Chapter Text
Emma strolls back into civilian life on a Tuesday. She lingers on the edge of the rugby pitch trying to look like she isn’t waiting for him, a thin gold cigarette perched between scarlet lips, face shielded by her “fuck off” sunglasses. He takes the time to appreciate the view of Emma in lace stockings dragged over her knees and a pale scrap of pleated silk that might generously be called a skirt, an outfit calculated to screw with the tender brains of schoolboys. She looks like a pin up or a demented film goddess or his favourite girl or all three.
He doesn’t remember if he calls her name before he flies across the field, but she braces for the impact in that resigned, familiar way of hers as he smothers in a hug. “Emma darling,” he breathes, his face buried in fistfuls of gold hair. Her hands curl around his neck, not quite grudgingly.
“You’re paying for my dry cleaning,” she informs him. “You’re getting grass stains and mud and your sweat all over my jacket. You're disgusting.”
“I’ve been languishing away without you, too.”
“Liar,” she says, in that reflexive way, without any heat. She’s going for casually bored, but when she lets her sunglasses slide down, he can see the purplish smudges of sheer exhaustion beneath her eyes, and she’s leaning against him a little more heavily than merely missing him can account for.
“Let’s get you to bed.”
“Really, sugar, so soon? Old Lefty not good enough company for you?”
He slings an arm around her waist and picks up her travelling case. “Oh yes, I am intensely aroused by the thought of tucking you into bed.”
“Well, you’re a sick freak that way. So.”
“Gentlemen,” he calls to his team mates who are taking down the goal posts and gathering up stray rugby balls, “if you’ll excuse me from packing up this one time, I’m just going to escort Miss Frost back to her room.”
None of the vets openly leer, because by this point and time, they've been subjected to the unsubtle battering ram of Emma Frost’s rejections, but a few of the rooks gape.
“Take your time, Captain. And welcome back, Miss Frost,” Azazel says dryly, giving Emma an unmistakeable salute. Charles, out of curiousity, had once inquired about the origins of Azazel's healthy respect for Emma. Azazel had thought for a few minutes, and then launched into a fascinating and erudite lecture which incorporated quotations of (non-translated) Russian poetry; at Charles' blank look, Azazel just gave up and said, "She's an ice cold bitch. I respect that. Reminds me of my mother."
Emma nods at Azazel in an imperious way and they hobble off the pitch like the world’s slowest three legged race. Emma's back is ramrod straight until they get to Charles' room. She collapses on his unmade bed, and he has to wrestle with her a bit to get her jacket off, but her shoes slide off easily. She punches a few of his pillows, buries herself in a cocoon of blankets, and Charles debates with himself for about thirty seconds before he kicks off his cleats and joins her.
“Ditch the jersey. Both its colour and aroma are offensive.”
“I think it's a very charming combination,” Charles protests automatically, mostly because he's been acclimatized to the blue and yellow striped “monstrosity.”
“Honestly, Charles, are you blind? Petition to get rid of the thing and you'll be the most beloved captain in the rugby team's history.”
“Emma dear, they're school colours. They will outlive you, and me, and everyone we know.”
But Charles concedes, strips off the jersey and his underarmour, and Emma absentmindedly hands him a crumpled white t-shirt poking out of one of his drawers. When they settle back together, her back is flush against his chest, and their legs tangle together comfortably as he feel his heartbeat slow down to match Emma’s.
Two weeks, he thinks. Two weeks, he thinks, two weeks, fourteen days, three hundred thirty-six hours, and he won’t be trite enough to count the minutes and seconds they've been separated. They'd texted and written and Skyped nearly every day, but it wasn't - couldn't ever be - quite the same.
“How was Christian when you left?” he murmurs.
Emma's silent for a beat, then says, not quite lightly, “He's still alive. So that’s more than anyone expected.”
He presses his lips into her hair, and feels her her sigh and shift. They’re like kittens, like the children they never really got the chance to be, huddling together, whispering secrets. They breathe in, they breathe out. Their bodies sink into the relief of each other’s remembered warmth.
Emma says something, but so quietly that you'd have to be pressed up against her to hear it. It's a good thing that Charles is.
“I missed you too,” he whispers back, and watches the flush creep up Emma’s throat and shoulders. A wave of fondness washes over him. She could be so shy about the oddest things.
A knock at the door, and “Xavier – “
Emma tenses. Charles props himself up on an elbow, catches her eye; she pauses for a fraction of a second, then gives a minute nod. “Come in,” Charles calls to the door, straightening and sitting up in bed.
There’s the slightest pause before Erik Lehnsherr pokes his head in through the door. Charles can detect some kind of movement of Erik’s eyes, hidden as they are behind sturdy, thick-framed spectacles, as they settle on Charles and Emma. Charles feels that curious sensation that arises whenever Erik steps into a room; it's as if his chest is a balloon slowly filling with air, except air of an exhilarated and effervescent kind, the Dom Perignon of oxygen and dear Lord, he's giddy. He's giddy and babbling in his brain and there is Erik and there is Emma and breathe, Charles.
“Erik! This is my best friend Emma, I've talked about her loads already. Emma, this is Erik Lehnsherr from 217B next door. He transferred here at the beginning of the term. You remember him, don’t you?” Charles nudges Emma with his shoulder. She glares at him through cat-slitted eyes.
“No, I don’t,” Emma says baldly, because she has always disdained social lies, even though she’s masterful at deploying them. Erik doesn’t even blink. She gives a sigh of long suffering as Charles aims his most patient, pointed Look at her. “Emma Frost,” she grumbles, in Erik’s general direction. “Charmed.”
“I’m sure.” Erik’s voice is a perfect match in dryness. “Xavier, I finished my half of the questions. I’ll just-"
And he leaves a stack of papers on the top of Charles’ desk, which is scattered with old cups of tea, apple cores, half-open textbooks, cartoon doodles of cells, and most of a two-foot tall model of a DNA helix. Charles knows that all the questions will be precisely, succinctly answered, neatly labelled and lettered, without a single sign eraser smudge or bit of white out. Perfect.
“Thanks very much, Erik. I’ll see you in class tomorrow?”
Erik gives him a weary look. “Tomorrow's Wednesday, isn’t it?”
After the door shuts, Emma gives him quite a different Look.
“What?”
“Charles,” Emma asks, “do you have a crush?”
“Hardly,” he says, trying to go for an Emma-approved level of dismissiveness, but she grabs his face in her hands so she can work her soul-searching voodoo on him, perfect blue eyes honed like a laser.
“Good God, you do. You’re practically glowing with it.”
“I do not. How were you able to discern that from a thirty second conversation? I just think Erik is – a fascinating specimen, and that – that the two of you would get along splendidly - "
“Charles. I don’t get along with anyone. Splendidly or otherwise.” The except you goes unspoken.
“I think you would make an exception for Erik,” Charles soldiers on. “You have very similar temperaments – "
Okay, so Emma’s perfectly arched eyebrows shooting up to her hairline might be a little justified.
“If anything, both of you have a talent for giving me the most incredulous looks.”
The thing is, Erik does remind him of Emma, in so many ways. Erik is an exquisite analytical machine, energy and thought perfectly converted to motion, efficient to the point of the sublime, and yet – and yet – he is not cold. There’s an engine at his heart’s spring center, a core of warmth hidden under layers of sullen, vibrating tension and sarcastic, guttural German. Charles has never heard Erik laugh, but he’s plotting out a time line for it, and he thinks that when he does manage to coax Erik into laughing, it will be savage and joyful and utterly real.
“Charles, I know you are not blind, so you could not have missed that atrocious turtleneck he was wearing, or those old man glasses from the seventies. He doesn’t even wear them in the ironic hipster way, just in the awkward European immigrant way.”
“His mother made him those sweaters. I think it's rather sweet. And he only needs the glasses for reading, but I find that they make him look quite – “
“Sexy, yes, Charles, we know what a whore you are for nerds.”
“ – Intellectual,” Charles says, with what remains of his dignity which, honestly, with Emma, is very little.
“Charles.” Emma’s finger taps the side of his face. “Falling for straight boys is – “
“A crime against humanity, I know.” His fingers meet Emma’s. “He’s just my lab partner for AP Bio, and an excellent chess player. That’s all. I promise, love, I won’t do anything tragically stupid.”
“You do stupid things all the time. You adopt kittens. You lead student groups. You wear cardigans. You play rugby. You tutor dumb people. You say ‘good morning’ and mean it...”
He kisses her on the forehead, as if that can smooth away the furrow between her eyes. “Then it’s a good thing you come back to set me on the path of righteousness again.”
“You’re damn right it’s a good thing.” Her eyelids are closing, and he wonders how many people have had the privilege of seeing Emma Frost like this, hair a mess and lipstick smudged and sharp-edged words unspooling into sleepiness. Not enough, not nearly enough. “You’d be lost without me, sugar. Utterly lost.”
~
Emma wakes up at six in the morning after fifteen hours of sleep, feeling… not refreshed, but – “comforted” might be the right word. By the familiar angle of the splash of sunlight against the wall, the colourful rows of non-compulsory scientific reading (good God, who reads about evolutionary biology and computational theory of mind for fun? If they weren’t friends, she would have to make Charles’ life miserable, or more miserable, or something); rugby posters of the school team, the Great Britain Lions, and the New Zealand All Blacks; the framed portrait of a benign, beaming Albert Einstein whimsically topped, by Emma, with a sticker of a rhinestone tiara; and most of all, by the warm, steady weight of Charles pressing against her side, soft puffs of breath against her collarbone, her cheek. His face is blue-shadowed and stubbly in the morning, and she loves him for this, for all of the rough edges that no one else gets to see.
At some point, he had roused himself and done useful things, she assumed, but honestly, she’d been blacked out for most of it, roused only when Charles crawled back into bed somewhere around two or three in the morning.
Two weeks by Christian’s bedside in the hospital and also in Snow Valley, that’s how much of her life had passed by, in a spate of both ignoring and being ignored by her father, driven half-mad by her older Adrienne‘s shameless brown nosing, Mother’s confused, copious weeping and discreet pill popping, her younger sister Cordelia’s harried text messages which came frequently, despite Cordelia claiming that she refused to rush home every time Christian pulled one of his “stunts” and then asking, over and over again, if anyone was saying anything about her absence. Only Charles’ e-mails and timely texts and daily half hour Skype calls kept her sanity on a sort of even keel. Inevitably, trapped in her childhood home without the soothing presence of Charles, her insomnia had returned, and so she’d found herself pacing around her old room of pastels walls and deep carpets and finely aged oak furniture, feeling an urge to tear the dresses off of dolls and set lacy pillows on fire and get very, very drunk and barge in on the middle of her father’s conference calls with his business partners while wearing nothing but a slip.
Six a.m. Still enough time to go to her own room – where she spent very little time, to be honest – for the routine of shower, change, hair, and make up. There would even be time to ingest a fuckload of caffeine, even as Charles gave her doe eyes over his breakfast platter and delivered a well-meaning lecture on essential nutrients.
Emma pulls her jacket on over one of the endless supply of white men’s t-shirts that she’s forever stealing from Charles, shimmies into her skirt, pulls back her hair in a loose knot, and drops a kiss on Charles’ forehead.
“Morning, love.” His voice is hoarse and sweet the way it always is in the morning. “Don’t forget,” he says drowsily, “your notes are in that blue folder, on top of the desk.”
The blue folder rests precariously on top of a stack of molecular physics textbooks; as much as it looks like the contents of Charles’ room regularly explode, his notes for her missed school work are fastidious and tidy. Charles is one of those delightfully contradictory human beings who is neat and put together in his personal appearance, but, beneath his veneer of well-buttoned cardigans, is actually a total and utter slob.
“I knew there was a reason I loved you.”
“There are many,” he protests, before burrowing back beneath the covers. She knows that he will show up precisely five minutes before breakfast stops being served, and charm all the servers into giving him double helpings of everything. The brat.
She opens the door to the washroom, thinking to splash some cold water on her face just to get her awake enough to drag her luggage and things back to her room, and she is faced with a very surprised Erik Lehnsherr, opening up the door on his side of his and Charles’ shared bathroom. He looks quite different from the turtleneck-choked, bespectacled nerd fairly exuding a grim aura of “I loathe all beings on this planet."
Instead, he’s in shorts and a faded t-shirt that does great things for his shoulders, and has his sweaty hair pushed back from his forehead. Without the glasses, he actually has a face, which, she admits in a grudging way, is not the most tragically unattractive face she has ever seen. It is probably for the best that Charles sleeps in as long as possible in the morning and has missed this probably boner-inducing sight.
Charles has crushes all the time – on student teachers, tech guys, visitors from other schools, juniors and seniors in his upper level classes, boys he meets at science camps and chess competitions and rugby matches. These crushes are harmless things, fluttering, colourful, brief. They add a bit of excitement to Charles’ life, but they remain at a safe distance, more fantasy than anything else. They can do him no harm and make for excellent masturbatory material.
But Erik is here, next door, in AP Bio three times a week, and chess matches whenever. And Charles has a habit of not knowing where to draw boundaries. Emma loves him for it and despairs over it, often in the same breath.
“Morning, Lehnsherr,” she says. If he registers any surprise at her presence, he does a good job of suppressing it, merely blinking at her coolly.
“Morning, Frost.”
“Emma darling,” she hears a plaintive voice call from bed, “did you steal my shirt again?”
“You have a million like it,” she says, not moving her gaze from Lehnsherr’s.
“I was wearing that one.”
“You can have it back afterwards,” and she maneuvers herself against the sink, splashing her face and throat with cold water in slow, luxurious motions, feeling Lehnsherr’s eyes on her back.
“Are you being an awful brat and hogging the washroom?” Charles calls from the bed. “Get out of there, Emma. And good morning, Erik.”
She steps away from the sink. “It’s all yours, Lehnsherr,” she says, her voice glittering with a subtle warning that may or may not go undetected.
“Good morning, Xavier,” Lehnsherr says, moving smoothly past Emma as if she isn't even there.
She doesn’t bite down on a nail (French manicure, not worth the ruin), but she feels, for no reason whatsoever, like tripping Erik Lehnsherr or pulling his hair or locking him in his own washroom or – or something. For some reason, she doesn’t want to look at Charles’ face when she comes back into his room, and instead just mutters out of the side of her mouth, “I'm going back to my room to get less disgusting. Meet you in the dining hall for breakfast.”
“Will you eat breakfast?”
“No.”
Even when she’s not looking at him, she can feel his face fall.
“Maybe,” she amends, and then wonders, as Charles beams at her, when she became so tame.
~
It turns out that Lehnsherr doesn’t eat breakfast, either.
Emma nurses a cup of coffee – black, black, with a spoonful of sugar – feeling much more composed now that she is freshly showered and clothed, hair curled and make up perfect. She chalks up her imperfect encounter with Lehnsherr in the morning as a failure to arm herself adequately for battle and know that next time, things will be better.
Then Erik and Charles come down to breakfast together.
Charles looks as he usually does in the morning, harried but cheerful in a mis-buttoned cardigan, his hair perpetually rumpled, one hand gesticulating wildly as he tells a story that Erik Lehnsherr – again in the turtleneck, again in the glasses – does not appear to be listening to, his face stony and bored. But he doesn’t seem to be telling Charles to shut up, either.
She feigns total non-surprise as Lehnsherr joins her and Charles at their usual table.
“Really?” Charles asks through a mouthful of hash browns, eyeing the both of them as they sip coffee in mutual silence. “Neither of you are hungry?”
“You know it often nauseates me – “ “It’s difficult to concentrate on a full stomach – “ Lehnsherr and Emma say, almost at the exact same time. She glares at him. He gives her a grating stare in return.
“But it’s – “
“If you say the most important meal in the day, I will stab you with your own fork. Really I will,” Emma says, as lightly as if she’s commenting on the weather.
“Delicious,” squirrel-cheeked Charles says. Charles’ plate is heaped high with various breakfast foods, many of the bacon variety, and the entire thing is drenched in maple syrup. She feels a vague moment of solidarity with Lehnsherr as he looks as ill as she feels.
“I knew you and Erik were secretly the same person,” Charles mutters. A muscle in Lehnsherr’s face twitches – fascinating!
Emma finds herself saying, “I think I could choke down something after all,” and she snags a piece of whole wheat toast off of a corner of Charles’ plate that hasn’t yet drowned in the sea of syrup. The toast tastes like cardboard. She puts a dollop of strawberry jam on it and it tastes like cardboard with strawberry jam on it, and also a bit like victory. She doesn’t do anything so crass as send a smirk in Lehnsherr’s direction, though.
“Doesn’t that make you feel better now?” Charles asks, blithely and idiotically like the blithe idiot he is.
God damn it. Tamed.
~
Erik is keeping a list in his mind of Maddening Things That Charles Xavier Does. This mental list is ever-growing, and includes a few of the folllowing items:
-
11: Being appallingly, frighteningly intelligent, and therefore the only student the school who is worthy of being Erik's academic rival.
-
12: Also being one of the most annoyingly cheerful and/or sociable human beings at the school and insisting on carrying on conversations with Erik as if they are quote "getting on pretty well as friends, don't you think?" end quote.
-
52: Pinning up, over his desk, the circuit diagrams that Erik drew for him in AP Physics. Erik congratulated Charles for keeping the diagrams, because they were much more useful than the ones in the textbook, but the sight of Erik's diagrams mixed in with Charles' other things caused a strange constriction in Erik's throat that Erik did not need to examine too closely to conclude that (1) he didn't like it and (2) it was probably Charles' fault.
-
61: greeting, by name, every single student and staff member that he passes in the hallway, right down to the guy who empties out their trash cans. (“Come now, Erik,” Charles had laughed at him, just a few days ago. “His name is Manny and he’s always singing Motown. Last week it was 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone.' Don’t you remember?”)
-
77: Mentioning his mysterious, absent best friend Emma Frost all the time. (“She's had a bit of a family emergency, but she'll be back soon. I can't wait for you to meet her!” “Emma’s just brilliant, I wouldn’t have passed Art History without her – “ “And over there are the stables, where Emma almost gave the master of stables a heart attack by jumping a half-broken colt over a fence – “ “Emma’s quite good at chess too, although she gets bored rather easily – “ “I really, really, REALLY can’t wait for you to meet Emma! I think the two of will get along splendidly!”)
-
78: Failing to mention that Emma Frost is, objectively speaking, one of the most ruthlessly beautiful human beings that Erik has ever had the misfortune to meet, especially when she is in Charles' bed, and wrapped around him like a very blonde boa constrictor.
Right now, Charles is on
-
79: Dragging his shirt cuffs through maple syrup and beaming at Erik expectantly while Emma Frost (he does not get a strange punched feeling in his gut whenever he thinks of her, he does not, INEXCUSABLE) glares at him like a well-groomed and irritated cat.
“What do you say, Erik?” Charles asks. “I've been gathering up Emma's notes and assignments for the past two weeks, but we should really have a thorough study session to go over things since we have a free study period right after breakfast, and you've a much better head for languages and history than I, and I'm sure Emma would be very happy to return the favour if you end up missing classes for some unfortunate reason, so what do you think?”
Coffee, Erik thinks nonsensically. This is just Charles on tea. I shudder to see him on coffee.
With all the intellect of his seventeen years on Earth, Erik says, “What?” at the same time that Emma Frost says, “Unnecessary,” again, in a flat tone that eerily reminds Erik of himself, except that Emma Frost definitely sounds more dead inside.
Charles waves his arms around, obviously one of the compliance techniques that he learned from the debate team. “Studying! With me and Emma (yes, Emma, it is 'me and Emma,' not 'Emma and I,' don't make that face)! For catch up! Mmm, maple syrup,” and Charles Fucking Xavier licks at a droplet of maple syrup running down the side of his wrist and it is definitely not distracting. At all.
“Disgusting,” Emma Frost says, sounding deeply bored by the universe and everything it contains.
“It's a crime to waste good maple syrup,” Charles lectures, and then he turns and says, “What do you say, Erik?”
In all nine circles of hell, no -
“Yes,” Erik's stupid, traitorous mouth says, causing Charles to beam at him. Erik broods, for the nth time, about the lack of proper nemeses to crush and destroy and generally just grind into dust and non-existence.
“Fantastic! To the library!” Charles says with the kind of unironic enthusiasm for knowledge that makes Erik want to set himself on fire and that is simultaneously, humiliatingly, bafflingly arousing.
Emma Frost chooses, at that moment, to give Erik a contemplative look. He does not flip over the table. He does not give her the finger. He drinks his coffee, and pointedly does not watch Charles out of the corner of his eyes, the way he never does.