Chapter Text
Charles Xavier was popularly described in the following ways: CEO of Xavier Pharmaceuticals, billionaire and one of the richest men in America (Forbes), endlessly polite and ridiculously charming (testaments of various women and the occasional man in half a dozen gossip rags), holder of three PhDs (one from Harvard, two from Oxford), heralded genius (The New York Times), most eligible bachelor of 2013 (People) and possessor of a dazzling smile that ranked third on a Top Ten list (also People).
Erik Lehnsherr described him in the following way: the most maddening, arrogant, ignorant asshole Erik had ever had the displeasure of knowing.
Said maddening, arrogant, ignorant asshole was, at the moment, using a strip of beef jerky to tempt a kitten out from under the carriage of a blindingly neon-yellow Volkswagen. Charles was lying on his stomach on the sidewalk, his arm thrust underneath the car as he cooed softly at the kitten. Erik stood in bored irritation behind him, wishing he would just get up and stop making a scene. Already, three people had stopped to ask if they could help, turning away only when Erik glared hard at them. And now two young girls were starting to drift curiously toward them from across the street. Erik glared at them, too, knowing that if they got anywhere near, Charles would attempt to flirt with them, even lying on the ground, even with half his body stuck under a car. Charles flirting, Erik had learned within the first day of tailing his charge around, was nothing short of an exercise in secondhand embarrassment and exasperation, and was to be studiously avoided if at all possible.
“Come here,” Charles said soothingly as he wiggled further underneath the car, his voice a full pitch higher than it usually was. He used this voice often on strays. He’d tried using it once on Erik, who had favored him such a glower that they had never mentioned it again. “Come here, I won’t hurt you. Look, I’ve even got food. Shh, it’s all right. You’re safe. Come on now, come out from under there.”
“Charles,” Erik said, letting the annoyance bleed into his voice. “We’re going to be late.”
“Oh, hush,” Charles replied without looking up. “I’m the CEO. They can’t start without me.”
Spoiled brat, Erik thought, making the thought sharp and pointed enough that any average telepath could have picked it up. But Charles was a weak telepath, not good for much more than reading base emotions and general moods, so Erik wasn’t afraid of him noticing any unspoken words. It gave Erik free-rein with his mind at least; he’d have never taken the job if it had put his mental privacy in jeopardy, even if Fury had threatened to cut off his access to SHIELD resources.
After another couple of minutes, Charles succeeded in coaxing the kitten out to where he could reach it. With a triumphant cry, he slowly pulled the animal out by the scruff of its neck and sat up, clutching it to his chest and cooing wordlessly.
“Oh, look at you, poor thing,” Charles murmured, petting its tiny head with one finger. “You’re shaking. How long have you been under there? And you’re filthy, too.”
The kitten let out a tiny squeak, and Charles grinned delightedly, his eyes wide and bright. Erik was starting to realize that Charles got excited over the smallest things. In this case, literally.
“Where’s your mama, hmm? Are you hungry?”
Erik watched as Charles waved the piece of beef jerky in front of the kitten’s nose. “Already late,” he said, glancing impatiently at his watch. “And that thing is going to choke.”
Charles frowned. “You’re right. This kitten’s probably too young for solid food. Milk, do you think?”
Erik tapped his watch pointedly. “Late.”
“We can spare a minute to get some milk somewhere,” Charles said dismissively, climbing to his feet. The kitten squirmed in his arms, and he hushed it with soothing rubs pats along its narrow back. “A lot of good you were, by the way. You could’ve lifted that car to help.”
“I’m a SHIELD consultant assigned to protect you,” Erik growled. “Not to help you play animal control.”
Charles snorted. ‘“SHIELD consultant.’ You just like saying that.”
Erik, in fact, did not. He’d have much preferred to deny any and all affiliation with both SHIELD and any other government agency. He’d worked alone for years before Fury had found him, and if it were up to him, he’d still be working alone now. At least then he wouldn’t have to take orders from Fury, that snide, one-eyed bastard. But hunting Sebastian Shaw was more than a one-man operation. SHIELD had resources he needed, and that was the only reason why he was here now, babysitting a billionaire with a bleeding heart.
At least he wasn’t babysitting Stark, he told himself, which was a mercy in and of itself. He would rather terminate his entire alliance with SHIELD, effective immediately, and eat several bullets than be required to keep Stark company for longer than fifteen minutes. And that was putting it mildly.
That was one good thing about Charles, he figured. He wasn’t prone to flying off at a moment’s notice, determined to kill himself in that tin can Stark called his Iron Man suit.
He was, however, prone to a) nursing an ego that rivaled Stark’s, b) launching into interminable science lectures using terminology that made Erik’s eyes go blank, and c) forever getting distracted by one novelty or another, all of which pissed Erik off. And he was careless, too, which Erik loathed to no end. He himself was fastidious with his appearance, his actions, his time. People who didn’t dress neatly and were piss-poor at time management drove him insane. Charles Xavier was guilty of both.
Good things, he thought to himself as Charles headed at last for the car. Just think of the good things.
He’d taken to making a list of Charles’ redeemable qualities to calm himself down before he seriously considered socking the telepath in the face. Thus far, he had come up with the following:
One: Charles Xavier was a mutant. Caveat: He had only a weak mutation, and his involvement in Xavier Pharmaceuticals meant, in Erik’s humble opinion, that his status as part of the mutant community should be permanently revoked.
Two: Charles Xavier was polite and, by all accounts, actually very friendly. Caveat: Erik was sure it was a result of his wealthy upbringing and likely served as a mask for his vices, a sort of defense mechanism so people wouldn’t look closely enough to see the haughty snob within.
Three: Charles Xavier had blue eyes that were like looking into a very calm, very deep ocean. Caveat: They were too fucking blue and too fucking distracting.
When the caveats outweighed the main points, Erik would consider Charles a lost cause. For now, those three redeemable qualities seemed to be holding their own.
He mentally added another one: Charles Xavier looked absurdly adorable holding kittens. Caveat:
Well. He’d figure that one out later.
They climbed into the car, Charles in the passenger seat, Erik driving as always. Charles had tried to fight him for the keys once when they had first met, a struggle that had ended with him securely tied up in the backseat with the seatbelts. Erik was, at heart, an impatient man; he didn’t have time to take anyone’s shit, and certainly not a spoiled billionaire’s. Charles had complained about the treatment the entire drive, but at least he hadn’t asked for the keys again after that, though he occasionally looked vaguely displeased whenever Erik pushed him toward the passenger door. The looks he shot Erik—disgruntled, slightly hurt—made Erik feel the tiniest bit guilty over insisting to drive. But Charles didn’t understand Erik’s inherent fear of cars—ironic, really, given his mutation. And he would never understand anyway, because it was no one’s business but Erik’s, and he hadn’t told anyone since he’d been sixteen, on that early May morning in bed when Magda had asked him where he had gotten his scars.
Charles glanced over at him, and Erik shut away those thoughts with practiced ease. He focused instead on the green digits on the car’s dashboard clock. “You’re seventeen minutes late already.”
“They’ll have milk in the lounge, won’t they?” Charles asked absently, petting the kitten’s spine, from the base of its neck to the end of its tail. “For coffee and the like.”
Erik resisted the urge to snap at him. He was just so frivolous all the time—so concerned now over a fucking kitten when the world was filled with problems so much bigger—that it was difficult not to punch him in an effort to knock some sense into his silly head. Erik gritted his teeth and said, “Give the thing to your secretary and tell her to take it to the pound.”
“The pound?” Charles sounded appalled. “No, no. We’ll take him to the vet, get him checked out.”
“And then?”
“And then…”
He trailed off. When Erik looked over, Charles was gazing silently down at the ball of fur in his hands. The kitten was currently leaving tiny, dirty paw prints all over Charles’ white dress shirt, but Charles was grinning, his smile soft in a way that, somehow, inexplicably, made Erik’s irritation subside the smallest bit.
No. He was not allowed to find Charles attractive. He refused to even think anything remotely flattering about a man who was continuing his father’s work in helping to oppress mutantkind, one dose of suppressant at a time. That thought chased away any burgeoning seeds of goodwill in Erik’s mind and reaffixed the scowl on his face, which remained for the duration of the drive.
When they arrived at the headquarters of the New York branch of Xavier Pharmaceuticals, Charles ignored the curious stares and stepped into the first empty elevator in the lobby. Erik got in after him and eyed the kitten, which was now gnawing on the tip of Charles’ index finger.
“Would you do me a favor and hurry the elevator up a little?” Charles asked, flashing Erik an engaging smile as he hit the button for the thirty-first floor. “Seeing as how I’m—” He checked his watch. “—thirty-six minutes late now.”
Erik crossed his arms. If he were a dog, he might have bared his teeth in annoyance. Last he checked, he wasn’t a dog, but he curled up his lip, baring his teeth anyway. “You got yourself into this, Mr. Xavier,” he said evenly. “You can deal with the consequences of your actions just like everybody else.”
Charles huffed. ‘“Mr. Xavier.’ Always with the Mr. Xavier. You do love trying to get a rise out of me, don’t you? For one thing, it’s Dr. Xavier, thank you. For another, I’ve told you a thousand times to call me Charles, or else I’ll call up Director Fury and tell him that if he must assign me a bodyguard, let it at least be someone who will consent to drop the formalities.”
“I’m not a bodyguard,” Erik said stiffly. “I’m here to ensure your personal safety.”
Charles grinned cheerily. “Sounds like a bodyguard to me.”
Erik pointedly decided to ignore him. There were two reliable ways to end an argument with Charles: admit Charles was right or pretend there was no argument at all. The first option was unacceptable, seeing as how the word capitulate had failed to make it into Erik’s vocabulary. The second option, while grating in its own right, was at least something Erik could live with. He glared at the button panel on the wall and tugged ever-so-slightly on the elevator cables, rushing the ride. He wasn’t doing Charles a favor, he told himself. He was cutting short the time he had to spend in a confined space with Charles and that damnable kitten, which was now perched precariously on Charles’ shoulder and giving Erik a wide, yellow-eyed, innocent look. Erik glowered at it until it squeaked and wobbled on ungainly legs safely back down into Charles’ arms. Good. At least someone in this elevator recognized how dangerous Erik could be when tested.
Erik yanked the doors open almost before they reached their floor. Charles stepped out, his pace leisurely even now, when he was forty minutes late. Instead of heading straight for the scheduled conference room, Charles detoured to the nearest lounge, where a small, stout woman was sleepily pouring coffee into a mug by the counter.
“Good morning, Doris,” Charles said pleasantly. “How are you?”
Doris was a middle-aged, weary-eyed woman with a ring on her finger who looked as if she might actually kill whoever interrupted her before she took her first cup of coffee. Still, she blushed noticeably when she spotted Charles standing beside her, and her dully murderous expression eased into something less threatening and more starstruck.
“Dr. X—Xavier,” she stammered, her eyes darting everywhere but his face. “I don’t think we’ve ever—we’ve—”
“Met?” Charles finished, smiling brightly at her. He rummaged around with his free hand in the cabinets overhead, presumably in search of a saucer. “No, I don’t believe we have. But I do try to look over employee records regularly—get to know my own company and all that—and I recognized your name and face. How do you do?”
Doris’s blush deepened and she stuttered her way through a handful of pleasantries while Charles chattered charmingly on, and Erik had to wonder for about the fifty-third time in the last two weeks if Charles was actually Cupid, or some form of some god of love and friendship because the ease with which he dealt with people and the ease with which people fell in love with him was actually maddening, to the degree that Erik was beginning to realize that the only way to stop people from throwing themselves at Charles was to lock him up in a padded room with no windows and no Internet and no goddamn kittens.
(The kitten was squirming in Charles’ hands now. Erik glared at it as it twisted around to look at him. This time, it lifted its lip just slightly, just enough to show one sharp, tiny tooth. All right, so it had backbone. After a moment of consideration, Erik gave it a nod of grudging respect.)
Doris cooed over the kitten. Doris did not look like a woman given to cooing, so Erik noted with exasperation Incident No. 31 in which Charles’ mere presence inspired out-of-character behavior. Incident No. 1 had been Erik’s inexplicable decision to keep on the job, even after meeting Charles and being determined to hate him. Incident No. 16 was memorable in that Charles had somehow convinced Erik to help him ferry a family of ducks safely across a busy New York street. Erik did not help ducks. Carrying small baby animals to safety was out of the purview of a feared, occasionally government-sanctioned assassin and on-and-off SHIELD consultant. And yet he’d done it, and to this moment, he had no idea why.
(That was a lie: he had some idea why. Blue eyes was why.)
Together, Doris and Charles hunted down a small white saucer and half a gallon of two-percent milk in the refrigerator. Charles set the kitten down on the floor, where it stumbled a moment before righting itself. Then he poured a bit of milk in to fill the saucer halfway and placed it carefully in reach of the kitten, who was sniffing the air, its whiskers twitching wildly. It took a couple of staggering steps toward the saucer and then nearly face-planted before steadying itself and cautiously flicking out its tiny pink tongue.
“It’s so adorable,” Doris said, crouching on one side of the saucer as the kitten began to lap up the milk in rapid, sloppy licks.
Kneeling on the other side, Charles beamed happily. “Isn’t he? He doesn’t have any identification either. We’re going to have to call him something.”
“He’s not yours?” Doris asked in surprise.
“Oh no. I found him under a car this morning. Poor thing was all alone.”
Charles ran one finger down the thin line of the kitten’s back. Erik resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He cleared his throat instead and tapped the face of his watch when Charles looked up.
Charles heaved a sigh. “Are you my bodyguard or my nanny? Because you are bordering on nanny territory right now, what with the nagging and the—”
“Excuse us,” Erik said curtly to Doris as he reached down to yank Charles to his feet by his arm. Charles, for all his slender build, was surprisingly heavy and resisted valiantly. Erik hauled him up, valiance aside, and then ignored Charles’ pout, which took an effort because Charles had the sort of pout that no grown man should be able to pull off without looking absurd, except Charles managed to only looked piteous.
“You’re leaving?” Doris said, staring up at them—well, at Charles. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him since he’d said hello. It was that way Charles had of—of being horribly alluring, to the point that it was somehow ridiculously difficult to look away. Erik could sympathize. He was seventy-five percent sure that it was a secondary mutation of Charles’, because nothing else could explain it.
“He has a meeting,” Erik said.
Charles leveled a stern look at him. “Don’t be snippy.”
“I’m not being snippy.”
“He’s jealous,” Charles told Doris. “He always gets like this when I talk to other people, particularly women.”
“I’m not—” Erik felt his cheeks heat. Fuck. What the fuck. He never blushed, and he never got jealous.
He wondered, very briefly, if he should count this as Incident No. 32, or as 32 and 33, separately.
“You’re late,” he said, moderating his tone and smoothing over his expression. Deep breath. One, two, repeat. Charles, Erik thought, should be regularly thanking the yoga class Erik had been coerced into taking when he’d been seventeen; breathing techniques had thus far been the only thing saving one insufferable billionaire from becoming a very dead insufferable billionaire. “Very late. I don’t want to have to deal with MacTaggert, that’s all.”
Charles laughed. “My big bad SHIELD agent is afraid of my secretary. Come now, Erik, she’s not that bad.”
Erik wasn’t sure which part of that sentence to address first: the fact that he wasn’t Charles’ anything (though some part of him seemed to tingle at the possessive, but he thought that it was more likely that that was the beginnings of a stomachache from the one-day-expired cream cheese he’d had this morning), or the fact that Moira MacTaggert cut letters open like she was cutting throats and was most definitely that bad.
Before he could say anything to either, Charles’ phone began to ring. It was that abominable laffy taffy song again. Erik resisted the urge to crush the phone with a flick of his fingers. If anything was going to break him, he told himself, it wasn’t going to be a fucking ringtone.
Girl shake that laffy taffy
That laffy taffy
Shake that laffy taffy
That laffy taffy
All right. So he wasn’t ruling out the ringtone just yet.
Charles patted his pockets. “Left front,” Erik bit out. Charles fished out his phone and flashed Erik a grateful grin that promptly fell off when he saw the name on the screen. Erik leaned over his shoulder and laughed darkly. “The big bad CEO is afraid of his own secretary. Come now, Charles, she’s not that bad.”
“Oh, shut up,” Charles muttered, visibly steeling himself before hitting “accept.” “Hello?”
There was a long pause in which MacTaggert was, Erik assumed, expressing her disappointment in that perfectly even, perfectly calm voice of hers that somehow still painted a vivid picture of her impending wrath. Erik had been subject to that voice only once in the last two weeks. It had made an impression.
Charles winced. “But there was a kitten...” he began, and then it all went downhill from there, more of a downward leap off a cliff than a downward spiral, and when the perfectly-calm yelling was done, Charles hung up shamefacedly and gave Doris a sheepish smile. “I’m so very sorry to dump this on you, Doris, but would you mind terribly watching over Patches here? I’ve got to run.”
She shot him a quizzical look. “Patches?”
“Look, he’s got patches of color all over him. It’s perfect.” He bent over to pet the newly-christened kitten on the head. “Just for a little while, all right? I’ll be by to pick him up at the end of the day at the very latest, I promise. Or I’ll send Erik.”
“I’m not a kitten courier,” Erik growled.
“He’s not a kitten courier,” Charles informed Doris solemnly, “but last week he carried ducklings across the street. Make of that what you will.”
Doris turned that adoring, fellow-animal-lover grin on Erik, who glowered at her until her grin withered and she averted her eyes uncomfortably. “I’ll just take Patches back to my office then...”
Charles smiled blindingly. “Excellent. Very nice to meet you, and I’m very late now. Have a wonderful day, love.”
He took Erik’s elbow and whisked him out of the lounge.
‘“Have a wonderful day, love,’” Erik mocked as they power-walked down the hall.
“You know, I’d stop accusing you of being jealous all the time if you stopped being jealous,” Charles remarked, sounding terribly amused.
“I’m not jealous,” Erik snapped. “It’s hard to get jealous over a man you hate.”
Charles missed a step. Erik kept walking for a handful of seconds before he realized Charles had stopped. When he looked back, Charles was regarding him with something very nearly hurt in his eyes.
“Oh,” he said.
“Fuck,” Erik said, equally eloquent. Charles sounded genuinely wounded. “I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” Charles interrupted. “Come on, I’m late.”
“Charles—”
But Charles brushed past him without pausing again, and Erik followed him into the conference room feeling vaguely guilty. He tallied that as Incident No. 34 because before he’d met Charles Xavier, guilt had been an alien concept to him. But he was feeling guilty now, especially when Charles took his seat and listened to MacTaggert’s hissed scolding without protest, offering such listless excuses that even MacTaggert stopped to ask if he were deathly ill. Charles replied that he was sulking, and fucking hell, Erik had caused him to sulk, and could he go to prison for that because anything that put that injured look in Charles Xavier’s eyes deserved three to five without possibility of parole. Erik wondered if it were possible to arrest yourself.
Before he could follow that line of thought to its conclusion, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Glad for the distraction, he stood up and silently left the room, pointedly ignoring the way Charles was pointedly ignoring him.
One look at the caller ID made him consider dropping his phone down a toilet and pretending he’d broken it. But it was waterproof; all SHIELD-issued tech was, courtesy of Stark, the bastard.
Besides, he reminded himself, the call might come with new orders. He might finally be free from his glorified babysitting duties and on to more important things—namely, hunting Sebastian Shaw off the face of the planet. Resuming his decade-old quest would be the best outcome of this phone call; escaping Charles Xavier before the Incidents began to seriously stack up and before he, God forbid, became some sort of baby animal ferry would be a very welcome bonus.
Once he was out of earshot of the meeting, he hit “accept.” “Fury.”
“Lehnsherr,” came a deep, bored-sounding voice. Fury always sounded heavily ironic and about three seconds away from being done with all this shit. He had a knack for it.
“Tell me you have a new lead for me to follow,” Erik said, pulling a coin out of his pocket and beginning to weave it through the cracks of his outspread fingers. He had first started this habit as a child, with an old shekel coin that his father had given him. He had loved that old coin dearly, had carried it with him everywhere from age four to age eight, when he’d lost it in an old sewer while tussling with another boy from school who had called him a freak. He’d been inconsolable when he’d gotten home and discovered that his coin was no longer in his pocket where it had always been for as long as he could remember. It wasn’t until his mother had soothed him with kisses and handed him a new shekel that he’d calmed down, and then he’d gone on to love that new coin just as fiercely as he’d loved the old one.
The new shekel, which was now dull and smoothed over with age, was currently sitting on his living room mantel, too precious to be taken about and risked. In recent years, he’d taken to floating around any old change he picked up. Today’s coin of choice was a Canadian nickel, chipped at the edges and a bit weathered. He liked this coin, if only because Steve Rogers always looked askance at him whenever he whipped it out, as if confused at the very idea of something not American.
“I have something new for you,” Fury confirmed, “but I seriously doubt you’re going to like it.”
This was how approximately 98% of their conversations began. Erik braced himself. “What is it?”
“The X-Men. You know them.”
“Of course,” said Erik. Who didn’t? The vigilante group had sprung up sometime within the last three or four years, starting with small raids on a handful of privately-owned research laboratories that were conducting illegal mutant experiments. The X-Men had, in quick succession within the first year, shut down eleven such facilities, and the remarkable and baffling thing about each occasion was that there were never any casualties. Local law enforcement was always tipped anonymously after the fact, and when they arrived, all they ever found were human scientists neatly bound with zip ties, unconscious but uninjured, and all evidence of illegal activity displayed in plain view. Any and all imprisoned mutants were always gone from various holding cells and cages, suspected to be taken by the X-Men. There were reports of missing mutants returned to their homes, as well as media interviews with survivors that were almost actively suppressed by human-based newspapers but widely published on the Internet, which was nearly impossible to censor.
The X-Men were vigilantes, to be sure, and condemned by the government, but they had raised awareness by exposing the illegal labs in the first place, something the human government had, some suspected, turned a blind eye to. Erik approved of them for that. They were doing mutantkind good by deconstructing the human regime, one facility at a time. And they were doing it while earning public goodwill, too; even the human public drew the line at experimenting on children, and the last time the polls had gone out, the X-Men had had an approval rating of 54%, mutants and humans both. They were something of Robin Hoods, Erik thought. Nationally-celebrated rogues.
“What about them?” he asked Fury now. SHIELD kept an eye on the X-Men, he was sure of it. Fury liked to keep abreast of every little thing going on in the nation, and the X-Men situation was hardly a little thing. Erik wondered how much Fury knew about them. The X-Men had been notoriously secretive all this time, and even today, years after their first appearance, no one had any photographs or sketches of anything clearer than a blue and yellow blur, which was probably a suit of some sort and probably should have made it ridiculously easy to spot them but—well. Clearly not.
“They,” Fury said, rolling the word along his tongue slowly, “are dangerous. Or at least they’ve been deemed dangerous.”
Erik watched the nickel circle his ring finger, then his middle finger. “By who?”
“By people whose paychecks are bigger than mine and who regularly play golf with the president,” Fury replied dryly. “Now the X-Men aren’t all bad. Public opinion’s even on their side, for the most part. But they’re dangerous because they don’t answer to anybody, and that makes certain people in our government uneasy, understand?”
Erik suppressed a snort. He’d known since the beginning that the presence of mysterious vigilantes running around the country striking at random would make the government very uncomfortable. To be honest, he was surprised the X-Men had gone this long without being flagged as a serious threat rather than merely a passing curiosity.
“So what are they going to do about it?” Erik asked.
“They want the leader. They want Professor X.”
Erik caught the coin in his hand and straightened minutely. “What? Kill him?”
“No, Lehnsherr,” Fury said, sounding very faintly exasperated. “Not every problem can be solved by slitting its throat.”
“I don’t slit throats,” Erik answered evenly. Too messy. He preferred bullets to the head. Simple, efficient, clean. Although he had made a notable exception with one of Shaw’s old cohorts in Venice in August of last year. Erik remembered that face vividly. It had belonged to the man who had held his mother’s arms back as Shaw had killed her, just by putting one finger to her head and pushing back and back until her neck had snapped. Erik had made sure that man had suffered, just as he would make sure Shaw would suffer, in the end.
“I’m well aware,” Fury said, and he probably was. Erik knew SHIELD had a file on him, just like they had a file on Natasha Romanoff and on any other person of interest who had even the remotest tie to the United States and, occasionally, foreign affairs. He’d snuck in and peeked through his file once, when he’d first started to work with Fury. It had been impressive, the information they’d had on him. Erik had ripped a couple of choice pages out, just to keep them on their toes. To this day, he wasn’t sure of Fury or his cronies had ever noticed, or even cared.
“No,” Fury said again. “They want Professor X found and brought in, peaceably if possible. They want to speak to him. Figure out his intentions. Once they’ve got that, they’ll decide on a further course of action. But we don’t worry about that. We worry about the first part. Or, should I say, you worry.”
Erik bit back an irritated sigh and attempted to moderate his tone. It took an admirable effort. “When I came to work with SHIELD,” he said, “you promised me the use of your resources to hunt Sebastian Shaw. It’s been nearly three months since the last lead, and you haven’t given me any time or information to go after him since. Instead, you’ve been sending me off on your little missions, like I’m one of your obedient pet Avengers. I’m here because I want to be, Fury, because our alliance has benefitted me so far.” He clenched his fist, feeling the grooved edges of the coin digging into his palm. “Let me remind you that as soon as that ceases to be true, I’ll be gone.”
Fury was, as always, unfazed. A bomb going off in his face would’ve elicited the same reaction as listening to someone sneezing three rooms away. Erik had seen it happen. ‘“Obedient pet Avengers,”’ he repeated, his voice laden with sarcasm. “I don’t know where you got that idea, Lehnsherr.”
“Steve Rogers,” Erik threw in, because really, the man was the human incarnation of a golden retriever, eager to please, always friendly, always bouncing on his toes, anxious to be of some use.
Fury paused. “All right, you have something of a point there. But that’s one. Do I even need to mention Stark?”
No. Stark never needed to be mentioned, ever. Speaking Tony Stark’s name was like invoking a curse; when it was uttered aloud, Tony Stark himself would inevitably follow. Erik knew this from experience. He avoided the T-word or the S-word with every ounce of his determination.
“So,” he said, steering the conversation away from billionaires who dressed themselves up in a bucket of metal and proceeded to fly around harassing people and calling it heroism, “you want me to find Professor X.”
“That’s right. You’re a mutant, and that will, hopefully, give you a tactical advantage. Trusting those similar to you and all that. Furthermore, you’ve cultivated a resource that I want you to use.”
Erik leaned against the wall. He’d fucking carried ducks across the street last week. Unless those ducks were secret agents equipped with some marvelous shrinking and morphing technology, he doubted he’d been cultivating much of anything, except maybe a migraine.
When he said as much, he could almost hear Fury rolling his eyes heavenward. “Charles Xavier. I’m talking about Charles Xavier.”
Erik’s spine automatically straightened. Funny how that happened, he thought, a bit annoyed at how his focus seemed to sharpen at the mere mention of Charles’ name. “What?”
“You know Xavier’s one of our best assets on mutant affairs. He’s a damn good consultant with plenty of ties to the mutant community. I sent you to him to protect him as a SHIELD asset. Now I’m telling you to use him as an asset. He knows mutants. He’s got his fingers in all the pies. Get him to tell you as much as he knows about the X-Men. Start from there.”
“He’s your asset,” Erik pointed out, in a bid to extract himself from Charles’ presence as soon as possible. “You ask him.”
Fury sighed that sigh that said everyone was an idiot and he was getting very tired of having to explain things that should have been obvious but usually weren’t, at least not to anyone who didn’t have an eye-patch and who wasn’t the director of SHIELD. “Xavier is pro-mutant. Obviously. As such, he might be reluctant to tell us humans information that might bring down Professor X, a mutant who’s championing a cause that quite a few mutants seem to be getting behind. I happen to have exactly one mutant asset to play now, and that’s you. Am I making myself clear?”
Erik sighed and resigned himself to more days of digging small animals out from gutters and probably having his hard-won, fearsome reputation torn down around his feet. “Fine,” he bit out. “I’ll talk to him. No promises.”
“Good. Then—”
“In return,” he continued, “when this is over, I want everything you have on Shaw. No more games, Fury. You said I could use all SHIELD resources when I agreed to become your asset, and I intend to collect. Am I making myself clear?”
Fury was silent for a long moment. Erik knew that Nick Fury was a man adept at forcing people to agree with him and, failing that, bulldozing over the dissenters to get what he wanted. Fury was a force of nature that lived up to his name, rock-solid, implacable. One way or another, whether through cajoling or threatening, Nick Fury achieved his goals. Defeat was unthinkable.
Erik was much the same way. That was the only joy of working with Fury: knowing that at any moment, he could choose to walk away, and there would be nothing Nick Fury could do to stop him. Fury knew it, categorically refused to acknowledge it, and yet avoided pushing Erik beyond the limits of his tolerance all the same. Having that sort of power over a man who prided himself on holding all the keys was immensely satisfying, and God only knew that Erik had had so little satisfaction in his life. He couldn’t be blamed for basking in his autonomy and taking the opportunity to remind Fury of it whenever he saw fit, which was often.
“Fair enough,” Fury said, a thinly-veiled edge of displeasure in his voice. “Bring in Professor X, and we’ll talk.”
“Bring in Professor X, and I get what I want,” Erik corrected. “Access to everything scrap of information you have on Sebastian Shaw and any of his affiliated Brotherhood. All of it.”
There was a pause. Then, because SHIELD needed Erik more than Erik needed SHIELD and because they both knew it very well, Fury acquiesced. “Fine. Sebastian Shaw’s files for Professor X.”
“Pleasure doing business,” Erik said. Without waiting for a reply, he ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket, dropping the nickel in beside it.
When he returned to the conference room, the meeting was over. People were packing up, snagging last-minute pastries and coffee from the center of the long table before they headed out on their separate ways. The distinctive feel of Charles’ watch and tie bar was nowhere to be found.
Erik crossed over to Moira MacTaggert, who had a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a pile of papers in the other. She smiled as he approached, which he regarded warily. Moira MacTaggert was given to smiling, just as Charles was. The problem was, when Charles smiled, it was like a little burst of sunlight, bright and genuine and irritatingly joyful. MacTaggert smiled like she had an agenda.
“Good morning, Mr. Lehnsherr,” she greeted. “Can I help you with something?”
She never called him agent, probably because he wasn’t really an agent, just an independent contractor whose services Fury liked to abuse with abandon. Normally, no one ever made that distinction, even when he routinely introduced himself as Erik Lehnsherr, SHIELD consultant. But MacTaggert did, for some inexplicable reason. He was usually pleased when his affiliation with SHIELD went unmentioned, but with MacTaggert, it always felt as if she were omitting the agent with the very specific purpose of undermining any authority he claimed to have.
Suffice it to say, there was little love lost between the two of them. No love, if Erik were being perfectly frank.
“Where’s Charles?” he asked, glancing past her smile to scan the room again. “He was just here.”
“He went out,” she replied. “Had an errand to run. Probably couldn’t wait for you.”
Her tone made it clear that she thought he was doing a poor job of playing bodyguard. For once, Erik halfway agreed with her. Heading back out of the conference room, he pulled out his phone again and dialed Charles’ personal cell number, which he’d programmed in the day he met Charles, for safety precautions’ sake. He’d only used the number a handful of times, just to coordinate meet-ups in the morning so that Erik could escort Charles from his home to work. The line rang seven times before going to Charles’ pre-recorded message: “You have reached Charles Xavier. I can’t answer your call right now, so do me a favor and leave a message if it’s urgent so I know why I need to get back to you. Thank you.”
Erik waited until the tone sounded before growling, “You’re not supposed to be out of my sight without giving me advance notice, Charles. That was our arrangement. Call me back when you get this.”
He sent Charles a text for good measure and then went to check the lounge. It was empty, the empty saucer in the sink the only sign that Charles had been there. Then he went to find Doris, who had probably been Charles’ next stop before leaving. Charles had promised, after all, to come by for the kitten later, and from what Erik had seen so far, Charles made it a point of pride to keep to his word.
Finding the office in question turned out to be more frustrating and difficult than Erik ever believed possible. He had once hunted down one man in all the winding streets of Rio de Janeiro with singular ease, but he couldn’t figure out the fucking office system of this building and it pissed him off. By the time he’d located Doris’s office, he was panting, tightly-wound, and maybe a little wild-eyed with impatience because when he yanked the glass door open with nearly enough force to shatter the pane, Doris took one look at him and squeaked, “I don’t know anything!”
He demanded anyway, “Was Char—Dr. Xavier here? Where did he go?”
“Like I said, I don’t know anything!” Her hand inched toward the phone. He was almost certain she was going to try to dial the police if he lingered, so he slammed the door shut again and stalked off down the hall.
When he reached the assigned parking spot labeled C. XAVIER in the parking garage, the car was still there, with no sign of Charles anywhere.
Fuck, Erik thought blackly. He didn’t lose people, and certainly not spoiled, bright-eyed CEOs with more money than sense and an infuriating soft spot for animals. He’d been doing a stellar job of keeping Charles in line so far, too. As far as charges went, Charles was—and Erik hated to associate this word with Charles Xavier, but there was no way around it—excellent. He was polite, listened reasonably well, and kept to a fairly predictable schedule. If only he weren’t insufferably pro-human, Erik might have even liked him. Just the tiniest bit.
But Charles had broken from the schedule now. He was supposed to be in his office working until lunchtime, but Erik had checked the office twice on his horribly convoluted path to Doris’s, and it had been empty. He still wasn’t answering his phone either.
Well, Erik thought sourly, fuck.
He was going to find Charles, and then he was going to kill him.
*
Charles was, at the moment, sipping a truly wonderful cup of Earl Grey at a delightful little store two blocks down, Fifty Shades of Grey propped up on the table in front of him. He was idly thumbing through the pages, alternating between amused horror and just horror. His reading choice was drawing stares from the other patrons. A few of them were very obviously scandalized. A few others made no attempt to hide their interest, shooting him lascivious glances that barely ruffled him. Their surface thoughts, however—he had to make an effort not to flush. He hadn’t realized what sort of an attractive force lay in publicly reading a bestselling erotic romance novel. Perhaps he should have tried this earlier.
More than one girl stopped by his table to ask if he wanted to share a drink. He declined each one, telling them he was waiting for someone. And he wasn’t lying; he was watching the hands on his watch tick by, counting the minutes. He’d slipped away from the office at 10:15. It was now 10:46. Erik was apparently taking his sweet time catching up. Flipping another page with his free hand, Charles sipped his tea and wondered what sort of name Anastasia Steele was, and how it was that Christian Grey managed to have time enough to send presents and take trips and generally not work when he had a company to run. Charles ran a company, and his sleep patterns were abysmal, the state of his sex life even more so. It would appear that this Christian Grey had trade secrets. Charles figured that it would be worth scanning through the rest of the book to find them.
He was in the middle of Ana’s rapturous orgasm, which sounded mostly painful and only a little bit orgasmic, when the door swung open, and a thundercloud walked in.
Erik’s mind was very distinctive. As per Erik’s request (more a demand, really; Charles had never heard please spoken so imperiously) and Charles’ own boundaries—which had been firmly set by the time he had been thirteen years old, young enough to still be figuring his way around his gift but old enough to understand the need for limits and to create them for himself—Charles had only ever touched the periphery of Erik’s mind. Someone had taught Erik some techniques to ward off telepaths; his mind was guarded against psionics. Trying to touch his thoughts was like peering through a steam-blurred glass: Charles could see vague impressions and make out hazy emotions, but they were indistinct. If he had wanted to, he could have broken through the haze easily, punctured Erik’s defenses without an effort. But Erik would know in an instant if Charles did, and since Charles had unofficially begun to consider their arrangement a friendship, then it was probably not a good idea to violate Erik’s trust, now or ever, if he could manage it.
Sometimes though, a stray thought or feeling would bubble to the surface, pressing up against the fogged pane close enough to become discernible. It was in those moments that Charles gleaned his clearest picture of who Erik Lehnsherr was. And what Erik Lehnsherr was, was a storm: cold and furious and dark as the midnight sky, and as refreshing as a burst of cool rain on a hot day. His mind was a mystery, and Charles loved it, loved its edges and its intrigue and the flashes of something more he could see within, some greater part of Erik’s personality that he kept locked away behind that stoic, perpetually-annoyed SHIELD agent façade. Secrets like that made Charles curious. He wanted to break Erik’s mask and see what sort of man came out then, when all the anger and sarcasm and cynicism was stripped away.
But they’d spent two full weeks together already, nearly 24/7, and he hadn’t even managed to put a crack in Erik’s shields. Charles wasn’t easily puzzled, but Erik—Erik presented the most fascinating challenge Charles had seen in ages. It was all fiercely exciting.
The fiercely exciting thundercloud stopped in the doorway, glowered at the entire room, and then glowered more intensely when his gaze fell on Charles, who was seated at a two-person table against the wall. Erik looked like he might blow a gasket (perhaps literally, given his mutation), or maybe kill someone, which seemed to be his default expression, but there was real intent behind it now. If they hadn’t been in public, Charles was fairly certain Erik would be throttling him at the moment.
Charles met his eyes, smiled cheerily, and waved. That horribly perfect jaw of his clenching, Erik marched stiffly over and stood for a moment behind the chair, his hands clenching angrily at the backrest. Charles watched his fingers flex. Erik had beautiful hands, long and elegant and callused. It was hellishly unfair: Erik was outrageously attractive, and it had actually been quite some time since Charles had any sort of sex, despite his cultivated reputation of being a flirt, a casual lover, and a subscriber to the no-strings-attached type of business. To be perfectly honest, the most action he’d seen in months was with his hand. And now Erik was here—unbearably sexy, stoic, firm-jawed, broodingly handsome—and Charles’ libido was shooting through the roof. Damn the man for being exactly Charles’ type.
He cleared his throat. “Hello. Can I buy you a coffee?”
“Charles,” Erik gritted out through clenched teeth, sounding as if he were making an audible effort not to sound murderous. He ended up sounding like he had swallowed something unfamiliar and was trying to work out how he felt about it. “You are not supposed to leave my sight at any time without my approval. We agreed to this. You’re a genius, don’t tell me you don’t remember the rules.”
The rules. Erik and his rules. He’d come prepared at the very beginning with a list of them. Charles had scanned them over, deemed them excessive, and crossed out the latter third. Erik had fumed over this for a good long while; he was, Charles had gathered very quickly, a man not used to being contradicted. Eventually, they’d agreed upon three main rules that were not to be broken under any circumstances.
Number 1: Charles was to remain with Erik every minute of every day, unless Erik deemed otherwise. Bathroom breaks were to be taken with Erik’s permission beforehand, which Charles found demeaning, as he was capable of taking himself from his office down the hall to the single-person bathroom without getting lost and/or attacked, thank you very much. But the cohabitating wasn’t bad. In fact, it was excellent, providing endless opportunities for Charles to a) study his bodyguard and try to puzzle out his true intentions, as Erik didn’t strike Charles as a man who simply followed orders, which meant that there were ulterior motives at work here that Charles didn’t and needed to understand; and to b) gawk as surreptitiously as he could manage. He was doing much more of the latter than the former, to his chagrin.
Number 2: Weekend excursions had to be cleared by Erik first, which made it nearly impossible to go anywhere fun because Erik deemed nearly everyplace too risky, too crowded, too unfamiliar. Charles pouted. He pouted very well, and it usually worked like a charm, but Erik had some sort of mutation that inured him to all things fluffy and cute (hence the inexplicable hatred of the ducks and the kitten and generally all small living things that had the potential to be described with the word “adorable” or any synonym of it). Charles had thought more than once about taking Erik to a gay bar the first chance he could manage. See if he could loosen Erik up a bit then, no pun intended. Or perhaps intended—Charles wasn’t quite sure what he wanted from Erik yet, though he had a sneaking suspicion that it involved a bed, maybe a candle, and a blowjob or two.
Rule Number 3 was that Charles was to follow any orders Erik gave him, without question, without hesitation. Charles had argued that this was a blanket rule that covered too much. This blanket rule, Erik had argued back stubbornly, might save his life one day. Charles had eventually acquiesced, if only to get Erik to stop looking as if he were contemplating knocking Charles over the head, stashing him behind some drywall, and leaving him to rot. Charles was relatively good at obeying this rule. He did follow most of the orders Erik gave him. It was the ‘without question’ part that tripped him up from time to time, much to Erik’s annoyance.
He considered. So Number 1 was a lost cause now. But Charles was, by his estimation, fairly skilled at talking his way out of a jam. He turned on the charm.
“Now, Erik,” he began, pitching his voice soothingly.
“Don’t.”
Charles stopped, mystified. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a fucking kitten,” Erik snarled, and oh, Charles hadn’t realized it before, but he supposed his soothing voice did sound quite a bit like the voice he’d used to lure Patches out from under the car this morning.
“Sorry. Habit. Sort of.” He gestured to the chair Erik was currently attempting to strangle. “Sit?”
“I don’t take orders from you. You take orders from me,” Erik snapped, but he pulled out the chair and dropped into it anyway. His hands, now unoccupied, clenched and unclenched agitatedly. “Now explain to me why the hell you thought it was okay to run off without informing me, without giving anyone any notice.”
“It’s just a coffee shop down the street,” Charles protested.
“With open streets where you could’ve been ambushed at no fewer than eight points!” Erik retorted, jabbing his finger in Charles’ face. “Don’t test me, I counted.”
Charles sighed and folded his arms across the table. “Erik, listen. “For one thing, I find the idea of an attack or an ambush highly unlikely. My father received threats all his career. I received threats before I even took over the company. A tiny escalation—”
Erik growled at him to interrupt him. Growled. Charles found it a bit primitive and also ridiculously hot. “Listen,” Erik said in that rough, accented voice of his, “Director Fury wouldn’t have assigned me to protect you if there hadn’t been reliable intel to suggest that you were in real danger. And an escalation doesn’t even begin to cover it. You’ve received threatening phone calls with highly specific threats. You’ve gotten alarmingly violent letters. Three weeks ago, your car’s headlights were smashed. Fury thinks you need someone to watch your back, and so do I.”
So do you? Charles thought, skeptical. He was 95% sure Erik could not possibly care less about what happened to him. He would have been 100% sure had it not been for the fact that Erik had a vested interest in keeping him safe, for the sake of his reputation as a reliable SHIELD operative and probably for the sake of his pride. Charles knew what Erik thought of him. It was what most mutants thought of him, especially the extremists who seemed hell-bent on hating humankind and on elevating mutantkind on some misguided and often frighteningly bigoted concepts of superiority. Xavier Pharmaceuticals had begun as a manufacturer for general medicines, but in the ’80s, when mutants had started expose themselves to the public at large, Brian Xavier had shifted the focus of the company to designing a suppressant for mutant powers. He had been a pioneer in the field and an inspiration to other researchers. Within a handful of years, Inhib-4 had emerged as the leading suppressant brand, created and mass-produced by Xavier Pharm. It had not been approved by the FDA, but after several violent attacks perpetrated by rogue mutants—often unbalanced individuals acting alone, not that anybody cared to make that point—people were in such hysterics about the possibility of a hostile takeover that they had welcomed any offer of safety. Xavier Pharm profits skyrocketed in those early years, bolstered by public fear. The company and its CEO also became Public Enemy Number 1 to nearly every mutant in the country. Popular mutant sentiment reviled suppressants as tools of human oppression. Xavier Pharm had been so constantly flooded with death threats that there had been a separate mail sub-department created to handle the influx, and there had even been an attack on Brian Xavier’s office in 1985, which Charles remembered vividly because he’d been hiding under his father’s desk the entire time, trembling with terror and trying desperately not to drown in the vitriol flooding from the minds of the intruders. His father had given him his first dose of Inhib-4 that afternoon, after he hadn’t been able to stop crying in fear.
Only Charles knew how strongly his father had been driven to find not a suppressant but a cure, a fix to make his son normal. Brian Xavier hadn’t been evil. Charles had seen his mind, and he knew this to his core. But his father had been afraid of the X-gene and what it meant for Charles. He’d been worried for his family, and for that, Charles forgave him, for the experiments in Westchester’s basement laboratory that had taken up his childhood—painless normally, but uncomfortable and frightening to an eight-year-old boy—and for becoming so thoroughly reviled by the mutant community that Charles had had to be home-schooled for two years because the bullying by other mutants had gotten so bad.
He hadn’t had any friends when he was younger. Maybe that was why he was still alone now, he reflected. He didn’t know how to be any other way.
With an inaudible sigh, he shook away those thoughts. No time to be maudlin now, or ever. He’d made his peace with a lot of things in his life a long time ago. He had more important concerns to deal with now.
Chief concern at hand: Erik Lehnsherr’s determination to remain firmly attached to Charles’ side at all times, rendering it nearly impossible to garner any amount of privacy for a significant amount of time. Peripheral and more pressing concern: Erik Lehnsherr’s anger, which, directed at Charles, was actually somewhat terrifying. There was a look Erik had that said that he was very seriously weighing the pros and cons of your death and finding the pros side to be more heavily stacked. It was a look he was leveling on Charles now, and Charles decided that unless he did his best to appease Erik, he was going to end up sans-bodyguard, if not sans-head.
“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely, letting any trace of humor disappear from his face. “I was just in the mood for a good cup of tea. I didn’t consider the consequences, or how worried you’d be, and for that, I am truly sorry.”
Erik stared at him for a long moment, his mouth half-open as if he’d been intending to yell some more but had forgotten what he wanted to say. The anger flickered on the edges of his mind, smoldering like hot coals. Charles watched it burn, watched as dim impressions of thoughts flitted past the surface of Erik’s mind, there and gone too quickly to make out. Then the anger disappeared, as abruptly as a candle snuffed out. Charles marveled at the control Erik must have over himself, to be able to shut strong emotion away so cleanly like that. The glass surface of his mind smooth and unreadable again, Erik said gruffly, “Is that the first time you’ve apologized in your entire life?”
Charles relaxed. Jokes and jabs. Familiar ground again. “No, of course not. There was this one time when I was eight and I broke my mother’s favorite china plates.”
The corner of Erik’s mouth twitched, almost as if he were fighting back a smile. Charles held his breath. In the two weeks they’d been stuck with each other, Charles had never seen even a hint of amusement creep into Erik’s expression, not even when confronted with a flock of clumsy ducklings, which, to Charles’ mind, was a sign that Erik had misplaced his heart somewhere in the last decade and forgotten to go back to look for it. Or perhaps he’d taken it out and thrown it away purposefully, to rid himself of any weakness. It seemed like an Erik thing to do.
The near-smile flattened out before it could even truly begin to form. Charles was only slightly disappointed.
“You shouldn’t have left without telling me,” Erik muttered, apparently deciding that he was still disgruntled. “It was irresponsible of you.”
“I’m sorry,” Charles said again, making sure his tone was properly apologetic. “Won’t do it again.”
Erik’s displeasure lurked in the fringes of his thoughts, but it was muted. “If it ever happens again, I’ll handcuff you to your desk and let you out of your office only for bathroom breaks.”
“Kinky,” Charles remarked cheerily, grinning when Erik’s eyes narrowed.
“Is everything a joke to you?” Erik demanded. That displeasure began to flare up noticeably. “My job is to protect you from threats. I can’t protect you if you aren’t willing to abide by my rules. Can you get that through your thick skull?”
“Thick?” Charles sniffed. “Some people might find that offensive.”
“It was meant to be,” Erik growled, glaring.
A waitress dropped by. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked Erik pleasantly, though her smile faltered at Erik’s scowl.
“No,” Erik said.
“Actually, he’d like a coffee, black,” Charles told her. To Erik, he said, “Take it as an apology.”
Erik glared. “A coffee isn’t going to win you any points with me.” But when the coffee arrived, he picked it up and drank it anyway, grimacing as he did.
Charles watched him idly. He liked watching Erik. It had become something of a hobby over the last two weeks, like bird-watching, except more intense and endlessly more fascinating. It was partly watching with his eyes and partly watching with his telepathy, and either way, he discovered very little. Erik was always consciously guarding his expression and his thoughts, which made Charles wonder who had taught him to be so careful, or who or what had made it so necessary that he learn to do it in the first place.
Finally, Erik said, “You need return to the office and get back to work.”
Charles shrugged. “Maybe I’ll take a day off.”
Spoiled and insufferable, Erik thought, his sudden contempt powerful.He hid away that thought as soon as it rose up, but Charles caught it anyway. Weak telepath, Erik reassured himself half a second later, like he did about thirty times a day. He can’t read this deep.
Charles gave no indication that he had heard anything. With a smile, he put down his tea and his book and stood. “Excuse me for just one minute. I’ll go to the bathroom and then we’ll go back.”
He skirted around the tables to the back of the café where a large, hand-painted hanging sign declared RESTROOMS. Erik’s eyes tracked him the whole way, as if watching to make sure Charles didn’t suddenly make a break for it. When he disappeared into the men’s room, he felt Erik’s attention shift away, no doubt considering the best exits and categorizing the café patrons into groups of possible threats and no threats. Erik seemed permanently hard-wired to maintain a constant state of vigilance. That was what made him such a good agent, Charles supposed, as well as a good bodyguard. It also made him frustratingly difficult to slip.
He locked himself in a stall and pulled out his phone. One missed call from Hank. He dialed him back and waited for an answer.
The line had barely rung twice before Hank said, “Hello? Charles?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Charles ran a hand through his hair, keeping a touch of his telepathy on Erik as a sort of warning system, in case Erik decided to come his way. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go through with tonight without me.”
He could hear Hank’s breath shorten. “Charles…you can’t be serious.”
Charles wished he could pace to release the restless tension coiling up in his body. Instead, he leaned back against the stall wall and crossed his arms. “I can’t get away from Erik. Agent Lehnsherr. I tested him today, slipped away while he wasn’t looking. Took him less than forty-five minutes to catch up with me. He’s not slacking on his job. There’s no way I’ll be able to disappear for the night without him noticing and tailing me.”
“But we’ve never done this without you before!” Hank sucked in a deep, worried breath, and Charles willed him to keep calm, wishing he were at the mansion so he could better soothe Hank’s no-doubt growing panic.
“You can do it,” Charles told him encouragingly. “I’ll coach you through the plan.”
“We can’t follow the plan when we don’t have you. You’re an integral part of it. Without you, how else are we supposed to bypass the guards?”
Charles huffed. He’d spent much of the last two weeks contemplating that very question and attempting to delay this mission for as long as possible. But they could wait no longer; Moira had informed him that it was tonight or never.
“You know my policy on violence…” he began.
“Charles.” Hank sounded shocked. “We’re not…we’re not killing anyone. Even for—even for this, we can’t hurt anyone. It’s against everything we’ve ever—”
Charles interrupted him. “Hank, listen to me. I’m not suggesting that we kill anyone, or even hurt anyone. I’m saying we’re going to have to alter the plan, just a little, and if necessary—only if you need to defend yourselves—then do what you must. You need to be prepared for that possibility. Now before you argue, listen. You’re going to have to be stealthier about this than usual. No strolling through anymore. I need you to gather the others and put me on speakerphone. And get Kitty and Raven.”
“Kitty?” Hank repeated, shocked. “She’s never gone on a run before. She’s barely seventeen. She hasn’t even trained with us for that long.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Charles replied wearily. He’d gone over the options a dozen times in his head, thought out a handful of contingencies. This was the only way they could do this. It was infinitely riskier without him there to guide them personally, but with Charles unable to escape Erik’s constant scrutiny, it was a hurdle they would have to leap. Quitting now was out of the question.
Hank rapidly reached the same conclusion. His mind always worked with astonishing speed, considering and discarding choices in the time it would take most others to even begin to collate their options. “All right,” he said quietly. “Wait a moment.”
When he emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, Erik was standing directly outside the door, his arms crossed and his shoulders tense.
“That,” he said when Charles stepped out, “took a while.”
Charles grinned charmingly at him. “Bladder problems. Shall we go?”
Erik leveled a dubious look on him but nevertheless followed him out the café in silence. They started back toward Xavier Pharm.
“One hour of work,” Erik said sternly, checking his watch. “Then lunch break. You don’t get to leave your office until then.”
Charles stuck out his tongue. He knew Erik hated it when he acted juvenile, but there was just something about ruffling Erik’s feathers that made it so fun to do. When Charles had been a boy, they had owned a big old hound that had lay there on the floor by the fireplace and given him sulky looks as he tugged on its ears until it finally got fed up and snapped at his hand before settling back down enough for him to resume the pestering. Erik reminded him strongly of that hound. He was just prone to snapping much sooner and never quite settled back down.
“Actually,” Charles started, tucking his hands in his pockets and quickening his pace by a step. By his side, Erik kept up easily. “Actually, I think I’ll go pay Patches a visit. And we should schedule an appointment with a vet. Should you call or shall I?”
Erik glared at him for a moment. Then he lengthened his stride and cut on ahead, his entire figure rigid with irritation. Shirking his duties, always shirking his duties, Charles heard. The words were laced through with disdain. Don’t even know why I fucking tolerate him. And then, with a sharp burst of annoyance: Stupid blue eyes.
Erik was a fogged-up glass. But sometimes, something like that slipped through that made Charles want to wipe the fog away with his hand so he could see underneath into the part of Erik that felt almost fond when it pictured Charles’ eyes. Was it his own projected desire, reflecting onto Erik? Likely. He didn’t know. And he couldn’t afford to care, not with the situation as precarious as it was: Erik an agent of SHIELD, keeping close tabs on Charles and unaware, as of yet, that he was the self-proclaimed leader of a ragtag band of vigilantes who would likely all be thrown in jail if they were to be discovered. He didn’t have time for relationships or even one-night stands, and besides, hooking up with a government agent—even a consultant—was, as Alex might call it, a pretty fucking bad idea.
Still. He felt a burst of warmth in his belly at Erik’s current line of thought—if only his eyes were fucking mud brown, but they’re blue, it’s just something about that fucking color, I hate it. But he was sure Erik didn’t hate it, not really. He spent far too much time staring at Charles’ eyes when he thought Charles wasn’t paying attention to truly loathe them. At least that was what Charles hoped.
Being attracted to Erik was dangerous, inadvisable, risky. He wouldn’t follow through with it. But he figured it wouldn’t hurt to allow himself that flurry of pleasure at the idea that Erik might be attracted to him, too. Mutual appreciation had to be fine, so long as they let it pass unexamined and untouched.