Armistice (7/?)
Chess the next day was better. Charles had established a slight lead - three games to two, and Summers had given up interesting chess as an oxymoron and was off flirting with the nurses. But McCoy was still watching, albeit a little less intently than at first.
“I wrote another poem,” Xavier said, moving his first pawn out.
Erik glanced over the board at him. “Is it any good?”
“I was hoping you might tell me.”
Erik nodded.
“It’s in your style,” Charles added, glancing fixedly down at the board. He moved one of his knights. Erik watched the neat fingers toy with the stem of a pawn and wondered whether Charles were doing it on purpose. It brought half a dozen things to mind. He could sense Charles clamming up.
Of course the poem was good. It was terrifyingly good except for the last two lines, which Erik admitted might be the lines that were most in his style. He tried to tell Charles that.
Charles smiled. “Are you writing, then?”
“A bit,” Erik said, thinking of the abortive recent efforts that were all mixed up with Xavier’s slow smiles and too redolent of Greek.
He thought, I’d show it to you but I know you’d blush, the similes are all a little off, but you’d spot yourself anyway, I don't know how you've done it already but you're slipping into everything, your eyes and your hair and the sounds you made when I was inside you, even the way you don't look at me now sometimes.
--
The next morning without any apparent fanfare Xavier sat down next to him at breakfast and he tried to keep from grinning.
At the conclusion of the meal Xavier produced two sheets of slightly crumpled paper and began rereading them, following the lines with a pencil as he read.
“What’s a synonym for ‘radiant and exulting’?” he asked, at length.
“Good God,” Erik said. “What on earth are you writing? Propaganda?”
“It’s for my mother,” Xavier said.
"Propaganda then," Erik said. “How about effulgent and radiant?”
Charles shot him a look. "You don't write your mother," he said.
"I write her every day," Erik said.
The boy was opening up again, almost in spite of himself. No wonder the boy got sent back to Blighty within moments of deployment, never mind the telepathy, he wore his emotions on his sleeve, they brimmed out of those sea-bright eyes. He knew what Charles would have looked like in the trenches; dingy and a little worn-down at the edges, eyes drooping from lack of sleep, mouth wedged into a tight line, but still that fatal openness. Trying to box it up would have been half the struggle. No wonder he wore down so quickly. That was the same thing that had struck him about Tommy. The openness and the natural laugh that seemed to bubble up from underground until it hit the sunlight. The reproachful smile. The way they buttered their toast.
--
The next afternoon Xavier came across him outdoors practicing with a knife. He had taken to humming Keep The Home Fires Burning to himself while he moved things. It was not particularly glamorous but it was effective.
“Erik,” Xavier said, finally. “You’re being very difficult.”
“Don’t see how I’m being difficult,” Erik said. The irritation gave him a very definite sense of the metal and now he flung it in Xavier’s general direction, catching it two inches from his throat. “But you are.”
“That’s excellent control, you know,” Charles said. Erik turned and looked at him. He always had the sense these days that Xavier was trying not to say something. It was intensely frustrating. At once he noticed that Xavier had something metal in his pocket. He probed at the dimensions. Flat. Not a coin, with gears and - Pocket watch. He pulled it out of the pocket and caught it in one hand.
“Give me back my watch, Erik,” Xavier said.
“Make me,” Erik said.
The phrase seemed to startle Xavier a little. “I could,” he said.
"Bet you couldn't," Erik said. Xavier's blue eyes narrowed. Erik felt his legs begin walking over to Charles, hand outstretched with the watch on the palm. Then Charles was panting and had to stop. He was only halfway to him. He took another step and held out the watch.
"You never made me want to give it to you, you know," Erik said, pressing the watch into his palm. Suddenly Charles' eyes met his and they were no longer talking about the watch.
Charles tried to pull his hand away. “Erik, I know what you think, but you were going to stop and I -”
Erik took another step closer and slipped an arm around his waist. “I wasn’t going to stop,” he said, mouth brushing Xavier’s ear.
Xavier seemed to melt a little into the touch. “I oughtn’t admit that,” Erik muttered. “But you came to me, sudden like that, knowing what you did, and you wanted me to take you rough and quick like that, and I had to have you.”
Xavier’s neck arched a little, as though he were asking to be kissed, and Erik pushed down the collar and found the mark his mouth had left and pressed his lips to it. Xavier’s whole body answered the touch, and then Charles pulled away and muttered, “No, Erik.”
“Why?”
Charles flushed. Erik still had his hand, fingers tracing a line over the wrist, and Charles said, “It was a bad idea,” and then, “I’m not usually like that,” and then, “I can’t control it with you."
Then Charles snatched the watch and was walking rapidly away across the grass. Erik could still feel the ghost of the metal in his hand.
--
“You’re letting me win,” Erik said. Charles frowned at him across the board.
“I’m not,” he said. “Honestly I’m not. I wish I were.” He stifled a yawn.
Erik moved a rook. “You ought to worry less about that knight,” he said.
“Surely you don’t think that’s all I can think about?” Charles asked.
Erik shot him a puzzled glance. “You’re protecting it,” he said. “Or is that not what you’re doing?”
“Oh,” Charles said, flushing a little. “Oh. Homophones.”
There was a silence.
“I’ve been thinking,” Charles said at length. “We could use each other. To train. Since we know about each other’s -”
“Peculiarity.”
“Precisely.” Charles drew his lips together and Erik wished for perhaps the seventieth time that the things Xavier did with his mouth didn’t send his mind reeling towards the gutter.
“You’ve been using me to train enough as it is,” Erik said.
“This would be different,” Xavier said. “Platonic.”
“Naturally,” Erik said.
--
“Enough cutlery,” Xavier said. They were standing on the edge of the grounds in a haphazard clump of trees. Erik had just managed to get the blade of a butter knife wedged into an oak. “Try something more challenging.”
“Like what?”
Then Xavier was grinning. “Let’s go find the golfers.”
They came upon the bedraggled-looking trio teeing off in some long grass. One man raised his club and Xavier shot Erik a look.
Erik caught the club mid-swing and threw it off just a little, sending it waggling down to miss the ball. The man cursed.
“Now you,” he said, and Xavier lifted a hand to his temple and got a marvelously concentrated expression and the man who was swinging the golf club began shaking like a leaf and nearly dropped it.
“What’d you do?” Erik asked, feeling a smile spread across his face without knowing the answer.
“Here,” Xavier said, and Erik saw the golfer’s companion’s dressed in tea-gowns with impeccably coiffed grey hair and painted faces. He glanced over at Xavier. “Not bad.”
The next man raised his club and Erik caught it at the peak of its arc and twirled it in the man’s hands. The man shook his head, recentered himself, brought it back level with the ball, raised it again. Charles caught his eye and grinned, and the men were all mermaids, great grey-green tails flailing about in the grass. The man dropped the club as though it had been enchanted into a snake in his hands. At this Erik could not suppress a grin.
“Vivid imagination,” he said. Xavier laughed. It was a curious rippling laugh that cascaded into a chuckle. It was a good laugh, more solid than the boy looked.
The next golfer raised his club and Erik grinned conspiratorially back at Charles and caught it and began flailing right and left with it, dragging the man’s hands.
“Hi! Watch yourself!” the man’s companions yelled, darting out of the path of the metal harrow.
“I don’t - I don’t know what’s going on!” the golfer was yelling. Erik concentrated a moment, tried to twist the metal of the club out into a snake, couldn’t quite manage it, contented himself with bringing it down to stick in the grass like a flag marking a new continent.
“My club got the better of me,” the man was gasping. His comrades looked petrified at him. One of them said something inaudible.
Xavier laughed.
“We aren’t golfing next to that loony-bin again, Bert,” he leaned over to Erik and quoted. “It’s catching.”
“Good ears.”
“I’m listening with him -“ Xavier said, pointing at the indignant man trying to free his club from the grass. “I’ve sort of gotten on board his head, if you like -”
Erik nodded. Then Xavier grinned at him again - he hadn’t seen Xavier smile like that the whole time they’d been here - and two of the men vanished and goats that bore them an uncanny resemblance, down to the spectacles, appeared in their places. Erik couldn’t stifle a laugh.
“Bert?” the man tugging his golf club out of the hillside cried. “Richie? What has become of you?”
Then the men were back and he and Xavier were laughing hysterically.
“That’s magic,” he said.
“’S not,” Xavier said. “It’s - I was a bit sloppy on that last one, I forgot to put in most of the hillside and nobody had any shadows. If there’d been anyone here like me they’d have spotted it in in a flash.”
“There’s no one like you,” Erik said. The way Charles looked at him after he said it made him weigh the words out again in his mind.
He had not laughed so much in weeks. Xavier was sunshine and the swift wind between the trees and rippling laughter and the sour looks of men in golfing flannels. He had a definite and increasing urge to kiss him. He would shove him up against a tree and the kiss would begin warm and chaste and then he would slide a hand into Xavier’s trousers --
“Stop it,” Xavier said, finally.
“What?”
“Thinking that. You’ll spoil it.”
“It isn't my fault you won't get out of my head,” Erik said. That didn't sound quite right either.
--
That night he couldn’t sleep, still too excited. He was gazing out the window again when he noticed the grim little procession making its way across the grass - this time going away from the hospital, first one doctor, then Charles, then the other, a set of dour brackets for the bright phrase, vanishing halfway between the trees and the house, as though they were disappearing into the grass itself.
This time Charles didn’t look up.
Chapter 8