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The night before they leave for Cuba, Erik quietly closes the door on his room and slips into Charles’. They’ve tried to be discreet, before, but it hardly matters now. Tomorrow they depart to find Sebastian Shaw, and something has to give. Something is going to break.
This, Erik thinks, is likely the last night of his life. The realization hurts more than he expected and it disconcerts him that it does. He’s known it all along, of course. The end of this particular journey had been planned out from the start. His role is judge, jury, and executioner; for the guilty, and in the process, himself. The memory of the camps, the bitterness that has grown to fill the absence of his mother, keeps him to it. He will do what needs to be done.
He doesn’t think about what has changed now. He doesn’t think about how much more he has to lose.
Charles is looking out the window, sunset spilling over his hair, his crossed arms, the soft curves of his face. It paints him in generous lines of gold. (A fairytale, maybe, or a hero: Icarus leaping off the edge of the world, Hyacinthus wearing Apollo’s favor like a crown.) But then he turns around, mouth parted to greet Erik, and the only thing Erik can think about is how terribly young he is. How terribly young they all are.
“I didn’t think you would come tonight,” Charles says, crossing the room in two long strides and reaching out to tug gently at the front of Erik’s shirt. His touch leaves behind a fleeting kind of warmth.
“You’re the telepath, not me.” Erik puts both of his hands over Charles’ to keep them there as Charles draws back. He aches like an open wound, skin pulled apart to expose what must surely be visible for everyone to see.
Charles pushes against him, soft and insistent, backing them both against the door. His body is a long warm weight down the side of Erik’s; Charles runs warm, that’s one of the things he’d discovered after they’d first spent the night together. “Come to bed, Erik,” he murmurs against Erik’s collarbone, lips a sweet pressure against the skin there. “You’ll catch cold just standing here like that.”
Erik lets himself be guided by Charles’ hands settling on his back. They take a few steps together like that—Charles backwards and Erik forwards—until Charles can reach down to fling back the duvet and slide into the space left behind. He doesn’t let go of Erik at all, pressing his fingers bruisingly tight into skin. Charles noses into the hollow of his throat and Erik yields. He swings his legs up onto the mattress proper until they’re both ensconced in the warm confines of the bedding.
“Hello,” Charles whispers with a crooked grin. They’re close enough that Erik can feel the ghost of the word against his mouth. He can’t help but to respond with an exhale and a smile, shifting Charles’ legs under the covers so that they tangle with his. In all his years of hunting down Shaw, he’d never imagined this as an option. Charles is something—someone—he doesn’t think he can bear to lose. Whatever he has here, it’s one more thing to come back to.
“Would you?” Charles says from beside him, his voice low. He must have been projecting. “Would you come back for this?”
He’s talking about the school, the children, a future for mutants that only someone like Charles Xavier would dream of, but at the end of the question lingers a small, unspoken sentiment nonetheless. Would you come back for me? Am I enough to keep you here?
Erik reaches forward to gather all of Charles’ warm body into his arms and doesn’t respond for a long time. The last rays of sunset disappear from the horizon, retreating across the room as if to slip out through the window. In this half-light, Charles’ face looks taut and bruised with shadow. Icarus had fallen ruinous into the sea, he remembers. Hyacinthus was killed by his own lover; a slip of the hand, careless steel staining his skin. (The wound they will inevitably make of themselves—it’s unfolding before his eyes, an infinite permutation of universes where he and Charles model the tragedies of old.)
The clock ticks. Tomorrow gets closer.
Killing Shaw had been the only way he could stand to define himself, for years. Erik’s last tribute to a dead mother and dead family and the ruins of the millions of his people, murdered. He is so close. He doesn’t think himself capable of stopping, of surrendering arms, even if Charles were to ask.
And yet. He doesn’t think he has it in him to see Charles hurt. He doesn’t think he can ever hurt Charles worse than by leaving.
“I won’t make you any promises,” he says finally. He can’t promise to stay and then not, because he thinks it might break him, too.
Charles lets out an indistinct noise somewhere to the right of his ear, and suddenly, Erik is seized by the desperate need to say something, anything.
“Charles,” he breathes. His heartbeat kicks up, incongruent in the dimming light of this last soft-edged sunset. “Charles, I have to say this, I—”
Charles leans in to brush a kiss against his lips, stopping the words. “Don’t say it. I don’t want you to say it because you think you need to, before you leave.” Erik recoils back from the bluntness of the statement, so casually thrown out, but Charles grabs him by the shoulders and forces him to look up. “I’d rather have you than empty air. Stay, and tell me tomorrow night.”
Tell me every day for as long as I live , his mind echoes, and Erik aches. “Just in case things go wrong.” He runs a finger across Charles’ jaw, the beating pulse of his neck. “Please, I need you to know.”
“Dearheart, I do know. And no matter what happens, I will,” says Charles. His face is infinitely vulnerable as he clutches Erik in the encroaching dusk.
“We’ll be alright. Tell me tomorrow, Erik.”