Chapter Text
XLIII.
The doctors whisper “paralysis” like a foul word around children.
It sends Erik’s blood into a boil as they file in and out of the spacious room, look Charles over, and shake their heads. No, they can’t fix this, they’re very sorry. The surgery required to mend Charles’ spine will only keep the tear from severing it completely, but his legs will never feel again.
Charles will never pace before a class or stroll in on Erik’s shower swinging a tube of slick and grinning. Charles’s icy toes will never press up against Erik’s calves in the middle of the night, his giggles cutting through the darkness between them. He’ll never dance or swim or walk up to a man in an alley with intent to kill.
Charles will never be the man Erik came to love.
Charles will always be broken, a shadow of his former glory.
And that’s enough to bring a prickling of tears to Erik’s eyes. He rests his head on Charles’ bandaged arm and allows himself this moment.
____________________
Charles had awoken only once since his hospitalization. It was on the third day, his surgery over, doctors keeping him for observation. Erik has been dozing in the chair beside the bed when shaky fingers found their way into his hair, startling him awake.
Blue eyes stared placidly at him. He could feel Charles in his head for once, the handling of his telepathy almost clumsy, sluggish. It latched onto the word “paralysed” like a leech, and Charles’ brow was furrowing. The telepath went through Erik’s thoughts, his memories of conversations with the doctors, and something in his eyes quavered.
“Darling?” Charles’ voice trembled.
“Mm?”
“I love you.” His smile was off, but Erik didn’t question it.
“I love you too.”
“Would you fetch me a glass of water?”
“Mmhm.”
Charles squeezed his hand as he left.
When he returned, nurses were running into the room with IV bags and Charles’ bed was surrounded. He could hear Charles screaming, his voice broken in a way Erik had never heard.
“NO! NO! I can’t! You can’t make me live like this!” His cries were punctuated with a sob and Erik’s gut twisted. He slipped into the room, hovering like a ghost as a few male nurses restrained the telepath while the doctor tried to sew up the gaping gashes in Charles’ arms. He could feel Charles’ telepathy crackling in the air like a brewing thunderstorm, ready to lash out. It stopped suddenly.
The nurse withdrew a needle from Charles’ arm and they finished sewing and bandaging him.
Since then, Charles has slept, his arms restrained. The straps on his ankles seem excessive, but the nurse insists they’re necessary.
His face is deceptively peaceful, almost convincing that he’ll wake up and smile in that way he does when he surprises Erik, that he’ll laugh and say his secondary mutation is self-healing, swing his pretty legs over the side of the hospital bed and skip through the building with his lover in thrall.
Erik has taught himself not to dream of such things, forces himself to hold to this.
He squeezes Charles’ limp hand and scratches days’ worth of stubble.
“You must be Erik.”
Erik’s head jerks up, not realizing he’d started to doze.
The woman standing at the door is giving him a cool, assessing look. Out of the corner of his eyes, he could mistake her for a nurse with her all-ivory ensemble. She gives him a thin smirk before clicking to Charles’ other side, touching his cheek and pressing her rouged lips together.
“Who are you?” Erik demands the moment he finds his voice and her icy gaze snaps to him.
“Emma Frost. I’m Charles’ best friend.”
“Oh.” Frost. He’s heard of her somewhere, he knows, a memory he can’t quite grasp waving at him like a corner of paper sticking out of a crack. Charles, he decides, Charles would have mentioned his best friend at some point, wouldn’t he?
“Yes. I came as soon as I heard.”
“How did you . . . hear?”
Emma smiles again, though it’s more a reflexive muscular movement than expression of amusement. “Charles told me.” She taps her temple and he nods slowly. “We’re . . . bonded, you could say. Telepathic sames.”
“Um . . . oh.” Erik nods slowly, looking between Charles and Emma, whose pale blue eyes have moved back to his sleeping face, affection flooding them.
“Show me what happened.”
“No. Look in Charles’ head.”
She sighs and Erik flinches the moment he feels the frigid touch against his mind. He attempts to draw away, to shield himself, which seems to amuse her, and she presses forward until his head begins to throb. It withdraws in a rush and he opens his eyes, not realizing he’d closed them, having to blink several times before being able to comprehend the sight before him.
Charles’ eyes are open and filled with something Erik has never seen there before. His hand is a vice around Emma’s forearm, and her face is contorted in pain. Erik stares between the telepaths for several long, aching minutes before they break apart. Emma shakes herself and Charles smiles slowly, squeezing her arm gently before withdrawing his hand. She sweeps it behind her just as Erik catches sight of a red mark that will likely bruise.
“You’re awake,” Erik murmurs, and Charles deigns to glance at him, blinking slowly, his expression stony. It melts away after a moment and he’s the Charles Xavier that Erik knows and loves. This touch against his mind is soft and familiar, gentle as the kiss of a feather against his consciousness.
“I needed rest,” Charles states simply, smiling sweetly, “it’s been a . . . trying few days, no?” He looks up at Emma and whatever crosses between them is more than telepathy.
“Very. How are you feeling?”
“Sore.” He chuckles and flexes his fingers, looking down at the bandages on his arms, then back at Emma, who’s frowning. “And I can’t feel my legs.”
“Charles, I—”
“I don’t want to hear your apologies, Erik. It won’t do anything. Unless you have the ability to apologize away the damage. Do you?”
“No.”
“Then keep it to yourself.”
Charles’ voice is hard, his eyes hurt, expression guarded. He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair. “Get me out of this hospital before I murder everyone in it, please.”
XLIII.
He sits in silence across from Emma, reading the paper and ignoring her pointed looks. The woman—whose secondary mutation allows her to become a diamond—sighs often and theatrically, but never says anything. Her long, blonde hair is tied up and she’s sporting a pair of silk pajamas from one of the several suitcases lining the wall of their flat.
They both jerk up at the sound of a crash.
Erik loses track of Emma, sight going into tunnel vision. The doors spring open before he can think to command them to do so, the lock on the bathroom door unlatching despite the couple’s silent agreement that a locked door meant alone time was requested.
The shower curtain has been torn down and the water patters against it where it cocoons a motionless Charles. He sees red in the tub and for a moment, assumes the worst. But there is Charles’ mind licking against his. The magnetist makes quick work of pulling the curtain away, tossing it behind him and looking at Charles’ quivering, naked form.
He sees cuts on his pale legs, angry, oozing welts and bruises, like someone had assaulted them with a rusty hacksaw. Charles lifts his head slowly, wet hair dripping in his face, and Erik almost misses the blood over the natural red of the telepath’s lips. But he sees it rolling down his chin, the swollenness of his lower lip.
“Liebling, yo—”
“Erik, get out.” Charles’ voice quavers, and Erik can’t tell if the water on Charles’ face is from the shower or his eyes.
“Your legs—”
“Erik, my love, please.” It cracks on “love” and Erik feels as if he’s staring at a much younger, more vulnerable version of his lover. He reaches out again and Charles flinches away, raising shaky fingers to his temple, and he hears it as surely in his mind as aloud: “GET OUT.”
When he climbs into bed beside Charles later that night, the Englishman is dead silent and there are bloodstained bandages on his fingertips.
XLIV.
They don’t speak, not to one another.
Or, rather, Charles doesn’t speak to Erik. Or anyone for that matter.
Emma Frost spends more time with Charles than Erik would like, and he’s sure they communicate telepathically, but Charles is detached, sullen. His eyes are like an opaque stone whose luster has worn away under the weight of time and a thousand fingers sullying its face. They do not dance or convey distaste, they simply Are, moving about to gaze at whatever he’s set his sights on, but that is all. A grimace etches itself into his features; lips downturned, brow not quite furrowed, but drawn into displeasure, a tightness of expression.
He sits by the window with a blanket wrapped around his dead legs, a cup of long-since cooled tea held loosely in his fingers, a damp spot in his lap, stickiness on his fingers from where it sloshed over when Emma handed it to him. Frost sits across from him, having dragged an armchair over, curled up in her white silk nightie, hair in a bun. They’re still, like a life-sized portrait stripped of its frame.
Emma, beautiful and poised, only disturbing the image with her occasional blinks, or the twitching of her gaze. And then Charles, drawn into himself and wan, shadows circling his eyes.
The wheelchair suits him ill. Erik knows this is no longer his Charles. His Charles who is made for Life. Life and kinesthetic action; for dancing in the kitchen and grinding his hips against Erik’s in the showers after a midnight swim. The chair is too large, too impersonal a contraption, and certainly uncomfortable, and Charles is chained to and by it, his iridescent wings clipped and a shackle slipped beneath his skin, melded to his bones.
The still-life is interrupted as Charles glances up, and Erik feels, once again, as if he has stepped into another life, some other Erik’s universe, one who made only poor decisions. This cannot be the same Charles he met in the pool, the man who had radiated impudence and pleasantry like a sun.
A bone-deep sorrow steals over Charles’ expression and his eyes flick back to his lap. Emma glances up, sighs, shakes her head.
“I . . .” Erik frowns, tries to coax Charles into looking at him, reaches a tentative hand forward. It is rejected with a shrug and the telepath rolls his shoulders as if still attempting to shake off a pesky fly. “Charles.”
Their eyes meet and something cracks.
“Is this how it’s gonna be, huh?” Erik explodes first, his denied hand curling into a fist. “That bullet might as well’ve killed you for all you do now, Charles. It was an accident, you don’t think I feel fucked up over this?! What do you want, Charles? Tell me.”
Charles blinks once, twice, scratches his wrist and looks up finally, expression hard and cold. “I want you my bloody legs back, Erik! I don’t want to be a useless invalid! This isn’t a world kind to cripples, this life of mine isn’t made for one! I’m broken and there’s nothing that can be done to fix it! No mutants with healing powers or time-traveling abilities to fix this! You’re right, perhaps that bullet should have killed me.”
Erik doesn’t mean to hit Charles. The telepath’s words hang between them, churlish and ugly, and before he or Charles can stop it, Erik’s fist is connecting with his lover’s face. The teacup falls from Charles’ hands and shatters on the floor, leaving a frigid silence in its wake.
Emma is completely still, her expression frozen in shock. Erik steps back immediately, uncurling his fisted hand and staring at Charles in horror. For his part, Charles is tense, a hand cradling his cheek, turmoil swirling through cerulean, utterly crushed. In that moment, Erik sees a small child in place of the man he’s shared a life with all these months. Charles is an unfamiliar little boy with hopeless blue eyes quickly filling with tears.
The image flickers and fades and Charles is staring directly at him, bruise blooming on his cheek, eye swelling.
“You need to not be here right now.”
“Charles—”
“You need to not be here right now. You need to not be here right now.”
His voice is mechanical, like an audio recording with only those words to regurgitate until the end of time. All too suddenly, Erik is reminded that Emma is there when her diamond hands fall on his biceps and the woman is steering him toward the door.
“Get out of here, Erik,” she says softly. “Don’t come back for a few days if you like your mind the way it is.” The hall is too bright, the lights refracting off her facets. She stares him in the eye, shakes her head, and slams the door shut.