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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.

Chapter Text

Early in the morning Erik found himself dragged out of his warm bed and into the kitchen, which was equally warm, but lacking in covers and softness. Charles was already there, paying attention to nothing outside his coffee cup, while Edie bustled around the stove.

"Big day today," she was saying brightly, "we assemble at the warehouse at noon, then we have three hours to complete the game, then we come back here for dinner."

With some trepidation Erik eyed the enormous turkey, which was splayed on the kitchen counter, already stuffed to the brim with what seemed to be a slightly smaller turkey.

"How many people have you invited, Mama?"

"It didn't seem fair not to invite everyone who came to play and it's no fun playing paintball with too few people," Edie said dismissively and hefted the turkey with a grunt. Erik held out his hand and the metal tray lifted from his mother's shoulders, sailing smoothly through the air and landing safely in the confines of the oven, whose sides it avoided touching only by a very narrow margin. "Thank you dearest."

"You're welcome." It was only nine a.m., he noticed, and the game began at noon – what a day, he thought, collapsing next to Charles. What a day.

It got worse when, upon arriving at the paintball warehouse, he realized all the people his mama so gleefully invited were middle-aged women. He vaguely recognized a few as mothers of his classmates or people he saw in the temple as a child, but there were over twenty women there – seventeen women, according to Charles, and seven men, the two of them included.

Four of the seventeen were nubile.

Erik began groaning in the back of his mind when the people in charge began demonstrating the proper use of a gun and how not to shoot themselves in the face.

Mama is trying to marry me off, I don’t care what she says, he told Charles.

She is.

That's all you have to say?

What else can I say?

I don't know, save me?

There's no chuppah waiting, if that's your worry. She just wants you to be happy, Erik.

I want to be happy, too, doesn't mean I'm going to flirt with every girl in the neighborhood.

There are only four girls of your age here, and I'm pretty sure one of them is married.

Thank everything for the terrible oversight.

Don't be rude.

"Alright," Edie began in a strong voice, completely at odds with the worn camouflage two sizes too big for her slight body, to say nothing of the enormous gun she was clutching. "The victory goes to the last one paintless! Let's be good sports and agree not to shoot at each other during the first quarter-hour, so that everyone gets some target practice. After that it's open season! I have a bottle of champagne for the victor cooling in the fridge, so, let the hunger games begin!"

Erik had imagined playing paintball against little old ladies was going to be the kind of game in which he gallantly pretended to lose by getting shot at close range, and for the first fifteen minutes he thought he was justified. He toured the many crates and ladders, which simulated an extensive and imaginative battlefield, picking out the best places to hide, occasionally firing a shot at a crate in particular, to check if the rifle was still on. Then, when the whistle sounded, he naturally assumed the first few shots fired would stray and spatter on the crates, while everyone started thinking about picking out their targets based on peculiar likes and dislikes, which was why he remained relatively uncovered, but at a safe distance from everybody else. Well, he was wrong. Within seconds of the whistle, he got hit by no less than eleven paintballs and pandemonium began. He saw his own mother leap over an upturned barrel and nail Mrs. Pryde in the chest at close range, escaping a hail of bullets shot by Mr. and Mrs. Grey.

"What?" he managed, staring rather dumbly at the multitude of splatters of color on his camo overall.

"You snooze, you lose," Charles called merrily, poking his head from behind a crate and firing a series of pellets at Mrs. Munroe, who immediately ducked behind a pile of logs, shoved some of the camouflaging nets aside and began to retaliate.

"Well, it usually starts with a rush," Mrs. Pryde told him, getting to her feet with a grunt. Her ample bosom was decorated with a circle of blue and yellow splats, on top of the puke green and muted sienna blobs. "Shame, but I will get Edie at the next game."

Erik reflexively offered her his arm and together they ambled off the battlefield, where the game was just turning vicious. "She holds these often?"

"Start of Ramadan, Hanukah and Easter."

"There is so much about my mother I don’t know," Erik said, then wondered for a moment if paintball games were better than dating. Papa had been dead for going on ten years now, and he wasn't that big a fan of Mama being alone, even if it froze his blood to think that someone might be moving into the house.

Mrs. Pryde gave him a curious look. "Did she finally tell you about the marriage she's been cooking up for you?"

So it wasn't a big secret, then. "She did. I hope I made my feelings clear."

"Magda is a darling girl, you know." Mrs. Pryde reached the lockers and began to struggle out of the overalls, having first handed her rifle to the attendant. Erik followed suit.

"I just saw her slide under a table, overturn it and shoot Mr. Summers in the face," he said, as evenly as he could.

"She missed, as I recall."

"Only because he was busy tripping on a rock."

"The girl can play paintball, which is useful in a wife," Mrs. Pryde said, with only a touch of admonishment, no doubt referring to the fact that Mr. Pryde preferred to watch football rather than play.

"Granted, I might have to add it to my list of requirements, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm not interested in Magda," Erik said, pulling his sweater on.

"Come now, dear, she is a very pretty girl."

"She pushed me in a mud puddle once."

"She is a pretty girl with strong opinions," Mrs. Pryde said.

The paintball game might have been real enough, but Erik was having some serious suspicions about the entire Hanukah proceedings confirmed. "How does Magda feel about this?"

"Ah, no worries, Mrs. Maximoff is working on her."

In a valiant attempt to discourage further conversation on the subject Erik blurted, "Can I buy you a drink, Mrs. Pryde? I think they have a bar here."

"I'd be delighted."

In the following hour they were joined by Mr. and Mrs. Grey, who had fallen prey to Charles and Magda, who joined forces briefly and split once it became apparent a lasting alliance was out of question, Mrs. Munroe, and half a dozen other people. By the end of the second hour of the game there were only five players, and the stakes were high. Erik nursed his beer and pretended he didn't feel increasingly victimized when six Jewish mothers circled him on a Mobius-strip slide, with endless praises of Magda and her lovely hair. They weren't his Jewish mothers, but he was starting to suspect her arrival would do the opposite of curbing the onslaught of matchmaking.

Thank god Magda was a vicious beast and therefore still in the running for paintball champion, else he would be forced to spend time with her, circled by the aforementioned Jewish mothers, in the absence of Charles.

Speak of the devil. Charles emerged from the heavy-duty metal gate which separated the arena from the bar, red in the face and sweaty. Erik immediately flagged the bartender down for a beer.

"What is the situation?" he asked once Charles was seated and had his first gulp.

"Your mother and Magda cornered me in the pit. Then I think they turned on each other, and it got even more complicated from there."

"Speaking of complicated and turning on each other," Erik muttered, gazing intently into his glass. "I've had an endless parade of women come and congratulate me on my impending engagement."

Charles winced around his beer. "Uh oh."

"Yeah."

"You can't let them bully you into marrying Magda. The woman would wipe the floor with you."

"One, thank you. Two, I'm not worried. There's a reason they're targeting me and not her, and not even they are crazy enough to insist I marry someone against their will."

"Same reason she would wipe the floor with you," Charles said cheerfully. "She's a bit like Raven, you know, she will take no shit from anyone." He returned to considering his beer carefully. "I would really love another. And some crisps to go with it."

"Careful, your British is showing," Erik muttered, getting up nonetheless. They still had a good hour to while away, and beer would be the least of their needs. Thanks heavens Mama was driving.

"I need to stop watching the BBC, I know." Charles finished the beer and handed Erik the glass. "Thanks."

"No problem," Erik said, signaling the bartender.

*****

The game wrapped finally just before the cut-off time, with Mrs. Maximoff emerging a very surprising victor, while Edie and Magda took the respectable second and third position. The entire party then converged into the seven cars which arrived at the center and made their way to the Lehnsherr abode, where the enormous turkey had been gaining a crispy glaze in the oven all morning.

"It looks beautiful, Mama," Erik said wholeheartedly, once Edie made it clear he was responsible for the presence and deliciousness of potatoes, in all of the three forms they were expected to take. Mama might have had a fridge full of food cooked as far back as last Tuesday, but potatoes would be freshly cooked, if she had anything to say about it.

"That's the idea with food, dear. According to Australian Master Chef, anyway," she said, running a hand through his short hair.

"Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought food should taste good."

"Get with the times," Edie said, grabbing a plate of light, crispy snacks and disappearing into the living room.

"My mother just told me to get with the times, Charles, I need therapy."

"Poor baby." Charles, who had volunteered to make cranberry jam, stirred the pot and licked the spoon. "Here, try some of this."

Charles wasn't a qualified cook, but then cranberry jam wasn't a culinary Everest, and for an inexperienced climber Charles had made a valiant effort. "It's delicious, what did you put in there?" Erik asked. The jam was tart and sweet, with just enough bite to make it more than just a condiment.

"An orange, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg."

"Erik!" Mrs. Maximoff ambled through the kitchen door, pulling Magda behind her. "Is this cranberry jam I see on your face?"

"It is."

"It looks good," she told Charles, who beamed.

"Thank you."

"Anyway, Erik, you remember my Magda?"

Erik gave Charles a long look, before turning to Mrs. Maximoff. "Of course I remember Magda. She tried to smother me once."

"You were twelve, you were just playing."

"No offense, Magda," Erik told the proud owner of illustrious auburn curls, "but even if I let the pillow incident slide, there would be the mud incident and you kidnapped Magneto once."

"The gerbil? Wow, that thing was nasty, it kept trying to bite me."

"Magneto knew what he wanted."

"I seem to recall the mud incident was preceded by the PB&J&hair incident, not to mention the pool incident."

"Anyway!" Mrs. Maximoff beamed and pushed Magda towards the counter. "You probably have a lot of things to catch up on, like what you're doing, where you go in life, how many babies are you going to have…"

Is she for real? Charles asked, awed and not a little scared.

You'd think not, but there she is.

I am sorry about it, and I will put my foot down, but I need to stay on her good side for now. She sprung this on me this morning, said Magda's mental voice, unpracticed and a little rough, channeled through Charles. Useful trick.

Thank you.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Maximoff was gathering speed, listing Erik and Magda's accomplishments alternatively, one after the other, summarizing now and then how well were they matched. "And just think, what lovely children they would be, with your hair and your eyes! I think it'd be best if you took Magda for a drink right away."

Erik let the final peel of the potato hit the counter. "I'm here with Charles," he blurted, before he could make himself think about it.

On the bright side, this shut Mrs. Maximoff right up.

On the downside…

An empty plate clattered to the floor by the door and Edie slapped both her palms across her mouth. There were tears in her eyes and when the hands slid down, her mouth was trembling. "Oh darling," she whispered. "I'm so happy!"

Edie was across the kitchen before Erik could think the pertinent syllable and both her arms were around Charles' neck. "I wish you'd told me earlier! And you're a professor! I looked you up online, you know, the photo on Wikipedia doesn't do you any justice, you are much more handsome in person. Your grandmother would be so proud, Erik, a professor! My little boy got himself a professor!

"These look about done," she added in an approximation of her normal voice, before slipping into the proud mother routine again. "I have to introduce you to everyone. I really should have done that earlier, I'm so sorry, Erik you will join us once the salad is done, please make sure you add enough onion."

Charles threw Erik a panicked look over his shoulder, as Edie dragged him into the living room, intent, without doubt to introduce him as Erik's boyfriend to everyone she knew.

Holy shit.

"Erik, you naughty boy," Mrs. Maximoff said, smacking his arm. "We're all good people here, no one will judge you. Your boyfriend is a very nice young man, did you know he helped Mrs. Toynbee up?"

"After he shot her six times," Magda said with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes, but it was paintball, he didn't need to assist the poor dear afterwards. A very charming young man, Magda, you should take Erik as an example and settle down, your hair won't stay lustrous forever!" With that Mrs. Maximoff tumbled out of the kitchen, leaving Erik and Magda alone.

"You're not really a couple, are you?" Magda took the knife out of Erik's hand and set it on the counter.

"No."

"Edie will be heartbroken."

"I know."

"She will kill you if you tell her now, with all those people around."

"I know!"

"Better play it up for the cameras and let her down gently later."

"Yes, okay." Erik shook his head. "Yeah. Okay. We can do that. We fight all the time, I won't even have to pretend, just call her then."

"It'll still break her heart. Unless your boy is a serial killer who collects little porcelain figurines and puts them in his bathroom."

Erik blinked. "Are you high?" She looked high. Her pupils were a little too wide and her movements too smooth.

"I smoked half a joint in the bathroom right after the game," she admitted, not repentant in the slightest.

"Oh god, I'm taking advice from a junkie."

"Half a joint does not make me a junkie."

"I have to go rescue Charles." Erik let the knife slide through the onion at a rapid pace, pushing the vegetable forward with the tips of his fingers. He dumped the whole thing, now in neat, fluttery fans, into the bowl on top of the potatoes, and left the kitchen.

His gallant plan to scoop Charles into his arms and carry him to safety was, unfortunately, delayed, as there was a long line of Jewish and non-Jewish mothers, congratulating him on his relationship and implying things he was biologically incapable of providing to anyone, man or woman.

Mama must have gone through the entire crowd in record time while he was in the kitchen, because she had Charles seated on the couch with a cookie and a cup of tea, tangling him in her motherly web by blindsiding him with science and flattery.

Hot damn, his mama was an evil genius.

"… the current theory is that psionic abilities are a derivative of the organization of higher brain functions," Charles was saying and three women in the immediate vicinity turned away to fetch cakes or tea. Edie stayed, smiling encouragingly, and although it made Charles blush, he continued. "You see, unlike metallokinesis – which is a misnomer if I ever heard one, but that's how it's differentiated from telekinesis – the strength of telepathy is judged in its resting state. A kinetic can be pushed beyond limits, beyond endurance, much like the muscles. Given adrenaline, state of mind, a muscle can be forced far beyond its normal capabilities. The scale we have for measuring kinetics is not unlike the physical strength. We measure the amount of weight they can lift with visible, though not overwhelming, effort. A typical score for a kinetic is 1, which means they can lift about their own bodyweight."

"Erik surpassed 5 during his first testing. I remember; he lifted a small car. I think he might be past classification now," Edie said, pride oozing out of every pore. The few people still listening turned to Erik with moderate surprise.

"Erik is exceptionally gifted, yes." Charles, as he was wont to when speaking of Erik, turned to him and smiled before continuing. "Psionic scale is a little different, as I said, because psionic abilities are different in nature. You see, every sentient mind has a sort of a wall around it. It's like your mind was a viscous liquid and the walls keep it a given shape. It varies from person to person, even among those who don't test positive for the X mutation, so psionic abilities are actually the most common type."

"Depending on this wall?"

"Precisely." Charles nodded enthusiastically. "The more closed-off the mind, the thicker the wall, the firmer the shape of the mind. Strangely enough, it doesn’t meant they are more difficult to read to psionics, but they are easier to pick out in a crowd. My sister, Raven, has one of the most sharply defined minds I have ever come across. She is as close to a perfect zero on the psionic scale as a person can be."

Edie faltered. "Is she ill?"

"Oh, no, never. Yes, a zero is a typical score for several illnesses – autism, to name the obvious example – but there are many cases of autistic telepaths. What the scale actually measures is ground-state awareness. It's not easy to ascertain properly, because we do have other senses to rely upon, but the basic idea is how many individual people the psionic in question is aware of. This is important, because the previous test focused on physical range, and assigned scores based on how far could the test subject reach to contact another person, and it's been proven lately that a telepath's range increases when there are people around. So the range score depended on whether they were tested in an office building in New York or a farm in Australia. I'm completely serious – I was first tested in the home I grew up in, in Westchester, and I got a score of eleven. Then, later that month, in a New York clinic, I scored a hundred and twenty one."

"So if not distance, what is the score?"

"For most of us the state of hearing – although again with the misnomers – is a natural state. It's like a background hum, like you perceive a forest in the middle of the day. It's quiet, but it’s a natural sound, a sound of life going on around us. Individual thoughts are no more discernible than a cricket, or a person in a crowd." Charles stopped talking to shake his head. "We really need more words in this accursed language. We have a sense of a person which is not unlike seeing their faces, only more obviously colored by emotion. Unless one focuses." He took a bite of the cookie Edie put into his hand. "You see, what makes a psionic is that the wall that shapes their mind is just as fluid, or in my case absent, so we perceive the walls of others through contact. But, since they are everywhere and all around, they fade into the background. So what determines the strength of psionic abilities is not how far they can see, but how many individual minds they can perceive at one time. What we once might have called a strong telepath – there was the movie in which the telepath saved the day by listening in to the thoughts of the villain from another building – falls apart when you consider they are only able to read one person at a time with considerable effort. He was practically in the line of sight!"

"So the new scale measures how many people you can talk to telepathically at the same time?" Edie took Charles' cup and absently handed it to Erik for a refill. Erik held out his hand without looking and the pot obediently flew over, held in place by mesh wire, which had encircled many of the dishes in the Lehnsherr household ever since Erik hit puberty.

"Yes, exactly!" Charles swallowed the cookie and clapped his hands. "The test is still impractical, in many cases, but essentially you are asked to contact as many people as you can, which is an equivalent of simultaneously looking as many people as you can in the eye. Then the actual score is a negative logarithm of the inverse of the amount of people you contacted, with one being a given, since you are always aware of yourself. We're working on computerizing it now, to eliminate the potential of disturbing strangers."

"Negative logarithm, isn't that needlessly complicated?"

"The scale accommodates all known telepaths and is easily expressed with fewer than four digits."

"What does a zero mean, then?"

"That a mind is incapable of perceiving another through psionic abilities."

"So if your sister is unusual…"

"Most people do have some form of ability. Empathy, for instance, is greatly underrated and it is an ability of the psionic spectrum, although unlike telepaths empaths can only get a clear reading on emotion, not thoughts. The score most people get is in fact an oh-point-three, meaning a person who has no mutation still has the ability to perceive another person's psionic presence. You, I think would be an oh-point-seven."

Edie's eyes opened wide. "That is fascinating! Why would you say so?"

"I saw you take cues from Magda when your back was turned, while staring down Mrs. Quested. I could tell your attention was on both." Charles said, sipping his tea.

"What is your score, if you don't mind me asking?"

Charles blushed again, and in a low voice admitted he cheated during the test, and thus his official score is three. He fiddled with another cookie and Erik had to subdue a sigh. His palm got the itch he had long since determined as the itch to pat Charles' back.

"Three… Let me think, ten to minus three, one thousand. I'll be damned," Edie said. "That is amazing!"

Charles merely stared at her, displaying the face of incomprehension, one of the few faces of Charles Erik wasn't acquainted with as of yet. This one was a peculiar blend of flabbergasted!Charles with a dash of unexpected-mushroom!Charles and a healthy sprinkle of surprised!Charles.

"Mama is a physicist," he told Charles quietly. "She knows what a logarithm is."

"Oh. Well. Wow. No, I'm sorry, that's—I usually assume it's common knowledge, but I have been proven wrong more than once."

"I understand that," Edie said, patting Charles' cheek, and giving Erik a conniption. She hated condescension, and Charles' overeducated manner didn't always stay away from it. Erik dealt with it, though not without wanting to punch someone in the face. Mama usually got snippy. "Don't worry, dear, I know the feeling. My Jacob had a very tenuous grasp on mathematics. He was a baker."

Now Erik knew they were in for it. It's been nearly a decade since his father died, and Mama still would only mention him occasionally. To hear his name spoken like this, with a tender air of sharing a much-beloved secret with what amounted to a complete stranger…

Erik. Do something. Charles said in the privacy of their heads.

Yeah, do something Erik, tell your ecstatic mother you are not involved romantically with her new favorite son.

… murder-suicide pact?

You know it.

Chapter Text

It was a tense dinner. Not for the guests, obviously. The guests were delighted, because the turkey was moist, the cranberries jewel-like and the potatoes perfect, to say nothing of the variety of Edie's side-dishes. Edie was glowing like she had been in her wedding photos; she was patting Charles' hand at every other bite and if left unchecked she would probably be attaching herself to his hip and administering motherly kisses to his forehead every thirty seconds. Further reason for the uplifting atmosphere was that Edie was delighted to cart Charles by the hand and snuggle him in full view while espousing her delight at seeing her prodigal son finally settling, and goddamn it, Charles was falling for it. Edie had him, hook, line, sinker and the boat she rowed in on.

"Oh Erik, your boy is a darling!" Erik dutifully blushed, hugged Mrs. Pryde and moved on, to receive a barrage of congratulations, some more sincere than others. Magda rose to the occasion and while her speech was applauded for the strong undertones of graciously giving up for the sake of True Love, he personally felt it was over the top.

It was only after the dinner, the cleaning after dinner and the late tea that he managed to corner Charles in the guest room.

"I don't know what happened!" Charles hissed, burying his hands in his hair and sitting on the bed. "I have literally no idea, your mother is just so sweet, I couldn't bring myself to say anything!"

"We're dead," Erik said, sagging weakly against the door.

"If the murder-suicide pact goes through, we will be."

"We could get fake identities and run to Timbuktu."

"I don't care for the climate."

"Your capriciousness is going to be the death of us."

"My capriciousness?" Charles stood and immediately sank back down. "Shut up. This is not a good time for a fight."

"Yeah. I know." Erik sighed and sat on the bed as well. "I am sorry about this, but…"

"We can," Charles assured him immediately. "Once we're out of here, it won't be too much trouble to maintain the charade for a few months, then we can have an amicable break up."

"Thank you." Erik flopped back, stretching his arms over his head. "I hate this."

"All the more reason to find yourself a mate soon," Charles said, stretching beside him. The bed was just big enough to accommodate them, even if Erik had an inkling that if he made any sudden movements in the direction his head was pointing, contact with the wall was imminent.

"A mate, really?" he asked, turning his head to face Charles.

"It seemed appropriate in context."

"I'll context you."

"Because that makes so much sense."

Erik closed his eyes and mapped the springs they were lying on. This truly was a comfortable bed. He wasn't as enthusiastic about lavender, but the room smelled tolerable, now that someone had been sleeping in it and presumably airing it once in a while. The sheets smelled vaguely of Charles' cologne.

"I don't want to lie to your mother," Charles admitted finally. "She's so kind."

"She really likes you. I thought at this point she'd paw at Mitt Romney if I brought him home, but she genuinely likes you. You're entertaining her inner mutant studies nut and you're a professor."

"I know. It's lovely."

"We're doomed."

Charles said nothing to that, and anyway, what would be the point?

Much of the weekend went the same way. Edie would kidnap Charles into the kitchen ("Erik's favorite pie is raspberry, now raspberry is idiotically difficult to get into a pie without having it drip all over the place. What is your favorite pie, Charles? Oh, wonderful, let me double-check the recipe, I'll make it for you right away, Erik come on quick, you must learn to make Charles' favorite pie!"), the living room ("How advanced is your study? Will it be published? Would you send me a link? Oh no, are you really a subject yourself?"), her closet of memories ("… and here is Erik's first step. He fell on his little face, isn't that adorable?") and Charles would eat it right up with a solid silver spoon. Fucking seriously, Erik groused, when he got out of the bathroom on Saturday night and went downstairs (he was sharing the bed with Charles now) to find Charles in his pyjamas, curled up on the couch with a hot chocolate, cuddled with Edie in front of Love, Actually.

"I love that movie," Edie confessed tearfully. "Especially when Simon phases through the security officer to catch up with the girl."

"I know," Charles said and sniffed. "And it's one of the few movies in which telepaths are portrayed accurately in terms of emotional attachment. I mean, I know they say Mark's just emphatic, but it's so painfully realistic." That was putting it mildly. Mark was probably the only character in mainstream cinema with whom Charles identified. Erik plopped into the seat next to him and stole the mug from his hands.

"Erik, get your own!" Edie admonished, slapping his knuckles lightly.

"I'll get one for you." Charles unfolded, slithered from under the blanket and made for the kitchen.

"I can't tell you how happy I am," Edie said softly. "You look so happy when you're together, both of you."

"Charles is my best friend," Erik said truthfully, feeling only a small pang of guilt. Whatever else they weren't, this was the honest and complete truth, and he wasn't expecting that to change.

"That's wonderful, darling." Edie patted his cheek with a warm smile and returned her attention to the TV, disregarding everything. She did make an exception for Charles' return, when she wiggled to make space for him to get under the blanket, and it struck Erik with astonishing clarity that this was dangerously domestic, that this was too much like the evenings they had when papa was alive, curled on the couch, the three of them, watching silly movies.

This wasn't right, sitting here with Charles wedged under his arm, with the short hair at the nape of his neck tickling Erik's wrist. They were just friends, not a family.

*****

The drive home had been tense. Edie had fussed and fluttered and fretted, and made them a basket of food fit for a fortnight, not a three-hour ride. She clutched Charles to her as they said their goodbyes, stroking his hair lovingly.

"I understand young men don't like to hear this from their mamas, but I really hope you boys have good sex."

Erik was reasonably certain he wasn't adopted, but then again, who knew? Charles had laughed and kissed Edie's cheek. "Thank you," he said. "We make do."

"Make do? No, no. I want my boys to take good care of each other!"

"We do," Charles told her, kissing her knuckles. "I promise."

They were twenty miles down the road when Charles spoke again. "Erik. Murder-suicide pact. Starting any moment now."

"I don't know, you seemed pretty into it," Erik said, staring at the road ahead with far more intent than it deserved.

"I don't follow."

"You were laying it on pretty thick."

Charles was frowning. "I was responding in kind. Edie is a hurricane of motherness."

"You didn't need to go along with everything! She must have gotten her hopes sky-high!"

"Is it my fault she wants you to settle down?"

"You didn't have to go out of your way to play the perfect boyfriend!"

Charles bristled. "Excuse me? I went along with your crazy scheme, because you asked me to! You don't get to pin this on me, you certainly don't get to pin hurting Edie on me."

"She is my mother!"

"I don't recall asking to be adopted!"

Erik bit his lip and clenched his hand around the steering wheel. "I didn't ask you to go full-on Twilight on her!"

"What's that even supposed to mean?"

"We're supposed to be breaking up in a few weeks, did you really have to make it seem like I'm the world's biggest idiot for breaking up with you?" Erik diverted his gaze from the road and looked to the side, where Charles' wide, blue eyes were giving him the mother of all accusing stares.

"Fine, I can break up with you, if it's such a terrible hardship! Believe me, it's not going to be difficult," Charles muttered, crossed his arms and stared out the window. Erik gave the road his full attention once again. They didn't speak for the rest of the drive. Erik dropped Charles off at his apartment and drove off in what might be described as a huff, but in all honesty, there was going along with the charade, and then there was blatantly seducing Erik's mother. Some people had no shame.

He related the story to Raven the following morning and quite appropriately got smacked on the head for his trouble. It got him thinking and so, early the following week, he dug out the pin he rarely used to prick the inflated balloon of his ego, got himself into a car and drove, coming to a stop in front of Charles' apartment building completely by accident.

"Hey," he said when Charles opened the door looking less than his normally artfully disheveled self. "It had come to my attention I was a bit of a dick."

"Really, a bit of a dick?" the unusually scruffy Charles asked.

"A lot of a dick, never mind. I came to see if you wanted a beer as an apology."

"I wish I could." Charles let out a long sigh. "You have no idea what's the week's been like."

"Charles?" An attractive female between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five poked her head out of the room. As far as Erik recalled her name was Moira MacTaggart and she was one of Charles' grad students. "I'm going to make some more tea before I start strangling Sean, okay?"

"Do the strangling outside my apartment, please." Charles waved his hand in the direction of the kitchen. "Help yourself, teas are in the cupboard. If you could make a whole pot, that would be wonderful. I think there might be some cakes in the fridge as well."

"Sure thing."

She disappeared down the hall and Erik watched her go, admiring the sway of her hips in a platonic kind of way. "I'm not cockblocking you, am I?"

"I don't sleep with my students." Another sigh. "You wouldn't believe the week I've been having."

"Did your mother call to adopt your best buddy as her new son? Because mine did."

"You're a lying liar. No." Third sigh. Something really was bothering Charles. "I'm sorry if I'm distracted, I've students over. I had to cut back on my office hours. Or rather I moved them here."

"Why?"

"Gabrielle stopped by on Monday."

"Gabrielle…"

"Gabrielle Haller, I told you about her?"

Erik ran a quick scan of his memory, coming up with two matches. "Is she the pole dancing champion or the investigative journalist?"

"Journalist. The pole-dancer was Gabrielle Hammond."

"Right. She stopped by and?"

Charles looked at his watch. "Do you have time? We've about half an hour left, hopefully less, and it's not something to deal with in three minutes over the doorstep."

Erik had the whole night, if need be. "Sure. I'll amuse myself."

"Just keep quiet."

Erik shrugged and made for the library. Only Charles could have a three-bedroom apartment in the middle of the city and convert one of the bedrooms to a personal library. Correction, only Charles could have a three-bedroom apartment in the middle of the city and not convert it to a porno viewing room. Granted, a good portion of the reason was that porn didn't cater to telepaths and the few that did got it hilariously wrong, but the point was still there.

Erik had been listening to Charles' woes about the sex life of a telepath for as long as they knew one another, and was therefore an expert on the subject.

He settled on the couch with a worn copy of Good Omens, when a completely foreign sound drew his attention. It was a fragile wail, something close but faint at the same time, like it couldn't quite muster the strength to be more than a hint of a sound. Erik set the book down and went to investigate.

He found the answer in Charles' bedroom. There was a cot in the corner, with the original IKEA box still piled behind it, and in the cot there was a pink blanket. Wrapped in the blanket there was a baby, sleeping, and as Erik stared the baby let out a hiccoughing wail, which carried practically not at all.

A baby, Erik thought and started to frown, but then the tiny person hiccoughed and opened its eyes. They were blue. Not the washed-out blue usually deemed as blue eyes, but the same vibrant color that Erik had memorized from all the time he spent looking at Charles. The baby let out a distressed chirp and arched its back, holding its tiny arms out, and Erik reached for it, hypnotized, lifting the infant out of the cot and letting it curl into his chest.

The baby settled, wiping its snotty nose on Erik's shirt, and gurgled. It was so small. Erik could hold it up with one hand, could cup its fuzzy head in one palm. It was swathed in a onesie with a surprisingly realistic dinosaur on it, but other than the eyes there was nothing remarkable about the child. Erik held it close and sang the first verse of Enter the Sandman into its forehead feeling the comfort relax the tiny body.

"Who are you?"

Erik started and turned to the door, surprised to find a woman glaring at him. She was tall and slim, though not so slim that Hollywood would hire her as anything other than the fat best friend, to better set off the skeletal blonde heroine. "Who are you?" he responded, because she was glaring at him from underneath her dark lashes as though he was the intruder.

"I'm his mother," she said, crossing her tanned arms across her chest. Despite their actual color, she gave the impression that she was a pale person who spent a lot of time in the sun, and the latter was somewhat supported by the bronze, sun-bleached highlights in her dark hair.

"I'm Erik."

"And you’re entitled to be handling my child because?"

"I'm a friend of Charles'."

"Not a burglar then?"

"I'd have better things to handle if I was."

"There is that."

Erik had a brief epiphany at this point, although it was a quiet, unassuming epiphany, strongly conscious of the infant curled into his chest. "You're Gabrielle Haller, right? Charles said you stopped by."

She raised an eyebrow. "That’s all he said? You must not be a particularly good friend."

Erik bristled. "We spoke for three minutes."

"Never mind. So, Erik, if I may ask, what drove you to delve into other people's cribs?"

"It was crying."

"His name is David."

"Well, now I know that." It was a good name, Erik thought, looking down at the baby who was still awake and looking back at him with his enormous blue eyes. It suited him well. "He looks very… normal."

Gabrielle shrugged. "You never know, I didn't have him tested."

"I meant he looks healthy."

"Knock on wood, right?" Gabrielle shook her head and sighed. "Do you mind? He's been colicky and the little bastard won't go to sleep unless he's held. I need to pack."

"Sure, go for it," Erik said without looking at her. David was trying to stuff his little fist and a fold of Erik's shirt into his mouth, all the while looking up to his perch for approval.

"I see you found Davy," Charles said quietly. Erik started. Gabrielle was gone, though he could hear movement in the other room.

"Yeah. So, you and Gabrielle…?"

"If you're asking if we had sex, clearly. But we're not together or anything like that."

"That crib looks pretty permanent."

"The crib is permanent. Davy will be staying with me."

"And Gabrielle?"

"Gabrielle is going back home tomorrow."

"Fuck." Erik rocked David, who'd begun to hiccough again.

"Yeah."

"Can't you do something?"

"Gabrielle is a journalist. She spends more time travelling than she does at home."

Erik narrowed his eyes. "It's her baby too. Come to think of it, I didn't hear any mention of it, did she have one of those learning channel pregnancies?"

"We've been through that spiel," Charles explained with a sigh. "She wanted to keep him, at first, but then she had to take on a desk job for six months. She went stir-crazy. The editor almost fired her. She doesn't really have family to leave him with."

"I understand this is neither the time nor the place, but condoms do make a difference," Erik said, hefting David higher so that his head rested on Erik's shoulder.

"Except in the few percent of cases when they don't." Charles pursed his lips. "Or if you're having a quickie on the minibar and you're on the pill, anyway, but accidentally washed it down with alcohol the previous evening, which you then threw up."

"Shit."

"I'll live." Charles smiled wanly, stroking the brown fluff on Davy's head. "He's a cute baby."

"He has your eyes."

"He does, doesn't he?"

Is it permanent? Erik asked silently. I ask because I know you get attached and if she comes back for him you will slowly wither into nothing. Maybe a bald corpse.

Shut up, I'm not balding.

Charles.

It is. We agreed I get sole custody, and I mailed the paperwork on Thursday. Gabby gets all the visiting rights she wants, but she doesn't want many. I'll be scheduling more of my vacation in Israel, it's about the end of it.

Erik narrowed his eyes, but before he could form a thought Charles added, It's fine, you don't need to be cross with her. She wants her career more than she wants a family. I don't think she likes me all that much, to be honest.

"I'm just worried," Erik mumbled, feeling decidedly prickly at the hypothesis. Charles might have been an arrogant, condescending dick at times, but he was a lovable condescending dick, goddamnit.

"Don't be," Charles said, shaking his head. "It was a good conference and as soon as David stops being colicky he will be adorable. Speaking of which, I need a new baby monitor."

"He wasn't being loud."

"Yes, you found him by the mysterious baby fluids," Charles said, waggling his fingers, but Erik wasn't listening. Davy was looking at him again and making bubbles with his tiny coral-colored mouth and it was the most precious thing in existence.

"Who's a good baby," Erik said warmly, bouncing him a little. "Who's a darling little baby?"

"He's not that darling at three a.m.," Charles said, but he was smiling as he did.

At some point in the future Erik was going to realize that he wasn't entitled to a biological clock. He was a man and, regardless of what Mama said, he could still father babies in his old age. Of course, that realization would have followed a cascade of other realizations, all of them more profound and life-changing, some of which might even render this one irrelevant. But that would come later. For now Erik told himself he was being a good friend when he packed a suitcase, compressed the habitat of his parakeets for travel, and moved into Charles' guest bedroom, to help out with Davy. It seemed like a no-brainer at first, even when it turned out colic was a pain in the ass, and two weeks later it still was a no-brainer. Emma was surprisingly understanding about letting him work from home, which he often did with one foot on Davy's rocking crib and the computer in his lap, waiting until Charles got home, so that he could shower and nip across the city, to present his results. Things just slotted into place, somehow.

This was why he was comfortable opening Charles' door at ten p.m. the night before Christmas, with Davy's wailing mouth tucked into his collarbone, wearing an old t-shirt and sweat pants. This was why, when registering a friendly, familiar face, he merely yawned and waved them in, closing the door with a soft click before fully realizing what just happened.

"Erik, I think there is a loop that missed me entirely," Edie said, letting her suitcase wobble on the floor while she shook the wet snow off her coat and gave him a look.

"Uh," Erik said, beeping MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAMA ALERT on all frequencies. "Mama. What are you doing here?"

"I asked Charles for his contact details, to send him a postcard. My flight was very late, so I thought I could stay with you tonight and take a train tomorrow. You weren't picking up your phone, so I called Charles, and he told me you were here."

So sorry! Charles' whisper came through the ether. I completely forgot. Moira and Sean just had a breakthrough.

A warning would have been nice.

"Erik…"

"I'm sorry – of course, come right in, make yourself comfortable. Charles is still at school."

I'm on my way.

"Charles is on his way," Erik amended.

"I think we both know I don't have a problem with Charles not being present," Mama said, approaching Frost levels of iciness. She shrugged her coat off, hung it by the door, and bent to take off her shoes.

Erik finally connected the dots to the snuffling baby on his shoulder. "Oh. Right. This is David," he said, holding the little guy out, thereby getting a good view of the Lehnsherr Baby-Dar Gene in action. Mama melted on the spot, wrapping her arms around the child and cradling him to her chest.

"He's got Charles' eyes," she said, the frost melting completely.

"I know."

"Not his nose though."

"He might grow into it." David's nose was tiny and upturned and altogether made for kissing. It might grow into the koala sniffer yet, but so far there were no indications, other than the six freckles. Then again, Erik had seen his baby pictures and his head wasn't a block of ginger scruff then, so maybe once puberty had a go the resemblance would be more obvious.

"Refresh my memory, darling, do you have a uterus?" Mama asked, utterly preoccupied with the aforementioned freckles.

"…no?"

"Does Charles?"

Erik bit back a reflexive "How would I know?" and said, "I don't think so."

"So whence sprung my adorable tiny grandson?"

"Charles had an eventful conference in Israel. He didn't know until after Thanksgiving. David's mother is an investigative journalist, she tried to be a single mother, but the desk job apparently drove her crazy."

"I see."

Erik ran the timeline in his mind, and okay, it didn't contradict anything they'd said or implied during the Hanukah weekend. They never said how long they were supposedly together, so factoring in them not living together, they couldn’t have been a couple for more than a few months.

Whew.

Mama cooed at the baby and the looked up with a glint in her eye. "Does that mean he's Jewish?"

"I'm not sure, to be honest? He might be." He probably was, as he had been circumcised and Gabrielle wore a Star of David on a silver chain around her neck.

"Such a beautiful baby, and he's Jewish, too! Is he fed and changed?" Mama asked when Davy's face scrunched up and he let out a wail.

"He's colicky."

"Poor darling," she murmured, launching into a Hebrew lullaby.

I'm screwed, Erik thought at no one in particular.

Chapter Text

"What are we going to do?" he hissed at Charles while they were sneakily moving Erik's clothes to Charles' bedroom, to make space for Mama, while she was distracted with the unhappy infant.

"We could tell her the truth," Charles said, arranging his underwear drawer so that Erik had someplace to put his things.

"Be my guest."

Charles winced. "I don't think so."

Erik bundled up three turtlenecks and shoved them into Charles' closet. It struck him in that moment that he knew every piece of clothing hanging there, from the very posh and expensive bespoke tuxedo he wore to Raven's wedding, the slightly less pretentious but no less expensive tailored suits, the Walmart undershirts and even the pack underwear bought at Marks&Spencer, from when they went backpacking through Europe.

It struck him that he was standing in his best friend's bedroom, getting ready to get into one bed with him and pretend they were a couple, that there was a baby in the living room to whom he'd already devoted three weeks of his life and planned to devote far more. It struck him that he had absolutely no misgivings about moving to Charles' place at the drop of a hat, that he could cook dinner around Charles making seven cups of tea and that none of this, not one thing, was odd or uncomfortable.

It struck him, finally, how little work they'd put into faking the relationship in the first place.

"We could just roll with it," he said, while Charles changed the sheets.

"Roll with what?"

"I'm thinking – look, how much effort did we put into pretending we're a couple?"

Charles stiffened. "What's your point?"

"I'm saying, we did nothing. Short of implying we're a couple in public, we did nothing. Everyone just assumed. And now, with Davy, you can use the help, so I was thinking we can just… go with it. Neither of us is particularly into commitment, and it's not like you don't have bedrooms to spare, in case we need to get laid, plus there's my apartment. We can have a civil partnership!"

The set of Charles' shoulders loosened a fraction and he let out a long breath. "Erik… I need you to think really carefully about what you're saying. You're proposing we enter a fraudulent legally binding relationship, while having sex with strangers, because you don't want to tell your mother the truth.

"Don't get me wrong," he added. "I see what you're saying, and before you ask, I am thrilled that you connected with Davy, he mostly baffles me. It's just… This is spiraling out of control. Edie will want to throw us a wedding, and as applicable as the vows might be, we are not a couple, Erik."

"We could try to be," Erik said stubbornly, because there were many things in life scarier than having sex with Charles. Not that it would be easy, getting past the years and years of looking at him like another part of himself.

"You want us to try being a couple because you're afraid to own up to lying to your mother Erik," Charles said flatly. "I'm sorry, I thought we put that behind us when we graduated high school."

Erik deflated. "Yeah. I know. I'll… talk to her."

"Why don’t you drive her home tomorrow?"

"What, on Christmas?"

"I'll be going to Raven's for an unassuming vaguely holiday dinner, then back here. We're not big on Christmas and the weather is dreadful. I'm sure Edie will appreciate it."

Edie did appreciate it, as evidenced by the grateful sigh and less than a token protest when Erik made the suggestion. She was a curious creature, his mother, happily hopping on a plane to get wherever, but wary of anything that required a surface to move along. Statistics were on her side there, it had to be noted, and Erik was a keen, safe driver. They set out early, dropping off Charles along the way, and made for the main artery without much obstruction.

"Tell her," were Charles' parting words, and there couldn't have been a worse instruction. What am I supposed to say, Erik raged for the first hundred miles, listening to his mama detail the excitement of the Canary Islands.

The second hundred was mostly silent, interspersed randomly with Edie's gushing at the cuteness of David and how well Erik looked with an infant in his arms. Charles, apparently, could use a little more practice, but the resemblance between them nullified his discomfort.

When they broke the second hundredth mark, Erik gathered his courage and blurted, "Mama, Charles and I aren't a couple."

"Excuse me?"

"We're—friends. We've only ever been friends. We're not together, Mama. I didn't mean to make it happen, but Mrs. Maximoff was so insistent and wouldn't take no for an answer, and then… Davy is not your grandson, although Charles adores you, and I'm sure he'll be accommodating."

"Accommodating," Edie said tonelessly. "You're telling me you intentionally let me think I finally could stop worrying about your future, that you have someone to build a life with, that you were no longer alone, and finally that I have a beautiful, clever son-in-law, then a grandchild, and here you are saying it was all a sham."

"I wouldn't call it a sham," Erik said, evading a spray of sleet from a pick-up travelling in the opposite direction. "Just a misunderstanding."

"Erik Magnus Lehnsherr!" What followed was a carefully chosen selection of words every dock worker would be ashamed to utter. Erik felt his ears burn.

"I know," he whined. "I know!"

"You don't know, that seems to be the problem. And Charles went along with it? Why?"

"He's my friend," he said quietly. "And you were so kind to him. He's a sucker for people who are genuinely kind to him."

Edie stared out at the greyish-white landscape outside, chewing on her nerves and spitting out the occasional curse. "I'm still mad at you," she said when they pulled up to her home and Erik lifted the bag out of the back seat. "I can't believe you'd do this to me, ever."

"Please don't be mad at Charles," Erik said. "He went along with it only because I asked him to, but he loves you now, too."

"Of course I'm mad at Charles, he's a telepath, he should know better!" Edie fumed for a few more minutes, methodically checking the house for unwanted visitors. Erik did a brief sweep with his powers and found everything intact. "He seemed smarter than that."

"We were surprised, Mama. I swear to you, it was an accident, but then you pounced on the idea, and we couldn't bear to tell you the truth."

"Thirty years and I haven't managed to teach you zany schemes never work. Erik, really?" Then, in a quiet voice, she added, "Really, Erik?"

"I'm so sorry…"

"You should be." Edie was quiet for a moment. "But then again, I might not be a telepath, but I can tell when people are lying to me. For all the lying, you didn't seem to be putting too much effort into looking like a couple."

"We were convincing enough."

"Which is my whole point," Edie said seriously, fixing Erik with a glare. "You can't fake that kind of closeness. You can't fake loving someone, not like you did."

"Of course I love Charles, he's my best friend!"

"Is he? Erik – you spent three days falling into step with him, are you sure there's nothing there?"

"We're just friends, mama."

"I don't believe you."

"It's true, I'm done lying."

"You're done lying to me, you mean."

"What?"

"I know you, liebchen," Edie said, coming closer to cup Erik's cheek. "I knew all the friends you had in school, and none of them were half as close to you as Charles is. You can't tell me you aren't attracted to him, dear, I saw you salivate at the sight of boys fitting his general description. Your head swivels towards him whenever he enters a room, sometimes minutely, but it does."

"We're just friends, Mama," Erik said stubbornly.

"Of course you are," Mama said, patting his cheek. "Now go, before I put you over my knee. I'm still mad at you."

"I'm so sorry—"

"Save it. I want to have Charles and David over for a few days, whenever he's free. Just because you've your head up your ass, doesn't mean I can't enjoy their company. Shoo."

Erik went. He drove sedately, barely paying attention to the road or in fact the car. His ability kept the Bentley on the road and out of other cars' path more efficiently than any driver ever could. He wasn't paying attention when he drove back to the city, or when he bypassed the turn which would take him home, and ended up pulling into the garage by Charles' place.

"Might as well," he told himself. "My parakeets are here."

The elevator was dark and scary, and Erik made his way upstairs one step at a time, not quite sure how to explain his mood. Or at least not until he opened the door to Charles' flat and found Charles coat dripping on the hanger.

"Charles?"

Silence. Erik moved through the half-lit apartment towards the bedroom, where the tell-tale bracelet of a watch shimmered in his awareness. He found Charles, curled around the pink bundle of David on the bed, flushed and sleeping, with his mouth parted and his fluffy hair bearing signs of having been wet lately.

Erik stood over the two of them in silence, and argued with his mother, who had put the notion in his head. He argued against it with all his might. What did it matter that when he first met Charles he couldn't draw a breath, because the sharp jab of attraction stabbed him in the back and shoved him off a really tall tower? Did it matter Charles was the first person he called when things happened, that he was the first person Charles called? Did it matter that he'd rather listen to Charles wax poetry about the squiggly lines his machines spat out rather than have an orgasm?

Did it matter at all, in the grand scheme of things, that he felt something in him swell and burn bright as he stood over his sleeping friend and their—Charles' infant son?

"Damn," he whispered. "Damn shit fucking bullcrap."

Davy stirred. His tiny mouth – red, almost as candy-red as Charles' – parted and a soft keen emerged. Erik shed his jacket and slid onto the bed, resting his head close to Charles' lax hand, so that he could watch them both sleep.

He didn't even realize that his eyes closed of their own accord.

He woke up some time later, to a gentle murmuring. Charles was lying on his back with a very awake Davy on his chest, singing him a soft lullaby.

"Charles," Erik said.

"Hmm?"

"I love you."

Charles once again stiffened. "I know. I love you too."

"No, I'm—I want to marry you. I want to have a dozen children, I want to move out of town so that Mama can spoil them silly. I want you." He let a beat go, staring at the irresistible blue of Charles' gaze. "I want all of you."

Very slowly Charles sat up, cradling the baby to his chest. "Get out."

"What?"

"Get out. Go. I'll send the parakeets over soon, just leave."

"Why? You can't tell me it's that big of a deal, nothing has to change! Mama still wants to see you for dinners and holidays—"

"Get out!" Charles screamed, and with that something like a chasm opened in Erik's head. He recognized the feeling as foreign, he recognized the fear as fabricated; he knew enough telepaths to know the taste of thoughts which weren't his. Trouble was, even though the stimulus wasn't his own, the emotional response was. Very much so.

And so Erik panicked. Through the haze he managed to collect his shoes, his jacket and keys, and was downstairs before he could realize what was going on. He stopped with his hand on the door, staring at his reflection in the coat of metallic paint. What just happened? he asked himself, staring numbly at the magenta finish. Charles never lost control! He was a frigging measuring stick for telepaths world-wide!

What was the stubborn bastard thinking? Erik dug through his pockets for his cellphone and smashed his thumb into the screen, until the phone crackled and tensed in his grasp. Charles' name flashed on the screen. Charles did not pick up. Not this time, not on any of the following seven.

"Stupid fucking prick," Erik growled, dropped the phone onto the seat, got into the car and drove away. Alright, what next? He could go home, but without the parakeets there was hardly a point. He could go back, let himself into Charles' apartment and yell until he went hoarse, but that might upset David, and Charles did throw him out once already. Going back up there might result in Erik strangling him, and he was strangely reluctant to try, now that he realized he'd rather be doing other things. He'd never made food for Charles, he realized. Not properly, anyway. None of the truly delicious things, like latkes or pontchkis.

He took a sharp turn, narrowly missing a harried pedestrian, and sped off through the not-surprisingly empty streets.

His phone rang. Erik picked it up with a blind stab at the screen. "If that's you, Charles, I hope to fucking hell you listed me as a legal guardian for Davy, because I'm coming to murder you."

"Ah," said Raven's voice. "Charles just called. He's skipping town in panic. Care to explain?"

"Care to—what?"

"Are you driving? Holy shit, who let you on the road. Get your ass here."

Erik, a little numbly, took a half-legal U-turn and sped back the way he came, eventually coming to a stop in a prime parking spot opposite Raven's door.

"I can't believe this is my Christmas," she said as she opened the door. "Good grief, are you adults, or are you adults?"

"What do you mean he's skipping town?"

"He called me ten minutes ago to let me know he was leaving town, that he needed space, and that your parakeets are coming with him, because he felt bad leaving them alone. That's how messed up he is. I had to remind him he has a boy-child now, because he sounded like he was about to leave him in the washing machine for the long cycle."

"What is his problem?" Erik all but yelled, waving at Hank, whose blue fluff resembled nothing so much as a giant blue sweater. The perils of winter. Raven, in contrast, looked slimmer than ever, as though she contracted in the winter months, to better preserve the heat. She was also boycotting pants, it looked like, because all she had on, other than a worn t-shirt, was a pair of shorts so tiny it barely covered her ass.

"I'm guessing, and this is wild conjecture here, given your recent idiocies, which, by the way, someone needs to elaborate on, because I refuse to be left in the dark—"

"Raven!"

"Sorry, sorry. I assume you told him you love him."

"Really, him running scared gave that away?"

"Who's his sister?"

"He's not that crazy! I thought, out of the three of us, he was the sensible one!"

"Haha, no."

"What is his problem?"

"He's scared he made you say it," Raven said matter-of-factly.

"What bullshit is this?"

"Sharon was a right bitch, you know that, and it wasn't just because Brian died early." She took Erik by the elbow and led him into her living room, where a Christmas showing of Rambo was underway, complete with beer on the table, while Hank excused himself with the promise of returning with coffee. "Even when he was alive they were in their own little world, and Charles was just something that popped out of Sharon before she got her tubes tied. Then along came Kurt, and wow, that went over great."

"If there is a point, I'm missing it."

"Charles' parents only really paid attention to him when he really wanted them to," Raven said seriously. "Like, he broke his leg wanted to. It's fucked up, but that's a fact."

"You think he thinks he made me… But this is bullshit! I read his fucking thesis, telepathic influence in the most basic things is hard and can't be achieved except via conscious, concentrated effort, never mind causing life-altering emotion!"

"Unless we're talking a momentary lapse of reason, or a sudden craving," Raven pointed out. "I'm not making it up, I've seen him wake up from a nightmare and have Sharon sort of acknowledge his presence."

"Yes, if you're a child! This is not the bladder we're talking about!"

"How can you get so wrapped up in my brother and not noticed he'd rather put pins in his eyes than go on an actual date?"

Erik frowned. "I thought he didn't like commitment."

"Yeah, because you two are joined at the hip, anyway. For the love of puppies, Erik. He's been in love with you since day one, and he's too much of a screw-up to admit it to himself. I'm sure you have no idea who that feels." She threw herself against the back of the couch in a huff, while Hank emerged from the kitchen with a tray of Christmas leftovers and coffee.

Erik felt his mouth go dry. "Do you really think that?"

"I may not be his companion of choice, but I do know him somewhat. Trust me. He loves you like crazy. He barely shuts up about you at the best of times, let alone when you do something halfway interesting, like sneeze."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Beats me."

"You can't bail on helping out now."

"You're coming to me to ask for help with his telepathy issues? Really?" Raven reached for the beer on the table. "You realize we managed to drive each other into alcoholism because of that?"

"I didn't know that."

"Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what happened." Raven shrugged and then sighed. "I know he's a good guy, and rationally I know he couldn't whammy me into liking him on a permanent basis. I do love him, don't get me wrong, but it's best if I love him from a distance. Send me to assassinate people in his name, I'm your girl.

"The problem is that I saw him beg his parents for attention, and I then saw him get it, effortlessly, when he needed or really wanted it. I know he didn't mean it, I'm not an idiot. The sort of thing stays with you, though."

"You know he would never do anything to harm you."

"Yeah, what difference does it make? My lizard brain thinks he would take a blender to it and turn it into mush. Ain't much that can be done against the lizard brain. Don't tell me it never crossed your mind."

"Crossed, yes, but then I am naturally resistant to suggestion and I don't really mind?"

"You don't really mind mindfucks?"

Erik shrugged at the open incredulity in her voice. "I don't mind Charles."

"Yeah, I'm glad we had that conversation, I was going to climb him like a tree but I'll do the gallant thing now and leave you to it. Idiot."

Erik smiled at the coffee table and one of Raven's scaly feet. "Do I have your blessing?"

"Do you care?"

"A little."

"Then yes, sure. Go for it. Although how you're going to convince him, I'll never know."

"I might have an idea," Erik said, and in fact did. "Do you know where he went?"

"Yeah, there's only one place. The mansion. It's in Westchester, I'll get you the exact address."

"Thanks Raven," Erik said, bending over to give her a kiss on the cheek. "You're a life saver."

"Don't you forget it!"

Erik shook Hank's hand, wished them a Merry Christmas and left, much calmer, for the stillness of his apartment, plotting all the way down there.

Chapter Text

Erik's clever plan had to wait until Friday, when the stores would open and he could gather the necessary components. He whiled Thursday away in his apartment, being annoyed at the silence and doing research, because fuck Charles and his know-it-all tendencies. At around four he contemplated a burglary, because the complete lack of chirping was drumming on his nerves. Who knew that such a small thing, smallest than small, even, because it was the lack of a thing, would provoke such annoyance. He made of a point of calling Charles and telling him that, maybe calling him a keet-napper for good measure, because you never knew, maybe he got over his little huff and would spare Erik the trouble of travelling.

Finally, however, Friday arrived and Erik made his way to the mall, where he terrorized an intern until she got out of his way and let him shop in peace.

*****

Charles' giant-ass mansion was located way out of New York City. Erik had never been there, since Charles deemed it unworthy of his time, and with what Erik knew about his home-life, he couldn't be blamed. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other playing with a quarter, his new purchase twirling idly in the backseat.

The scenery went through a gradual decline, from skyscrapers to blocks, houses and finally, the houses disappeared and instead the landscape became a blur of dollars and multipliers of dollars. He knew he was approaching the right address when the GPS informed him he arrived and there was nothing but really posh ivy to be seen. He paused at the first gate he found, flipped it open with a wave of his hand, and drove on, slipping the helmet he'd bought onto his head. He left his car in the middle of the driveway, making a mental note to find a garage later. With the size of the goddamned palace, there was bound to be seven. Hell, Charles said he found the Bentley's corpse in the back of one!

He skipped up the steps to the main door and knocked. Then knocked again. When there were no open doors and a welcoming kiss, he snapped his fingers and felt the lock give way.

Beyond the doors there was a poorly-lit hall. Marble and dark, expensive wood had been involved, not to mention carpets and stuff. The place was a tomb, albeit a decently kept one. Erik pressed on, marveling at the silence. There was a frigging colicky infant in the house, and by the sound of it everyone had long since died and been entombed. No wonder Charles referred to the place as a mausoleum.

Almost as though it was a horror movie, Erik sensed movement behind him, or rather sensed a watch. Watches seldom travelled unassisted, so he ducked, grabbing for the nearest free-standing piece of metal.

His attacker moved through the shadowy hall like he had been born in it. Erik could smell a faint whiff of cigar smoke and beer, which didn't stop him from throwing the metal implement – which just happened to be a sword he pulled from a suit of armor – at his head.

"Put the sword down, bub," the shadowy cigar-man said. "It ain't gonna hurt me much, 'least not before I get to you." He was holding his fists up and as Erik watched three claws emerged from between the knuckles, crossing in front of his face. "We're closed until January."

"What do you mean you're closed?"

"Did you miss the notice on the door?"

"Where's Charles?" Erik asked, brandishing the sword in front of his face and searching for a second one, for dramatic effect. The damned helmet was impairing his field of vision.

"Whadya want with Chuck?" the brute asked, dropping low into a fighting stance.

"What do I want with Chuck? What do you want with him?" Erik held the sword up higher.

"Mostly, beer. And a paycheck."

"A paycheck?"

"Really, boys, that's enough." Erik let the sword fall down a foot or so and looked up. Charles was standing at the top of the staircase, wearing what could only be describe as a romantic white shirt and loose linen pants. The overall adorable effect of his bedhead was a little spoiled by the fresh stain, which hopefully was baby formula, on his shoulder.

"You know this bozo, Chuck?" The brute with the claws stuck a hand out and pointed.

"Didn't your mama teach you not to point?" Erik asked, pointedly not returning the sword to its armor.

"Didn't your mama teach you not to break into places?"

"Calm down, both of you," Charles said firmly. "I was about to make tea. Logan, if you would show Erik into the drawing room, we can chat there."

"Drawing room? Really?" Erik straightened and looked between the other two in disbelief.

"Shut up and walk. Third door on the right."

Erik rolled his eyes, but went. He claimed a chair and stretched out on it, glaring at Logan from under the edge of his helmet. What was that brute doing there? Look at him, perched on the armrest of the couch, like a giant rabid pigeon, ready to leap at the slightest crumb. Charles' arrival with a tray of tea pierced the tension and the impending fight, because while they weren't exactly saying anything, the implication of verbal violence hung in the air above them.

"Erik," Charles began, after he poured tea into three dainty cups. "What brings you here in this peculiar outfit?"

"I don't know, what brings you here?"

"Careful bub," said the Neanderthal on the couch, gripping the dainty porcelain cup with two enormous fingers.

"No, I'm sorry, who is this guy?" Erik asked, sitting up straight and pointing a finger.

"Logan is the curator-slash-custodian. Slash groundskeeper. He is in charge of the estate." Charles poured himself a cup and sat on the edge of the settee.

"Curator? This guy? He looks like a rabid wolverine!"

"That's Dr. Wolverine to you, bub," said the beclawed, plaid-wearing maniac.

"Be nice Erik. Logan is a very pleasant person to be around. His interests include beer, cigars and Canadian impressionism."

Two sentences, so much new information. "Canada had impressionism? I thought it was a French thing."

"Shows what you know," the Neanderthal grunted.

"Logan wrote a monograph on the works of Maurice Cullen and his circle. I happen to own a sizeable collection of their lesser-known paintings," Charles said.

Erik could only assume he was referring to the slightly blurry landscapes, a few of which he noticed along the way, which exhausted his knowledge about impressionism as a movement. "Why?"

"As far as I understood the story my great-grandfather had an affair with I think the whole country of Canada. It's a family legacy."

"What, screwing around?"

"Careful now," this Logan said, letting his claws extend once again.

"It's fine." Charles held him back with the slightest shake of his head. "Erik is allowed to take cheap shots. He doesn't mean it."

"Might wanna rethink your friending policies, Chuck."

The baby monitor Charles had in his pocket wailed. "Oh damn, I just put him to sleep."

"I'll handle the kid," Logan said. "You deal with Lord Vader over there."

"You know I can feel your dog tags, right?" Erik shot back, getting out of his chair.

"Oh hush," Charles said. "And thank you, Logan. Just be careful, and for the love of god, babies needed to be picked up carefully. You have to support the head – okay, Davy is big enough not to need that overmuch, but still!"

"Yeah, yeah, I practiced."

"I have my concerns. A sack of granulated sugar is not really equivalent—"

"I watched an instructional video on Youtube. Chill."

"That doesn't alleviate my concerns," Charles said weakly, even as Logan disappeared through the door.

"Say the word and I'll drag him out by his watch," Erik offered.

"Logan is good people, Erik."

"Good maybe. People, I'm not so sure about."

"Why are you here?"

"I came to tell you that I love you. Again," Erik said, adjusting his helmet. "And also that I think you're a complete idiot."

"I'm sorry about that, I panicked."

"No kidding." Erik fiddled with the helmet again. It made him a little self-conscious, wearing something like that on his head, even if it was metal. His hair was sweaty and he bet when he took it off it would be flat and lifeless. "Can you please get over your childhood so that I can take this thing off?"

"Thank god you're not a therapist." Charles let out a long sigh. "I gathered you spoke to Raven. She called to yell at me."

"She was right. I was going to yell at you too, but then I saw how pathetic you looked, and I lost the will." Erik crossed his arms and let the flat stare do the job.

"Thank you for that."

"Look—I get why you're scared. I do. But you can't convince me this is something you forced me to feel, that this is something that's not mine at all."

"How can you be so sure?" Charles asked in a wavering voice. "We're spending a lot of time together, I could've slithered up your brain while you weren't paying attention."

"Sure, but if that's the case denying me what you made me want makes you a complete asshole, right? Because I know you, and no way in hell you'd fuck a person up on purpose, and you're enough of a martyr to suffer through the consequences if you did it by accident. Flawless logic."

"I don't think inducing romantic thoughts counts as doing anything by accident," Charles said, a little firmer. Erik grinned. He was coming around.

"You know what I mean." Erik rolled his shoulders, hopefully taking care of the prelude to foreplay. He wasn't as young as he used to be, after all, it behooved a man to stretch before attempting strenuous activities.

"You should know what I mean."

"If you mean 'I'm a giant idiot, Erik, forgive me and come here for a congratulatory fuck,' then yes, I know what you mean," Erik said.

"I'm not touching you while you have that thing on. Where did you even get it?"

"I made it. HomeDepot sells psionic insulators by the yard and mithril has some magnetic components, weirdly enough. I guess that explains why I liked being in classrooms."

"That's impressive." Charles toyed with his cup, seeming at once vulnerable and stubborn.

"Yeah, well, it occurred to me that I go to great lengths for you," Erik told him, gently, much like he talked Cyaneto out of sulking in the corner. "Always have. You can't tell me you make me, because a lot of these times you aren't even around. Why is this such a hard concept for you to understand?"

"Look, if you're here under the mistaken assumption I somehow suffer for the lack of your dick in my life, you are wrong. I get on just fine, and this isn't a coping tactic or anything. You mean everything to me, and friendship is far more dependable than romance, as means of binding people together."

"I'm not saying we should shelve the friendship. Goddamn it, Charles."

"What are you saying, Erik?"

"I'm saying that this is our only option," Erik said flatly. "Seriously, I've had three men whom I dated semi-seriously break up with me because of you. I broke up with Raven because of you."

"You were with Raven? When?"

"Exactly."

"Wait, no, I really need to know, you were dating my sister?"

"The point is, it didn't happen. Because of you."

"Then maybe it's for the best."

"For fuck's sake, Chuck." Erik turned to see Logan in the doorway. He was holding Davy to his chest in one meaty hand, thankfully the right end up, and was glaring at the both of them over the baby's head. Davy seemed content to be swathed in plaid, which was the only reason Erik wasn't coming over to rescue him. "Do you ever sit yourself down and listen to the bullshit you're spouting? You've been bitching nonstop about this guy ever since you got here, and looking tragic when you stop to take a breath. Let it go already. Shit happens, people get stabbed, you get over it by mutual consent and move on."

"Did anyone get stabbed lately?" Erik asked, only a little alarmed.

"I give up. David and I are going to get a beer, you clowns do what you want."

"Really, that won't be necessary," Charles started saying, but Logan was already out the door. Erik tracked his dogtags to the front door and out, at which point Logan got into a car—

"He took my car!" Erik shot off the couch, ready to chase the bastard down. "That asshole took my car!"

"Oh dear."

"Oh dear? Your Neanderthal custodian took our son out in my car and you don't care?"

Charles' eyes switched into liquid lake of frozen bubbles mode, trapping Erik quite thoroughly. He remembered, all of sudden, how it was that exact look which first struck him through the heart, the very same day they met, running into each other at the deep end of the university pool.

"Our son?" Charles asked with a soft smile, and if Erik was the mind reader in that moment (and wasn't wearing a psionic-proof helmet), he was certain this would be the moment in which the obvious fucking truth finally filtered through to Charles' enormous, idiotic brain. David was their baby, and when two people have a baby together, then clearly it's time to set aside petty issues.

Erik really had exhausted his talking quota for the day, so instead of elaborating he leaned in and brushed his lips against Charles'. It didn't have the desired effect.

"Okay, eww, no. Absolutely not. You're not touching me wearing that," Charles said, pushing lightly at his shoulders.

"I'll take it off if you promise not to run screaming."

"I don't think I'm qualified to make that promise."

"Then it's not coming off."

"Fine, no coming."

"I hate you."

"I know."

Erik let the helmet slip from his head and tumble to the ground. The warm, familiar cadence of Charles' presence filled the previously cold room. Erik let out a long breath. "I missed that."

"Shouldn't it worry you?"

"What, that you're like a smell I got used to?"

"Okay, now I'm worried. And maybe a little bit offended."

"Cry me a river," Erik muttered and Charles shook his head and stepped forward into the tight circle of Erik's personal space. This was good. Better. Better than good. This was the warm pulse of electromagnetic waves Charles emitted at all times tickling Erik's inner compass just right, like a heartbeat only less visceral. There was the smell of his soap and shaving cream, of Davy's formula and baby powder. Erik inclined his head and maybe he should buy Charles some heels, to deal with the height difference, because his neck was going to kill him after the first hour of kissing, and Erik wasn't going to stop after an hour, or even two.

"I don't think I have the legs to pull heels off," Charles said, withdrawing slightly, although neither fast nor far enough for Erik's arms to miss him.

"Tony Stark does it all the time."

"Tony Stark also builds suits of red and gold armor and walks around in them."

"See? Compensating."

"Which is my whole point. I don't need to compensate."

"You are short," Erik said, even though Charles wasn't that short, or even that much shorter.

"It would serve you so right if it turned out we can't have anything but IKEA sex."

"IKEA has hookers now?"

"We should pitch the idea."

As stalling tactics this wasn't bad, Erik thought, bending his head to mouth at Charles' smoothly shaven jaw. "Do you have a bedroom here, or do we need to defile a gallery?"

"Logan would have my head."

"Now there's a thought." Erik's hands travelled southwards, pausing at Charles' pert ass. This was his now, he thought in glee. All of it.

"Why me," Charles moaned, but as he slithered out of Erik's arms he grabbed his hand and started walking, out of the lavish drawing room and up the stairs, then down the corridor, then right, then through the first door on the left.

"Holy shit," Erik said dutifully. "I knew you were loaded, but this is pushing it."

"I'm not a fan myself."

Erik closed his mouth and unlatched the door with his mind, letting it swing outwards with a faint screech. The Neanderthal was really useful, it looked like, he thought with a roll of his eyes.

"He's got the entirety of the mansion to look after, and my bedroom isn't on the tour," Charles said with a frown.

"You could get better mileage out of the museum if you included it."

"I'm going to assume it's a compliment, else I'd have to hurt you considerably," Charles muttered, and Erik plastered himself to his back, knee to shoulder, with his cheek pressed against Charles' ear.

"It is a compliment," he whispered. "Everything I tell you is a compliment. I don't talk to people."

"I have mixed feelings about this brand of compliments," Charles said, started sliding down until his shoulders slipped from Erik's embrace, turned and slid back up, so that they were face to face, and somehow kissing again, always kissing. Erik couldn't even imagine wanting to stop.

The bed beckoned with an undeniable allure. Erik got his hands under the flowing white shirt Charles must have recovered from the basket of a romantic poet dying of cholera or consumption or whatever. It mussed his hair up something awful along the way, worse than Erik had ever seen it, and even that was an endearing sight, the mess of washed but otherwise untouched curls, sticking up over Charles' temples and the very peak of his skull, and Erik couldn't resist smoothing it over with one hand, pressing kisses in its wake, while Charles wrenched Erik's shirt out of his trousers and unbuckled the belt.

"Okay, maybe I was suffering for the lack of your dick in my life," he said, once they tumbled onto the bed and the insistent pressure of having a muscled thigh wedged between his awoke Erik's aforementioned body part from its restless slumber. "That feels like a really good dick."

"I never complained."

"I can see why anyone would want to call you back," Charles said, sitting up while still straddling Erik's thigh, wedging a knee underneath Erik's pelvis and lifting him up. One of his hands slithered up Erik's inseam, stretching the underwear in the V of the open pants.

"You always call back," Erik pointed out sensibly, while Charles stretched over him and brought their mouths together, simultaneously dipping his hand into Erik's pants. Erik wouldn't be outdone, so while zippers and metal buttons were easy as pie to get rid of, the moment he had access he let his hands stray across Charles' naked buttocks, down the back of his thighs and back up again, sliding between them.

He could feel the pressure of the arousal, first through the usual channels, his own very eager cock, but then there was the echo, the warm, pulsating want filtering through Charles' consciousness and into the air between them, curling and amplifying what was already a pretty goddamned sexy moment.

"I need to be quick about this," Charles whispered, parting their lips for a moment. "Please. The first time, I need it to be quick."

"How I suffer," Erik whined theatrically, worming his hands between their bodies to nudge their respective pants down and get a better, if cramped, access to their respective sex organs. Oh baby. On a list of adjectives that accurately describe Charles "shy" could possibly be allocated the position next to last, for these rare occasions when someone started petting him behind the ears while broadcasting genuine affection (current count of people familiar with this fact: two), and he certainly didn't change the rating now. The moment Erik got his slightly rough palm around his cock Charles began thrusting up into the hold, riding out the sharp bursts of pleasure and feeding them back to Erik, who wasn't exactly suffering for lack of arousal himself.

From there it was a relatively simple matter to get busy otherwise, to dig and grind and kiss the moans out of one another's mouth, and then finally come, embarrassingly quickly for two guys in their early thirties. Probably. Erik cancelled his subscription to When to Come and How Hard: a Guide to Avoiding Embarrassment the day he stopped having erections every time someone bent over. He tipped his head back and breathed in, deeply, feeling the orgasm trace thick, lush lines, dispelling warmth and light, throughout his body.

"Yeah, I'm terrified," he said, when the reality started filtering in and he could separate the sensation in definitely his own, probably his own and what the everloving fuck.

Charles chirped.

This was mildly weird, so Erik blinked his eyes open and turned to look. Charles was staring at him from the depth of a groove in the pillow, breathing deeply and looking rather perturbed, and on the side of his head, tangled in his hair, there was Cyaneto, giving Erik the beady stink-eye.

"Um," Charles said.

"I told you not to let them loose, they go all over the place," Erik said, a little annoyed, just as Magento crash-landed on the pillow between them.

"I didn't let them loose. They were in the cage!"

Erik lifted himself up an inch and looked for the familiar wires of the cage, and the moment he felt them he knew something was off. The latch was swinging freely, compelled by gravity, and the entirety of the cage resembled nothing so much as a giant explosion, made entirely out of wires.

"That's never happened to me before," he said numbly. Cyaneto hopped off Charles' head to burrow in the pillow next to its cage-mate.

"Performance issues can happen to anyone at any age," Charles said wisely, gathering himself up and standing on somewhat unsteady legs by the bed. He bent to free his ankles from his pants and underwear and looked down at Erik, who was rather enjoying the view. "You should probably call your mother," he said quietly, though the very interesting progression of the glowing pinkness on his face and ears strongly implied the controlled voice was a façade rather than a genuine artifact.

"Award for the most awkward post-coital remark goes to," Erik grumbled, but started crabbing off the bed, anyway. His stomach was a complete mess, not that Charles was faring much better, and he sure as hell wasn't going to call Mama nude and covered in come. She'd know. Mothers had powers. "We should probably move the cage to another room."

"Good plan."

Luckily for everyone involved, the birds got bored with freedom and when Erik got out of the shower (feeling rather snug in Charles' sweatpants and a hoodie he dimly recalled as having been his once) they were sitting on top of the wreck their habitat was, having a chirpy conversation about the state of human affairs. Erik slowly reshaped the cage around them and lifted the whole structure in the air, following Charles to the drawing room, where they cleared a desk and set the habitat up. As grand finales to torrid love-affairs, it was disappointing. Erik wandered into the kitchen to make a mountain of food, although how he managed with the seventeen varieties of beer and only the most rudimentary edible provisions he didn't know. They ate the food in front of a giant TV in yet another drawing room, sitting on opposite ends of the couch and playing footsie in the middle.

Logan returned from his wild excursion half an hour later with a six-pack of beer and a very upset David, whom he immediately palmed off on Erik, who in turn handed the baby to Charles and proceeded to be very upset himself about the borrowing of cars by unapologetic rabid wolverines. This turned out so-so for him, because while in the end he extracted a promise that his car would remain untouched from then on (to be fair, it was returned without a scratch), he had to extract the promise from Dr. Wolverine.

He didn't call Mama in the end. Instead, he bullied Charles into packing the essentials and David into his car and then he drove three hundred miles to show off his husband (because what were legally binding agreements, seriously, you could get those anywhere) and baby son at his mother's house.

If it was a little weird to show up with an infant to a murder scene during a dark, stormy night, when a bespectacled Colonel Mustard and Reverend Green in a flowery dress had teamed up to take out Mrs. Peabody before she blabbed about the involvement of Miss Scarlet and Mrs. White, with Reverend Green rolling a suspiciously consistent string of nineteens, well, Erik didn't really want to be whatever the opposite of weird was. Even if it meant being cast as Mr. Black Junior, a newlywed, returning from his honeymoon with his suspicious English butler and an infant boy, with no arranged wife in sight.

Mama, as it turned out, in addition to having an impeccable sense of narrative timing and planning plot points in advance, had an infinite supply of forgiveness and maternal love to shower on her grateful sons.

THE END