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Charles stares at his reflection in the mirror and levels the concealer with his face. He just has to apply an ample amount of concealer to the ripe purple blooming under his left eye and no one will be any the wiser. He’s done this enough times in the past to know that the layers of concealer have to be set with powder to reduce the risk of smudging. But he neither has the time nor the means to procure the powder, and this time, he’ll just have to make do with what he’s got.
Besides, he’d always nicked Raven’s concealers in the past — Raven, whose blonde façade shares the same skin pallor as his. Moira’s skin is at least a shade or two darker, which really doesn’t bode well. If the left half of his face is darker than the right, it’ll definitely raise questions — questions which Charles is trying ardently to avoid. He’ll just have to cover his entire face with the concealer and swing it off as a tan, then. There’s nothing to be done about the swelling under his eye, though, just like there’s nothing to be done about the bruises beneath his clothing.
Thankfully, morning classes are in full swing, and only a handful of students are loitering in the corridors outside the washroom. Besides, Charles had chosen this very washroom on the far side of the campus, as it’s not frequently used by students or faculty.
Charles takes a deep breath to steel himself and nearly collapses on the floor from the sheer pain the motion tugs from his bruised ribs and stomach. Tears crowd his eyes, and even that causes his left cheek to throb. He takes another breath despite the pain and leans on the counter for support. He feels light-headed and dizzy. The tears threaten to surpass the barrier of his eyes and flow down his cheeks.
No. He won’t cry. He can’t; because he doesn’t think he’d stop once he starts. Besides, crying will only empower Kurt further. He can’t let the man break him in every way possible.
Just as he’s about to open the tap to splash water over his eyes, the door to the bathroom bursts open and Erik enters. For a moment, Charles wonders if he could just nudge Erik’s mind into walking out, but no such luck. Erik has already spotted him, jaw clenched tightly and every muscle of his tall body coiled with anger. His mind is blocked to Charles, but if it weren’t, Charles has no doubt he’d only find rage there.
Shit. What is Erik doing here? Shouldn’t he be in a lecture? Even if he just wanted to use the urinals, there’s already a toilet on their floor. He needn’t have walked across the campus to use the one Charles is specifically in. But before Charles can voice any of those thoughts, Erik asks, in a voice as hard as steel, ‘What happened to your face?’
Charles winces unconsciously and regrets it at once as a sharp pain blooms on his left cheek and blazes its way to his temples. What could he possibly say? That he hasn’t learnt his lesson after all these years? That he was stupid enough to go back to that house despite the past?
So he tells the same weak lie he’d told Hank that morning. ‘I fell down the stairs.’
‘Really, Xavier?’ Erik spits, his voice crowding the small washroom and trembling with all the metal inside. ‘You think I’m as stupid as your furry friend to believe it?’
Charles pales. What does Erik know exactly? And more importantly, why does he even care?
‘I don’t know what you think it is—’ Charles sputters. But before he can utter another word, Erik crosses the short distance from the door to Charles’s space beside the counter in three quick strides, his movements jerky and projecting raw anger. Instinctively, Charles takes a step back, only for his back to hit the tiled wall. He’s trapped between the wall and Erik, and he’s in no physical condition to defend himself if Erik chooses that moment to pick a fight with him.
The panic that he’d fought to bury all morning comes rushing past its barriers and floods his throat and mouth with bile.
This close, Erik’s eyes are a wild grey, and they hone in sharply on the concealer held tightly in Charles’s grip. Erik darts a hand forward, and all Charles sees is danger. Out of sheer instinct, Charles raises both of his hands in front of his face and ducks behind the barrier. His heart thrashes painfully against his sternum, and his quick breaths tug further on his bruised ribs. The blood in his ears is rushing so loudly that it takes him a while to realise Erik is telling him something.
Calming his racing mind is a feat. Deep breaths, he tells himself. You’re fine. You’re not hurt. Erik’s not going to hurt you. He chants it like a mantra in his head until his breathing slows and his panic abates.
Only when he lowers his hands does he realise that the two taps on the sinks have melted in on themselves. And so has all the metal in the washroom.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Erik says when Charles finally looks at him. ‘I’m not—’ He shakes his head vehemently, as though just the thought of hurting Charles makes him sick. ‘I’m just—’ He lifts both hands in a mock parody of surrender. In the grip of his left hand is a small white tube.
Erik follows Charles’s gaze and produces the tube in front of him. ‘It’s a muscle relaxer,’ he says in lieu of an explanation. ‘It’ll help with the swelling and pain.’
He takes a tentative step forward — slowly — broadcasting every movement and intent to Charles, as though to give him every opportunity to duck away, and doles out a blot of the white ointment on the tip of his finger.
‘Can I?’ Erik asks softly, pointing his finger at Charles’s left cheek.
No, Charles should say, because the thought of anyone touching him churns his gut. He shouldn’t let Erik, of all people, tend to his wounds. They’re not friends, or even acquaintances. If anything, the closest they’ll ever come to being is enemies — be it on the classroom floor, at pro-mutant rallies, in debates, or anywhere outside them.
But there’s also no reason to fear Erik. If he wanted to, Erik could have hurt Charles on multiple occasions, but he hasn’t. Not even when Charles was drunk and barely conscious enough to stand on his own feet at a party filled with mutants six months ago.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Erik says again, voice just above a whisper. There’s something incredibly honest in his tone, and a raw vulnerability in his eyes. It’s probably what pushes Charles into nodding his head in acquiescence.
Erik closes the distance between them in a single step and, with gentle fingers, tilts Charles’s head to the right so that his left cheek is exposed. Erik’s touch is feather-light on his skin, so very gentle. He begins rubbing the cool ointment on the apple of Charles’s cheek in slow circles.
The lull of repetitive movements calms Charles’s panic further, persuading his heart and breathing to slow down. His death grip on the counter is disorienting and painful, so Charles rests his hand on Erik’s shoulder for support, the leather of his jacket warm and soft beneath his palm.
Gentle. Erik’s gentle with him. A man who threatens the entire campus and half the faculty with his furious persona is gentle with him.
Gentleness. What a foreign concept after just a weekend spent at a place that should have been his home. He wants to laugh at the irony of it all, and cry at the unfairness. That must have done it, for the hysteria he’d buried all this while comes unbidden, and tears flow freely down his cheeks.
Though Erik doesn’t say anything, his fingers on the base of Charles’s cheek still. He doesn’t even comment when the tear tracks ruin his careful application. After a moment, he resumes applying the medicine quietly to the base of Charles’s jaw.
Seemingly satisfied with his ministrations, Erik steps back an inch and asks Charles softly, ‘Where else does it hurt?’
Where else does it hurt? Charles wants to laugh. Everywhere, he wants to scream. His body is one big bruise. It just hurts everywhere.
He can’t put it into words, though, because he can’t stop if he starts now. So he takes Erik’s hand — still cupping his jaw — and presses it flat against his chest. The warmth of Erik’s palm is a balm in itself against the ache.
‘Here,’ Charles says, voice hitching around a sob. He moves the hand down to his ribs. ‘Here.’
And further down to his stomach. ‘Here.’
He moves it a little left, to his hip bone. ‘Here,’ he says with a shuddering breath that leaves him weak-kneed with pain.
Erik is instantly on him, snaking his other arm around Charles’s waist to steady him. The extra support is a welcome reprieve after having to support his own weight for so long.
Charles sags in Erik’s grip, directing Erik’s palm from his hip bone to his backside. ‘Here,’ he says, weakly, and this time the sobs come unbidden, tugging on his chest and flooding his heart with pain.
Out of everything, it’s his heart that aches the most. Erik curses harshly under his breath, the accompanying scowl etching every line of his angular face in pure fury.
And that’s the last thing Charles remembers before his mind tumbles and his vision goes black.
*
He’s disoriented the first time he wakes up, and doesn’t remember much of it except for a warm hand on his shoulder, something like a pill sliding down his throat, and the relief of cool water on his dry lips.
Charles is coherent the second time he wakes up, still a little groggy from sleep, but coherent enough to take stock of his surroundings. He simply lies on the bed for a few minutes, listlessly staring at the ceiling. It’s already dark outside, the streetlight from the far window lighting the small room dimly.
He knows where he is and who he’s with. He also knows why he’s here — though how is a question he doesn’t need to know the answer to. The other mind is still closed off to him, but its presence is unmistakable.
‘I really shouldn’t make it a habit of waking up in your bed, you know?’ Charles says finally. For he is sleeping in Erik’s bed, and in Erik’s dorm. He remembers waking up in a similar state last time, suffering from a hangover instead of bruises.
‘How are you feeling?’ Erik asks, inflectionless, from the chair he’s sitting on opposite the bed. A coin twirls between his long fingers as he speaks.
Charles takes a moment to assess his state. The pain is subdued now, owing mostly to the pill Erik had made him swallow earlier, he supposes. His legs and torso don’t sting as he attempts to sit up and lean his back against the wall. Most importantly, he’s not on the verge of blacking out every time he tries to breathe. Just to prove it to himself, he takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with oxygen, and exhales steadily.
‘Better,’ he says finally. Not fine, just better.
Erik glares at him from the chair as though debating internally whether to believe Charles or not. He’s resting one heavy-booted leg on his other knee. He looks more like a king sitting on his throne weighing his options on war, and less like a college student who runs a supremacist club in his free time.
Now that Charles is looking, he notices the blood on Erik’s right knuckles — blood which wasn’t there previously. Between his bruised knuckles and the broken wall behind Erik’s head, it's an easy guess as to what might have happened.
‘Who did this to you?’ Erik asks finally.
‘Not beating around the bush, are we?’ Charles smirks. What had he expected? Of course Erik would go straight for the jugular.
‘Who did this to you, Charles?’ Erik asks again, glare intensified. His voice seems to rumble with a thunder that leaves all the metal in the room trembling in its wake.
Charles sighs. He has neither the mood nor the strength to fight with Erik. ‘Kurt,’ he says. ‘My stepfather.’
‘And what were you doing when he was beating you black and blue?’ Erik nearly spits the words out. ‘You’re a telepath, dammit! Why didn’t you stop him?’
‘Because it’s not moral or ethical?’ Charles tries, but shuts his mouth immediately when the coin spinning in the air stops mid-motion and all of Erik’s attention focuses on him.
‘But more importantly,’ he continues, ‘Kurt has a telepathic blocker that enables him to shield himself from my powers.’
‘Isn’t that—’
‘Illegal? Yes, it is. But Kurt has powerful friends in powerful places. Power that comes from the Xavier money and name.’
For a few moments, Erik processes Charles’s words with a heavy scowl that twists the clean angles of his face. Charles is half amazed that Erik isn’t already yelling by now about human scum like Kurt, and how corrupt the system is, and how the government won’t spare a minute to wipe out mutants.
When he speaks, however, all he says is, ‘Why didn’t you go straight to the police then?’
‘Because if I do that, Kurt will sell away the shares of my father’s company to the highest bidder and throw away the fortune just to spite me.’
Erik’s face hardens and sets to stone. In a voice that could probably cut diamond, he asks, ‘So that’s what this is all about. Money!’
He spits the word between them as though it burns his tongue.
‘No,’ Charles protests, his voice rising to match Erik’s evenly. ‘It’s not about the money, Erik. It’s about the company that my father built from scratch. It’s about my father’s lifelong work going down the drain. Xavier Pharmaceuticals manufactures suppressants, yes. But that is only to help children with dangerous mutations learn to control their powers. Not to cure them. Not to erase the X-gene.
‘If Kurt has his way with the company, he’ll start manufacturing inhibitor collars and cures for the X-gene on a large scale. And even though those are illegal now, he has means of making them legal. So no, it’s not about the money, Erik. It’s about mutants with physical mutations like Hank, Raven and Azazel; it’s about mutants like you who can pass off as human, and it’s about mutants like me who can’t defend themselves without their powers.’
It’s either the fire in Charles’s tone and pitch or the flare in his eyes that stops Erik from arguing further. He clenches and unclenches his jaw a few times, as though forcing himself to drink cough syrup.
‘Can’t you do anything about it?’
‘Kurt has power over the fortune only till I turn twenty-one. It’s mine after that. And I turn twenty-one in two months.’
Charles could have stopped at that. He should have stopped at that. He doesn’t owe Erik an explanation. In fact, he doesn’t owe anyone any explanations.
But he still wants someone to see him, not just see a trust fund kid flaunting his privileges unapologetically. He wants someone to see him past the façade of brevity he puts on for the sake of Raven and Hank. He just wants someone to simply see him for what he is.
Fiddling with the threadbare blanket on his lap, Charles begins to speak. ‘My father died when I was thirteen. Raven was ten at the time. My mother remarried my father’s business partner, Kurt Marko. He only married my mother because she was now the sole proprietor of the estate and the company. She drank herself to death a few years later.
‘Raven was adopted, so spare for the ten percent of the family holdings she left to Raven, my mother named me the sole custodian of the rest of the fortune in her will. She appointed Kurt to be our guardian and custodian of the company until I came to twenty-one years of age.
‘Kurt was vicious when he found out that he wouldn’t get a penny of the money. And since I was the reason for his destitution, I became the target of all that anger.’
He stops to take a deep breath, forcing himself not to go down the dark hole of memories that churn in his mind.
‘Fortunately, I passed out of school a year earlier than everyone else and moved out of that house the first chance I got. I dragged Raven with me on my way out. If it weren’t for the trust funds my father left in her name and mine, we’d be on the streets by now.’
Erik doesn’t say anything for a very long time, and Charles doesn’t dare look up from his lap to see what reaction he’s wearing — repugnance, or God forbid, pity.
‘Does Raven know?’ Erik asks, voice uncharacteristically soft.
Charles does look up at that. ‘No, she doesn’t. And I’d like to keep it that way.’
Erik nods curtly and goes back to his brooding.
This is what conversing with Erik is like outside their yelling matches in the classrooms, then — witnessing Erik process his thoughts in that brilliant mind of his and waiting for him to respond.
Erik’s not good with words, Charles realises belatedly, and all those dramatic displays and temper tantrums he puts up are just to compensate for the fact that he’s not good with words — or with people, for that matter. The realisation warms Charles’s heart more than it should, and he smiles despite himself.
‘How did you know to find me in the washroom?’ Charles asks when he realises that a response from Erik isn’t forthcoming.
‘I saw you talking to Hank in the morning before he walked away into class. You were clearly aiming to slip away unnoticed, so I followed you,’ Erik says without a hint of embarrassment or apology in his tone.
‘And the ointment?’
At this — at least — Erik has the decency to look sheepish, albeit, only a little. ‘I have a habit of getting into fights, and even though the bruises I end up with are few and far between, Az makes me carry a tube in my pocket.’
That prompts another smile out of Charles.
Erik gets up from his impromptu throne and turns towards the desk behind him. He moves around, filling a glass with water and upending the contents of a packet into it.
‘It’s one of Az’s protein shakes,’ Erik tells — no, orders — holding the glass containing a murky fluid in front of Charles. ‘It tastes like rat poison, but it’s good for the body. Drink it up.’
Though it tastes like rat poison, Charles gulps it down. He hasn’t eaten anything since that morning — or the previous afternoon — and that won’t sit well with his stomach for long. Erik hands him some form of painkiller after, and Charles dutifully swallows that, too.
‘We’re going to a doctor first thing in the morning tomorrow to make sure there aren’t broken bones,’ Erik says as he retrieves a spare blanket and pillow from the closet and throws them on Azazel’s bed. ‘And after that, I’ll drop you off at your apartment.’
‘Actually…’ Charles bites his lip. ‘I don’t have an apartment. Well… not anymore.’
‘What?’
‘The lease to our apartment ended a week after Raven moved in with Azazel. A whole apartment all to myself seemed like a waste of money. So I applied for a dorm room last week. They said it’d take them a week to allot a room for me. I had nowhere to go till then. So I went to the mansion only for the weekend and…’ He trails off.
And look where that had got him.
After another bout of cursing under his breath, Erik says decisively, ‘Fine. You’re staying here in this dorm then. Azazel has moved out, and his bed is free anyway. You can keep my bed, and I’ll sleep on Az’s.’
‘Erik—‘
‘What is it, Xavier?’ Erik rounds on him like a shark does its prey, deathly graceful. ‘Ashamed to be associated with the likes of me?’
‘No.’ Charles winces. ‘The warden might throw a fuss. I’ve not been allocated to this dorm and—’
‘I’ll talk to the warden,’ Erik cuts him short. ‘And if he doesn’t agree, then you can persuade him into doing so. Now, sleep.’
‘I have to tell Raven—’
‘Sleep, Xavier.’
Charles pouts. ‘The authoritarian regime is only cute for so long, you know,’ he says, but soon finds himself lying down on the mattress and cushioning his cheek against Erik’s soft pillow. Maybe it’s because of the medicine kicking in or the exhaustion of the weekend catching up on him, Charles’s eyelids close on their own accord and sleep creeps up on his conscience.
He feels Erik pull the blanket over his torso and whisper something that sounds like goodnight.
Oh, but Charles didn’t get to ask the most important question that had been plaguing his mind ever since he saw Erik in the washroom that morning. He only has to lift his hand to catch Erik’s wrist.
‘Why?’ he asks, and his voice slurs out of his mouth. ‘Why care for me when you so clearly despise me?’
Charles could be, but he isn’t dreaming of Erik’s hand carding the hair out of his forehead, and he isn’t dreaming of Erik’s voice as it whispers, ‘I don’t despise you, Charles. And that’s not for a lack of trying. Now, sleep. I’ll be right next to you if you need me.’
A warm blanket of safety wraps around Charles’s senses before sleep truly claims him.
_