Chapter Text
If there was one thing Erik was great at (there were many, but let's not curb the drama, Erik thought), it was shoving awkward things under the carpet and then walking all over them until they got flat enough so he could pretend they no longer exist. This occasionally caught up with him, often in the form of his mama noticing the smell (poor, poor Magneto the gerbil), his mama wising up to the slipping of his grades (that was a tough month) and finally there was his arranged marriage.
"For fuck's sake," he groused to Raven, who was sitting on the low, cream-colored leather couch in Erik's office with her blue, scaly legs cheerfully sticking out of her indecent miniskirt, "I am to be married off in some kind of arrangement. In this fucking day and age."
"You can't blame her for worrying," Raven said, thoroughly unconcerned. "She probably thinks without the help you will die sad and alone, until the gerbils gnaw you to dust."
"There is a slight misconception you have about gerbil anatomy and digestion."
"You know what I mean."
"I don't even like gerbils all that much!" Magneto had been the One True Gerbil, as far as Erik was concerned. The One True Mammal, in fact. After his passing Erik turned to the less evolved members of the animal family, and now he kept a pair of parakeets, whom he called Magento and Cyaneto, for the sake of thematic continuity.
"And the gerbils don't like you," Raven told him brightly, sliding through a lengthy email on her iPad. "Which reminds me, Emma wants the designs hammered out by the end of the week and committed to reality in two, or she is going to do unpleasant things to you."
"Yes, that's going to happen," Erik muttered. The neat pages of rice paper on which Mama had written her diatribe glared at him from his desk, slightly less white when laid out on mahogany. "Dearest Erik, blah blah blah, you are now a grown man, capable of sustaining a family. Magda is a…" Erik dropped the page onto the desk and glared at Raven. "Magda is not even Jewish!"
"There're your grounds for calling it all off."
"Alright, I see how she made the roster – her mother was Jewish, but only technically."
"Can you be technically Jewish?"
"Her mother was Jewish."
Raven stared at him blankly. "You lost me."
"Never mind. I don't want to marry Magda!"
"Then don't marry Magda," Raven told him without taking her gaze off her tablet. "There is literally nothing in the world they can do to force you. Unless she is pregnant with your spawn. Then they can just guilt you into it."
Erik scowled. "If she is, I feel very violated, as I haven't seen her since I graduated high school."
"There you go." Raven looked up. "Call your mother and tell her you're not doing this. What am I saying, call Magda, your parents are not the boss of you. Tell her you have no idea who she is, but you feel obliged to inform her you are a creature from the black lagoon."
Erik faltered. "I don't have her number."
"This isn't a Kate Beckinsale movie. She is an American citizen whom your mother knows. You can get her number, failing that you can hire a private detective who can get her number, probably by typing her initials into Facebook and charging you five hundred bucks."
"I can't just call her!" Erik glared at Raven, who continued her flicking through the very important emails. Goddamn it, whyever did he think having a personal relationship with a co-worker would be a great idea? Raven was a magnificent handler, the best he's had so far. She ran a very successful interference between his engineering genius and the rest of the world, but she was a very bossy person. The complaint did make sense. Shut up, brain. "It would be disrespectful. I just explained I don't know her."
"Oh, and marrying her would be respectful? I'm sure she would enjoy riding a total stranger on her wedding night. Wait, is cowgirl permitted, or is missionary the only option?"
"On the Sabbath cowgirl is an option," Erik said, with such a massive rolling of eyeballs he nearly gave himself an aneurysm.
Raven put away the tablet and sighed. "Erik, seriously? You are what, thirty-three? You can't tell me you are sitting here and contemplating going through with an arranged marriage, just because your mother told you to."
"She's my mother." Besides, it's not like an arranged marriage would be that much worse than an actual marriage, right? At least he would have someone to blame the cock-up on.
"Okay, pause, I need to rewind." Raven closed her eyes and exhaled. "Where is Charles when you need him, goddamn it. I'm shit at empathy. Alright." Raven opened her radiant yellow eyes and glared at him. "Erik. If my mother told me to jump, I would have told her to go fuck herself. No, I wouldn't, because my mother is dead and if she told me anything I would have a coronary. If Sharon told me to jump, I would also tell her to go fuck herself. She wouldn't tell me to jump, because she liked to pretend I didn't exist, and she is also dead, but you get my point."
"You can't expect me to use that language in front of my mother!"
"Of course not, we wouldn't want to remind her you're no longer twelve," Raven muttered. "Please tell me she thinks you're still a virgin."
Erik flushed. "I'm pretty sure she knows I'm not."
"Pretty sure." Raven's lush blue mouth curved into a perfect V. "Oh god, this will be golden, and I want a front seat."
"This is not funny!"
"Au contraire, this is hilarious." Raven stretched her toes and briefly flickered into the skin of a white, blonde girl, who filled out her miniskirt just the same. "Tell her you've got someone, and that it looks serious."
"Great idea, and I haven't brought the someone home to meet her because?"
"… you are a strong, independent Jewish man, who don't need no approval?"
"Maybe if it was new," Erik said, acutely aware that Edie would skin him if she found out he had a lover and didn't introduce them. "But then there would be no reason to call the marriage off."
"One, you're unbelievable. Two, say it's a guy and you didn't want to scandalize your community?"
Erik froze. Yes. God. This was gold. Mama knew he was gay – well, alright, she didn't know he was gay, she knew he was bisexual, and he was, it's just that his bisexuality was more of a "yeah, okay, maybe" rather than otherwise. Technical bisexuality, that's what it was. The kind that occasionally let him take a girl home for a round of perfunctory middle-of-the-day sex-gotta-hurry and sleep soundly the rest of the year, knowing that he wasn't lying to mama when he told her he wasn't completely gay, and maybe he would meet the right girl, and have children, and make her a grandmother.
"I'm going to call her," he said, picking up his mobile. Raven gave him the thumbs-up and sat back, presumably to watch the fallout.
The phone rang and rang and just as Erik was preparing to hang up he heard his mother's voice. "Erik, liebchen?" she asked warmly, and Erik's whole insides melted into a puddle of sugary goo.
"Hi, Mama," he said.
"What is this strange and curious occasion that drove you to call me?"
"I got your letter."
"Ah, yes. We all understand your job is important, so have no worries, all the preparations will be handled here. Magda expressed a willingness to move to join you in the city, but you absolutely must be here a week before the wedding."
"Mama, the wedding can't happen," Erik said loudly, fearing that if he lowered his voice Raven would do something embarrassing. "I'm sorry, but it just cannot."
There was a brief, disapproving pause. "I know you like to think you're modern and the tradition is outdated, but Magda is a perfectly pleasant girl, and you both need to settle down. Money is no object for either of you – Magda may be between formal employment, but she does freelance artwork – and your families agree; it's a perfect match."
"I don't know Magda!" Erik yelled, fighting for every ounce of control.
"That's what marriage is for, liebchen. And we are not quite so backward to insist divorce is an impossibility. It is a better deal than most young people get, you know. At some stage in life you must settle down, and I know you, darling, Magda is the perfect partner for you. She's fertile, too. I've made inquiries. Menstruates regularly."
Erik slapped his hand across his face. "Mama… No."
A loud sigh filled the receiver and for a moment Erik was worried she put it to the fan. "Alright, if you insist. I still think you should get married, and soon. I've been reading the papers, you know, and after thirty the quality of sperm isn't what it used to be, and as much as I would love and cherish any grandchildren, the odds of the child having a terrible disease are greater the older the father is. You can't afford waiting much longer, remember. On top of your age, there are studies regarding the cesspools of genetic diseases in small communities. Magda has lovely wide hips, the kind one might call child-bearing in the old days. And her hair! I would dearly love an auburn-haired granddaughter."
It was about that point that Erik decided he would be better served by losing the ability to speak or think. Alas. "Mother," he managed eventually.
"There's no pressure, darling," she said, mustering much more cheer than Erik expected, following a diatribe on the genetic cesspool he was swimming in and the salvation from said. "You will, however, come over for the Thanksgiving dinner. Bring a friend, so that you aren't lonely, it's mostly going to be us old people and Magda. I already planned a game of paintball assassin."
"I'll be there," Erik said, rubbing his forehead. Bring a friend. Ha! This meant no one told Magda of this clever plan yet, and mama wanted an exit strategy when they did. "Yes, I'll bring a friend."
"Wonderful! If, during the course of the day, you happen to get to know Magda and you elope, I won't judge. She has beautiful hair and healthy teeth, and her father was Roma, so she has genetic diversity working in her favor."
"Goodbye, Mama," Erik said fondly. "I love you."
"I love you and my future grandchildren, too!"
Erik set the receiver down. "Either that was the most poorly arranged marriage of the century, or she'll be waiting for me on the front porch with the Chuppah."
"From what you've told me your mother is not big on deception," Raven said, making her amusement known with a subtle shifting of her scales.
"I wouldn't rule that out. She did tell me to bring a friend."
Raven stretched across the couch and propped her bare feet on the armrest. Her fingers flew across her iPad, aligning color-coded schedules. "Yes, Charles is free during Hanukah. Should I give him a call now, or do you want to break the news in person?"
"What? How did you—"
"How did I know you were going to invite Charles?" Raven's upper lip curled. "I don't know, years and years of experience?"
"I was actually planning to invite you," Erik said, folding his arms in a clear, transparent bluff.
Raven, unfortunately, treated it like the bluff it was, and popped whatever air of confidence puffed it up with her sharpest pin. "Erik, you bailed on a promising blow-job because Charles' machine spit out loads of squiggly lines."
"Hey! I'll have you know Charles won a million dollar grant for those squiggly lines."
"I won awards for blow-jobs."
"Name one!"
"Best Blow-Job Award? Hello?" Raven pressed the screen a few times and there it was, splayed across the iPad, the golden dildo with a post-it note that said "Best Blow-Job Award."
Erik, however, wasn't impressed. "Of course you will win awards if you blow impressionable grad students; it's not like you'd have anything other than diagrams to live up to."
"That one was from Azazel, actually. And Hank is fine, thank you, and he's got enough sexual sophistication not to bail on a promising blowjob for squiggles. I trained him well."
"Oh shut up," Erik muttered and fell into his chair. Hanukah was around the corner, and he wasn't stupid enough to assume Mama was giving up, but he was confident he could survive it, with Charles at his side.
The phone in his pocket buzzed. Erik took one look at the screen and grinned. "I thought you weren't supposed to be keeping tabs on me," he said into the receiver. "It gives you a headache."
"Yes, I live for your attention and therefore am in constant contact, honestly," Charles said on the other end. Judging by the faint voices on the radio filtering through the phone towers, he was in his office at the University, population diversity 1:1:5000 (man, machine, paper). "Not even three layers of mithril could stop me."
"You okay? You sound tired."
Charles let out a long, whistling sigh. "You wouldn't believe what just happened to me."
"I think I can top it anyway, but shoot."
"You know how around Christmas children get a one track mind?"
That could only really mean one thing. "Someone sent you a sex note again?"
"Better. Someone handed in a letter to Santa."
"Aww, did they ask for you?"
"In a Santa hat." Charles laughed. "And nothing else. There's even a drawing. Not a bad drawing, mind. Quite tasteful, really, although I think the wrecking ball was a bit much."
"Darling."
"They're just lucky the classrooms are psionic-proof. In fact, I might even go through the past papers and see who uses the same syntax, just to get to them."
"I agree, this would be a productive use of your time. The little bitches need to go down."
"Tell me about it." Charles sighed on the other end of the line, and Erik could hear him massage his temples. "Won't this horrid semester ever end?"
"Five more weeks."
"Brilliant." Papers shuffled on the other end and Charles let out a huffing sigh.
"Did you ever want to shoot an old lady in the face?" Erik asked, quite seriously.
"No, not really. Is that what we're doing this weekend? Who’s the old lady and what did she do? You know what? Don't tell me. I'm going to need plausible deniability."
"I don't think that's how plausible deniability works, but Raven tells me you're free for Hanukah," Erik said, wedging the phone between his shoulder and ear.
"Yes, I should be, why and what does that have to do with shooting old ladies?"
"Mama is throwing a party with paintball assassin. She told me to bring a guest."
On the other end Charles' fluffy hair was mussed by an impatient hand. "Really, you're bringing me to a family dinner?"
"Did I stutter? I said paintball assassin. Though food will be available, too. Homemade."
"I could go for some homemade food. Should I bring anything?"
"Spring on a cheap wine, I'll pick you up Saturday morning. It's a bit of a drive."
Erik hung up and looked at Raven, who was giving him a look. "Cheap wine?"
"He thinks thirty bucks per bottle is affordable."
"You can't blame him, Sharon was a connoisseur." Raven grimaced and for a moment Erik could see something dark flicker across her face. "I'm not half-bad, either."
"Charles doesn't even drink wine."
"Again, the blame game. I'm a world champion. Or rather Sharon is, depending on how you define a winner." Raven stretched her legs and wiggled her toes. She never wore pantyhose and even the black Jimmy Choos were a concession to looking rich rather than anything else. Then again, when your natural skin is a deep sapphire blue, decoration is seldom necessary, but color-coordination becomes paramount.
"Don't you have work to do?"
"Don't you?" Raven stood, sliding her feet into the stilettos. "Emma needs her reports and she will haunt you if you fail to deliver."
"Tell her I'm working on it," Erik said, waving her off.
*****
Charles lived in what he and Raven described as a city apartment, a euphemistic way of saying palace. The flat boasted an enormous living space (in Charles-speak this amounted to a library) and two bedrooms, one of which had been Raven's, before Hank entered their lives. Erik's relationship with wealth was tentative, that is, he currently possessed enough of it (he was only five years away from paying off the mortgage), but hadn't had an overabundance growing up, so he instinctively distrusted people who did.
"Hi," Charles said, getting into his car with a green overnight bag in one hand and a basket in the other. Even without straining his eyes Erik could tell there was a mesh on the corks and the bottles were nestled in hay. "I couldn't decide. The lady at the wine store was very helpful and they had an excellent selection of kosher wines."
This was so typically Charles Erik didn't even bother sighing in exasperation. "You realize Mama's not-so-secret comfort food is a BLT, right?"
"Kosher food is generally held to a higher standard, and this one has a light, fruity bouquet, you should enjoy it."
Erik wouldn't recognize a bouquet unless it was a combination of tulips and posies. "If you say so."
"I also brought dry vermouth, vodka and organic silver onions."
"Now you're speaking my language."
Mama lived an unfortunate 200 miles away, meaning Erik didn't get to visit as often as he liked. As much as he liked driving, and with the ability to tune in to the metal around him, you bet driving was relaxing, he didn't relish the distance separating him from Mama's fridge. "All set?" he asked Charles, who sighed and sunk into the leather seat.
"I really can't stand students."
"You know you can report them for harassment, right?"
"I don't feel harassed and it isn't about the letters, anyway. They are relatively tame, most of those kids aren't stupid." Charles buckled his seatbelt and let out a sigh. "Getting out of university classrooms is a relief. The anti-psionic cages make me claustrophobic."
"Can't you complain? Telepaths are common as dirt."
"First of all, thank you. Secondly, it's mandatory for that very reason, and anyway, it doesn't impede the classroom experience. Most psionics don't even feel it. From what I've managed to gather most telepaths are finding it easier to concentrate in shielded classrooms."
"You can feel the mithril? How?"
"It's not that I can feel it or anything," Charles said with another sigh. "My normal range is vast and I feel the dampening as dampening. Sort of. It's not painful, it's not even discomfort. It's just wariness. It's like I'm walking through a fog at five a.m. on New Year's Day, after viewing a scary movie. I know the world is there, I can almost, almost see it, but I can't, and my mind is making things up."
"That sounds very Silent Hill. I think you should complain."
"Hardly seems fair, when you consider that's how non-psionics feel all the time."
Erik swerved around a rushing pedestrian, cursed under his breath and steadied the car. "I can assure you, I never feel like I'm walking through a fog."
"Okay, it was a bad analogy," Charles said, and Erik bit back the disagreement. It was a good analogy, he thought. A very good one. "It's not a fog. It's the discomfort of being in a large elevator."
"That can't be it, though."
"It's nothing to be concerned about, telepaths might be common as dirt, but I don't exactly fit the bell curve." Charles shook his head. "It makes me wonder, that's all."
"Makes you wonder about what?"
"I have trouble talking to people in classrooms," Charles admitted. "I can't seem to understand them properly."
"That's a unique experience, I'm sure." Erik vaguely recalled his college days as being a well of misunderstandings and misplaced anger. It helped that his TA for one of the physics electives (Neuroinformatics) was a delightfully impish troll with vast telepathic powers. Erik didn't miss college, having bagged the TA as a best friend and keeping him after.
"It's actually not that common, most psionics don't get their powers until they are in their mid-teens, so it's less of an issue," Charles told him. "I need to stop and look at emoticons to figure them out."
"I have yet to meet a psionic who gets people without being in their head. There is a reason banks don't hire telepaths as clerks."
"Yeah."
"So that can't be it."
Charles snorted, but the snort melted into a sigh. "At some point you have to wonder if the fact that I'm so acutely aware of people through telepathy doesn't go both ways."
"What?"
"Never mind. Do you have any music in this thing?"
"I object. Baby is not a thing." Erik patted his beloved magenta Bentley on the dashboard and she responded with a hum of the accelerator. She had been the most expensive and also the laziest gift he had ever received, which was rather a hallmark of Charles' approach to gift-giving, because it was of the "oh, I found this old thing in the back of my garage" variety. It had been worth every penny Erik poured into restoring it, and of course his own talents had not gone unused.
"I'm sorry, does the love of your life play any music, or do I have to hum?"
"There are some CDs in the glove compartment."
"Nice to see the digital age is moving forward."
Erik raised a brow. "You're wearing tweed."
"Tweed is stylish!"
"Not past the 1950s it isn't."
"If the cheekbone fits…" Charles grinned and handed Erik the sunglasses he normally kept in the glove compartment, which Erik slipped over his eyes with a flourish.
"Thanks, angel."
Charles laughed, bright and carefree and Erik, having spied an opening in the traffic, slithered onto the main artery leading out of the city to the tune of "We Are the Champions."
An hour later they had yet to clear the outer city limits. How Erik envied the few mutants flying overhead, about half in business suits with briefcases held close to their chests. There was even one kid gliding on the force of his own yells – what the fuck was that, seriously – getting out with luggage for the weekend. Erik imagined he was laughing at everyone stuck in the endless steel snake below as he zipped past. Distraction was paramount and thankfully Charles had the brainpower to set up a game of chess, even without a board in sight, else Erik might have been tempted to levitate the car out of the jam and after the yelling kid in the sky. They played several games, but by the time the traffic finally eased the sky was dark and Charles was snoring against the window. Erik spent the rest of the ride in a silent contemplation of the mysteries of the universe, casually speeding down the interstate.
He pulled up to Mama's house just past ten p.m., flicking the garage door open from the corner. It was loosely packed with all the stuff that a house amassed over the years. Luckily Mama got in the habit of using only reinforced steel shelves, so that when Erik arrived he didn't need to exit the car to clear a space for his Bentley.
"Are we here?" Charles asked, waking abruptly.
"Erik!" The door to the garage opened and Mama hopped in, holding her arms out. "Darling, you made it! I was beginning to worry."
"You know how the traffic gets," Erik mumbled into her shoulder. "Hello, Mama."
"Are you hungry?"
"A little, yes."
Charles had extracted his luggage from the backseat and stood shyly to the side, wedged between old ski boots and a gardening rake. "Good evening," he said when Edie turned to him.
Erik grabbed the wine basket from the car and used a piece of wire from the floor to keep it hovering at eye-level. "This is Charles, Mama."
"Good evening," Edie said, holding out her hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you."
"Likewise, Mrs. Lehnsherr."
"Dear, I won't be able to shoot anyone who calls me Mrs. Lehnsherr, and I will be shooting you tomorrow. I'm Edie."
Charles smiled. "Charles Xavier."
"You're the friend who gave Erik the Bentley!" Edie clapped her hands and then left a few oily smudges on the flawless paintjob of the aforementioned Bentley. "Do you know, I used to think your name was Bentley, because for the longest time Erik would call me and say things like 'I'm at the show with the Bentley,' 'good news, I found the perfect color for Bentley and such.'"
"Erik has a one-track mind, and the car is a classic," Charles said dutifully, drawing a paper tissue from the pocket of his slacks and handing it over to Erik, to wipe the smudges off.
"You don't say." Edie smiled brightly, took the tissue out of his hand and herded the both of them into the house. "Come now, I'll reheat the casserole and you get settled."
Erik's old room had gone unused, because Erik didn't count the addition of several bookshelves and boxes as use, and Charles was made comfortable in the tiny guest room with the floral tapestry and squeaky springs in the mattress. "It smells of lavender," he said taking a deep breath. "I love lavender."
"I'm glad! I aired the room, but I keep so much lavender in the closet to ward off the moths, I'm surprised the whole house doesn't reek with it."
"My nose isn't that sensitive," Charles said with a laugh.
"Erik used to have this friend who would start sneezing in the driveway when he visited, but then he could also tell if and which mailman was coming from the couch." Edie shook her head. "Goodness, that poor boy."
"Ah, I'm useful for that, too. Slightly less with smells, but when it comes to advanced warning of arriving guests, I'm your man."
"Oh, you're a psionic?" Edie lit up like a candle, as she usually did when confronted with mutants.
"Telepath."
"How exciting! Oh no – I use a lot of aluminum foil, I'm afraid, and I had to cook in advance this time, so I'm afraid the fridge is slathered in the stuff."
Charles laughed. "No, not at all. There are a few alloys that I can vaguely sense, but aluminum is not one of them, and certainly not when it's in the fridge."
"Really? But Dr. Shaw conducted a study a few years back…"
"I hate to discredit my colleagues, but he conducted the study on university grounds, and I happen to know that his laboratory is in the same building classes are held. Classrooms are insulated with mithril per regulation, you see, and while a mithril cage dampens all psionic activity within, psionics outside such cages are aware of their presence."
"I'll have to revise my reading material," Edie said gleefully.
Erik groaned, inwardly, because mama would think he was rude. Edie, while being baseline herself, took avid interest in the mutants and amassed enough credits for a degree in mutant studies in a local community college after Erik manifested, all of which Erik wrapped in an informative package and pinged mentally for Charles to take. "You can pick his brain all day tomorrow, Mama," he said. "Charles is a professor of neurobiology, he does studies on the— What was it again?"
"We're currently investigating the neural activity of people whose mutation is not physical, particularly those on the psionic spectrum."
"Goodness me," Edie said in delight. "You are speaking my language."
It was around that time that Erik began to fathom that he was doomed. The casserole was a welcome distraction.