Reunion Season
Author: jjtaylor
Title: Reunion Season
Pairing: Charles/Erik
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Summary: Forsythia blooms and fades.
Written for: Renata bessiemaemucho
Pairing/scenario requested: Post-X2, Erik and Charles fighting on the same side.
"Professor, it's for you," one of the children sang out, two weeks after they'd come home from Alkali Lake, and Charles had known it was Erik before it rang.
"Thank you, James," Charles said, and the boy closed the door on the way out of Charles' office.
"Hello, Erik," Charles said.
"Charles, isn't it polite to at least pretend not to know who is calling?"
"I can say truthfully that at least I do not know why you are calling."
"Oh, come now, old friend. Can't I simply call to ask after you? To ask if the forsythia is in bloom?"
"Forsythia blooms and fades, Erik."
"Good thing I called right at its peak."
"Any idea why you chose to plant it all around the mansion back when you were our gardener?"
"I don't know. You're the one for symbolism."
"Are we really going to do this again?" Charles asked.
"What's different now, Charles? So what if I'm a wanted criminal. Does that threaten you?"
Charles would have thought it odd, or been very suspicious, if this hadn't happened before. But it had. So often that it had almost become a part of their relationship. It was, in a way, seasonal. They broke up. They got back together. Every reunion was destined to end in parting. Every parting was destined to end in reunion.
Their last break-up had been fast; Erik had put on his shoes, his jacket, taken the car, and driven off. Charles was happy to see him go. He reminded himself it was better; he and Erik had irreconcilable differences.
And the in between time had been filled with occasional chess games and meetings in battles and a few late-night phone calls, and then visiting Erik in prison, and then there was Jean's death.
Charles didn't mean to associate his last meeting with Erik with Jean's death. It just happened that Erik was there, even though Charles had only felt Erik without seeing him, as though he had been standing right behind Charles the entire time, but always out of his reach.
Charles hung up after agreeing to have Erik over for a stroll around the grounds and possibly a game of chess, thinking that finally, after all this time, it was reunion season again.
By the second time Erik visited that week, Charles had realized that something was different this time, some balance was off. Things did not feel the same way between them. They did not argue, but neither did they joke, or at least not with ease. Charles wondered if it was just that they've gotten old, and if the old ways simply didn't suit them anymore, but Charles wasn't entirely certain they hadn't both been old men for as long as they'd known each other.
The third time Erik visited, Charles was waiting at the top of the gate for him.
"Hello, Charles," Erik said brightly.
"False cheer doesn't suit you, Erik," Charles said with a smile.
"How do you know it's false?" Erik said. There was mischief on his face that Charles hadn't seen for years.
As they walked, Erik silently asked and was given permission to control Charles' chair. Charles thought there was some great analogy to be found, but he bit his lip and stopped himself from sharing it with Erik. He did not want to let sarcasm ruin this delicate thing.
"I've brought lemonade," Erik said, taking off the bag he had slung over his shoulder. Two metal cups and a thermos materialized, from which Erik poured lemonade.
Charles took the cup from Erik; their fingers brushed.
Erik took a long sip, and then very obviously licked his lips.
"Are you courting me, Erik?" Charles asked, no longer hiding the amusement in his face.
"Do I have to?" Erik reached out to touch Charles' hand.
Erik came to the mansion every day for a week. On Tuesday, Erik asked if the X-Men were suspicious of his visits and Charles explained that Scott and Ororo were investigating mutant activity in Brazil, that Logan was biking around the country, and that the children knew better than to ask what visitors their professor was entertaining. And he had already spoken directly with Bobby and Rogue. "Besides," Charles said, "the spring term has most of them distracted, and some of them are going to their homes in a month."
"But some of them don't have homes. Or would rather not go," Erik said.
"Though the population of the school certainly does get smaller over the summer."
"Smaller," Erik said quietly, and Charles thought he caught the edge of something underneath Erik's words, but he let it go.
On Wednesday, they had tea set out in the garden, Erik's face shaded by the umbrella. Charles asked where Erik's "students" were, putting just enough emphasis on the word to pick a fight, if there was one to be had. Erik poured Charles more tea.
"My 'students' as you say," Erik responded, "Have graduated. We are no longer in need of each other."
Charles was about to press further, when Erik said, "I'd always wanted to try and plant phlox on that upper hill. I'm half-afraid there's too much sun, but if I wonder if I found the right variety...."
"Zinnias do well in the sun, and the flowers will add color."
"Indeed," Erik said, seeming to seriously consider the zinnias. He then said, "I asked John to come with me, here, but he would not, and I felt in no position to force him."
Charles nodded, and then suggested they go take a look at where the zinnias might take root by high summer.
Thursday they went out for flowers and plants and soil and bark, the smells and the sights, and the intoxication of the changing season, and Erik had a smear of dust across his forehead. Charles beckoned him closer to wipe it away, and left his hand on Erik's face, cupping the side of his face with his palm. Erik gazed back, calm.
Friday they planted, both of them on the ground side by side, fingers in the dirt. Charles wondered about the symbolism, since there had to be some somewhere, of gardens as a gesture of peace.
On Friday, it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they had not so much as snapped at each other, and that Erik appeared to be constantly holding his tongue.
Erik seemed to know the time had come, too. He sipped from a glass of water and kept the seed catalog closed, waiting for Charles to speak.
"Why have you come back, Erik?"
"Are you asking if my intentions are honorable?"
Charles smirked, "No, but I might ask that later."
"You always have so many questions, old friend."
"This has been on your mind since your first phone call," Charles said and Erik did not argue.
Charles was frightened by Erik's unwillingness to protest, more than anything. Suddenly, he was hit with the full wave of Erik's grief.
"If I'd stayed, I could have saved her," Erik said, his voice low.
Charles suddenly understood everything. "Erik," he said gently.
"If I had stayed, with you, with the jet, I could have saved her. You know I could have."
Charles wondered how true that really was. Erik could have lifted the jet, powerless or not, with very little effort, and then it was possible that Jean never would have gone outside, and yet it all seemed a hypothesis based on faulty logic.
"I'm here because she's gone and I could have saved her, and I don't want to make that mistake again."
"And so you've come back to pay penance." There was hurt in Charles' voice.
Erik shot him the first real angry look.
"I have come back for you."
Charles was silent, watching Erik, who had gotten up and started to pace.
"Something about recent events has turned my priorities on their end. Although it would be a lie if I said my thoughts hadn't been on this path for some time. Lots of time alone in a plastic prison. With you my only visitor. And I thought about you. You and your school and your ideals and what could have been our life. What my life has been like without you. No one compares to you, Charles," Erik said. His voice was especially harsh in the quiet, beautiful garden. "No one compares. No one's equal."
"And so you've come to me because no one else will do?"
"I've come to you because I always wanted you in the first place."
Erik's admission seemed torn from someplace inside of him. Charles reached out his hand, drawing Erik back to the table, and rubbing his thumb over Erik's knuckles.
"I can't believe she's gone either. But it's not your fault. You know how I feel about projecting potential outcomes." Charles stared into Erik's dark eyes. "You've always been the one I wanted."
They spent Saturday in bed. Erik's body was familiar, and Charles did not know how to be thankful that the loss of Jean seemed to have been the thing to bring Erik back to him. He did not like to think in terms of trade, but it used to be the three of them a family, and now one was gone and the other was returned. He did not want to think of one of them in place of the other, but he could not hold back his joy that Erik had returned to him, especially as it came to him in such a time of grief, when Jean was gone.
Charles gripped tightened on Erik's shoulders, because he was finally here and Charles was not alone.
They were two fathers without their daughter, two teachers without their prize student, two old friends remembering why they were once together and putting aside the reasons they were parted.
Charles went down to the kitchen in the early Sunday morning to check on the students, and he gathered breakfast - tea and coffee and toast. There were blueberries in the refrigerator and he brought those upstairs, too.
They were bluer and sweeter than he'd imagined when Erik fed them to him.
When Logan, and then Scott and Ororo returned a week later, there was first outrage, and then suspicion, and then a rather loud argument which, to Charles' astonishment, Erik did not join in on. It was that, finally, that made Scott wind down his temper.
After all, this was not so different from when Scott was a boy and Erik was reading the newspaper and drinking coffee early at the breakfast table, when he and Charles roamed the school grounds, when Erik was a teacher here, and not someone who used to be their enemy.
Charles wondered if the others, too, could see the grief so close to the surface in Erik's eyes, hear the tightness in his voice when he spoke aloud to the group, like the gesture was unfamiliar to him.
Erik fixed the air conditioners and Erik moved on to the planting of summer vegetables and Erik tutored some of the children in physics and plant propagation. And so it only made sense that when an unknown mutant with an unknown agenda attacked the mansion one Monday in August during dinner, threatening to steal the children, Erik stood and fought with them. Charles did not ask, "Is it just that you happened to be here?" The answer didn't matter, because Erik stopped bullets and even a flying desk chair that was a casualty of Ororo's windstorm without hesitation. It didn't seem to matter to Erik, either, who ran off with Scott, once the attacker was disabled, to check on the still-sleeping children. When Erik returned to bed, Charles was waiting.
"We haven't done that in years," Charles said, and Erik rubbed a hand over his hair, pulled his shirt over his head, and sat down on the bed.
"No," Erik said. "No, we haven't."
"It didn't feel all that unfamiliar."
"Fighting, unfortunately, never will."
"Erik, are we about to have an argument about ideology?"
Charles grinned, but Erik crawled up toward Charles and kissed him, cradling Charles' head in his hands. Erik tasted like iron, and Charles felt as though years of bitterness and loss were finally being erased.
Scott murmured, "You're back, you're back," and Charles found that his eyes teared quite easily when Jean leaned down to embrace him. She seemed stronger than when she had left, but he decided not to push; time enough for that later.
Charles watched her tense, and then relax, and then she was the one with tears in her eyes when she hugged Erik, who wrapped his arms around her first awkwardly, and then tightly.
There was a look on Erik's face that Charles couldn't quite place.
He realized later that he had never been good at recognizing that look, because it was the one Erik always got before he left, and Charles had always been surprised.
Erik called that night.
"Did you really think we would be happy?" Erik said.
"We were happy."
"We never last." Silence. "This is where you make a gardening analogy, Charles. Compare us to an early-flowering plant."
"Forsythia."
"Ah, yes, the bloom and fade." Erik paused. "I'm glad she's back, Charles."
"You didn't have to go."
"I did." Charles listened to Erik's breathing, and remembered that just this morning, it had been warm against the back of his neck as they lay in bed. "I'll call again soon." Erik said, and hung up.
Jean was gone, and then Erik was back. Jean was back, and then Erik was gone. Charles didn't like to think in terms of trade. But sometimes that seemed to be the only way that things worked.
Title: Reunion Season
Pairing: Charles/Erik
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Summary: Forsythia blooms and fades.
Written for: Renata bessiemaemucho
Pairing/scenario requested: Post-X2, Erik and Charles fighting on the same side.
"Professor, it's for you," one of the children sang out, two weeks after they'd come home from Alkali Lake, and Charles had known it was Erik before it rang.
"Thank you, James," Charles said, and the boy closed the door on the way out of Charles' office.
"Hello, Erik," Charles said.
"Charles, isn't it polite to at least pretend not to know who is calling?"
"I can say truthfully that at least I do not know why you are calling."
"Oh, come now, old friend. Can't I simply call to ask after you? To ask if the forsythia is in bloom?"
"Forsythia blooms and fades, Erik."
"Good thing I called right at its peak."
"Any idea why you chose to plant it all around the mansion back when you were our gardener?"
"I don't know. You're the one for symbolism."
"Are we really going to do this again?" Charles asked.
"What's different now, Charles? So what if I'm a wanted criminal. Does that threaten you?"
Charles would have thought it odd, or been very suspicious, if this hadn't happened before. But it had. So often that it had almost become a part of their relationship. It was, in a way, seasonal. They broke up. They got back together. Every reunion was destined to end in parting. Every parting was destined to end in reunion.
Their last break-up had been fast; Erik had put on his shoes, his jacket, taken the car, and driven off. Charles was happy to see him go. He reminded himself it was better; he and Erik had irreconcilable differences.
And the in between time had been filled with occasional chess games and meetings in battles and a few late-night phone calls, and then visiting Erik in prison, and then there was Jean's death.
Charles didn't mean to associate his last meeting with Erik with Jean's death. It just happened that Erik was there, even though Charles had only felt Erik without seeing him, as though he had been standing right behind Charles the entire time, but always out of his reach.
Charles hung up after agreeing to have Erik over for a stroll around the grounds and possibly a game of chess, thinking that finally, after all this time, it was reunion season again.
By the second time Erik visited that week, Charles had realized that something was different this time, some balance was off. Things did not feel the same way between them. They did not argue, but neither did they joke, or at least not with ease. Charles wondered if it was just that they've gotten old, and if the old ways simply didn't suit them anymore, but Charles wasn't entirely certain they hadn't both been old men for as long as they'd known each other.
The third time Erik visited, Charles was waiting at the top of the gate for him.
"Hello, Charles," Erik said brightly.
"False cheer doesn't suit you, Erik," Charles said with a smile.
"How do you know it's false?" Erik said. There was mischief on his face that Charles hadn't seen for years.
As they walked, Erik silently asked and was given permission to control Charles' chair. Charles thought there was some great analogy to be found, but he bit his lip and stopped himself from sharing it with Erik. He did not want to let sarcasm ruin this delicate thing.
"I've brought lemonade," Erik said, taking off the bag he had slung over his shoulder. Two metal cups and a thermos materialized, from which Erik poured lemonade.
Charles took the cup from Erik; their fingers brushed.
Erik took a long sip, and then very obviously licked his lips.
"Are you courting me, Erik?" Charles asked, no longer hiding the amusement in his face.
"Do I have to?" Erik reached out to touch Charles' hand.
Erik came to the mansion every day for a week. On Tuesday, Erik asked if the X-Men were suspicious of his visits and Charles explained that Scott and Ororo were investigating mutant activity in Brazil, that Logan was biking around the country, and that the children knew better than to ask what visitors their professor was entertaining. And he had already spoken directly with Bobby and Rogue. "Besides," Charles said, "the spring term has most of them distracted, and some of them are going to their homes in a month."
"But some of them don't have homes. Or would rather not go," Erik said.
"Though the population of the school certainly does get smaller over the summer."
"Smaller," Erik said quietly, and Charles thought he caught the edge of something underneath Erik's words, but he let it go.
On Wednesday, they had tea set out in the garden, Erik's face shaded by the umbrella. Charles asked where Erik's "students" were, putting just enough emphasis on the word to pick a fight, if there was one to be had. Erik poured Charles more tea.
"My 'students' as you say," Erik responded, "Have graduated. We are no longer in need of each other."
Charles was about to press further, when Erik said, "I'd always wanted to try and plant phlox on that upper hill. I'm half-afraid there's too much sun, but if I wonder if I found the right variety...."
"Zinnias do well in the sun, and the flowers will add color."
"Indeed," Erik said, seeming to seriously consider the zinnias. He then said, "I asked John to come with me, here, but he would not, and I felt in no position to force him."
Charles nodded, and then suggested they go take a look at where the zinnias might take root by high summer.
Thursday they went out for flowers and plants and soil and bark, the smells and the sights, and the intoxication of the changing season, and Erik had a smear of dust across his forehead. Charles beckoned him closer to wipe it away, and left his hand on Erik's face, cupping the side of his face with his palm. Erik gazed back, calm.
Friday they planted, both of them on the ground side by side, fingers in the dirt. Charles wondered about the symbolism, since there had to be some somewhere, of gardens as a gesture of peace.
On Friday, it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they had not so much as snapped at each other, and that Erik appeared to be constantly holding his tongue.
Erik seemed to know the time had come, too. He sipped from a glass of water and kept the seed catalog closed, waiting for Charles to speak.
"Why have you come back, Erik?"
"Are you asking if my intentions are honorable?"
Charles smirked, "No, but I might ask that later."
"You always have so many questions, old friend."
"This has been on your mind since your first phone call," Charles said and Erik did not argue.
Charles was frightened by Erik's unwillingness to protest, more than anything. Suddenly, he was hit with the full wave of Erik's grief.
"If I'd stayed, I could have saved her," Erik said, his voice low.
Charles suddenly understood everything. "Erik," he said gently.
"If I had stayed, with you, with the jet, I could have saved her. You know I could have."
Charles wondered how true that really was. Erik could have lifted the jet, powerless or not, with very little effort, and then it was possible that Jean never would have gone outside, and yet it all seemed a hypothesis based on faulty logic.
"I'm here because she's gone and I could have saved her, and I don't want to make that mistake again."
"And so you've come back to pay penance." There was hurt in Charles' voice.
Erik shot him the first real angry look.
"I have come back for you."
Charles was silent, watching Erik, who had gotten up and started to pace.
"Something about recent events has turned my priorities on their end. Although it would be a lie if I said my thoughts hadn't been on this path for some time. Lots of time alone in a plastic prison. With you my only visitor. And I thought about you. You and your school and your ideals and what could have been our life. What my life has been like without you. No one compares to you, Charles," Erik said. His voice was especially harsh in the quiet, beautiful garden. "No one compares. No one's equal."
"And so you've come to me because no one else will do?"
"I've come to you because I always wanted you in the first place."
Erik's admission seemed torn from someplace inside of him. Charles reached out his hand, drawing Erik back to the table, and rubbing his thumb over Erik's knuckles.
"I can't believe she's gone either. But it's not your fault. You know how I feel about projecting potential outcomes." Charles stared into Erik's dark eyes. "You've always been the one I wanted."
They spent Saturday in bed. Erik's body was familiar, and Charles did not know how to be thankful that the loss of Jean seemed to have been the thing to bring Erik back to him. He did not like to think in terms of trade, but it used to be the three of them a family, and now one was gone and the other was returned. He did not want to think of one of them in place of the other, but he could not hold back his joy that Erik had returned to him, especially as it came to him in such a time of grief, when Jean was gone.
Charles gripped tightened on Erik's shoulders, because he was finally here and Charles was not alone.
They were two fathers without their daughter, two teachers without their prize student, two old friends remembering why they were once together and putting aside the reasons they were parted.
Charles went down to the kitchen in the early Sunday morning to check on the students, and he gathered breakfast - tea and coffee and toast. There were blueberries in the refrigerator and he brought those upstairs, too.
They were bluer and sweeter than he'd imagined when Erik fed them to him.
When Logan, and then Scott and Ororo returned a week later, there was first outrage, and then suspicion, and then a rather loud argument which, to Charles' astonishment, Erik did not join in on. It was that, finally, that made Scott wind down his temper.
After all, this was not so different from when Scott was a boy and Erik was reading the newspaper and drinking coffee early at the breakfast table, when he and Charles roamed the school grounds, when Erik was a teacher here, and not someone who used to be their enemy.
Charles wondered if the others, too, could see the grief so close to the surface in Erik's eyes, hear the tightness in his voice when he spoke aloud to the group, like the gesture was unfamiliar to him.
Erik fixed the air conditioners and Erik moved on to the planting of summer vegetables and Erik tutored some of the children in physics and plant propagation. And so it only made sense that when an unknown mutant with an unknown agenda attacked the mansion one Monday in August during dinner, threatening to steal the children, Erik stood and fought with them. Charles did not ask, "Is it just that you happened to be here?" The answer didn't matter, because Erik stopped bullets and even a flying desk chair that was a casualty of Ororo's windstorm without hesitation. It didn't seem to matter to Erik, either, who ran off with Scott, once the attacker was disabled, to check on the still-sleeping children. When Erik returned to bed, Charles was waiting.
"We haven't done that in years," Charles said, and Erik rubbed a hand over his hair, pulled his shirt over his head, and sat down on the bed.
"No," Erik said. "No, we haven't."
"It didn't feel all that unfamiliar."
"Fighting, unfortunately, never will."
"Erik, are we about to have an argument about ideology?"
Charles grinned, but Erik crawled up toward Charles and kissed him, cradling Charles' head in his hands. Erik tasted like iron, and Charles felt as though years of bitterness and loss were finally being erased.
Scott murmured, "You're back, you're back," and Charles found that his eyes teared quite easily when Jean leaned down to embrace him. She seemed stronger than when she had left, but he decided not to push; time enough for that later.
Charles watched her tense, and then relax, and then she was the one with tears in her eyes when she hugged Erik, who wrapped his arms around her first awkwardly, and then tightly.
There was a look on Erik's face that Charles couldn't quite place.
He realized later that he had never been good at recognizing that look, because it was the one Erik always got before he left, and Charles had always been surprised.
Erik called that night.
"Did you really think we would be happy?" Erik said.
"We were happy."
"We never last." Silence. "This is where you make a gardening analogy, Charles. Compare us to an early-flowering plant."
"Forsythia."
"Ah, yes, the bloom and fade." Erik paused. "I'm glad she's back, Charles."
"You didn't have to go."
"I did." Charles listened to Erik's breathing, and remembered that just this morning, it had been warm against the back of his neck as they lay in bed. "I'll call again soon." Erik said, and hung up.
Jean was gone, and then Erik was back. Jean was back, and then Erik was gone. Charles didn't like to think in terms of trade. But sometimes that seemed to be the only way that things worked.