looked up at his only companion through most of his lifetime. Raven almost looked too young to be the undergrad lab assistant she was posing as, with her long blonde curls and round face. But it was either blonde or blue, or so was the ultimatum she’d laid down, so Erik took what he could.
With a wry twist of lips, Raven motioned with her head to the centrifuge that was merrily spinning away; untouched and unplugged.
“Shit!” Erik jumped up, scattering papers, pens clattering to the tile floor. “Shit. Fuck. Shitshitshitshit!” He batted uselessly at the furiously spinning machine. “Stop.” He told it firmly, pointing at the whirring test tubes like it was all one big errant puppy.
The centrifuge just whirled faster.
“You have to calm down,” Raven said. Not even attempting to stop the machine, knowing that it was pointless to try when Erik was this frazzled. But she did eye the pens that were agitatedly bobbing in midair with some apprehension. She thought it best not to bring attention to those at the moment though.
“I know.” Erik said through gritted teeth, and he fisted both hands in his hair struggling to find some calm.
Raven waited, watching the centrifuge slow and the pens cease bobbing and fall to the floor with a clatter. She looked at her oldest friend, brother even, and said what they were both thinking, “You need to start practicing again, to refine your control.”
Erik, predictably, blew up. “I do practice. I practice repression!” He stalked into his office, pens rattling on the ground as he strode past, but didn’t start levitating.
Raven gave him a mark for that much control, but he was not going to get away that easy. She had to jog to keep up with him, her little pump heels clacking on the tile floor. “Erik.” She called to his retreating back.
He shut the door to his office in her face, but didn’t lock it. Raven had never been deterred by a little wood, and she followed him in, closing the door again behind her softly.
The room was dim in the late afternoon light, the wooden shutters drawing slanted lines across the hardwood. There were books and paper on every available surface, including piled on the floor, and Raven wove her way to the back corner by the window were Erik sat, head in his hands.
“Not now Raven, please.”
Always later, she thought to herself as she looked down at him, how can you be so open and understanding with my abilities and so critical of your own?
With the only chair occupied, Raven chose to stand and just wait him out. It only took a moment before he was looking up at her through long thin fingers. “Your current regimen needs tweaking.” She responded to his earlier deflection at her demand to practice. And she looked over pointedly at the aluminum cord tassel from the nearby blind as it strained towards him like being pulled to a magnet. “Obviously.”
Erik’s eyes followed her glance and he buried his face back into his hands with a disgusted growl.
“Erik this isn’t working.” Raven said, getting impatient with him. Didn’t he see that? The repression that had held him though the awkward teens wasn’t enough anymore, his abilities were getting stronger, and control was the only thing that would help.
“I can feel the iron in your blood. Did you know that?”
Erik’s voice was hushed and low, raw. And Raven realized, with epiphany like shock, what the real problem was. Erik was afraid of what he could do. She didn’t quite know when this had started. It hadn’t been when he was a child, he’d been annoyed, embarrassed, yes. But never afraid. Something had changed, and that was probably when the control he’d learned while growing up had started to fail.
“You stopped scaring me with what you could do a long time ago Erik.” Raven said just as softly, “And besides, you can only feel it right? Or can you do anything with it?”
He looked up at her, shocked, bemused, but listening, “No.”
“You just know it’s there?” She confirmed.
“Yes.” Erik blinked up at her, waiting for the point with his customary impatience.
“So, you’re just like a big human shaped metal detector.” She saw the corner of his mouth flick up in a fleeting grin and ran with brief good humor. “Hey! Can we go out to Willard’s Park? There was a huge party out there last night, the one for the graduates. You know; the one you should have gone to? I bet there is tons of stuff out there, coins, keys, oh! Jewelry!” She got a knowing eyebrow raise and a chuckle for that, “Come on, you can even make little beeping noises when you get close to something.”
Erik sat back and gave her an indulgent smile, the pinched corners of his eyes easing with her levity. And most importantly, the cord tassel on the blinds fell back against the sill with a soft clack.
“But seriously Erik, this isn’t working.” She hated to ruin the mood, she really did.
Erik looked out the window at the trees and stone buildings of the university, sounding morose, “I know.”
She took a step closer, laying a hand on his shoulder. She thought better of it a moment later and started bullying her way onto his lap, only relenting when he wrapped his arms around her. But he still wouldn’t look at her, and she mumbled up into his ear, “What happened Erik?”
He took a deep breath then, chest expanding, and for a fleeting moment she thought he might actually tell her what was going on without having to fight him for every word, but such was not her luck. “I’ll go to Willard Park with you. I’ll practice more, get the hang of it again.”
She pulled her head back enough to see his face, “In exchange for me not asking what happened?”
He met her eyes with a look that said quite simply, ‘Precisely.’
~*~
The park was bright and cool the next afternoon, and the area that had been used for the party two nights ago was populated with no more than birdsong. Actually it was almost desolate. And he walked beside Raven with relative ease. A gusty breeze whirled by and he folded his leather jacket around him in a more snug fashion. He always got cold so easy, the knit turtleneck tucked warmly under his chin helped, but not overmuch.
He stopped once he felt the vibration of the metal object near his feet, but refused to make the irritating beeping noise that Raven had practically pleaded for.
Raven stopped a step later, looking down at the grass that was long enough to cover the tops of their shoes, “Found something?”
He nodded, “Something small, coin I think.” And he bet to pick it up, but Raven’s hand stopped him. “Don’t use your hands.”
He was set to protest until the blond shape shifter turned a pointed look his way. He made a promise, much as he hated it, and he’d rather lift a few abandoned coins out of the mud than tell his sister what he might be really capable of. He needed her to believe in him more than he cared to admit.
With a deep calming breath, he felt for the magnetic field surrounding the coin. At the moment, gravity was a stronger force than the pull of either pole, so he made his own pole to bring the coin to him. Holding his hand out and began pulling latent energy to him; the movement of the wind, warmth of the sun, and his own internal reserves. And then spinning all that energy until it was dense, circling it, making it rotate until it had enough pull to resonate with the metallic alloys in the coin, creating magnetic pull. Or at least that’s what he’d read in a journal once, on how magnetic fields were created.
Really, all he did was ‘want’ the coin, chain, or whatever and it would come to him; the whole magnetic field creation thing a non issue. It was kind of like walking though, he’d had to learn how hard to ‘want’ something. The harder he thought about it the faster it moved and the stronger the pull.
And he was out of practice. The coin rocketed out of the ground and into his palm with a smack.
Wincing, Erik reflexively shook his hand, the coin still stuck to the center of his palm. He looked over at Raven, whose face was remarkably bland. He’d had a difficult time, as a child, moving or lifting things; and anything larger than a toaster was almost impossible. Lifting a coin, that easily, had never happened until recently.
“Someone put on a growth spurt.” Raven only smiled as Erik glared at her. “Come on, let’s find another and try again.” She walked on, and Erik had no real choice but to follow.
The rest of the morning followed in the same way, until both of Erik’s hands were smarting from coins flying at high speeds. But as Erik used his power more he felt that he was gaining a degree of control over his expanded strength, and it was keeping him warm in the morning breeze.
“$5.13 in assorted coins, two unmatched earrings, and a fairly ugly ring, not a bad collection Erik.”
Shaking his head, Erik walked away from Raven, determined now more than ever to get his power under control so that he could go back to his life. They’d spent hours lifting objects from the ground, making them levitate in mid air, and after a heated discussion, sending those objects midair to Raven. Erik didn’t like how fast things were moving with how little effort he was putting into making them fly.
He stopped, looking at something white partially hidden in the grass. There wasn’t much metal, but it resonated like a hum in his head, and he lifted it off the ground. The string of white round beads floated in the air and swam snakelike into his palm. The string lifted again, and he sent it halfway across the field to Raven.
She squealed when they landed in her hands, “Pearls! I am so keeping these!”
“They’re going to lost and found Raven.” He said sternly.
There was an odd displacement of air, a sound like a fist hitting flesh, and the smell of brimstone behind him and Erik turned. Were only moments ago there was nothing but grass and leaves, now stood a brown haired man in a tailored suit. “Good Afternoon Professor Lehnsherr, my name is Janos Quested and I am an associate of Sebastian Shaw. And Mr. Shaw would like to make you an offer.”
Raven screamed behind him and Erik spun back around watching as another man, red as Raven was blue, wrap a rope around her neck. She lost her form in her panic, bleeding from blond co-ed to a mutant blue as a sapphire with hair bright red as the man behind her.
Eric turned to face Janos once again, snarl in place. The man only shook his head meeting Erik glare for glare, “One I seriously believe you should listen to.”