Chapter Text
It starts: With him face down, on a bed that smells faintly of lilacs, going, "No." This he recalls distinctly, having said it more than once. Possibly not loud enough. Definitely not loud enough, and even his own body isn't listening to him, so it's not all that unexpected that Erik doesn't. "No," Charles says again, for good measure, and then Erik shoves in, and Charles screams, and he's not saying no anymore. Not saying much, anymore. Heat, hot and unfettered and loud, like an accident or a gunshot or his blood, thudding through his veins, beat quickening to match Erik's.
Again and again and back again.
Slick between his legs, Erik's breath hot on the back of his neck as he moans, long and drawn out, and his cock - Charles pushes himself backwards so he's almost on his knees, says, "Fuck," almost incoherently, and comes.
-
The pregnancy kits are lying, all of them. What chance impregnation? Omegas in heat, almost eighty percent. This is why you stay indoors, draw your curtains and refuse company. Not go to a party even though you kinda sorta maybe suspect it's coming. Should have seen it coming. Dizzy and disoriented and the man - Erik Lehnsherr, he said, and his smile was slow and lazy and Charles liked him, would have, maybe, some day in the future.
What kind of fucked up biological system is this, anyway?
Charles sits on the toilet bowl for a while, wastes a few more pregnancy kits for good measure, then contemplates his mother's sleeping pills. Opium for the terminally disappointed: she'd wanted an alpha son like her father, and got Charles instead.
Sorry to disappoint you once again, Charles thinks, and it almost brings a smile to his face. Not that she will ever find out. Charles shoves the pills back into his coat pocket and throws the kits away - positive positive positive.
Someone ought to know someone who ought to know someone.
He starts making phonecalls instead.
-
Someone blows up the abortion clinic as he's standing in the reception area waiting to go in. In retrospect, it's kind of ridiculous, his timing.
In retrospect, that he could suffer only minor injuries and then the fetus not having the common decency to exit his body sayonara goodbye see you in the next life where perhaps the circumstances aren't so dire, more to tragedy, really.
Kurt yells for a while, brings some of the nurses in, but then he calms down and they let him stay long enough to ask questions that Charles keeps answering with either a No or an I don't know.
"What's the guy's name?"
I don't know.
"How could you let this happen to you?"
I don't know.
"Do you know how much shame you've brought upon this family? Upon me?"
No.
Kurt breaks his arm then, and Charles starts crying. The nurses rush back in, huddling protectively over the bed as one of them yells at Kurt, "Out. Out." Another one pushes a syringe filled with transparent fluid into his IV, and Charles, blessedly, is pulled down into darkness.
-
Kurt locks Charles in his room once he's released from the hospital. He doesn't care. It's not as if he has plans to leave the house ever again.
At least this way someone brings him food and he has his books to entertain him.
Welcome to his new life, which is exactly like his old life. Except for that thing growing inside of him, and Charles suggested once, because Kurt has taken to coming into his room late at night when he's well and truly wasted to berate him on a) being a failure and a disgrace to his family b) being a slut who would let just about anyone spill his seed into him and c) still refusing to tell him the name of that anyone.
"What does it matter," Charles asks, shifting his pillow under him so it's more comfortable. It's how he usually copes with Kurt, curled up on the bed with blanket wrapped around him and his eyes snapped shut so the words just drift past in an almost incomprehensible blur. It irritates the fuck out of Kurt, but he dragged Charles forcibly out of the bed once and Charles threw up all over his shirt - morning sickness, so sorry sir I have this parasite growing inside of me - so now Kurt stands a safe distance away and raises his voice even louder.
There's no response to his question, so Charles cracks open one eye. "Well?"
"We shouldn't be the only ones made to suffer for your indiscretions," Kurt says, reddening slightly. "He should take responsibility."
Charles has to smile at that. "What, are we going to shotgun wedding him?"
"There is a law." The words are blurted out as if he's been holding back a big secret, and that explains the persistence then.
But then: surely not.
But then: something a teacher said in Sex Ed one day, and Charles had absorbed it into his mind then dismissed it, how quaint and archaic, and besides, who would be so foolish as to get knocked up without proper bonding and marriage rituals.
Who indeed.
"Surely you can't be serious." But then Kurt's pissed away his sense of humor into the bottom of a drink, so obviously he is. Charles sits up, reconsiders it, lies back down again and pushes his face into the pillow.
"You'll tell me soon enough."
Charles ignores him until he goes away.
-
Raven calls, at some point, mutters something about someone who heard something from someone at the hospital surely it can't be true Charles are you are you are you -
"Shut up," Charles snaps, and her voice stutters abruptly to a halt.
"Oh, you are," she says finally, a little breathless with shock. "I thought it was just rumors, honestly. You know how people get."
"I told you I didn't want to go to that party. I told you."
Raven doesn't respond, and of course it's not her fault. Raven's cycle came and went, she behaved in the appropriate manner and surely it wasn't her responsibility to make sure Charles didn't get fucked in the upstairs bedroom in some stranger's house - Charles should send him a check for the laundry bill, sorry sir for the soiled sheets you know how we get when we get how we get.
"I'm sorry," Charles says. "Who knows?"
"Not everyone," Raven says, evasive even over the phone. Terrible liar, that girl. "Just a few people. It'll be allright Charles." She pauses. "How was it? Was it - was it good?"
Was it good?
Erik tried to kiss him at first, and Charles spun away, laughing even as he was pushed gently into the room, as the door clicked behind them and the music abruptly shut away, leaving only the heavy pulse of the base and the man staring at him as if he were a particularly vulnerable prey.
Come here come here come here -
and Charles did exactly the reverse, evaded him by walking backwards, but mother always said he was the clumsiest of children, and he ended up falling onto the bed instead. Practically an invitation.
First mistake.
No, first mistake was accepting that drink saying hello following him upstairs going into heat -
Leaving the house, surely.
"Charles, are you there?"
Charles can't bear to hear her voice anymore, so he slams the phone down into the receiver and screams into his pillow for a while. It doesn't help.
-
He's not been imprinted upon. At least he doesn't feel it. Nauseous, sometimes. Growing crazy with isolation, more than sometimes. Obsessing over the bump that's sure to appear some day soon as the thing keeps growing, all the fucking time. But not bonded. Not filled with warmth, security, protection, all the things the phamplets say when they hand them out, "Your true mate and you!" instruction manuals on how to be the perfect omega to your alpha.
As far as Charles can tell it's a lot of propaganda to encourage breeding. Understandable, birth rates keep falling even with half the population going insane every once in a while and the other half sniffing them and following suit.
It's not that he thinks about Erik while jerking off, hand desperate over his cock and grateful that he can still see it over the flat plane of his belly. So much slick gushing between his legs, shouldn't it stop now he's already fucking pregnant the job's been done - Erik with his hard eyes and calloused hands and the way he held Charles' waist effortlessly as he tried to pull away - or shove back into him, everything got blurry at some point, just the slap of skin against skin and the scent of an alpha marking his territory.
Charles doesn't feel particularly marked now, just as alone as he's ever been. The scent that marks the air after he's done is just his own, ordinary and weak.
Kurt comes into the room once, just as Charles has finished, and blanches. He practically runs out of the room and slams the door behind him, and after that Charles times his masturbation carefully.
Son-of-a-bitch though, sometimes he comes in early.
To change his strategy, apparently: "Don't you want to see him again, Charles? He's your mate. He broke ritual, sure - but you were in heat. Can't fault the man."
"We just fucked the one time, Kurt," Charles replies lazily, desultorily, because it's that kind of day, apparently. Tomorrow he will go back to monosyllabic answers and sullen defiance, as usual. "It was hardly the whirlwind romance of the century."
"You are an impossible boy," Kurt says, his face hardening in disgust. "Your mother always pampered you too much. I warned her. You've driven her ill, I hope you know. She's not gotten out of bed in a weak. They doctors have had to come around."
It's nothing new, his mother is driven ill once every few months, as if she's replaced going into heat with it. It's mostly due to a diet that consists of nothing but bloody marys and salad leaves drenched with french dressing, and her obsession with keeping her pre-birth weight is hardly Charles' fault.
Although that she has such a hard time keeping the weight off, that one Charles gladly takes the blame for.
Maybe in eighteen years or so he'd hate his child too, for fucking up his body.
His child. His child. It's a thing. Cells dividing into two and then once more and over again, stealing his nutrients in order to survive and thrive.
Charles has nightmares sometimes, of it biting its way out of his body, soaked in Charles' blood and with a piece of torn flesh in between its gums.
Planned parenthood, and all the terrified and uneasy Omegas in that reception area, with their unwanted spawn-in-progress and their shame, overriding every other scent in the room.
There's still time, but Kurt's fear of God is apparently stronger than his fear of losing face, and Mother had slapped him when Charles had suggested that they just dealt with the situation quietly while they were in the hospital.
Charles arm itches, where the bone is starting to heal. He sighs in frustration as he tries to get under the cast to scratch at it, and says, "Do send her my condolences. I hope I'll be allowed to attend her funeral if she succumbs permanently."
The backhand makes his head ring, and Charles wants to shout: I'm pregnant, what is wrong with you, but instead he starts to cry, and Kurt sighs. "There are alternatives," he says, "If you insist on being so stubborn."
"Like what?" Charles asks, barely listening. He wipes at the snot and tears on his face with his sleeve and it comes away wet and streaked with red. When he licks his upper lip he tastes blood, copper and rich. "What could you possibly do to me that's worse than this?"
There's no reply, and Charles doesn't expect one.