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browngirlTitle: Stand In The Advancing Light
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: NC-17 with warnings.
Pairing: Charlotte Xavier/Sebastian Shaw, Charlotte Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr. Others mentioned. Special appearance by Jean Grey
Summary: From the prompt: How long will Erik stay when he finds out Charlotte's carrying Shaw's child?
Content Advisory: Genderswap of the always-female variety. Consent issues. Rape/non-consent, violence, enthusiastic consent, on-screen character death, happy ending.
Acknowledgements: Whichever brilliantly imaginative anon prompted this at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
xmen_firstkink, all my friends who encouraged me while I wrote at breakneck speed, and the talented anon who wrote House of Cards, the excellent (and very different) other fill for this prompt.
Disclaimer: This fanwork has been created for pleasure only and not for profit.
Title from It's This Way, which was given me by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
igrockspock
Part One.
The walls are all mirrors, and every mirror reflects Charlotte's tears. She stares at herself multiplied, the images wavering, tears streaming sideways across countless copies of her face; she doesn't look up past the edge of the helmet, up to Shaw's fiercely grinning face pressed to hers, cheek to helmet to cheek.
She manages, this time, not to watch him. It's not as if she can't feel his fist wrapped around her wrists, his weight on her back, his clothing crumpling between their bodies as he rocks searingly into her. It's not as if she can stop him, the helmet's smooth void curved around his hateful mind, and no matter how intently she's made herself watch him she's never spotted a weakness to turn to her advantage. Charlotte stares instead at her own face, bruised mouth and red nose and tears puddling beside her eye, and tries to endure until Shaw finishes with her for the moment. It's only sex, she reminds herself, it's only physical. I won't be here forever. Neither Erik nor Raven will leave a stone unturned until they find me.
So Charlotte tells herself, biting her lip until the dented flesh goes pale, clenching her eyes shut when he begins puffing into her hair. She hates that she knows now the harbingers of Shaw's impending orgasm, that part of her sighs in relief that at least this will soon be over once again. She hates him more and more with every twinging thrust, sobbing through her stuffed nose, gasping high as Shaw squeezes her wrists sharply, as he gropes down her side and clutches her hip, and he growls harsh and hot as she feels him finally come. "Get off," she chokes out, her voice clogged as her nose, "get off me. You've had your fun."
Shaw just sighs luxuriously, draping himself over her, not letting go for an unbearably long moment as Charlotte's heart thuds against the floor and she shudders with sobs beneath his hard immovable body. Finally he lets her hands go and shoves her forward as he pushes back, kneeling up; with that helmet hiding him from her telepathy, he vanishes from her awareness as soon as she can squirm free of his hold. She should sit up, she thinks, glare at him, confront him, but all she can do is curl up tightly on the mirrored floor, arms wrapped around her belly as she cries.
"My dear, you mustn't dehydrate yourself," Shaw advises, barely even breathless. "Think of the child!"
"Go to Hell," Charlotte snaps between sobs, hardly her best rejoinder, but her brain feels swollen and her body leadenly useless.
Shaw just chuckles, and Charlotte curls up tighter around a spasm of thwarted fury. "I began this to beget that child," he tells her, "but you do make it such a pleasure." He pats her hip and laughs at her weak flail of a kick, stands up and strolls away, shutting the door behind him with its usual metallic thunk.
Eventually, Charlotte cries herself out on the cold smooth floor. Eventually she sits up and reaches for the wooden cube that serves as a table, wipes her face with the towel, and makes herself swallow again and again until she's drained the cup of cool water. Eventually she wobbles to her feet, scrubs herself as best she can and flings the towel at the door, and dresses herself with numb, shaking fingers.
Eventually, fully clothed but for bare feet, she lies down on the cot, wraps herself in one of the several soft gray blankets and shuts her eyes against the relentless light.
It's the sixth time Shaw has visited her since he had her abducted. It's the fourth time he's forced himself on her. Charlotte thinks she's been here four days, if her count's correct, and knows she's never been so alone in her life.
* *** *
As long as she's been aware, Charlotte's never been alone; in the darkness behind her eyes she's always seen the drifting distant lights of other minds, soft or sharp-edged, flickering with colors beyond any spectrum. She's always heard, far below any conscious thought, the soft symphonic murmur of sentience all around her, until Shaw had his teleporter bring her to this mirror-polished isolation chamber.
She'd been talking with Erik, standing in her study as he sat in his customary chair, long elegant legs crossed and eyes alight with the fire. They'd averted World War Three and returned triumphant with their team intact; Moira had returned to the CIA to an assured promotion and with private glee at her superiors' chagrin, while Charlotte had brought all her fellow mutants to her home, filling the dusty old mansion with wonderful life, a prelude to the school she might finally found. All of this fluttered through her mind in drifts of happiness as she watched Erik relax, a tumbler of scotch by his hand and the furrows fading from his brow, as she teased him, "But you'll make an excellent instructor! One glare and the children will fall all over themselves to improve!"
Erik arched a sharp eyebrow, but his eyes were warm and soft. Smiling, Charlotte swung her hips as she turned to fetch the chess set; they'd been busy for weeks, most recently with settling everyone into the mansion, but she'd thought she and Erik might steal this night for themselves.
She turned, right into a sulphurous explosion of black and red. Shaw's teleporter caught her upraised hand, his smile gleaming in his crimson face, and Erik's formless alarm reverberated through her mind as the world vanished in smoke and flame.
It reappeared gleaming silver and white, inside a rounded-cornered cube lined with smooth mirrors, and as Charlotte reached for his mind the teleporter flickered away before she could grasp him, leaving her there alone. But not for long.
Charlotte rolls onto her back, staring up at her own blotchy face, one of only three she's seen since her abduction; silence stretches around her as if the world were gone, annihilated as Shaw had planned. She's had nightmares about that, dreams that her team lost and all her happiness since has been delusion, dreams that she'll spend the rest of her life walled up in this gleaming vacuum as Shaw's brood mare. This can't be good for her sanity, she thinks, and watches herself laugh, the sound high and cracked. What a ludicrously obvious observation.
She sits up and looks down at herself, at her blazer and blouse and skirt all a mess of wrinkles, then stands up and makes herself stretch. It feels pointless, but she knows, dryly and academically, that movement helps. So she walks around the little cell, a circuit around her table and bed, another lap and another, taking steady breaths of the stuffy air. Her mirrored image flickers in multiplied columns as she moves, until she shuts her eyes and trails her fingers along the smooth wall instead, thinking of dearer faces. Her team, Angel, Sean, Alex, Darwin. Her friend and colleague Moira. Hank, smooth and furry; Raven, pink or tan or blue. And Erik, Erik, Erik. She matches the cadence of his name to her heartbeat as she walks endlessly around her little prison.
The door opens, as it has eight times before, twice a day. As on each morning, Emma Frost stands frowning in the doorway, glitteringly icy as her namesake. She hates Charlotte for gaining Shaw's interest, for being thrust into the crux of his demented scheme, and Charlotte want to laugh and cry and scream in response that for her part she could wish all of her unwelcome fertility on the woman if she could just go home and never see Sebastian Shaw again in her life.
Charlotte lets herself do none of these things. At least she's not crying this time. She walks forward, arms folded and head high, and allows Frost to escort her through the welcome open air of the corridor. In the bathroom Charlotte ignores Frost's sneer as she meticulously folds her battered clothes, the tap-tap-tapping on the tiled wall as she showers.
As she scrubs herself under the hottest water she can stand, Charlotte contemplates Emma Frost. In diamond form she's like a wall of glass, not a void like Shaw in his helmet; Charlotte wonders, after what Erik told her of their confrontation and what she's seen herself, if Frost has any telepathic capabilities in this form, or only that imperviousness.
It's worth taking a chance.
Charlotte dresses as methodically as she can get away with, to the tink tink tink of Frost tapping her glittering foot. She bows her head as if simply weary, as if expecting nothing more than to be handed a breakfast tray and locked in again, but as she walks she reaches out through the rooms of Shaw's facility. It's more difficult without the focus of fingers at her temple, but she finds the windworker sunning himself on the roof -- a tiny push turns his doze into deep sleep -- and then the teleporter. Him, Charlotte calls.
He whirls into the hallway in a blur of red and gray, and Frost screams as he swings his dagger at her. Steel, properly wielded, can cleave diamond, after all. "Azazel!" Frost shouts, arms before her face, transforming back to flesh to use her telepathy --
Charlotte seizes the chance she's made. Sleep, she shoves into Frost's head. Take me home, she thinks to Azazel, reaching out for her household as she strides towards him. Raven! Erik! Hank! Their minds flicker on the edge of her range, flaring in surprise as they hear her; she hears running footsteps, and lunges forwards towards Azazel's hand. I'm here! I'm--
A wall of force smacks Charlotte across the hall, Azazel thrown away from her to slump stunned against the bathroom door. Shaw stands between them, staring down at Charlotte, his eyes cold and his mouth a flat line. He wags a finger at her, clicking his tongue, tut-tut-tut, and the sudden memory of Erik making the same gesture, the realization of how he must have learned it, chills her down to her gut. "And after all our hospitality," Shaw says, bending to her.
Charlotte knows it won't work, she knows it, but she has to try. She grabs at his helmet, trying to push it off, but he grips her wrists and drags her to her feet, hauling her along as he palms open the door and strides inside. It thunks shut behind her, cutting off her household's minds from hers with echoing finality, and Charlotte can't stop shaking as she looks up at Shaw. It's all she can do not to scream.
* *** *
Charlotte will never think of the phrase, "tore my clothes off" in the same way ever again. Shaw deliberately rips her clothes away, fistful by fistful, pulling them so taut they press sore lines into her flesh, twisting his hand so they tear free with awful snarls of parting cloth. Charlotte tries to struggle, tries to clutch her clothes to her, but Shaw pushes her against the wall, pinning her shoullder with a heavy hand as he tears every stitch from her body.
When he's done he touches the pile of shredded cloth with one finger, and it goes up in a yellow-white flash, leaving a thin dust of gray ash on the mirrored floor. He turns away and Charlotte sags against the wall, naked and humiliated but thinking this moment's ordeal over, until he pauses and turns back again, unfastening his pants, and his smile curls at the corners, twice as unpleasant as before.
"No," Charlotte says uselessly. "No!" she shouts as Shaw grips her by the arms and forces her down onto the cot, knocking the blankets aside with a flick of his wrist. "No!" she screams in his face until she's hoarse. He just pins her hands above her head, leaning on his elbows, and grips her chin in his other hand.
This time he makes her look at him as he enters her, his chilly eyes and his gleeful grin. This time he bites her and pinches her and makes it hurt even worse than before. And when he's done at last and he climbs off her, leaving her gasping and clutching herself, he adds casually, almost drowned out by the snarl of his zipper, "Once my team recovers we're going to have to pack up and move, you know. All because of your little stunt."
When Charlotte returns from blindly staring at nothing she finds herself chilled, bruised and naked; agony jacknifes through her, and she rolls off the cot into the heap of blankets as sobs wrench her through and through.
She has no idea how much later it is when the door creaks. Then the wall shudders, and the door creaks again, sending a crack up through the mirrored plating. Charlotte looks up, inhaling, and the world rushes in, all the space, all the minds, and nearest of all the chaos of her team in a fierce fight outside the door. "In here!" she screams, lunging forward, and when Alex shouts in answer, "Get back!" his deep welcome voice brings tears springing to her sore eyes as she huddles in the blankets.
The wall shudders again, red light flashing through the developing spiderweb of cracks around the door, and Charlotte hears Sean's distinctive inhale and covers her ears. The door bursts inwards, one hinge entirely broken, and she has just enough time to pull a blanket up to cover herself before Sean and Alex appear in the doorway, disheveled and smiling and so very welcome.
Then both boys frown in confusion, looking down at their hands.
What, they think, and No, and Charlotte soaks in their thoughts, half of her catching their alarm but half just so glad to feel friendly minds again... at least until they look up at her, unnatural smirks spreading across their faces, their hands reaching out, groping the air.
Frost. Charlotte wrestles down the flare of panic, fights the urge to hide from the cruel lust twisting their features as they lurch towards her. She knows these boys, she knows they'd never willingly hurt her. She throws her hand out, freezing them in place, and slides into both their heads at once, clutching the blanket at her collarbone as she rummages for the enemy telepath's wicked glitter. There, and there.
Charlotte pushes, and Frost pushes back. You won't knock me out this time, sugar, Frost throws at her, full of ice and edges, but Charlotte ignores the pain. Or, no, she billows with it, suddenly angry, suddenly furious. Frost has aided and abetted Shaw's crimes against the world, against Charlotte, has resented her and blamed her for Shaw's every act of abuse. Charlotte bares her teeth and shoves with all her anger, all her pain, and she's not at the point between rage and serenity which she showed Erik, but as he'd said, this gets the job done. SLEEP, she pounds into Frost's mind, sleep for a WEEK. Before she can stop herself Charlotte adds, and dream of everything I've suffered, gathering up all the memories of confinement and fear and pain, isolation and humiliation and rape, pushing the whole bundle of nightmares into that hateful woman's head.
Outside the room she hears a gasp and a thud, and yanks her consciousness back into herself, airlessly gasping herself.
Sean and Alex are blinking, moving, reaching out to support her now. "Professor," Alex says, his gloved hands tentative on her arm, "Professor Xavier, we've come to get you."
"I know," Charlotte says absently as she wipes her palm across face, and thinks to pat his shoulder and Sean's. "Thank you -- oh dear," as Armando tumbles backwards across the doorway and the walls creak.
Trailing her blanket, flanked by her boys, Charlotte hobbles as fast as she can from the cell, and finds Hank struggling with Azazel in a flurry of blue and red. The windworker flings himself at the fray, and Charlotte's reaching for her temple when he punches Azazel in the chin; the teleporter freezes and stares, his eyes concentric blue and white stark against his skin, and Hank slams him down so his face bounces against the floor.
As Azazel lies stunned, the windworker stumbles, catching himself on Hank's arm, and ripples into welcome beautiful blue, into Raven grinning as Hank grins back at her. They look over in unison and Charlotte smiles at them, cherishing the unfamiliar stretch in her cheeks after these days of horrors.
Then metal screams, tearing apart, and they all turn. Shaw has Erik pinned behind a massive beam, his helmeted head smooth and impervious as a bullet, one hand tucked behind Erik's nape as he murmurs in his ear. Erik's eyes are wide and unseeing, and Charlotte can hear Shaw's noxious whispers twisting through his mind, feel them knotting his guts. "... enjoyed her, little Erik? Have you felt her wriggling beneath you, the silken clasp of her exquisite cunt?"
That is absolutely beyond the pale. "Stop it!" Charlotte screams, staggering forward, one arm thrown out.
Shaw turns to her, his face stretched in that utterly gut-churning smile. "Look who's decided to join us!" he says, reaching as if he would take her hand or tap her into oblivion. Charlotte's knees shake beneath the aching weight of his gaze, she feels the air on her naked back, the blanket flimsy around her bare legs, the memory of his fingers in every bruise. But behind Shaw she sees Erik see her, she watches his hand rise and that helmet rise with it, plucked neatly from Shaw's head.
Before Erik even shouts, "Charlotte! Now!" she has her fingers at her temple, her teeth grinding with effort as she grabs mental hold of Shaw and freezes him in place. His eyes go wide but that's all he can do before she forces him to complete stillness.
Behind him, Erik lets the beam drop, the coin he's always carried fluttering up to orbit Shaw's head. He looks at her once more, his eyes deeper than the ocean, and she knows without reading him what he's going to do, how much it's going to hurt her. How necessary it is. She nods, struggling to breathe against the rib-locking dread, and Erik's eyes focus on Shaw's profile as the coin slices through the air, sailing towards Shaw's head.
Shaw's eyes are focused on Charlotte, her bruise-mottled arms and blanket-wrapped body, her disheveled hair and narrowed eyes, and her team gathering behind her, Alex helping Armando up, Angel fluttering in to land, Hank and Raven holding hands. Charlotte watches herself through his eyes as she holds him still against his formidable will battering at hers. But now she has him. They have him.
Erik's coin burrows a line of agony between Charlotte's eyes as it digs a slot into Shaw's forehead. She gasps, puffing, hyperventilating, clinging to the blanket, to herself. It rips into his brain, spinning now, pulverizing all it touches, and the pain reverberates through Charlotte's head until she feels the floor slam into her knees, until she feels her throat burning as she screams. But she keeps hold of Shaw, and now his mind clutches at hers with desperate fingers, with bitter claws, trying to drag itself away from the expanding vacuum as Erik cores out his brain.
Charlotte shudders, ablaze with pain, but she keeps hold of Shaw as Erik destroys him, staring into his dimming eyes until their cold light is completely extinguished, until the coin exits silently through his occipital and his mind plummets down its own gravity well. She pushes him off as she never could these last five days, she watches his mind wink out of existence and his emptied body crash to the floor, and she laughs dizzily as the pain slowly dissipates, gulping as tears stream down her cheeks.
Erik blinks, once, twice, and sees her. He flings the helmet to the floor, smashing it flat, steps uncaring over Shaw's corpse and gathers Charlotte in his arms, tucking one behind her back and the other beneath her knees to lift her up. "Charlot-te," he murmurs over and over against her forehead, three German-accented syllables she's only ever heard before inside his mind. "Charlotte, Charlotte." Her arm wrapped around Erik's shoulders, she slumps onto his chest, the excruciating hysteria draining away to leave her safe in his hold. Finally, finally, Charlotte is home.
Part Two
That night Charlotte lies in her own bed, scrubbed and combed and wrapped in soft flannel, and listens to her household settle to sleep. Their worry for her suffuses all their thoughts, and she sighs and pulls her pillow over her head, shamelessly allowing herself to snoop as Angel reads a travel book, as Raven brushes Hank's fur, as Alex and Armando murmur together and Sean masturbates so guiltily she chuckles into her pillow. It feels good to laugh, but even as she does a corner of her awareness remains focused on Erik in his bed down the hallway, not in hers.
At length the lights dim, one by one. Charlotte lies in the restful darkness and waits for all their minds but one to fade to sleep. When they have, she pulls on her robe and walks down her own familiar, creaking hallway, and Erik's doorknob turns before she touches it.
Though he lets her in he doesn't look up at her, remaining curled motionless in his sheets. Charlotte perches on the edge of the bed and just listens for a little while, to his breathing, to his mind.
Eventually, she says, because Erik hasn't, "He's gone."
Erik rolls over at that, and Charlotte watches him from the corner of her sight; his eyes are as wide and worried as the day Hank introduced her to Cerebro. "But, Charlotte, what he did to --"
"Is over," she says, more loudly than she should, and takes a deep breath to affirm her control. "It's over. Our lives are ours now." She looks at him, sliding her hand towards him. "Can we continue sharing them as we were?" Will you still want me now that he's touched me? she wonders, keeping the dismal thought locked inside her own head.
Erik makes her wait for a long moment as he searches her face, his own unreadable, as she aches to read him and restrains herself. Then he slides his hand forward to meet hers, and as their fingers tangle her heart hurts with hope, she dares to smile and blinks fast against crying. "What do you want?" he asks in return. "That's what matters right now."
Charlotte smiles wider at Erik's chivalry, and a tear spills down her cheek. "This is what I want. All of us. Both of us. This." This is what I longed for, she thinks, her throat tightening, and lets him hear it. This brought me through.
Erik lifts her hand to his lips, and opens to her in return, his throat just as tight. I thought you would want me to leave, he thinks, and Charlotte shakes her head so hard tendrils fly free, leaning forward to grip his hand in both of hers. He reaches up to brush the tears from her cheeks, she kisses the heel of his hand, and he curls his fingers under her chin, long and warm.
Aloud, she chokes out, "May I sleep here?"
Erik's first reaction is to pull back, and it almost crushes her. Sitting up, he sees her face fall, and closes his hand over hers again. "Yes," he answers, and she never knew he had such a kind smile stashed away. "Yes, just -- a moment?" He lets go, reaching for a drawer with his power, and pulls a pair of sweatpants to his hand by their laces, then puts them on under the covers as if Charlotte doesn't already know every magnificent inch of him.
She smiles wryly, and doesn't let herself laugh, or cry. She pushes off her robe and lets it drop, and Erik folds his arms around her, long-sleeved nightgown and all, tucking her head beneath his chin. Her cheek against his chest, his mind nestled beside hers, Charlotte closes her eyes and sleeps quietly and dreamlessly that entire night.
* *** *
That is, unfortunately, the last night of unbroken sleep any of the household have for several weeks. The nightmares return, despite Erik's arms and strength, and the first morning Charlotte sees everyone arrive for breakfast sunken-eyed and slumped-shouldered, shame drives her to the nearest bathroom where she cries until she vomits bile. Raven eventually coaxes her out by simply waiting on the far side of the door, her mind like a steady candleflame, and by wrapping warm arms around Charlotte when she finally can bear to emerge.
When she returns to the kitchen full of her waiting friends, Charlotte squares her shoulders and announces, in her best businesslike voice, "I apologize for last night, and I wish I could promise it won't happen again, but... I may project in my sleep for... awhile." Flattening her hands on the polished wooden table, looking down from all their weary worried eyes, she inhales and goes on. "If I do, feel free to come wake me. We've all been through a great deal, and you all deserve your rest."
As she's about to sit down Angel sets a cup of tea in front of her, then hugs her tightly. That provokes a general rush in which even Alex joins, and Charlotte buries her face in Hank's furry arm as she starts crying again, much happier tears.
Charlotte's emotional volatility grows worse rather than better. Raven gives her a pair of wide sunglasses to cover her red eyes and Sean announces she looks like a movie star, which makes her smile. She struggles against impatience with herself; she has a degree in psychology, she knows what processes she must work through and that she can't block her own memories, but she's always prided herself on her control, and sometimes she finds herself sobbing in rage at her present instability. Sometimes she pounds on Erik's chest and he lets her, lets her scream and cry until she collapses into his arms. He never says anything when she does, his mind steady as a mountain, and she appreciates that more than she can say.
She rations her nights with him, limiting herself to two or three a week, after finding that he stays awake watching over her when she sleeps beside him. The other nights she lies in her own bed, tucked between mounded pillows, listening to the distant ripples of her household's minds, waiting to fall asleep. Sometimes she listens more closely than she knows she should, drawn guiltily but irresistibly to their present minds, to their conversations, to their thoughts, to their pleasure when the couples make love; re-familiarizing herself with the feel of that joy, she hopes they would forgive her if they knew, and those are the nights she sleeps best, sleeps longest before the nightmares return. Still, almost invariably someone has to knock on her door to bring her out of dreams of mirror-lined agony that leave her twisted in her blankets, her heart pounding when she lurches awake.
Sometimes whomever's knocked at her door comes in to sit with her, especially the girls or Alex. The first time, Angel takes her hand and says simply, "It's bad now, but it gets better," and Charlotte hugs her with all her strength. Raven always strokes her hair and usually can coax her back to sleep. Alex sits stiffly and silently, and after awhile Charlotte smiles and squeezes his hand before sending him back to Armando.
She has a good household here, she knows, and during the day they plan and work towards the school she still intends to open, from reconstructing Cerebro to setting up student bedrooms. A few weeks go by and life becomes almost normal, except for Charlotte's occasional crying jags, and how delicate her stomach seems to have become in the mornings.
Then comes the day when Charlotte goes looking for Raven and finds her in the ballroom trying to kick Erik. "No, from the hip," he corrects with a sharp thwack, and Raven's wince breaks something inside Charlotte with a nearly audible snap.
"What on Earth are you doing?" she asks, striding into the room.
As they turn to her Raven smiles brightly. "Erik's teaching me to fight," she says, and Charlotte stares at her, at the incongruity of that explanation; Raven's her younger sister, she may be taller but she'll always be younger, she shouldn't be involved in violence, she can't be fighting.
"Is this a good idea?" Charlotte asks as mildly as she can, and Raven's smile fades into a wounded pout, but Erik radiates certainty.
"It's an excellent idea," he answers. "She's strong, agile, fast -- in a year she'll be nearly unstoppable --"
"You'll stop right now!" Charlotte doesn't even realize she's screaming until she feels her throat burn. Erik steps towards her, hands out, frowning slightly, but her telepathy leaps out and she feels all his emotions, anger and worry and guilty, frustrated lust. She's so beautiful in her fury, she hears him thinking, and it's been almost two months and all those nights with her warm in his arms, and --
Charlotte shrieks, "No!" and both Erik and Raven clutch their heads. She staggers back -- she's hurt them -- she spins and runs away, stumbling blindly, her chest already shaking with another thrice-damned crying fit.
She finds the library bathroom, fortunately before she throws up yet again; afterwards she sobs down to a shaky, emptied calm, washes her face, and drinks a palmful of tap water. She owes them both an apology, but even her mind feels too drained to reach out. She looks at herself, pale and lean-cheeked, her eyes sunken. She doesn't look well.
She's not well.
She looks at herself, and realizes her next period should have arrived already, and in that moment she knows.
Charlotte sits down heavily on the toilet lid, shockily staring at nothing. Shaw succeeded. She's pregnant. She tucks in her chin, looking down at her own belly, her tear-washed mind suddenly, strangely clear.
She has a decision to make.
Erik will not be pleased to hear this, Charlotte thinks, and coughs up a hysterical giggle. To say the least. She's not best pleased herself, and she knows more than one doctor who could help her quietly deal with this. She has a choice. And yet... Charlotte's often thought she'd like to have a child someday. Soon she'll have a school full of caretakers, other adults, adolescents, a full and vibrant house for a child to grow up in. She's no longer so callow, and she and Raven raised each other fairly well, so she has reason to believe she could do well by a baby. She could fairly accomplish this now, at this point in her life.
She could.
If she has this child, Charlotte decides, it won't be Shaw's child. It will be her child. And Erik's, if he'll have it.
She has to hope he will, as she pulls herself to her feet, takes another palmful of water, and makes herself open the door.
* *** *
All day, Charlotte has gone over her reasoning time and again. After dinner she told Raven, cried with her, and swore her to temporary secrecy. In her time she's faced down thesis committees, prison wardens, armed soldiers, and a megalomaniacal mutant, but it still takes all her courage, standing that night beside Erik's bed with her hands folded together, to tell him plainly, "I'm pregnant."
Erik jerks, head to toes, and looks up at Charlotte as if she learned to levitate or turned a new color. She giggles ridiculously, and watches his eyes narrow as he obviously evaluates her sanity.
Then he scoots over to sit before her, reaching up for her hands. "I trust you know someone," he says gently, stroking her knuckles with his thumbs. "No matter where they are, I'll take you there, and stay with you through the procedure if you need."
"Oh God, Erik." Charlotte has to sit beside him before her knees give out beneath her. "That's... thank you, that's incredibly kind of you, but I don't think... that won't be necessary. I'm going to have the child."
Erik yanks away from her, dropping her hands, and his sudden repulsion feels like her skin's being torn off in strips. "What?" he says flatly, disbelief rather than curiosity.
Charlotte makes herself look at his profile, though he's stopped looking at her. "I'm having this baby."
"Why?" Erik stands into pacing. "Why would you do this?"
"I think I can offer a child a good home, even or especially considering the school, and --"
"No." Erik slashes one hand through the air, elegantly decisive, and Charlotte could kick herself for noticing that now. "Why would you have his child?"
"It's my child," she counters, and realizes she's wrapped her arms around her belly. "I've thought all day and I've decided --"
"You told me --" Erik's voice cracks, and so does Charlotte's heart. "You told me he was gone, Charlotte."
"He is!" She reaches up, but Erik waves her off, his eyes bleak and terrible as he stares her down.
"Not when you willingly carry a piece of him inside you." Erik pulls his shoes from his closet and a sweatshirt from the cabinet, whose handles are all rattling.
"Erik, where are you going?" Charlotte asks inanely as he dresses. She knows. Even without using her telepathy, she knows.
"I have no idea." Erik shoves on his shoes as his suitcase sails from the closet and all the dresser drawers slide open. "But I suggest you return to your bed, Charlotte. You're going to need your rest." The pure venom lacing those last words makes her hands press to her mouth, and as the door swings open the hallway beyond gapes pitch-black.
Erik packs busily, his back a bulwark between them. Once Charlotte could persuade him not to leave the CIA facility, their shared mission, their newfound fellowship. Now she has no words in her mouth or her mind to call him back to her. She gets up, arms wrapped tightly around herself; at the threshold she turns to say, her voice trembling, "You'll always be welcome --" and the door slams shut in her face.
Back in her empty room, Charlotte sits shivering on her bed, unable to make herself lie down. On numb autopilot she reaches into her linen closet for another comforter and finds herself pulling out the blanket she wore home, though she'd meant to dispose of it in the next charity box. Shaking, she wraps herself in it and huddles in her bed for the rest of the night, sleeplessly listening to Erik's crackling rage. Just before dawn he leaves, the doors and gates opening and shutting for him as he strides away, and she lies under the brightening sky, feeling more alone than she's ever been despite everyone around her, too bereft even to weep.
Part Three
Six weeks and ten hours later, not that she would be counting, Charlotte lies on a deck chair, enjoying the spring sunshine. Beside her Raven and Alex brush Hank's fur out as he sprawls on the roof deck like a thick happy bearskin rug, Sean and Angel fly overhead, and Darwin climbs up through the house back to them, having flung himself off the roof for the joy of tumbling through the air.
It's not a bad day, and Charlotte almost feels content.
Then a mind brushes hers, familiar and unexpected, and she sits upright in her chair.
"Charlotte?" Raven asks, looking up from her hands buried wrist-deep in Hank's back fur. "Is something wrong?"
"No, I don't think so," Charlotte answers, slow and distracted as she shades her eyes and peers off into the distance. Did she hear --
"Hey!" Sean shouts high above them. "Hey, it's Mr. Lehnsherr!"
It is indeed. Erik is sailing through the air towards them at roof height, looking nonchalant though Charlotte can feel the effort buzzing within him. She considers for a moment letting him have the monopoly on melodrama; then she stands and waves, calling, "Welcome back!"
Erik smiles, his mouth tilting softly, and alights on the roof. "Hello, and thank you."
"You're welcome," Charlotte answers, feeling everyone's eyes on them as she steps up to him. "Will you be staying?" she asks, because she's human, if not only.
Erik's smile widens and tilts further. "He'd better," Raven mumbles, and Hank agrees with a low growl.
"If you'll have me." Erik offers his hands, palms up.
Charlotte smiles, her heart swelling with his particular painful hope. "Let's go inside," she suggests, laying a hand in his, though her mind reverberates with a yes so loud she doubts anyone on the roof doesn't hear it.
"Have fun, kids!" Raven calls, waving vigorously, and Armando steps up from the stairwell and holds the door open with a flourish, smiling ear to ear.
"Try not to fall off the roof," Erik tosses over his shoulder as they step down onto the stairs, settling his free hand on the small of Charlotte's back, and she has to scrub hers over her prickling eyes.
They walk just like that through the quiet, sunny house, no words between them, just silent accord. Down in the study they sit across her chess table, Erik settled into his customary chair as if he had never left. He's been gone six weeks, and they should discuss their situation like rational people, but it's all Charlotte can do to make herself sit in her own chair as she stares at him, real and present and back in her home. Erik, Erik, Erik.
He smiles, and she watches every shift of muscle in his jaw, the dynamic curves and hollows of his cheek. "Why did you come back?" she makes herself ask, because she should care.
"There was nowhere else I could be," he says, leaning forward, forearms on thighs. "I don't know what you've done to me, Charlotte." He smiles wider to bely those words. He knows, and knows he's done the same to her.
Charlotte nods crisply, as if gladness isn't suffusing the air, and asks, "Why now?"
"Because I was gone too long already." Erik stands as he says it, and shockingly, delightingly, he comes to her, kneeling before her, draping his hands over her knees. "Charlotte," he says slowly, tasting her name as she stares in wonder at him. "Are you still --" the slightest pause -- "pregnant?" She nods, her heart in her throat, her hands itching to slide into his hair. He nods too, his gaze on her belly, and lays a hand on it, fingers splayed. "Then will you have me back? Will you both have me?"
"Erik," Charlotte says or projects, she hardly knows anymore, as her hands curl over his shoulders and his face fills her vision. Erik, yes. Yes of course. She leans to him and he leans in, pushing up to kiss her, and she winds her arms around her neck, her mind crying out, Yes, yes, YES.
Erik rears up over her, pushing her back against the upholstery as he kisses her devouringly, and she clutches him, taking deep draughts of his warm male scent, her head spinning as with liquor. But then he goes rigid on a pulse of uncertainty, pulling back to look into her eyes. "Charlotte," he asks, his voice thick. "I want --"
"So do I." It's been too long, far too long. She's no longer the woman who slyly told pretty strangers in pubs about their groovy mutations, and she's been hoping, every night of these past six weeks, every morning. Hoping for him.
So Charlotte lunges forward but Erik tilts away, his eyes intent. "You're sure."
"Yes," she says, with mind and voice, her hand curving over the line of his jaw. "Yes, Erik, please," she begs, and his eyes flare.
This time when he kisses her, his lips urgently caressing hers, his hands slide up her sides, curving over her ribs, gathering her sundress. She pries her hands from his head and he pulls the dress over hers, she hooks her fingers into his turtleneck's hem as her brassiere writhes down her arms and Erik peels her underthings down her legs, and suddenly they're tearing at each other's clothes --
-- Charlotte remembers the bite of ripping cloth into her skin, and quivers to a stop. Just as quickly she pushes herself onwards again, keeping her lips moving, her fingers moving, as she carefully closes off her mind. But Erik notices, and smears his mouth off hers, kissing down her cheek and chin but then implacably raising his head. "Charlotte," he says, quiet and firm.
"I'm fine," she answers, and it's not a lie.
Erik quirks an eyebrow anyway, but what he says instead of his disbelief is, "Would you come into my mind for this? I need to feel you there."
Charlotte can't look at him and say no. She drops her eyes to the long lean musculature of his stomach, his unfastened trousers. "I shouldn't. I, if I have a flashback --"
"I won't leave you to face it alone." She looks up again, and Erik kisses her hard enough to make her mouth tingle. "Please?" He echoes her pleading tone, the sly bastard, and she laughs agreement, joy billowing as she reaches out to him, opening herself to him.
Erik brushes warm kisses over the notch of her throat, her collarbones, her heart. He rolls her nipple between his lips and she gasps at the shocking intensity of it, her breasts already so sensitized. He frames her hips in his hands and kisses her ribs, her flanks, her thighs, alternating as he pushes gently between them. He stills, thinking of the child beneath her skin, and kisses deliberately just above her navel, and then just below, down over her mound and further, tugging her gently to the chair's edge as he kisses her open.
When he licks her, long and lavishly, she sighs, her fingers curling in his hair. He's just as wonderful as always. But then he thinks, laced with satisfaction, Herr Doktor never pleased her, and it's like a drench of ice water and scalding oil.
Erik looks up at her gasping wince, his lips shiny wet, sees her face and winces himself. "Oh, scheisse. I apologize." He pulls his hands off her skin, planting them on the chair beside her hips, and at least she can feel how difficult it is for him to let go. "Do you want to stop?"
"No!" Charlotte says, a vehement edge to her voice, clutching at her still-wobbly control. "Just --" Not him. Don't think of him.
Of course. Erik lays his head on her thigh, and Charlotte runs her shaking fingers through his smooth hair as he curls his over her skin again, stroking the creases of her waist with his thumbs, filling his mind with the feel and scent and taste of her. He kisses her belly again, gently pushing her thighs open, and she drapes her knee over his shoulder and breathes, consciously trying to relax into the pleasure. At least until he suckles directly on her clit and she shrieks in shocked delight, distracted from anything and everything else.
Erik makes love to her with his mouth, forcefully and at length, varying tactics but never pausing for breath for either of them. He caresses her with his tongue in long flat strokes and nimble twists, grazes fine tingling lines of fire into her with the most careful presses of teeth, sucks on mouthfuls of her flesh and writes an unknown sonnet with the tip of his tongue. Charlotte presses her head back into the squeaking redolent leather of the chair and lets her hips rotate, bucking into the press of his mouth, lets herself clutch his hair and scream, and each time she comes he just pushes harder. He slides in two long fingers, firm inside her, and she squeezes around them, keening as she tips forward, panting over his broad scarred back. "Erik, Erik," she gasps in a shattered voice, "I'm going to die."
Erik thinks a smile at her, his tongue flickering over the folds fluttering around his knuckles, and keeps going unril she screams, thrashing and exultant, back arched as fire crackles through her to the roots of her hair and tips of her toes. He leans back then to look her over, licking his lips as he takes in her ecstatic dishevelment, and she grins breathlessly and thinks, Come up here.
He blinks as if he didn't expect that, and if he asks one more time if she's sure -- she ldrops herself onto him and he catches her, rocking back on his knees and laying her down gently on the thick carpet in front of the fireplace. The grate is cold, the room filled with afternoon shadows and scattered with golden slivers of light, and Charlotte reaches up with the last of her strength.
"I wasn't going to ask," Erik protests, leaning on his hands over her, kicking away his slacks. She reaches for him and he shuts his eyes, hissing through his teeth as she curves her fingers around the hot hard length of him, veneered with soft taut skin.
I want to feel you. Charlotte strokes once, twice, watching the pleasure she feels welling inside him send fine ripples across his face.
Charlotte, he answers, making three syllables of her name; his smile is sudden and blinding, his hand gathers up her knee and he leans on one arm over her as they shift and slide, fitting their bodies together again. They groan in unison, a tangle of emotions unfurling through them both, relief and hunger and gladness and worry. They've both been worried, but Erik doesn't feel anything like -- Charlotte swallows hard and opens her eyes, looking up at his long fine throat, his strong jaw, tipping her head back to meet his gaze. He feels inside her like he's come home.
Erik looks down at her, his eyes dark as the ocean where they met, and growls in soft frustration, wanting to touch her face. Charlotte squirms, winding her arms and other leg around his back, and he helps her, pushing her knee up over his shoulder, tilting her hips up to his. The shift slides him in even deeper and she moans, her eyes fluttering shut, and watches her own flushed face through his eyes, her own mouth parting and soft under his gentle fingers. "Come on," she murmurs, to the tension thrumming through him, to his fist squeezed tight against the carpet and the taut muscles of his magnificent thighs. "Come on," she orders somewhat ruthlessly, pulling him down by his nape. "Fuck me."
Erik groans and shudders all over, his hand closing in her hair, and obeys, and she screams her delight into his mouth pressing over hers. Charlotte moans to him, soaking in his enjoyment of her, sunk so deeply into him she can barely feel where he ends and she begins. His breath rushing between their lips, her name echoing through his mind, Erik fucks her just as she demanded until his pleasure surges and crests, and she rides every crashing wave, feeling him feeling her in that familiarly wondrous endless loop.
He sags panting into her hold, and she wraps herself more tightly around him, his mouth trembling against her temple, his body trembling over hers. I never want to let you go, she thinks, helplessly amused at her admission, and Erik's answering wash of half-chagrined delight is like a kiss, like a smile.
Eventually he disentangles himself from her, his fingers from her hair and his body from her four-limbed clutch, and when he lifts his weight off her chest she realizes she needed to breathe rather too long ago; when she wheezes he casts a worried glance at her and lies down beside her on the scratchy-soft rug, lightly kissing the top of her head, his hand curving over her belly.
Eventually Erik murmurs, "You made a decision for me." Which he didn't appreciate, he thinks clearly as speech.
Charlotte turns her head to look up into his face, his shadowed eyes, his tender bottom lip. He usually holds his mouth in a tight line, but when it's relaxed there's a certain softness to it, an elegant lushness. She reaches up, stroking her thumb across his lip as she says, "I made a decision for myself."
Erik sighs, thinking Sophist loudly enough to be heard, but Charlotte lets it go in favor of knowing he's come back, in hopes of hearing the words she sees coalescing in his mind. "So, your child."
"Yes." She shifts towards him, onto her side, and he slides his arms around her to pull her even closer.
"Have you thought of any names?" Erik's fingers slip into her hair again, his palm cradling her head, and suddenly she can see it, his big hands holding her baby more lightly and securely than any force in the world. Her eyes prickle, and she turns her face in against his chest, pressing her cheek over his heart.
"A few heroes of mine," she murmurs, willing her choked voice not to give way entirely, fighting back the happy tears. "Albert, Marie, Robert, perhaps Jane." At his inquisitive noise she amends, "Jane Gray, the nine days's queen."
"Noble, if rather plain." Erik's voice is so dry Charlotte has to laugh.
"All right," she amends. "Perhaps we might," and it feels as good to feel his relief on hearing 'we' as it does to say it, "adjust it to Jean."
Coda, ten years later.
It's fortunate that Charlotte has already skimmed this monograph, considering the thumps from down the hall where Erik and Jean are using a spare bedroom to fling furniture about with their powers. Allegedly, Erik is teaching Jean fine control, but Charlotte suspects right now they're goading each other into feats of strength or other ridiculousnesses.
She could go down there and chaperone, she supposes, but the sofa is warmly comfortable and she just doesn't feel like transferring back to her chair one more time today, so she keeps attempting to read. At least, that is, until there's a crash and a burst of dismay from Jean, then the sound of running footsteps; Charlotte reaches out, but all she feels from Erik is chagrin, not pain or alarm, so she waits for Jean to arrive, feeling the dismay flaring into anger as she approaches.
Jean bangs the study door open and shouts, "You never told me!" with her usual flair for the dramatic.
Charlotte pinches the top of her nose, briefly wondering if the mansion will survive this child's puberty, and uses her mildest voice to ask, "Please shut the door, love."
It slams shut, the lock clicking for good measure. Jean's fine control has improved, and she's so angry her long red hair actually billows around her head in an unfelt wind. Charlotte pats the bed beside her, but Jean faces her, small hands clenched into fists, and accuses, "Dad -- Erik, he's not my father!"
"Oh," Charlotte says, feeling the blood drain from her face. "Oh, yes. Well, he's -- yes. He's not the man by whom I conceived you."
"My father was Shaw!" Jean shouts at the top of her young lungs. "You taught us about him, how we're not supposed to be like him, how he used his powers to hurt people, how he was evil, but you had me with him! How could you --"
"You have no idea what you're saying," and Charlotte can hear her own voice rising. "If you would let me explain --" But she's remembering as she speaks, the mirrored cell and harsh hands and snide smile she's never forgotten, and her daughter is a telepath. Charlotte feels Jean read her, instinctively as breathing, in the moment before angry young eyes widen to circles of horror.
"Oh no," she says, voice fading small, words hitting Charlotte like a flurry of blows. "Mom, you didn't want to, did you. He made you. He --"
And Jean hides her face in her hands and bursts into tears.
"Come here," is all Charlotte can say, and at least now Jean listens. She burrows into Charlotte's arms and Charlotte rests her cheek on Jean's head and holds her, pushing the memories back down with the feel of Jean's silky hair. She could wipe the knowledge from Jean's mind too, could never again have to face that horror in her child's eyes... but that would be selfish, she knows. This is a chance to teach Jean what she had to learn on her own, how to cope with others' traumatic memories.
So she also suppresses the part of herself that wishes Jean hadn't discovered this so soon, because this sort of happenstance never waits long enough and never comes soon enough. She takes a deep steadying breath, and when Jean snuffles to quiet Charlotte looks her in the eyes and wipes the tears from her cheeks. "Did you learn this from your father?"
Jean nods. "I asked him if he thought I had my telekinesis from him, and he shook his head no, but I saw in his mind why he thought it can't be him. He hates Shaw so much, Mom," and Jean shakes as she says this, remembering the searing pain of Erik's hatred, "for all the things he did, but I didn't see those things, I just couldn't believe you would... but you didn't. You didn't want to. He must hate Shaw for hurting you, too."
"He does," Charlotte sighs. "As if he didn't have enough reason before. But the choice and the time to tell you about it must be his, Jean. You need to work on your shielding and your control. You read your father accidentally, you read me because you were upset -- you have a responsibility not to do these things, and to keep confidential whatever you accidentally learn." Jean nods solemnly, and Charlotte takes another breath. "And you're right, I ought to have told you, I just..." She doesn't want to appear this weak in front of her child, but anything else would be a lie. "It's not a happy memory."
"You've told us unhappy things before, when we needed to know them," Jean counters. Out of the mouths of babes, of course, and Charlotte smiles proudly at her, because she's right. However, Jean doesn't smile back, staring at Charlotte with huge sad eyes as she continues, "But why?"
"Why --?" Charlotte asks, and then painfully understands.
"Why did you have me?" Jean's eyes are welling over again. "He hurt you to make you have me. When you told us how people have babies you said we don't have to have any if we don't want to, so why did you have me? Don't I make you remember him?"
"Jean, please," Charlotte gasps to halt the barrage, her own vision wavering with hot tears. "Oh, Jean. I had you because I wanted you. Because I want you." Her cheeks are streaming wet, but she makes herself smile. "Because the worst thing that ever happened to me gave me two of the best things in my life, my beautiful eldest daughter and my marriage to her father."
Now Jean smiles, and throws her long coltish arms around Charlotte. "Mom," she whispers, overflowing with gratitude and love, and Charlotte holds onto her and radiates love right back, glad she can be honest, glad Jean is her daughter. As she holds her, Charlotte slides gently into Jean's mind and shows her, thought to thought, how to disengage from the terrible memories and to quench their lived-in intensity. Jean listens, nodding against her shoulder, and at least Charlotte can teach her this.
A faint scuff of footsteps makes Charlotte look up to find Erik standing in the doorway. She smiles at him rather tremulously, and he smiles back, tilted and rueful. "Jean," he says, and Jean turns and flings herself into his arms. "I'm sorry you found out this way."
"I'm sorry too," Jean says earnestly. "I shouldn't have gone into your mind."
"I won't argue there." Erik squeezes her and lets her go. "We all have work to do."
"Work?" echoes a piping voice from behind Erik; a white-topped blur flickers past his legs, streaks breezily across the back of Charlotte's sofa, bounds over her wheelchair, and resolves into Pietro perched on the windowsill in all his five-year-old imperious glory. "What are we working on?"
"Our powers," Charlotte says in unison with Erik's growled, "How not to eavesdrop," and Jean laughs, wiping her face on her sleeve. The doorway isuddenly fills with children, Ororo and Sanjeev and Bobby, Warren with his wings out, Alex's son Scott who shyly ducks inside and runs to Jean's side, and not to be left out, Wanda sucking her thumb as she drags along the tattered gray blanket she refuses to be parted from.
Charlotte shakes her head and decides not to scold Jean for misusing a sleeve as a handkerchief; one must choose one's battles after all. Instead she says, lifting her voice, "But that can wait until tomorrow, because I believe quite soon it will be bedtime." As the children wail their objections, she catches Erik's eyes across all their varied heads, and basks in his tilted, spreading smile.
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: NC-17 with warnings.
Pairing: Charlotte Xavier/Sebastian Shaw, Charlotte Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr. Others mentioned. Special appearance by Jean Grey
Summary: From the prompt: How long will Erik stay when he finds out Charlotte's carrying Shaw's child?
Content Advisory: Genderswap of the always-female variety. Consent issues. Rape/non-consent, violence, enthusiastic consent, on-screen character death, happy ending.
Acknowledgements: Whichever brilliantly imaginative anon prompted this at
xmen_firstkink, all my friends who encouraged me while I wrote at breakneck speed, and the talented anon who wrote House of Cards, the excellent (and very different) other fill for this prompt.Disclaimer: This fanwork has been created for pleasure only and not for profit.
Title from It's This Way, which was given me by
igrockspockPart One.
The walls are all mirrors, and every mirror reflects Charlotte's tears. She stares at herself multiplied, the images wavering, tears streaming sideways across countless copies of her face; she doesn't look up past the edge of the helmet, up to Shaw's fiercely grinning face pressed to hers, cheek to helmet to cheek.
She manages, this time, not to watch him. It's not as if she can't feel his fist wrapped around her wrists, his weight on her back, his clothing crumpling between their bodies as he rocks searingly into her. It's not as if she can stop him, the helmet's smooth void curved around his hateful mind, and no matter how intently she's made herself watch him she's never spotted a weakness to turn to her advantage. Charlotte stares instead at her own face, bruised mouth and red nose and tears puddling beside her eye, and tries to endure until Shaw finishes with her for the moment. It's only sex, she reminds herself, it's only physical. I won't be here forever. Neither Erik nor Raven will leave a stone unturned until they find me.
So Charlotte tells herself, biting her lip until the dented flesh goes pale, clenching her eyes shut when he begins puffing into her hair. She hates that she knows now the harbingers of Shaw's impending orgasm, that part of her sighs in relief that at least this will soon be over once again. She hates him more and more with every twinging thrust, sobbing through her stuffed nose, gasping high as Shaw squeezes her wrists sharply, as he gropes down her side and clutches her hip, and he growls harsh and hot as she feels him finally come. "Get off," she chokes out, her voice clogged as her nose, "get off me. You've had your fun."
Shaw just sighs luxuriously, draping himself over her, not letting go for an unbearably long moment as Charlotte's heart thuds against the floor and she shudders with sobs beneath his hard immovable body. Finally he lets her hands go and shoves her forward as he pushes back, kneeling up; with that helmet hiding him from her telepathy, he vanishes from her awareness as soon as she can squirm free of his hold. She should sit up, she thinks, glare at him, confront him, but all she can do is curl up tightly on the mirrored floor, arms wrapped around her belly as she cries.
"My dear, you mustn't dehydrate yourself," Shaw advises, barely even breathless. "Think of the child!"
"Go to Hell," Charlotte snaps between sobs, hardly her best rejoinder, but her brain feels swollen and her body leadenly useless.
Shaw just chuckles, and Charlotte curls up tighter around a spasm of thwarted fury. "I began this to beget that child," he tells her, "but you do make it such a pleasure." He pats her hip and laughs at her weak flail of a kick, stands up and strolls away, shutting the door behind him with its usual metallic thunk.
Eventually, Charlotte cries herself out on the cold smooth floor. Eventually she sits up and reaches for the wooden cube that serves as a table, wipes her face with the towel, and makes herself swallow again and again until she's drained the cup of cool water. Eventually she wobbles to her feet, scrubs herself as best she can and flings the towel at the door, and dresses herself with numb, shaking fingers.
Eventually, fully clothed but for bare feet, she lies down on the cot, wraps herself in one of the several soft gray blankets and shuts her eyes against the relentless light.
It's the sixth time Shaw has visited her since he had her abducted. It's the fourth time he's forced himself on her. Charlotte thinks she's been here four days, if her count's correct, and knows she's never been so alone in her life.
As long as she's been aware, Charlotte's never been alone; in the darkness behind her eyes she's always seen the drifting distant lights of other minds, soft or sharp-edged, flickering with colors beyond any spectrum. She's always heard, far below any conscious thought, the soft symphonic murmur of sentience all around her, until Shaw had his teleporter bring her to this mirror-polished isolation chamber.
She'd been talking with Erik, standing in her study as he sat in his customary chair, long elegant legs crossed and eyes alight with the fire. They'd averted World War Three and returned triumphant with their team intact; Moira had returned to the CIA to an assured promotion and with private glee at her superiors' chagrin, while Charlotte had brought all her fellow mutants to her home, filling the dusty old mansion with wonderful life, a prelude to the school she might finally found. All of this fluttered through her mind in drifts of happiness as she watched Erik relax, a tumbler of scotch by his hand and the furrows fading from his brow, as she teased him, "But you'll make an excellent instructor! One glare and the children will fall all over themselves to improve!"
Erik arched a sharp eyebrow, but his eyes were warm and soft. Smiling, Charlotte swung her hips as she turned to fetch the chess set; they'd been busy for weeks, most recently with settling everyone into the mansion, but she'd thought she and Erik might steal this night for themselves.
She turned, right into a sulphurous explosion of black and red. Shaw's teleporter caught her upraised hand, his smile gleaming in his crimson face, and Erik's formless alarm reverberated through her mind as the world vanished in smoke and flame.
It reappeared gleaming silver and white, inside a rounded-cornered cube lined with smooth mirrors, and as Charlotte reached for his mind the teleporter flickered away before she could grasp him, leaving her there alone. But not for long.
Charlotte rolls onto her back, staring up at her own blotchy face, one of only three she's seen since her abduction; silence stretches around her as if the world were gone, annihilated as Shaw had planned. She's had nightmares about that, dreams that her team lost and all her happiness since has been delusion, dreams that she'll spend the rest of her life walled up in this gleaming vacuum as Shaw's brood mare. This can't be good for her sanity, she thinks, and watches herself laugh, the sound high and cracked. What a ludicrously obvious observation.
She sits up and looks down at herself, at her blazer and blouse and skirt all a mess of wrinkles, then stands up and makes herself stretch. It feels pointless, but she knows, dryly and academically, that movement helps. So she walks around the little cell, a circuit around her table and bed, another lap and another, taking steady breaths of the stuffy air. Her mirrored image flickers in multiplied columns as she moves, until she shuts her eyes and trails her fingers along the smooth wall instead, thinking of dearer faces. Her team, Angel, Sean, Alex, Darwin. Her friend and colleague Moira. Hank, smooth and furry; Raven, pink or tan or blue. And Erik, Erik, Erik. She matches the cadence of his name to her heartbeat as she walks endlessly around her little prison.
The door opens, as it has eight times before, twice a day. As on each morning, Emma Frost stands frowning in the doorway, glitteringly icy as her namesake. She hates Charlotte for gaining Shaw's interest, for being thrust into the crux of his demented scheme, and Charlotte want to laugh and cry and scream in response that for her part she could wish all of her unwelcome fertility on the woman if she could just go home and never see Sebastian Shaw again in her life.
Charlotte lets herself do none of these things. At least she's not crying this time. She walks forward, arms folded and head high, and allows Frost to escort her through the welcome open air of the corridor. In the bathroom Charlotte ignores Frost's sneer as she meticulously folds her battered clothes, the tap-tap-tapping on the tiled wall as she showers.
As she scrubs herself under the hottest water she can stand, Charlotte contemplates Emma Frost. In diamond form she's like a wall of glass, not a void like Shaw in his helmet; Charlotte wonders, after what Erik told her of their confrontation and what she's seen herself, if Frost has any telepathic capabilities in this form, or only that imperviousness.
It's worth taking a chance.
Charlotte dresses as methodically as she can get away with, to the tink tink tink of Frost tapping her glittering foot. She bows her head as if simply weary, as if expecting nothing more than to be handed a breakfast tray and locked in again, but as she walks she reaches out through the rooms of Shaw's facility. It's more difficult without the focus of fingers at her temple, but she finds the windworker sunning himself on the roof -- a tiny push turns his doze into deep sleep -- and then the teleporter. Him, Charlotte calls.
He whirls into the hallway in a blur of red and gray, and Frost screams as he swings his dagger at her. Steel, properly wielded, can cleave diamond, after all. "Azazel!" Frost shouts, arms before her face, transforming back to flesh to use her telepathy --
Charlotte seizes the chance she's made. Sleep, she shoves into Frost's head. Take me home, she thinks to Azazel, reaching out for her household as she strides towards him. Raven! Erik! Hank! Their minds flicker on the edge of her range, flaring in surprise as they hear her; she hears running footsteps, and lunges forwards towards Azazel's hand. I'm here! I'm--
A wall of force smacks Charlotte across the hall, Azazel thrown away from her to slump stunned against the bathroom door. Shaw stands between them, staring down at Charlotte, his eyes cold and his mouth a flat line. He wags a finger at her, clicking his tongue, tut-tut-tut, and the sudden memory of Erik making the same gesture, the realization of how he must have learned it, chills her down to her gut. "And after all our hospitality," Shaw says, bending to her.
Charlotte knows it won't work, she knows it, but she has to try. She grabs at his helmet, trying to push it off, but he grips her wrists and drags her to her feet, hauling her along as he palms open the door and strides inside. It thunks shut behind her, cutting off her household's minds from hers with echoing finality, and Charlotte can't stop shaking as she looks up at Shaw. It's all she can do not to scream.
Charlotte will never think of the phrase, "tore my clothes off" in the same way ever again. Shaw deliberately rips her clothes away, fistful by fistful, pulling them so taut they press sore lines into her flesh, twisting his hand so they tear free with awful snarls of parting cloth. Charlotte tries to struggle, tries to clutch her clothes to her, but Shaw pushes her against the wall, pinning her shoullder with a heavy hand as he tears every stitch from her body.
When he's done he touches the pile of shredded cloth with one finger, and it goes up in a yellow-white flash, leaving a thin dust of gray ash on the mirrored floor. He turns away and Charlotte sags against the wall, naked and humiliated but thinking this moment's ordeal over, until he pauses and turns back again, unfastening his pants, and his smile curls at the corners, twice as unpleasant as before.
"No," Charlotte says uselessly. "No!" she shouts as Shaw grips her by the arms and forces her down onto the cot, knocking the blankets aside with a flick of his wrist. "No!" she screams in his face until she's hoarse. He just pins her hands above her head, leaning on his elbows, and grips her chin in his other hand.
This time he makes her look at him as he enters her, his chilly eyes and his gleeful grin. This time he bites her and pinches her and makes it hurt even worse than before. And when he's done at last and he climbs off her, leaving her gasping and clutching herself, he adds casually, almost drowned out by the snarl of his zipper, "Once my team recovers we're going to have to pack up and move, you know. All because of your little stunt."
When Charlotte returns from blindly staring at nothing she finds herself chilled, bruised and naked; agony jacknifes through her, and she rolls off the cot into the heap of blankets as sobs wrench her through and through.
She has no idea how much later it is when the door creaks. Then the wall shudders, and the door creaks again, sending a crack up through the mirrored plating. Charlotte looks up, inhaling, and the world rushes in, all the space, all the minds, and nearest of all the chaos of her team in a fierce fight outside the door. "In here!" she screams, lunging forward, and when Alex shouts in answer, "Get back!" his deep welcome voice brings tears springing to her sore eyes as she huddles in the blankets.
The wall shudders again, red light flashing through the developing spiderweb of cracks around the door, and Charlotte hears Sean's distinctive inhale and covers her ears. The door bursts inwards, one hinge entirely broken, and she has just enough time to pull a blanket up to cover herself before Sean and Alex appear in the doorway, disheveled and smiling and so very welcome.
Then both boys frown in confusion, looking down at their hands.
What, they think, and No, and Charlotte soaks in their thoughts, half of her catching their alarm but half just so glad to feel friendly minds again... at least until they look up at her, unnatural smirks spreading across their faces, their hands reaching out, groping the air.
Frost. Charlotte wrestles down the flare of panic, fights the urge to hide from the cruel lust twisting their features as they lurch towards her. She knows these boys, she knows they'd never willingly hurt her. She throws her hand out, freezing them in place, and slides into both their heads at once, clutching the blanket at her collarbone as she rummages for the enemy telepath's wicked glitter. There, and there.
Charlotte pushes, and Frost pushes back. You won't knock me out this time, sugar, Frost throws at her, full of ice and edges, but Charlotte ignores the pain. Or, no, she billows with it, suddenly angry, suddenly furious. Frost has aided and abetted Shaw's crimes against the world, against Charlotte, has resented her and blamed her for Shaw's every act of abuse. Charlotte bares her teeth and shoves with all her anger, all her pain, and she's not at the point between rage and serenity which she showed Erik, but as he'd said, this gets the job done. SLEEP, she pounds into Frost's mind, sleep for a WEEK. Before she can stop herself Charlotte adds, and dream of everything I've suffered, gathering up all the memories of confinement and fear and pain, isolation and humiliation and rape, pushing the whole bundle of nightmares into that hateful woman's head.
Outside the room she hears a gasp and a thud, and yanks her consciousness back into herself, airlessly gasping herself.
Sean and Alex are blinking, moving, reaching out to support her now. "Professor," Alex says, his gloved hands tentative on her arm, "Professor Xavier, we've come to get you."
"I know," Charlotte says absently as she wipes her palm across face, and thinks to pat his shoulder and Sean's. "Thank you -- oh dear," as Armando tumbles backwards across the doorway and the walls creak.
Trailing her blanket, flanked by her boys, Charlotte hobbles as fast as she can from the cell, and finds Hank struggling with Azazel in a flurry of blue and red. The windworker flings himself at the fray, and Charlotte's reaching for her temple when he punches Azazel in the chin; the teleporter freezes and stares, his eyes concentric blue and white stark against his skin, and Hank slams him down so his face bounces against the floor.
As Azazel lies stunned, the windworker stumbles, catching himself on Hank's arm, and ripples into welcome beautiful blue, into Raven grinning as Hank grins back at her. They look over in unison and Charlotte smiles at them, cherishing the unfamiliar stretch in her cheeks after these days of horrors.
Then metal screams, tearing apart, and they all turn. Shaw has Erik pinned behind a massive beam, his helmeted head smooth and impervious as a bullet, one hand tucked behind Erik's nape as he murmurs in his ear. Erik's eyes are wide and unseeing, and Charlotte can hear Shaw's noxious whispers twisting through his mind, feel them knotting his guts. "... enjoyed her, little Erik? Have you felt her wriggling beneath you, the silken clasp of her exquisite cunt?"
That is absolutely beyond the pale. "Stop it!" Charlotte screams, staggering forward, one arm thrown out.
Shaw turns to her, his face stretched in that utterly gut-churning smile. "Look who's decided to join us!" he says, reaching as if he would take her hand or tap her into oblivion. Charlotte's knees shake beneath the aching weight of his gaze, she feels the air on her naked back, the blanket flimsy around her bare legs, the memory of his fingers in every bruise. But behind Shaw she sees Erik see her, she watches his hand rise and that helmet rise with it, plucked neatly from Shaw's head.
Before Erik even shouts, "Charlotte! Now!" she has her fingers at her temple, her teeth grinding with effort as she grabs mental hold of Shaw and freezes him in place. His eyes go wide but that's all he can do before she forces him to complete stillness.
Behind him, Erik lets the beam drop, the coin he's always carried fluttering up to orbit Shaw's head. He looks at her once more, his eyes deeper than the ocean, and she knows without reading him what he's going to do, how much it's going to hurt her. How necessary it is. She nods, struggling to breathe against the rib-locking dread, and Erik's eyes focus on Shaw's profile as the coin slices through the air, sailing towards Shaw's head.
Shaw's eyes are focused on Charlotte, her bruise-mottled arms and blanket-wrapped body, her disheveled hair and narrowed eyes, and her team gathering behind her, Alex helping Armando up, Angel fluttering in to land, Hank and Raven holding hands. Charlotte watches herself through his eyes as she holds him still against his formidable will battering at hers. But now she has him. They have him.
Erik's coin burrows a line of agony between Charlotte's eyes as it digs a slot into Shaw's forehead. She gasps, puffing, hyperventilating, clinging to the blanket, to herself. It rips into his brain, spinning now, pulverizing all it touches, and the pain reverberates through Charlotte's head until she feels the floor slam into her knees, until she feels her throat burning as she screams. But she keeps hold of Shaw, and now his mind clutches at hers with desperate fingers, with bitter claws, trying to drag itself away from the expanding vacuum as Erik cores out his brain.
Charlotte shudders, ablaze with pain, but she keeps hold of Shaw as Erik destroys him, staring into his dimming eyes until their cold light is completely extinguished, until the coin exits silently through his occipital and his mind plummets down its own gravity well. She pushes him off as she never could these last five days, she watches his mind wink out of existence and his emptied body crash to the floor, and she laughs dizzily as the pain slowly dissipates, gulping as tears stream down her cheeks.
Erik blinks, once, twice, and sees her. He flings the helmet to the floor, smashing it flat, steps uncaring over Shaw's corpse and gathers Charlotte in his arms, tucking one behind her back and the other beneath her knees to lift her up. "Charlot-te," he murmurs over and over against her forehead, three German-accented syllables she's only ever heard before inside his mind. "Charlotte, Charlotte." Her arm wrapped around Erik's shoulders, she slumps onto his chest, the excruciating hysteria draining away to leave her safe in his hold. Finally, finally, Charlotte is home.
Part Two
That night Charlotte lies in her own bed, scrubbed and combed and wrapped in soft flannel, and listens to her household settle to sleep. Their worry for her suffuses all their thoughts, and she sighs and pulls her pillow over her head, shamelessly allowing herself to snoop as Angel reads a travel book, as Raven brushes Hank's fur, as Alex and Armando murmur together and Sean masturbates so guiltily she chuckles into her pillow. It feels good to laugh, but even as she does a corner of her awareness remains focused on Erik in his bed down the hallway, not in hers.
At length the lights dim, one by one. Charlotte lies in the restful darkness and waits for all their minds but one to fade to sleep. When they have, she pulls on her robe and walks down her own familiar, creaking hallway, and Erik's doorknob turns before she touches it.
Though he lets her in he doesn't look up at her, remaining curled motionless in his sheets. Charlotte perches on the edge of the bed and just listens for a little while, to his breathing, to his mind.
Eventually, she says, because Erik hasn't, "He's gone."
Erik rolls over at that, and Charlotte watches him from the corner of her sight; his eyes are as wide and worried as the day Hank introduced her to Cerebro. "But, Charlotte, what he did to --"
"Is over," she says, more loudly than she should, and takes a deep breath to affirm her control. "It's over. Our lives are ours now." She looks at him, sliding her hand towards him. "Can we continue sharing them as we were?" Will you still want me now that he's touched me? she wonders, keeping the dismal thought locked inside her own head.
Erik makes her wait for a long moment as he searches her face, his own unreadable, as she aches to read him and restrains herself. Then he slides his hand forward to meet hers, and as their fingers tangle her heart hurts with hope, she dares to smile and blinks fast against crying. "What do you want?" he asks in return. "That's what matters right now."
Charlotte smiles wider at Erik's chivalry, and a tear spills down her cheek. "This is what I want. All of us. Both of us. This." This is what I longed for, she thinks, her throat tightening, and lets him hear it. This brought me through.
Erik lifts her hand to his lips, and opens to her in return, his throat just as tight. I thought you would want me to leave, he thinks, and Charlotte shakes her head so hard tendrils fly free, leaning forward to grip his hand in both of hers. He reaches up to brush the tears from her cheeks, she kisses the heel of his hand, and he curls his fingers under her chin, long and warm.
Aloud, she chokes out, "May I sleep here?"
Erik's first reaction is to pull back, and it almost crushes her. Sitting up, he sees her face fall, and closes his hand over hers again. "Yes," he answers, and she never knew he had such a kind smile stashed away. "Yes, just -- a moment?" He lets go, reaching for a drawer with his power, and pulls a pair of sweatpants to his hand by their laces, then puts them on under the covers as if Charlotte doesn't already know every magnificent inch of him.
She smiles wryly, and doesn't let herself laugh, or cry. She pushes off her robe and lets it drop, and Erik folds his arms around her, long-sleeved nightgown and all, tucking her head beneath his chin. Her cheek against his chest, his mind nestled beside hers, Charlotte closes her eyes and sleeps quietly and dreamlessly that entire night.
That is, unfortunately, the last night of unbroken sleep any of the household have for several weeks. The nightmares return, despite Erik's arms and strength, and the first morning Charlotte sees everyone arrive for breakfast sunken-eyed and slumped-shouldered, shame drives her to the nearest bathroom where she cries until she vomits bile. Raven eventually coaxes her out by simply waiting on the far side of the door, her mind like a steady candleflame, and by wrapping warm arms around Charlotte when she finally can bear to emerge.
When she returns to the kitchen full of her waiting friends, Charlotte squares her shoulders and announces, in her best businesslike voice, "I apologize for last night, and I wish I could promise it won't happen again, but... I may project in my sleep for... awhile." Flattening her hands on the polished wooden table, looking down from all their weary worried eyes, she inhales and goes on. "If I do, feel free to come wake me. We've all been through a great deal, and you all deserve your rest."
As she's about to sit down Angel sets a cup of tea in front of her, then hugs her tightly. That provokes a general rush in which even Alex joins, and Charlotte buries her face in Hank's furry arm as she starts crying again, much happier tears.
Charlotte's emotional volatility grows worse rather than better. Raven gives her a pair of wide sunglasses to cover her red eyes and Sean announces she looks like a movie star, which makes her smile. She struggles against impatience with herself; she has a degree in psychology, she knows what processes she must work through and that she can't block her own memories, but she's always prided herself on her control, and sometimes she finds herself sobbing in rage at her present instability. Sometimes she pounds on Erik's chest and he lets her, lets her scream and cry until she collapses into his arms. He never says anything when she does, his mind steady as a mountain, and she appreciates that more than she can say.
She rations her nights with him, limiting herself to two or three a week, after finding that he stays awake watching over her when she sleeps beside him. The other nights she lies in her own bed, tucked between mounded pillows, listening to the distant ripples of her household's minds, waiting to fall asleep. Sometimes she listens more closely than she knows she should, drawn guiltily but irresistibly to their present minds, to their conversations, to their thoughts, to their pleasure when the couples make love; re-familiarizing herself with the feel of that joy, she hopes they would forgive her if they knew, and those are the nights she sleeps best, sleeps longest before the nightmares return. Still, almost invariably someone has to knock on her door to bring her out of dreams of mirror-lined agony that leave her twisted in her blankets, her heart pounding when she lurches awake.
Sometimes whomever's knocked at her door comes in to sit with her, especially the girls or Alex. The first time, Angel takes her hand and says simply, "It's bad now, but it gets better," and Charlotte hugs her with all her strength. Raven always strokes her hair and usually can coax her back to sleep. Alex sits stiffly and silently, and after awhile Charlotte smiles and squeezes his hand before sending him back to Armando.
She has a good household here, she knows, and during the day they plan and work towards the school she still intends to open, from reconstructing Cerebro to setting up student bedrooms. A few weeks go by and life becomes almost normal, except for Charlotte's occasional crying jags, and how delicate her stomach seems to have become in the mornings.
Then comes the day when Charlotte goes looking for Raven and finds her in the ballroom trying to kick Erik. "No, from the hip," he corrects with a sharp thwack, and Raven's wince breaks something inside Charlotte with a nearly audible snap.
"What on Earth are you doing?" she asks, striding into the room.
As they turn to her Raven smiles brightly. "Erik's teaching me to fight," she says, and Charlotte stares at her, at the incongruity of that explanation; Raven's her younger sister, she may be taller but she'll always be younger, she shouldn't be involved in violence, she can't be fighting.
"Is this a good idea?" Charlotte asks as mildly as she can, and Raven's smile fades into a wounded pout, but Erik radiates certainty.
"It's an excellent idea," he answers. "She's strong, agile, fast -- in a year she'll be nearly unstoppable --"
"You'll stop right now!" Charlotte doesn't even realize she's screaming until she feels her throat burn. Erik steps towards her, hands out, frowning slightly, but her telepathy leaps out and she feels all his emotions, anger and worry and guilty, frustrated lust. She's so beautiful in her fury, she hears him thinking, and it's been almost two months and all those nights with her warm in his arms, and --
Charlotte shrieks, "No!" and both Erik and Raven clutch their heads. She staggers back -- she's hurt them -- she spins and runs away, stumbling blindly, her chest already shaking with another thrice-damned crying fit.
She finds the library bathroom, fortunately before she throws up yet again; afterwards she sobs down to a shaky, emptied calm, washes her face, and drinks a palmful of tap water. She owes them both an apology, but even her mind feels too drained to reach out. She looks at herself, pale and lean-cheeked, her eyes sunken. She doesn't look well.
She's not well.
She looks at herself, and realizes her next period should have arrived already, and in that moment she knows.
Charlotte sits down heavily on the toilet lid, shockily staring at nothing. Shaw succeeded. She's pregnant. She tucks in her chin, looking down at her own belly, her tear-washed mind suddenly, strangely clear.
She has a decision to make.
Erik will not be pleased to hear this, Charlotte thinks, and coughs up a hysterical giggle. To say the least. She's not best pleased herself, and she knows more than one doctor who could help her quietly deal with this. She has a choice. And yet... Charlotte's often thought she'd like to have a child someday. Soon she'll have a school full of caretakers, other adults, adolescents, a full and vibrant house for a child to grow up in. She's no longer so callow, and she and Raven raised each other fairly well, so she has reason to believe she could do well by a baby. She could fairly accomplish this now, at this point in her life.
She could.
If she has this child, Charlotte decides, it won't be Shaw's child. It will be her child. And Erik's, if he'll have it.
She has to hope he will, as she pulls herself to her feet, takes another palmful of water, and makes herself open the door.
All day, Charlotte has gone over her reasoning time and again. After dinner she told Raven, cried with her, and swore her to temporary secrecy. In her time she's faced down thesis committees, prison wardens, armed soldiers, and a megalomaniacal mutant, but it still takes all her courage, standing that night beside Erik's bed with her hands folded together, to tell him plainly, "I'm pregnant."
Erik jerks, head to toes, and looks up at Charlotte as if she learned to levitate or turned a new color. She giggles ridiculously, and watches his eyes narrow as he obviously evaluates her sanity.
Then he scoots over to sit before her, reaching up for her hands. "I trust you know someone," he says gently, stroking her knuckles with his thumbs. "No matter where they are, I'll take you there, and stay with you through the procedure if you need."
"Oh God, Erik." Charlotte has to sit beside him before her knees give out beneath her. "That's... thank you, that's incredibly kind of you, but I don't think... that won't be necessary. I'm going to have the child."
Erik yanks away from her, dropping her hands, and his sudden repulsion feels like her skin's being torn off in strips. "What?" he says flatly, disbelief rather than curiosity.
Charlotte makes herself look at his profile, though he's stopped looking at her. "I'm having this baby."
"Why?" Erik stands into pacing. "Why would you do this?"
"I think I can offer a child a good home, even or especially considering the school, and --"
"No." Erik slashes one hand through the air, elegantly decisive, and Charlotte could kick herself for noticing that now. "Why would you have his child?"
"It's my child," she counters, and realizes she's wrapped her arms around her belly. "I've thought all day and I've decided --"
"You told me --" Erik's voice cracks, and so does Charlotte's heart. "You told me he was gone, Charlotte."
"He is!" She reaches up, but Erik waves her off, his eyes bleak and terrible as he stares her down.
"Not when you willingly carry a piece of him inside you." Erik pulls his shoes from his closet and a sweatshirt from the cabinet, whose handles are all rattling.
"Erik, where are you going?" Charlotte asks inanely as he dresses. She knows. Even without using her telepathy, she knows.
"I have no idea." Erik shoves on his shoes as his suitcase sails from the closet and all the dresser drawers slide open. "But I suggest you return to your bed, Charlotte. You're going to need your rest." The pure venom lacing those last words makes her hands press to her mouth, and as the door swings open the hallway beyond gapes pitch-black.
Erik packs busily, his back a bulwark between them. Once Charlotte could persuade him not to leave the CIA facility, their shared mission, their newfound fellowship. Now she has no words in her mouth or her mind to call him back to her. She gets up, arms wrapped tightly around herself; at the threshold she turns to say, her voice trembling, "You'll always be welcome --" and the door slams shut in her face.
Back in her empty room, Charlotte sits shivering on her bed, unable to make herself lie down. On numb autopilot she reaches into her linen closet for another comforter and finds herself pulling out the blanket she wore home, though she'd meant to dispose of it in the next charity box. Shaking, she wraps herself in it and huddles in her bed for the rest of the night, sleeplessly listening to Erik's crackling rage. Just before dawn he leaves, the doors and gates opening and shutting for him as he strides away, and she lies under the brightening sky, feeling more alone than she's ever been despite everyone around her, too bereft even to weep.
Part Three
Six weeks and ten hours later, not that she would be counting, Charlotte lies on a deck chair, enjoying the spring sunshine. Beside her Raven and Alex brush Hank's fur out as he sprawls on the roof deck like a thick happy bearskin rug, Sean and Angel fly overhead, and Darwin climbs up through the house back to them, having flung himself off the roof for the joy of tumbling through the air.
It's not a bad day, and Charlotte almost feels content.
Then a mind brushes hers, familiar and unexpected, and she sits upright in her chair.
"Charlotte?" Raven asks, looking up from her hands buried wrist-deep in Hank's back fur. "Is something wrong?"
"No, I don't think so," Charlotte answers, slow and distracted as she shades her eyes and peers off into the distance. Did she hear --
"Hey!" Sean shouts high above them. "Hey, it's Mr. Lehnsherr!"
It is indeed. Erik is sailing through the air towards them at roof height, looking nonchalant though Charlotte can feel the effort buzzing within him. She considers for a moment letting him have the monopoly on melodrama; then she stands and waves, calling, "Welcome back!"
Erik smiles, his mouth tilting softly, and alights on the roof. "Hello, and thank you."
"You're welcome," Charlotte answers, feeling everyone's eyes on them as she steps up to him. "Will you be staying?" she asks, because she's human, if not only.
Erik's smile widens and tilts further. "He'd better," Raven mumbles, and Hank agrees with a low growl.
"If you'll have me." Erik offers his hands, palms up.
Charlotte smiles, her heart swelling with his particular painful hope. "Let's go inside," she suggests, laying a hand in his, though her mind reverberates with a yes so loud she doubts anyone on the roof doesn't hear it.
"Have fun, kids!" Raven calls, waving vigorously, and Armando steps up from the stairwell and holds the door open with a flourish, smiling ear to ear.
"Try not to fall off the roof," Erik tosses over his shoulder as they step down onto the stairs, settling his free hand on the small of Charlotte's back, and she has to scrub hers over her prickling eyes.
They walk just like that through the quiet, sunny house, no words between them, just silent accord. Down in the study they sit across her chess table, Erik settled into his customary chair as if he had never left. He's been gone six weeks, and they should discuss their situation like rational people, but it's all Charlotte can do to make herself sit in her own chair as she stares at him, real and present and back in her home. Erik, Erik, Erik.
He smiles, and she watches every shift of muscle in his jaw, the dynamic curves and hollows of his cheek. "Why did you come back?" she makes herself ask, because she should care.
"There was nowhere else I could be," he says, leaning forward, forearms on thighs. "I don't know what you've done to me, Charlotte." He smiles wider to bely those words. He knows, and knows he's done the same to her.
Charlotte nods crisply, as if gladness isn't suffusing the air, and asks, "Why now?"
"Because I was gone too long already." Erik stands as he says it, and shockingly, delightingly, he comes to her, kneeling before her, draping his hands over her knees. "Charlotte," he says slowly, tasting her name as she stares in wonder at him. "Are you still --" the slightest pause -- "pregnant?" She nods, her heart in her throat, her hands itching to slide into his hair. He nods too, his gaze on her belly, and lays a hand on it, fingers splayed. "Then will you have me back? Will you both have me?"
"Erik," Charlotte says or projects, she hardly knows anymore, as her hands curl over his shoulders and his face fills her vision. Erik, yes. Yes of course. She leans to him and he leans in, pushing up to kiss her, and she winds her arms around her neck, her mind crying out, Yes, yes, YES.
Erik rears up over her, pushing her back against the upholstery as he kisses her devouringly, and she clutches him, taking deep draughts of his warm male scent, her head spinning as with liquor. But then he goes rigid on a pulse of uncertainty, pulling back to look into her eyes. "Charlotte," he asks, his voice thick. "I want --"
"So do I." It's been too long, far too long. She's no longer the woman who slyly told pretty strangers in pubs about their groovy mutations, and she's been hoping, every night of these past six weeks, every morning. Hoping for him.
So Charlotte lunges forward but Erik tilts away, his eyes intent. "You're sure."
"Yes," she says, with mind and voice, her hand curving over the line of his jaw. "Yes, Erik, please," she begs, and his eyes flare.
This time when he kisses her, his lips urgently caressing hers, his hands slide up her sides, curving over her ribs, gathering her sundress. She pries her hands from his head and he pulls the dress over hers, she hooks her fingers into his turtleneck's hem as her brassiere writhes down her arms and Erik peels her underthings down her legs, and suddenly they're tearing at each other's clothes --
-- Charlotte remembers the bite of ripping cloth into her skin, and quivers to a stop. Just as quickly she pushes herself onwards again, keeping her lips moving, her fingers moving, as she carefully closes off her mind. But Erik notices, and smears his mouth off hers, kissing down her cheek and chin but then implacably raising his head. "Charlotte," he says, quiet and firm.
"I'm fine," she answers, and it's not a lie.
Erik quirks an eyebrow anyway, but what he says instead of his disbelief is, "Would you come into my mind for this? I need to feel you there."
Charlotte can't look at him and say no. She drops her eyes to the long lean musculature of his stomach, his unfastened trousers. "I shouldn't. I, if I have a flashback --"
"I won't leave you to face it alone." She looks up again, and Erik kisses her hard enough to make her mouth tingle. "Please?" He echoes her pleading tone, the sly bastard, and she laughs agreement, joy billowing as she reaches out to him, opening herself to him.
Erik brushes warm kisses over the notch of her throat, her collarbones, her heart. He rolls her nipple between his lips and she gasps at the shocking intensity of it, her breasts already so sensitized. He frames her hips in his hands and kisses her ribs, her flanks, her thighs, alternating as he pushes gently between them. He stills, thinking of the child beneath her skin, and kisses deliberately just above her navel, and then just below, down over her mound and further, tugging her gently to the chair's edge as he kisses her open.
When he licks her, long and lavishly, she sighs, her fingers curling in his hair. He's just as wonderful as always. But then he thinks, laced with satisfaction, Herr Doktor never pleased her, and it's like a drench of ice water and scalding oil.
Erik looks up at her gasping wince, his lips shiny wet, sees her face and winces himself. "Oh, scheisse. I apologize." He pulls his hands off her skin, planting them on the chair beside her hips, and at least she can feel how difficult it is for him to let go. "Do you want to stop?"
"No!" Charlotte says, a vehement edge to her voice, clutching at her still-wobbly control. "Just --" Not him. Don't think of him.
Of course. Erik lays his head on her thigh, and Charlotte runs her shaking fingers through his smooth hair as he curls his over her skin again, stroking the creases of her waist with his thumbs, filling his mind with the feel and scent and taste of her. He kisses her belly again, gently pushing her thighs open, and she drapes her knee over his shoulder and breathes, consciously trying to relax into the pleasure. At least until he suckles directly on her clit and she shrieks in shocked delight, distracted from anything and everything else.
Erik makes love to her with his mouth, forcefully and at length, varying tactics but never pausing for breath for either of them. He caresses her with his tongue in long flat strokes and nimble twists, grazes fine tingling lines of fire into her with the most careful presses of teeth, sucks on mouthfuls of her flesh and writes an unknown sonnet with the tip of his tongue. Charlotte presses her head back into the squeaking redolent leather of the chair and lets her hips rotate, bucking into the press of his mouth, lets herself clutch his hair and scream, and each time she comes he just pushes harder. He slides in two long fingers, firm inside her, and she squeezes around them, keening as she tips forward, panting over his broad scarred back. "Erik, Erik," she gasps in a shattered voice, "I'm going to die."
Erik thinks a smile at her, his tongue flickering over the folds fluttering around his knuckles, and keeps going unril she screams, thrashing and exultant, back arched as fire crackles through her to the roots of her hair and tips of her toes. He leans back then to look her over, licking his lips as he takes in her ecstatic dishevelment, and she grins breathlessly and thinks, Come up here.
He blinks as if he didn't expect that, and if he asks one more time if she's sure -- she ldrops herself onto him and he catches her, rocking back on his knees and laying her down gently on the thick carpet in front of the fireplace. The grate is cold, the room filled with afternoon shadows and scattered with golden slivers of light, and Charlotte reaches up with the last of her strength.
"I wasn't going to ask," Erik protests, leaning on his hands over her, kicking away his slacks. She reaches for him and he shuts his eyes, hissing through his teeth as she curves her fingers around the hot hard length of him, veneered with soft taut skin.
I want to feel you. Charlotte strokes once, twice, watching the pleasure she feels welling inside him send fine ripples across his face.
Charlotte, he answers, making three syllables of her name; his smile is sudden and blinding, his hand gathers up her knee and he leans on one arm over her as they shift and slide, fitting their bodies together again. They groan in unison, a tangle of emotions unfurling through them both, relief and hunger and gladness and worry. They've both been worried, but Erik doesn't feel anything like -- Charlotte swallows hard and opens her eyes, looking up at his long fine throat, his strong jaw, tipping her head back to meet his gaze. He feels inside her like he's come home.
Erik looks down at her, his eyes dark as the ocean where they met, and growls in soft frustration, wanting to touch her face. Charlotte squirms, winding her arms and other leg around his back, and he helps her, pushing her knee up over his shoulder, tilting her hips up to his. The shift slides him in even deeper and she moans, her eyes fluttering shut, and watches her own flushed face through his eyes, her own mouth parting and soft under his gentle fingers. "Come on," she murmurs, to the tension thrumming through him, to his fist squeezed tight against the carpet and the taut muscles of his magnificent thighs. "Come on," she orders somewhat ruthlessly, pulling him down by his nape. "Fuck me."
Erik groans and shudders all over, his hand closing in her hair, and obeys, and she screams her delight into his mouth pressing over hers. Charlotte moans to him, soaking in his enjoyment of her, sunk so deeply into him she can barely feel where he ends and she begins. His breath rushing between their lips, her name echoing through his mind, Erik fucks her just as she demanded until his pleasure surges and crests, and she rides every crashing wave, feeling him feeling her in that familiarly wondrous endless loop.
He sags panting into her hold, and she wraps herself more tightly around him, his mouth trembling against her temple, his body trembling over hers. I never want to let you go, she thinks, helplessly amused at her admission, and Erik's answering wash of half-chagrined delight is like a kiss, like a smile.
Eventually he disentangles himself from her, his fingers from her hair and his body from her four-limbed clutch, and when he lifts his weight off her chest she realizes she needed to breathe rather too long ago; when she wheezes he casts a worried glance at her and lies down beside her on the scratchy-soft rug, lightly kissing the top of her head, his hand curving over her belly.
Eventually Erik murmurs, "You made a decision for me." Which he didn't appreciate, he thinks clearly as speech.
Charlotte turns her head to look up into his face, his shadowed eyes, his tender bottom lip. He usually holds his mouth in a tight line, but when it's relaxed there's a certain softness to it, an elegant lushness. She reaches up, stroking her thumb across his lip as she says, "I made a decision for myself."
Erik sighs, thinking Sophist loudly enough to be heard, but Charlotte lets it go in favor of knowing he's come back, in hopes of hearing the words she sees coalescing in his mind. "So, your child."
"Yes." She shifts towards him, onto her side, and he slides his arms around her to pull her even closer.
"Have you thought of any names?" Erik's fingers slip into her hair again, his palm cradling her head, and suddenly she can see it, his big hands holding her baby more lightly and securely than any force in the world. Her eyes prickle, and she turns her face in against his chest, pressing her cheek over his heart.
"A few heroes of mine," she murmurs, willing her choked voice not to give way entirely, fighting back the happy tears. "Albert, Marie, Robert, perhaps Jane." At his inquisitive noise she amends, "Jane Gray, the nine days's queen."
"Noble, if rather plain." Erik's voice is so dry Charlotte has to laugh.
"All right," she amends. "Perhaps we might," and it feels as good to feel his relief on hearing 'we' as it does to say it, "adjust it to Jean."
Coda, ten years later.
It's fortunate that Charlotte has already skimmed this monograph, considering the thumps from down the hall where Erik and Jean are using a spare bedroom to fling furniture about with their powers. Allegedly, Erik is teaching Jean fine control, but Charlotte suspects right now they're goading each other into feats of strength or other ridiculousnesses.
She could go down there and chaperone, she supposes, but the sofa is warmly comfortable and she just doesn't feel like transferring back to her chair one more time today, so she keeps attempting to read. At least, that is, until there's a crash and a burst of dismay from Jean, then the sound of running footsteps; Charlotte reaches out, but all she feels from Erik is chagrin, not pain or alarm, so she waits for Jean to arrive, feeling the dismay flaring into anger as she approaches.
Jean bangs the study door open and shouts, "You never told me!" with her usual flair for the dramatic.
Charlotte pinches the top of her nose, briefly wondering if the mansion will survive this child's puberty, and uses her mildest voice to ask, "Please shut the door, love."
It slams shut, the lock clicking for good measure. Jean's fine control has improved, and she's so angry her long red hair actually billows around her head in an unfelt wind. Charlotte pats the bed beside her, but Jean faces her, small hands clenched into fists, and accuses, "Dad -- Erik, he's not my father!"
"Oh," Charlotte says, feeling the blood drain from her face. "Oh, yes. Well, he's -- yes. He's not the man by whom I conceived you."
"My father was Shaw!" Jean shouts at the top of her young lungs. "You taught us about him, how we're not supposed to be like him, how he used his powers to hurt people, how he was evil, but you had me with him! How could you --"
"You have no idea what you're saying," and Charlotte can hear her own voice rising. "If you would let me explain --" But she's remembering as she speaks, the mirrored cell and harsh hands and snide smile she's never forgotten, and her daughter is a telepath. Charlotte feels Jean read her, instinctively as breathing, in the moment before angry young eyes widen to circles of horror.
"Oh no," she says, voice fading small, words hitting Charlotte like a flurry of blows. "Mom, you didn't want to, did you. He made you. He --"
And Jean hides her face in her hands and bursts into tears.
"Come here," is all Charlotte can say, and at least now Jean listens. She burrows into Charlotte's arms and Charlotte rests her cheek on Jean's head and holds her, pushing the memories back down with the feel of Jean's silky hair. She could wipe the knowledge from Jean's mind too, could never again have to face that horror in her child's eyes... but that would be selfish, she knows. This is a chance to teach Jean what she had to learn on her own, how to cope with others' traumatic memories.
So she also suppresses the part of herself that wishes Jean hadn't discovered this so soon, because this sort of happenstance never waits long enough and never comes soon enough. She takes a deep steadying breath, and when Jean snuffles to quiet Charlotte looks her in the eyes and wipes the tears from her cheeks. "Did you learn this from your father?"
Jean nods. "I asked him if he thought I had my telekinesis from him, and he shook his head no, but I saw in his mind why he thought it can't be him. He hates Shaw so much, Mom," and Jean shakes as she says this, remembering the searing pain of Erik's hatred, "for all the things he did, but I didn't see those things, I just couldn't believe you would... but you didn't. You didn't want to. He must hate Shaw for hurting you, too."
"He does," Charlotte sighs. "As if he didn't have enough reason before. But the choice and the time to tell you about it must be his, Jean. You need to work on your shielding and your control. You read your father accidentally, you read me because you were upset -- you have a responsibility not to do these things, and to keep confidential whatever you accidentally learn." Jean nods solemnly, and Charlotte takes another breath. "And you're right, I ought to have told you, I just..." She doesn't want to appear this weak in front of her child, but anything else would be a lie. "It's not a happy memory."
"You've told us unhappy things before, when we needed to know them," Jean counters. Out of the mouths of babes, of course, and Charlotte smiles proudly at her, because she's right. However, Jean doesn't smile back, staring at Charlotte with huge sad eyes as she continues, "But why?"
"Why --?" Charlotte asks, and then painfully understands.
"Why did you have me?" Jean's eyes are welling over again. "He hurt you to make you have me. When you told us how people have babies you said we don't have to have any if we don't want to, so why did you have me? Don't I make you remember him?"
"Jean, please," Charlotte gasps to halt the barrage, her own vision wavering with hot tears. "Oh, Jean. I had you because I wanted you. Because I want you." Her cheeks are streaming wet, but she makes herself smile. "Because the worst thing that ever happened to me gave me two of the best things in my life, my beautiful eldest daughter and my marriage to her father."
Now Jean smiles, and throws her long coltish arms around Charlotte. "Mom," she whispers, overflowing with gratitude and love, and Charlotte holds onto her and radiates love right back, glad she can be honest, glad Jean is her daughter. As she holds her, Charlotte slides gently into Jean's mind and shows her, thought to thought, how to disengage from the terrible memories and to quench their lived-in intensity. Jean listens, nodding against her shoulder, and at least Charlotte can teach her this.
A faint scuff of footsteps makes Charlotte look up to find Erik standing in the doorway. She smiles at him rather tremulously, and he smiles back, tilted and rueful. "Jean," he says, and Jean turns and flings herself into his arms. "I'm sorry you found out this way."
"I'm sorry too," Jean says earnestly. "I shouldn't have gone into your mind."
"I won't argue there." Erik squeezes her and lets her go. "We all have work to do."
"Work?" echoes a piping voice from behind Erik; a white-topped blur flickers past his legs, streaks breezily across the back of Charlotte's sofa, bounds over her wheelchair, and resolves into Pietro perched on the windowsill in all his five-year-old imperious glory. "What are we working on?"
"Our powers," Charlotte says in unison with Erik's growled, "How not to eavesdrop," and Jean laughs, wiping her face on her sleeve. The doorway isuddenly fills with children, Ororo and Sanjeev and Bobby, Warren with his wings out, Alex's son Scott who shyly ducks inside and runs to Jean's side, and not to be left out, Wanda sucking her thumb as she drags along the tattered gray blanket she refuses to be parted from.
Charlotte shakes her head and decides not to scold Jean for misusing a sleeve as a handkerchief; one must choose one's battles after all. Instead she says, lifting her voice, "But that can wait until tomorrow, because I believe quite soon it will be bedtime." As the children wail their objections, she catches Erik's eyes across all their varied heads, and basks in his tilted, spreading smile.
