Archive of Our Own

Erik’s Wednesday evenings are divided into three reassuringly predictable parts.

At six, in a lecture hall on the ground floor of the history building, he and the rest of the debate team listen to Charles Xavier formally argue his opponents into the ground.

At nine, in a dimly lit pub a few blocks from campus, he sits across from Charles Xavier and grows increasingly annoyed with every other opinion that passes his lips.

At eleven, in the dorm room Erik makes sure to tidy up every Wednesday morning, just in case, he presses a hand over Charles Xavier’s mouth and pounds him into the mattress.

You know that won’t shut me up entirely.

Even Charles’s telepathic voice sounds smug. Erik growls and flips him roughly onto his front. He’s rewarded with the sensation of laughter skipping along the edge of his mind.

When he eventually rolls off Charles, they’re both drenched in sweat and breathing heavily. Charles is still laughing, out loud as well as in Erik’s head, as he twists onto his back again. There’s a steady thumping bass coming from the room next door—Janos, presumably trying his very best to drown them out.

“As always, it’s been a pleasure,” Charles says, leaning over and giving him a light but lingering kiss. He pulls back and says with a grin, “Be a love and locate my trousers?”

They’d somehow wound up halfway across the room, so Erik floats them over by the belt buckle. He watches Charles dress, admiring the stretch and pull of his pale, freckled shoulders as he tugs on his shirt. His sweater follows, two sizes too large and, Erik isn’t afraid to think loudly, deeply unfashionable. Charles has the cardigan collection of a man four times his age.

Charles never asks to stay the night, but then, Erik has never offered.

“Until next Wednesday, then,” Charles says. He transfers to his chair in one fluid motion and Erik opens the door for him with his powers. Charles rewards him with a dazzling smile—he remains utterly charmed by any and all displays of Erik’s mutation, no matter how many times he sees them.

If he knows that Erik sometimes uses his mutation to trace along his belt buckle, wheelchair, and every other piece of metal on him, following the sense of it out to the elevator and down to the street where Charles calls for a cab home, well, Charles has never said a word.

*

Erik’s first instinct has always been to argue.

Long before his parents were killed, before he spent the better part of his adolescence shuttling though the highs and lows of the American foster care system, Erik was talking circles around his classmates and, often against his better judgment, his teachers.

His mother had liked to joke that he was making up for lost time—a reference to the year they’d moved to America, just after his eighth birthday, when he’d gone months barely saying a word. He’d understood English well enough—he’d been studying it for years, in school back in Germany—but he was the only foreigner in his new class, and he was deeply self-conscious about his accent.

Then his father took a job in New York City, and when they moved to Queens, Erik’s new school was full of so many different sorts of accents that he suddenly found he had a lot to say. He was smart, but he was quick to anger and never shied away from a fight, so he started arguing, too.

It was in the middle of an argument—with a fellow classmate in the sixth grade, in the hallway after math class—that Erik got so angry that he gestured violently, a long, sweeping arc through the air, and a whole row of lockers swung open in response.  

“God only knows what you’d be fighting about if you weren’t a mutant,” his mother once said. There wasn’t even a hint of disapproval in her words; he got his combativeness from her.

It was a silly thing to say, of course, because he could tell, even then, that the world was full of all kinds of injustice. And besides, his mother never let any intolerance stand, especially when it came to antisemitism—not with their family history.

But she had a point: mutant issues somehow managed to drown everything out. They were the loudest debates on the nightly news and the biggest source of tension in his school. He’d sit on the stairs and listen to his parents talking in low voices in the kitchen, as they fretted over bills and wondered how they could ever afford to move him from public school to a mutant-specialized program. His father wanted to take out a loan against their mortgage; his mother said she would look for a second job.

In the end, none of that had mattered, because one Saturday afternoon when Erik was fourteen, his parents went to the grocery store to pick up a few things and never came home.

*

On some level, he knew he was doomed the moment Charles Xavier rolled into the first debate team meeting of the semester and gave them all a sunny grin.

“Hope you don’t mind,” he said. “Moira invited me to tag along.” He gestured towards Erik’s co-captain, who was descending the stairs from the back entrance of the lecture hall.

“Charles from Oxford?” Erik said, glancing back at Moira. She’d spent a semester in England the previous fall and returned with a series of increasingly improbable anecdotes about the friends she’d made there—mostly starring a particularly audacious telepath named Charles.

Charles laughed. “My reputation precedes me, I see.”

“Not something I personally would brag about,” Moira said, leaning down to give him a hug.  

She made the introductions, and Charles greeted each of them with a handshake. When he reached Erik, he lingered a bit longer. Erik catalogued his face in that moment: the sweep of dark hair, curling at his ears, and the two prominent freckles on the bridge of his nose. His most striking features were his lips, which seemed unnaturally red, and his eyes, which seemed unnaturally blue.

It was generally considered poor telepathic etiquette to eavesdrop, but he could swear Charles picked up on his thoughts, his smile shifting from politely friendly to slightly sharper.

The debate team had always been a mix of mutants and baseline people. Charles was a welcome addition to the mutant side, joining Kitty, who could phase through solid material, and Armando, who usually went by “Darwin,” a nickname inspired by his ability to literally adapt to anything on the spot. Moira, Sam, and Rafael were all baseline, but they were better than most on mutant stuff—Erik wouldn’t have lasted long in the group if they weren’t.

Charles, he would learn at the pub after that first meeting, held duel citizenship despite his British accent, and had mostly been raised in New York state. He’d finished at Oxford and was now a graduate student, like Darwin and Sam, yet he was two years younger than Erik, an intimidating fact that was soon eclipsed when someone asked what he was studying.

“Molecular biophysics, specifically genomics,” Charles said as he took a sip of the beer he wasn’t legally allowed to drink. At the collective blank looks, he clarified: “We’re mapping the mutant genome, as it were.”

Erik frowned. “But don’t you worry that that sort of thing will lead to people trying to, I don’t know, edit out mutant genes?”

Moira nudged him in his side. “Do you have to pick a fight about everything?”

Erik was about to snap back at her when Charles held up a hand. “On the contrary, I think it’s a fair critique,” he said, before looking at Erik and adding, “And it’s a worthwhile debate.”

Charles smiled at him then, and Erik couldn’t help but smile in return.

He didn’t invite Charles back that night; the interest was obviously mutual, if the way Charles was watching him was anything to go by, but he didn’t normally sleep with people upon first meeting them. Hell, he didn’t tend to sleep with people, period. Classes, his work-study job, applications for jobs after graduation, his mutant activist group, his mutant advocacy group, and, of course, the debate team—it was an endless sea of work that left minimal time for anything like partying, let alone dating.

But two Wednesdays later, as they were trying to split the check seven ways—and after he’d spotted Charles slipping an extra $20 onto their communal stack of crumpled bills—he projected, just as Emma had taught him, Would you…like to go back to my place?

Charles looked up in surprise, the corners of his mouth turning upwards.

Yes, I would, he projected back, his voice as clear as if he were speaking directly in Erik’s ear, accompanied by a warm telepathic surge of something Erik could only identify as anticipation.

*

In his junior year of high school, even though Erik had finally landed in a decent, stable foster home, he wasn’t done fighting. After he earned three detentions in as many weeks—all for incidents involving both his mutation and his temper—the school ordered him to meet with a counselor every Monday afternoon.

It was a small miracle that the counselor they assigned him was a mutant, too.

“I have to level with you,” she’d said during their first meeting. “You and I share a pretty similar view of the world.”

He was slouched low in a chair across from her glaring at the industrial-grade carpet, arms folded across his chest, but he had to look up at that, startling as the statement was. Dr. Fuentes was watching him carefully with her wide-set reptilian eyes. Her tongue was forked, too.

When he didn’t say anything, she filled the silence. “The state of mutant rights in this country…” She sighed. “The state of a lot of things in this country, to be honest.”

“But then why do you let them punish me for standing—”

“Look, Erik,” she cut in. “I’ve read your file. No one needs to tell you that the world is unfair.” He scoffed at that, and she granted him a wry smile in return. “But,” she continued, holding up an index finger. “Someone does need to tell you that if you actually want the world to change, you should probably work on your tactics.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You can use your fists and you can use your powers,” she said. “And you can hurl words at people while you do it. And don’t get me wrong—you’ve got good ideas!”

“But…?” Erik prompted.

Dr. Fuentes shook her head. “Take this with a grain of salt,” she said. “But I think you’ll get a hell of a lot further if you learn how to turn those words into something a little more organized.”

By the end of the session, she’d convinced him to join the debate team; by the end of the month, she’d convinced him not to quit—on three separate occasions.

But by the end of the school year, he knew how to formally structure an argument, to deliver a rebuttal, to think on his feet and lay out his points clearly and convincingly. His team made it to the regional finals; his senior year, they won the state championship. It helped him get into an Ivy League university, and when he started college, he joined the debate team there, too.

He had hunted down Dr. Fuentes’s email address recently, and wrote to her about his studies and his activism and his plans after graduation—to go to law school and hopefully, to eventually become a mutant rights lawyer.

“Sounds like you’ve mastered tactics and are leveling up to strategy,” she’d written back. “Now hurry up and change the world for me.”

*

It’s not as if he wanted to date Charles or anything like that.

The one-off yielded a repeat visit, and then another, and by that point, Erik felt pretty confident that he and Charles were establishing a fairly reliable arrangement. (The sex, in which Erik enthusiastically granted Charles permission to use his telepathy, was uniformly spectacular—he regretted ever doubting Emma’s word on the subject.)

He really couldn’t pinpoint, then, why what had happened at the Halloween party had bothered him so much.

“Whatever you’re going to say, save it,” Emma had snapped as she entered the common area of their suite one afternoon in late October. She was wearing one of her habitual flawless white dresses and an extremely impatient look. “Halloween is on a Friday, there are no excuses.”

“I have to wo—”

“Didn’t I just instruct you to save it?” Emma flopped dramatically onto the couch, her blond hair fanning out on the back cushion. “I checked your schedule. You have the night off.”

Erik frowned and wondered if she was bluffing, or if she’d actually swung by the law library to peek inside his manager’s mind.

Emma snorted. “I don’t need to go over there, honey. I can read her from here.”  

“I don’t do parties, then,” Erik said, crossing over to the kitchen area to pull a beer from the fridge. “Certainly not costume parties.”

Emma rolled her eyes. “You are far too dramatic to pretend you’re too good for a costume party.” She gave him a mocking smile. “Don’t worry, we can probably find some way to incorporate a cape into your outfit.”

Erik popped off the top with his powers and floated it into the trash can. “Why are you so invested in this?” He took a sip and narrowed his eyes. “Does this have something to do with Scott Summers?”

Emma covered her face with a groan. “For the love of God, just come,” she said between parted fingers, before lowering her hands and giving him an appraising look. “Charles Xavier will probably be there, you know.”

“How do you—”

“Oh, we go way back,” she said with an airy gesture that Erik interpreted as some sort of rich person code. “But then,” she added, raising an eyebrow. “These days I only know him from the telepathic bleed of your combined orgasms every Wednesday night.”

Now it was Erik’s turn to cover his face with a hand. “If I come will you promise not to mention that in front of him? Or to anyone else, ever again?”

Emma laughed. “I promise, not a word,” she said, and then she tapped her temple. “Not out loud, at least.”

The whole suite headed to the party together. Azazel had a halo and a set of silvery wings; Janos was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, using his mutation to spin a little handheld tornado, and he pulled off the sequined red heels surprisingly well. Emma was dressed as Catwoman—Erik was more startled to see her in all black than he was by all the latex, and he told her as much.

“As for you,” she said, giving him a blatant once-over. “I can’t tell if you’re incredibly savvy or incredibly lazy.”

“The toga is a time-honored costume,” Erik said with an air of faux superiority. “I’m Socrates.”

Emma snorted. “I think you’re mostly just aware of the way your arms and chest look when you’re wrapped in a bed sheet,” she said, shaking her head. “Well boys, shall we?”

Azazel nodded and held out an arm, and then whisked them off in a cloud of sulfur.

The party was being thrown at the house Darwin rented with his boyfriend, Alex, and Alex’s younger brother, Scott. Erik found Scott to be deeply boring, especially for someone who could shoot lasers out of his eyes, but to his credit, he managed to be the only man on earth who could fluster the resolutely unflappable Emma.

Charles was already there, dressed in little tweed cape and deerstalker, waving a pipe in one hand while whatever was in his red plastic cup sloshed dangerously as he gestured with the other.

“Erik!” he said as he turned towards him, his expression lighting up, before he scrunched his face and said, “Hang on, hang on. I deduce that you’re…allergic to penicillin!”

“Is this your shtick tonight?” Erik said with a laugh. “Intrusively plucking random facts out of our minds?”

Charles grinned. He’d clearly had a lot to drink already, judging from the brightness of his eyes and the cheerful sloppiness of his gestures. “What’s your shtick, then?” he said. “Ugh, please don’t tell me you’re meant to be Julius Caesar.”

Erik wrinkled his nose. “I’m a philosopher, not a dictator.”  

“Plato, then,” Charles said with a sly smile. “Or maybe Aristotle?”

“How about Heraclitus?” Erik said. “After all, change is the only constant in life.”

Charles laughed and held up his cup for a toast. “I’ll drink to that.”

Erik drifted in and out of Charles’s orbit all evening, but while their interactions were flirtatious enough, Charles seemed to be flirting with everyone—touching peoples’ shoulders as he laughed at whatever they were saying, or tugging them closer to whisper in their ears.

He didn’t even need to do that, Erik thought churlishly as Charles’s lips brushed dangerously close to the ear of a redhead Erik didn’t recognize. Sure, the party was almost too loud to carry on a conversation, but couldn’t he just talk to her telepathically?

Five minutes later the redhead was all but sitting on his lap, and then they were outright kissing as she ran her fingers through Charles’s hair. Honestly, Erik knew it was a party, but this seemed like totally inappropriate behavior to carry on in public.

“If you didn’t know he was like this,” Moira said as she came up behind him. “You were going to learn sooner or later.” She handed him a fresh beer with a knowing look.

“Like what?” Erik said with a frown. He truly didn’t know what she was talking about.

“I’m not sure if I told you this part, but when I first got to Oxford, Charles and I slept together for a few weeks,” she said, taking a sip from her own drink. Erik raised his eyebrows; she had conveniently omitted that from her stories.

“And you decided you were better off as friends?”

“Sure, something like that,” she said. “Or more specifically, one weekend he took me to a party, and he went home with the captain of the men’s rugby team.” She laughed lightly. “I made the decision to just be friends unilaterally.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Erik said. “Though I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be learning here.”

He watched the redhead shimmy off Charles’s lap and hold out a hand, and then they headed towards the door. When he turned back to Moira, she was watching him closely.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. She smiled and set her cup on the counter. “C’mon, Lehnsherr. Let’s see if you tied that toga tightly enough to hit the dance floor.”

He thought about Charles and the redhead all weekend, and into the start of the week, until he saw Charles again at debate practice. They squared off against each other, flipping a coin to see who would argue each side of a motion about whether violence could ever be a justifiable element of protest. They’d all laughed when Charles had to argue for it, and Erik against.

Charles came home with him that night, and by the time they were naked, Erik was determined to put his persistent annoyance out of his mind—until Charles himself brought up Halloween.  

“I’ll say one thing for that party,” he said with a wicked smile, holding up the corner of the bed sheet. “I wouldn’t say no if you wanted to put this thing back on.”

Before Erik could say anything in return, Charles tugged him down for a bruising kiss.

*

When Dr. Fuentes had first sent him to off to join the debate team, he’d returned the following Monday session utterly indignant. She’d watched him pace back and forth across the narrow length of her office as he went on a towering rant.

“And then we debated mutant school integration!” He threw his hands up in the air. “With these stupid rules, and time limits, and…and…what’s the point?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Erik stopped short and put his hands on his hips. “A bunch of mutant kids debating ‘both sides’”—he punctuated the words with mocking air quotes—“How does that help us?”

“You said it yourself.” Dr. Fuentes shrugged, spreading her hands in an open gesture. “You’re kids. Nearly adults, I’ll grant you that, but kids just the same. You’re all still learning about the issues, and how to make compelling arguments about them.”

“You think I don’t know about mutant education?” he said incredulously.

Dr. Fuentes rolled her eyes. “It’s like you’re deliberately missing the point,” she muttered. “Stop looming and sit down.” She pointed at the chair across from her.

Erik spent about five seconds considering the idea of walking out the door and never coming back, but something in the way she was watching him, her eyelids blinking horizontally every few seconds, made him change his mind. He folded his arms as he sat, slouching and stretching his legs as far as they could reach.

“Much better, thank you,” she said, one corner of her mouth turning upward. “OK, so here’s the point of the structure and the rules—which I’ll admit can seem a little silly when you’re turning your day-to-day reality into some hypothetical debate topic.” She leaned in like she was about to tell him something confidential. “When you’re an adult, it’s going to be like this, but significantly worse.”

“I don’t—”

“Let me clarify. Not the argument for argument’s sake stuff, unless you get off on that sort of thing,” she said with a laugh. “But I’m talking about systems. Some people disagree with me, but I think the way you change systems is from within. That means learning the rules and using them to your advantage.”

“That’s bullshit,” Erik said. He looked up quickly to see if she would chastise him for language, but she was just watching him steadily, waiting for him to continue. “If everyone works within the system then doesn’t the system…keep going?”

“You can register my shock that a sixteen year old isn’t impressed with my endorsement of incremental change,” Dr. Fuentes said, shaking her head. “But short of violent revolution—which, I’ve got to admit, seems unlikely—this is the way it works. People bring lawsuits and get the courts to set precedent. They campaign for politicians who want to throw out bad laws and pass good ones. They accept that everything won’t change overnight, but that progress does happen.”

“It sure as hell doesn’t feel like progress is happening,” Erik said.

She gave him a small, almost sympathetic smile. “It never does, when you’re in the middle of it.”

*

Charles is one of those people who gets off on “argument for argument’s sake stuff.” Erik hadn’t really understood the phrase when Dr. Fuentes used it all those years ago, but now it’s crystal clear—and he’s starting to suspect that he might be one of those people, too.

Right now, they’re lying in Erik’s bed, naked and sated and sticky, and they could be basking in some sort of warm telepathic afterglow, but somehow they’ve wound up arguing about arguing.

“For fuck’s sake,” Erik snaps. “Everything is just theoretical to you!”

“Oh, come on—”

“Let’s try a little thought experiment,” he cuts in, putting on an admittedly terrible imitation of Charles’s accent. “Oh, shall I play the devil’s advocate, then?” 

Charles attempts to shove him in the side, but he’s too close to get the proper leverage, and he lets out a frustrated huff. “This is a frankly absurd accusation from the goddamned captain of the debate team.”

“I enjoy debating, sure,” Erik says. “But I actually do things beyond just listening to the sound of my own voice.”

“Oh, am I less of a mutant because I’m not staging some kind of die-in outside the dean’s office?” Charles says with a sneer.

Erik feels a swell of anger rise up deep in his chest, and he spitefully hopes that Charles is getting the telepathic residuals of it, at the very least.

“Try leaving your fucking lab for five seconds,” he snaps. He feels Charles stiffen. “Maybe you’ll start to see mutants as people and not just some sort of abstract thing to study—”

“On what planet is that a fair statement?” Charles says. “The work we’re doing is going to save mutants’ lives.” He actually sounds hurt. Erik feels something twist in the pit of his stomach, but it’s like he can’t physically stop himself from plowing forward.

“Maybe it’ll save lives,” he says in a mocking tone. “Or maybe you’ll give baseline parents the opportunity to check off ‘no mutant babies, please’ at a fertility clinic.”

“That’s just…just wildly pessimistic!” Charles pushes back from him with a frown, putting a good six inches of space between them. “And to be honest, a bit insulting. I’m proud of the work we’re doing, and I won’t let you twist it that way.”

Erik runs through the last five minutes of the argument, baffled at how they went from playfully bickering for the hell of it to actually trying to hurt each other. Charles is watching him with his big blue eyes, and something in his expression softens just slightly.

“Look,” he says. “I know things aren’t perfect when it comes to mutant rights. But we’ve come so far in the past few decades—”

Erik groans, frustration rising up again. “Do you want me to list all the ways that discrimination against mutants is alive and well in this country? Let alone the rest of the world, for that matter.”

Charles rolls his eyes. “No one’s denying any of that. But when you think about where things were in the eighties, for example—”

“It’s not some sort of linear progression!” Erik says. “Sure, we have a Democratic president now, but do you know how many mutantphobic assholes are in Congress?”

“No, please enlighten me about the modern Republican party’s attitudes towards mutants,” Charles says sarcastically.

Erik ignores him. “Do you know how easy it would be to take a step backwards, and then another, and then another, until—”

“God, spare me,” Charles mutters. “This is borderline paranoia.”   

“Why don’t you spare me your ridiculous naïveté instead?” Erik snaps back. “If you had any idea what most mutants are struggling with…if you spent one day outside your fucking sheltered, spoiled—”

“You know,” Charles cuts in quietly, his mouth set in a small, tight line. “It’s late, I should probably be heading home.”

Erik sighs and looks up at the ceiling, pressing his hands over his eyes and scrubbing his face in frustration. He feels Charles sit up, leaving a rush of cool air behind him, and listens to him dress as Erik senses one piece of metal after another go back onto his body.

He finally opens his eyes as Charles transfers himself to his chair. Charles looks back at him with an unreadable expression on his face.

“Well, I’ll see you at practice next week,” he says.

“No,” Erik says. Charles frowns, and Erik shakes his head. “No, I mean, there’s no practice, remember? It’s the day before Thanksgiving. Everyone will be gone.”

“Oh,” Charles says. “Well, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Me neither.”

They both stare at each other for a moment, until Charles bites his lip and says, “Well, good night, Erik.”

Erik doesn’t say anything in response—he just watches Charles roll across the room and turn the doorknob himself. Erik pulls his powers in close as Charles shuts the door behind him.

*

The next week passes in a blur, mostly because Erik’s labor history professor, clearly a total sadist, chose the Tuesday before Thanksgiving as the deadline for their longest paper outside the final. Erik pulls an all-nighter, and then Tuesday night, he sleeps for twelve hours.

Janos has already left by the time Erik wakes up, and Azazel is out buying a bottle of something appropriate to give to Emma’s parents, so Erik sits on the white couch in Emma’s room and watches her pack a suitcase with far more things than one person should need for four days.

“You’re sure you don’t want to come with us?” she asks for the ninth time.

Erik rolls his eyes. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” he deadpans. “How would I begin to know which fork to use?”

“Fine, fine,” she says, waving him off. “Sit alone in your dorm room all weekend getting drunk and pining after Charles Xavier—I won’t stop you.”

“I’m not—” Erik folds his arms across his chest and frowns. “First of all, the point of being friends with benefits is there’s no pining involved.”

Emma gives him a skeptical look. “Are you sure you’re even still friends?”

He stills. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that after last week, when you hurled one insult after another at him…” Emma shakes her head. “I don’t know about Charles, but that wouldn’t exactly endear me to a guy.”

Erik feels indignation rising up, and he leans forward. “Did you use your telepathy to—”

“You were literally shouting, Erik!” she cuts in, throwing up her hands. “These walls are paper thin. I listened to you being an asshole like an ordinary human.”

Erik pinches the bridge of his nose. “It’s not like he was some kind of saint, you know.”

“No,” Emma agrees. She crosses to the closet and pulls out a shimmering white gown. He can’t possibly imagine she’ll have any use for it, unless his teasing about her white-tie Thanksgiving is actually true. She adds, like an afterthought, “I mean, he never has been.”

Erik’s curiosity gets the better of him. “How long have you known each other?”

“Oh, ages,” she says blithely. She turns to him with a smirk. “Yes, that’s another one of our, how did you think of them, ‘rich person codes?’”

Erik gives her a flat look and she laughs in response as she folds the white gown and puts it in her suitcase.

“We saw each other periodically as we were growing up, before he went to school in England,” she says. “And I can confirm that he was just as smug and officious before his accident as he seems to be now.”

“He’s not—”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says innocently. “Weren’t you the one who called him naïve, sheltered, spoiled—”

“I was angry,” Erik mutters, looking down at Emma’s plush white area rug. It probably cost as much as he’ll earn in his work-study job all year.

“Yeah, I got that,” Emma says. She’s struggling to press the lid of the suitcase shut, leaning her entire body onto the top of it. “Do you mind…?”

Zippers are almost all plastic these days, but of course Emma’s luggage—which is also nicer than anything he owns—is made of leather and metal. He stands and crosses to the bed, pressing both hands down on the top of the suitcase as he uses his powers to pull the zipper all the way shut.

“Thanks,” she says, lightly knocking him in the shoulder. She meets his gaze and gives him an uncharacteristically serious expression. “Smug and officious aside, I’ve always liked Charles. He’s kind.” She lets out a small laugh. “And he’s remarkably well-adjusted considering he’s, like, the strongest telepath in the world.”

“What?”

Emma raises her eyebrows. “He didn’t tell you?” She cocks her head to one side. “Ah, of course he didn’t tell you.” She smiles and pats him on the bicep. “Well, I’ll leave that conversation to the two of you.”

Azazel pops into the room with a bang, and they both jump in surprise. He gives them a grin and holds up a brown paper bag. “Your parents drink vodka?”

Emma snorts. “Don’t worry, honey. They drink anything.”

Azazel gives a full-throated laugh. “I’ll get my things and we can go.” He pops out of the room.

“Before you…” Erik trails off, not certain what he wants to ask, exactly. Hell, he’s not certain what he even wants.

“You know how to bake, right?” Emma says. Erik nods. “It’s Thanksgiving, why don’t you make him a pie?”

Erik gives her a doubtful look.

“What, is that too romantic for you?” she says, sounding exasperated. “Fine, lightly insult him without being needlessly cruel and then suck his dick. He’ll be your boyfriend in no time.”

“I don’t want him to be my—”

Azazel pops in again holding a small duffel bag. “Shall we?”

Emma places a hand on her suitcase and goes up on her tiptoes. “Whatever you say, dear.” She gives him a peck on the cheek. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“But I don—”

Emma places a hand on Azazel’s arm and they vanish into thin air. Erik stands on Emma’s soft white carpet, frowning at the empty room.

He feels the time by the hands on his watch; it’s just before noon. The grocery store will be a nightmare the day before Thanksgiving. He sighs and pulls out his phone to look for a recipe.

*

His mother taught him how to bake, though mostly the sweets of her childhood, like rugelach and hamantaschen. Certainly not whatever the hell this monstrosity was supposed to be before he butchered it.

“I can save this,” Erik mutters. He’s grateful that the dorm seems to be wholly deserted for the holiday, because the communal kitchen now more closely resembles the scene of some sort of egg-and-flour natural disaster. There’s a faint burning smell and something sticky on his cheek, and why did he ever think this was a good idea?

He sets his hands on the counter and as he takes a deep breath, there’s a knock at the dorm’s front door.

He steps out into the entryway and stretches out his powers: belt buckle, watch, and, yes, wheelchair. He presses a flour-covered hand to his face and then realizes he’s probably just made things worse.

“I’m sure you look perfectly fine!” Charles shouts through the door. “Can I please come in?”

Erik opens the door with a flick of his wrist and Charles rolls in. He takes one look at Erik and bursts out laughing.

“I spoke too soon,” he says. “You might want to hop in the shower.”

Erik stares at him. “What are you doing here?” It’s only then that he notices the large white box on Charles’s lap. Charles holds it up.

“I know my strengths,” he says lightly. “And at the top of the list is ‘purchasing things in the hopes that people will forgive me for whatever I’ve said to them.’”

Erik takes the box, which bears the stamp of the most expensive bakery in the city, and opens it. It’s a pristine-looking apple pie, every ridge and fold precisely shaped. Erik can’t help but laugh softly—they both independently decided to give each other apology pies.

“Is everything—” Charles leans to the right as he tries to peer into the kitchen. Erik moves quickly to position his body to block Charles’s view.

“Nothing to worry about,” he says hastily. He nods at the box as he adds, “Um, thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” Charles says with a smile. “I also brought wine.” He pats the leather satchel hanging from the back of his chair.

“How did you buy wine?”

His smile grows wider, but he just shakes his head. “Why don’t we go back to your suite and you can get cleaned up?”

As he takes an extremely efficient shower, Erik tries not to think about Charles too loudly. Though now that he knows Charles is in fact a wildly powerful telepath, maybe that doesn’t matter—not that he thinks Charles is constantly listening in.

He gets dressed again and starts to run through all the possible things Charles might say to him, and all the things he might in response, until he’s created a veritable web of potential conversations.  

“Did you see this?”

He didn’t account for Charles wanting to discuss the news. He’s transferred from his chair to the common area couch; the pie and a pair of plates are laid out on the coffee table, and Charles has located a corkscrew and has clearly already made a dent in the wine.

He holds up his phone to show a news article of some kind. Erik crosses the room and squints at the headline, something about a congressional spending bill.

“I haven’t followed the news much this week,” he admits, sitting next to Charles while leaving a conservative amount of space between them. “I was busy getting pummeled writing a paper on mutant labor organizers.”

Charles lights up. “Oh, that’s an interesting topic!” He reaches over to pour what could only be described as a “generous” amount of wine in Erik’s glass. They are proper wine glasses, because Erik lives with Emma Frost.

“It is,” he says, nodding in thanks as he takes the glass. “But tell me why you mentioned that article first.”

“Oh!” Charles shakes his head. “Well, I didn’t notice this either, I’ve been locked in the lab—” They both seem to catch the reference to their fight at once, and Erik looks down quickly.

“Anyway,” Charles continues, raising his voice slightly. Erik looks back up and there’s something in Charles’s expression that gives him pause. “I’m just seeing this now.”

Erik cranes his neck to read the first paragraph of the article. “What does it—”

“Oh, it’s mostly about farm subsidies and the like, don’t bother reading the whole thing,” Charles says, putting the phone down on the couch. “But they passed the package late Tuesday, just before they left for the holiday, and it seems like in the rush to get out of town, Shelby Whitmore managed to sneak something in.”

“God, fuck that guy!” Erik says automatically. “Why not just say you’re in the fucking Friends of Humanity rather than sending out these constant dog whistles that—wait, sorry, what?”

“Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure that’s the natural response to Shelby Whitmore,” Charles says with a laugh. “But this…well, it isn’t great, to be honest. He’s put a provision in there that says all federal contractors have to disclose their mutant status if they want to get paid.”

“What?” Erik says. “That’s a flagrant violation of privacy.”

“I know.” Charles frowns. “I said it wasn’t great. Perhaps that was a bit of an understatement.”

Erik immediately thinks of his line the other night—isn’t this a first step backwards, to be followed by another, and then another? But he hesitates to say it aloud, because Charles isn’t being dismissive or flippant; his lips are pressed together in little worried line.

“Well,” Erik says slowly. “I guess we should…keep an eye on this.”

Charles is watching him carefully, and something in his expression shifts towards relief, as if he expected Erik to relitigate their entire argument. He nods and picks up his wine glass. “For now, well, happy Thanksgiving,” he says, raising the glass in a toast.

Erik knocks his glass and takes a sip. It tastes…fancy. Charles snorts.

“Are you always listening—”

“Sorry, sorry!” Charles raises a placating hand. “Sometimes things slip through.”

“Because you’re…” Erik falters. Telepathy is a thorny enough subject on a good day, but even after four years of Emma’s very blunt commentary on the subject, he’s not sure how you ask your…whatever…about something as intimate as the scale and depth of his power.

“I don’t mind talking about my telepathy, you know,” Charles says, keeping his tone so even that Erik can’t be sure whether Charles is in his mind or not. “Of course I’m well aware of the general stigma—”

“I mean, that’s bullshit,” Erik cuts in. “It’s a mutation just like any other. Kitty can walk through walls, and you don’t see people going on about how she’s going to invade—”

“Hey,” Charles cuts in, giving him a gentle pat on the knee. “No need to get yourself worked up on my behalf—though I do appreciate it.” There’s a faint dusting of pink high on his cheekbones.

“Sorry,” Erik says ruefully. “I just think people are…”

“Yeah, I got it,” Charles agrees with a laugh. “Good to see Emma’s so thoroughly indoctrinated you.”

“She didn’t—”

“I’m kidding!” Charles is laughing in earnest now. “But thank you all the same.” He takes a large sip from his wine glass and then gestures to the pie. “Shall we?”

Erik nods and uses his powers to float over the cutlery; Charles watches with delight as the knife sails through the air and lands directly over the center of the pie in the perfect slicing position.

“I was making you a pie, too, you know,” Erik says as he pushes the knife downwards. 

“I did know,” Charles says with a smile. “I’m incredibly touched and only slightly embarrassed that I bought you one instead.”

“Yeah, well, yours is edible,” Erik says, using the side of the knife to lift up a slice and deposit it on a plate. He hands it to Charles, who takes a large bite and then makes a deep, throaty noise that borders on inappropriate. Erik flushes as he says, “More than edible, I take it?”

Charles nearly chokes as he laughs. “Not to brag,” he says after he swallows. “But I’m pretty sure I purchased you the finest pie that’s ever been baked.”

He watches Charles take another bite, the way his lips look as he pulls the fork back, and something Erik can’t quite identify twists deep in his stomach.

He inches closer to Charles on the couch, and Charles gives him a soft smile. “Have some pie,” he says. 

As Erik brings the knife down again, a faint but unmistakable feeling of telepathic warmth fills his head.

*

Erik isn’t proud that he’s been too busy this semester to really keep up with the news, or that he’s missed a few mutant activist group meetings over the past few months in the process. But when the Seventh Circuit ruling comes down shortly after his last final, he’s furious with himself for not having followed this case more closely.

“Why are we supposed to be upset about this again?” Azazel asks without looking up from his computer.

“Because until this goes to the Supreme Court—which will take at least a year, by the way—this ruling stands,” Erik says, his patience wearing razor-thin. “Your employer can demand you disclose your mutant status, and they can fire you if they feel your power makes you a ‘danger’ in the workplace.”

Azazel looks up. “That…seems bad.”

“You’re fucking right it’s bad,” Erik snaps. “Wake the fuck up, Azazel!”

“Honey,” Emma cuts in, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Please don’t take out your anger on the rest of us.”

“You’re going to sit there and pretend this has nothing to do with you?”

Emma glares at him. “When did I say that? This is bad. We all agree it’s bad. You don’t get an award for having the strongest feelings about how bad it is.”

Erik lets out a wordless huff of anger and starts pacing. Emma pulls out her phone with a frown.

“Well,” she announces. “Scott says we’re all invited to their place tonight to, and I quote, ‘get fucking wasted.’” She wrinkles her nose. “Charming as ever.”

“Now you’re speaking my language,” Azazel says, standing and closing his laptop with a flourish.

“To be clear, he also said we’re going to talk about this ruling,” Emma adds.

Azazel’s face falls. He opens his mouth to say something, but when he catches the expression on Erik’s face, he snaps it shut. He rolls his eyes and pops out of the room.

“Unsolicited piece of advice,” Emma says, standing and straightening her already immaculate white trousers. “If Charles shows up tonight and you deem his response to this situation to be less than adequate by your unrelenting standards, you might want to keep that to yourself.”

Erik folds his arms across his chest. “Did I ask for your opinion?”

Emma sighs as she shakes her head. “I feel absolutely certain a smart boy like you knows the definition of ‘unsolicited,’” she says, walking past him as she heads towards the bedrooms. She adds over her shoulder, “Lord knows why I care, but I’m trying to save you from yourself.”

But Charles isn’t there when they arrive. Erik thinks about texting him, and then catches himself—he’s had Charles’s number for ages, but they’ve never once texted. It would be a violation of the Wednesday-night-only nature of their unspoken agreement.

Erik isn’t too proud to admit how relieved he was when, towards the end of the bottle of wine on Thanksgiving, Charles had leaned over and kissed him. They didn’t take things further that day, but the following Wednesday at debate practice, Erik found himself getting inappropriately turned on by the sight of Charles running rhetorical circles around Kitty. By the end of the night, Charles was back in his bed, encouraging Erik to bend him into a series of increasingly improbable positions. It was almost like their falling out had never happened.

Kitty’s here now, along with her housemate, Bobby. Aside from Darwin, Alex, Scott, and Erik’s suitemates, there are at least a dozen other people he doesn’t know—presumably Scott’s classmates, friends from Darwin’s program, and coworkers from the restaurant where Alex is a chef. They’re all mutants, as far as he’s aware, and several of them have clearly visible mutations.

“Hey there, thanks for coming,” Darwin says when Erik enters the kitchen. He crosses the room to give Erik a hug.  

“Thanks for having us,” Erik says. He pulls a beer from the fridge and pops the top off with his powers. “Hey, uh…did you invite Charles?”

“Shouldn’t you know?” Alex says. He’s arranging a tray of little tart-like things. Erik gives him a questioning look and he clarifies, “Because he’s your boyfriend?”

“No!” Erik says, possibly too quickly, because Alex and Darwin share a meaningful look. “I mean, we do sleep together, but he’s not my boyfriend.”

“Uh…OK, sure, man,” Alex says, holding the tray with one hand and clapping him on the shoulder with the other as he passes out of the room.

“He’s not, though,” Erik repeats to Darwin, who’s looking at him with a confusingly kind expression on his face.

“I know,” Darwin says softly. “And yeah, I invited him, but I haven’t heard back.”

Erik winds up in a deep discussion with Bobby and Kitty. He’s always liked Kitty—he even went to the mutant Shabbat dinner she runs a few times, until he privately told her it reminded him too much of his mother. She’d understood without having to make him explain it.

“But there’s other anti-discrimination stuff, right?” Bobby is saying. “In the constitution, I mean. Equal protection under the law.”

Erik barely knows Bobby, and he’s reserving judgment, but so far, he’s less than impressed. He takes a sip of his beer and decides to let Kitty handle this one.

“Well, there’s no explicit mention of mutants—like, obviously, because as far as we know and definitely as far as they knew, mutants didn’t exist when the framers wrote the constitution,” Kitty says patiently. “A lot of people are left out, actually, even with the various amendments. That’s why we use the courts.”

“But this is the courts being used against us?” Bobby says.

“Conservatives have tried to bring these arguments for years,” Kitty tells him. “Like, that the safety of the many outweighs the rights of a few ‘dangerous’ mutants.” She rolls her eyes.

“But I thought conservatives were all about individual rights?” Bobby looks genuinely confused.

Erik lets out a sardonic laugh. “Certain individuals.”

The doorbell rings, and Erik almost involuntarily catalogues the new arrivals with his powers. Two people—rings, watches, some kind of metal laptop case, and, most importantly, a wheelchair.

Charles rolls in, followed by Moira, who’s holding a large paper bag. She waves at Erik and leans down to give Kitty a quick one-armed hug before passing into the kitchen.

Erik’s immediately torn by his somewhat pathetic thrill at seeing Charles’s face right now and his annoyance that he brought a baseline person, even if that person is Moira.

His brain helpfully bypasses that first feeling and he says without properly thinking, “You brought a baseline?”

Charles gives him a sharp look. “I brought Moira? Our mutual friend and your debate team co-captain, someone you both like and respect?”

“This was meant to be a mutants-only gathering,” Erik says, raising his chin slightly.

“Really? I must have missed that,” Charles says sarcastically. “God, Erik. It’s one thing to hold these vague mutant separatist views in your head—”

“Then why don’t you stay the fuck out of my head?” Erik snaps. Charles’s eyes widen.

“It’s just an expression,” he says quietly.

“I…can leave, if you want,” Moira says from a few feet behind them.

Erik looks up and she’s eyeing the two of them while biting her lip. Bobby and Kitty are watching them with wide eyes.

“No,” Erik says roughly, standing and heading towards the kitchen. “It’s fine.”

Defying some sort of fundamental law of party physics, the kitchen is blessedly empty. Erik stands at the counter for a moment and sinks his powers into all the metal in the room to center himself. Alex’s professional-grade knives are particularly satisfying.

And then the shape of Charles’s wheelchair gets closer and closer, and Charles is rolling into the kitchen, a complicated mix of emotions written across his face.

Erik turns and leans against the sink, crossing one ankle over the other and folding his arms over his chest. Charles positions himself next to the table and spreads his hands in an expansive, open-palmed gesture.

“Look, I know tensions are high right now—”

“But we need all the allies we can get,” Erik cuts in, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard this all before.”

“Because it’s true, you idiot,” Charles snaps. “It’d be one thing if I’d brought some random baseline person—I mean, that reaction would have been extraordinarily rude, no matter who it was. But this is someone you trust! I just don’t understand why your first instinct is to lash…”

He looks up at Erik and cocks his head. He opens his mouth, but before he can speak, Erik holds up a hand.

“If you’re about to psychoanalyze me, you can save it,” he says. “This situation we’re in right now? Is fucked. I don’t understand why I’m the bad guy for being appropriately concerned.”

“Moira isn’t the enemy!” Charles says, sounding exasperated. “The average baseline person on the street isn’t the enemy, either, but Moira actually wants to help. You probably know a lot of baseline people who feel the same way. But if you just attack them indiscriminately, because the only thing you know how to do is fight—”

“At this precise moment in history,” Erik interrupts. “Fighting seems a hell of a lot more effective than just sitting around and talking about how we should all be friends.”

“Fighting indiscriminately!” Charles repeats with a sweeping gesture. “How is that effective? It’s like…like shouting into the abyss! You know better than that.”

“Oh, please,” Erik scoffs. “Tell me what I know, then. Illuminate me.”  

Charles leans back in his chair as he rolls his eyes. “Now you’re going to turn me into the enemy, too?”

Erik flexes his fingers and stretches his powers lightly over the metal in the room to try and calm down. 

Charles is watching him with his lips pursed. “Well?” he prompts.

“I know you’re not the enemy,” Erik bites out. 

Charles makes a little “go on” gesture. Erik sighs.

“Of course I know that Moira isn’t either,” he says. “It’s just that this ruling…we can talk about it all night, and we can go protest it tomorrow, but in the grand scheme of things, there’s not much we can actually do.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know, I just feel…”  

“Powerless,” Charles finishes. “Believe me, I understand.” He gives Erik a wry smile. “Probably better than most people would assume, considering…” 

As he trails off, Erik recognizes Charles’s attempt at deescalation. He’s secretly grateful—as much as he likes arguing with Charles, he really doesn’t enjoy fighting with him. 

“Considering you generally go around with your superiority complex on full display?” he says, trying to make the teasing tone as clear as possible.

Charles chokes out a laugh. “Excuse me?” he says. “If that’s not the pot calling the kettle—”

“You’re accusing me?” He puts a hand to his chest in a mock-wounded gesture.

Charles folds his arms and raises a challenging eyebrow. “If the megalomaniacal shoe fits…” 

There’s something charged in the air that must be at least partly Charles’s telepathy, whether he’s consciously projecting or not. A sharp swell of arousal rises up deep in Erik’s core, and he attempts to shove the feeling of it in Charles’s direction. He pushes off from the sink and crosses over to him, leaning over to place his hands on the chair’s armrests. Charles looks up at him, his eyes wide.

“I take it back,” he says, something taunting in his tone. “You actually know how to do two things. Fighting and—”

Erik shuts him up with a kiss. Charles moans and surges upwards, pulling at Erik’s arms to tug him closer, until Erik stumbles and lands on Charles’s lap, pressing down on his shoulders as he kisses him within an inch of his life.

I could strangle you right now, Charles projects.

Mr. Nonviolence, he projects back, laughing into Charles’s mouth. Charles reaches up to tug his hair, hard.

“All right, then! Guess you worked it out!”

Erik breaks away, and they’re both panting heavily as they look over at Bobby, who’s rooting around in the cabinets. He pulls out an oversized plastic bowl.

“They want me to make ice,” he says, gesturing unnecessarily at the bowl. “Well, uh…congrats.” He gives them a little wave as he retreats.

Charles bursts out laughing. Erik can’t help but join in, and he kisses Charles again, softer this time, as he gently pulls back off his lap and stands.

“Truce?” He holds out a hand and Charles takes it, weaving their fingers together.

“If you promise to apologize to Moira.” Erik opens his mouth to protest, but Charles holds up his free hand. “I shouldn’t reward you for being an asshole, but I’ll make it worth your while.” He sends Erik a frankly shocking mental picture, and Erik looks at him skeptically.

“I don’t think that’s physically possible,” he says.

Charles raises an eyebrow. “Try me.”

Erik smiles, and he tugs on Charles’s hand to lead him back out into the living room.

*

Freshman year, he’d dreaded the holiday break. It was early in his friendship with Emma, and she’d invited him home, as she has every holiday since, but the idea of going to her parents’ house—specifically, her parents’ massive estate, where they had horse stables and tennis courts and literal servants—for a holiday he didn’t even celebrate made him deeply uncomfortable.

But then everyone left campus except for a small cluster of international students and the odd person like him, with no real family to return to, and he was shocked at how calming it was.

That had been a particularly cold winter, and he’d bundled up and taken long walks around the deserted paths, admiring the metalwork of the buildings without all the small things that people carry around every day getting in the way. He traced the old, sturdy pipes down to the maintenance plant, and stood there basking in its warmth in the thin, wintry light.

Since it’s his senior year, Erik is determined to enjoy his holiday solitude as much as he can. But on Christmas Eve, the region gets hit with a massive nor’easter—it’s a wintry mix farther south, but by the time it reaches them towards late afternoon, it’s all snow.

He holes up in the suite and raids his roommates’ personal liquor stores. Janos, surprisingly, comes through with a decent bottle of bourbon. Erik debates asking permission, and then decides Janos never has to know—he’ll just replace it later.

He flips on the news, assuming they’ll be doing holiday puff pieces or covering the massive travel disruptions on the East Coast, but annoyingly, they’re still arguing about the Seventh Circuit ruling—the only thing the media seems capable of talking about these days.

“But it’s my right as an employer to know if the people in my employ are at risk!”

The speaker is a relatively young white guy wearing a bowtie, of all things; he has what Erik likes to think of as a punchable face. The host is on the next split-screen panel, and to her left is a green-skinned woman with a shock of curly green hair who looks like she’s trying to murder Mr. Bowtie with the power of her mind.

She narrows her eyes. “What does that even—”

“Would we want people walking around offices carrying guns?” Mr. Bowtie cuts in, looking triumphant. The green-skinned mutant gives him a flat look.

“Mutations aren’t things you can purchase at a trade show,” she says sarcastically. “They’re literally a part of us.”

“All the more reason that an employer has a right to know,” he says. “Because it’s not optional, like carrying a gun would be.”

“You’re the one who brought up guns!” She’s shouting now. “You literally just twisted the argument in a circle. You’re not actually saying—”

“And what about schools!” he says, shouting over her. The host opens her mouth, and then shuts it again. “Forget about employers. Don’t we have a right to know who—or what—is teaching our children? Violence in schools is one of the most important issues in Americ—”

“God, fuck this,” Erik mutters aloud to the empty room, jamming the off button.

He looks down at his phone and then nearly drops it in surprise. He has it on silent, but it’s ringing—and the caller is listed as “Charles Xavier.” He answers it quickly.

“Is everything OK?” he says in a rush.

Charles lets out a startled laugh. “Yes, of course.” After a pause, he adds. “Why, is everything OK with you?”

“It’s just that you’ve…” Erik suddenly feels very foolish. “We’ve never even texted before, let alone talked on the phone.”

“Oh.” There’s a beat, and Charles sounds quieter when he says, “Is this all right?”

“No, of course!” Erik says quickly. “I mean.” He clears his throat and tries to sound a little more calm. “It’s totally fine. I’m just sitting here snowed in, listening to a man on the news with two brain cells say teachers should have to disclose their mutant status.”

“Two sounds like a generous estimate,” Charles says with a laugh. “We’re also snowed in, not surprising since we’re only an hour’s drive away, give or take. We’re passing the time in true Xavier fashion—drinking heavily and trying to avoid speaking to each other.”

“We?” Erik echoes. He doesn’t know anything about Charles’s home life, other than the fact that his family is apparently rich enough to run in the same social circles as Emma’s—not to mention the fact that he’s able to afford lavishly expensive pies.

“My sister and my mother,” Charles says. “And the staff, of course.”

Erik’s brain trips slightly on the word staff—how in the world does he know multiple people with servants? Before he runs backwards and says, “Wait, sister?”

“Half sister,” he says. “I haven’t mentioned her before?”

“You haven’t.” Erik leans forward with interest, even though they’re talking on the phone. “Is she a telepath?”

“No,” Charles says. “But she is a mutant. A shapeshifter.”

“Really?” He knows he sounds overeager, but shapeshifting is by far one of the most interesting mutations.

“She’s also blue,” Charles adds.

“What?”

“Hang on, I actually—” There’s a rustling noise and then it sounds like Charles has dropped the phone, but after about ten seconds he comes back on the line. “Sorry, here, check your text messages.”

Erik pulls the phone from his ear and opens up his texts. His first-ever message from Charles: “Now imagine us taller,” and a photo of two children standing beneath a tree.

The smaller one is maybe six, her scaly skin a deep, striking shade of blue and her bright red hair done up in two braids. She’s wearing a frilly white dress, and she’s clinging to a boy in a neat little suit who looks to be about ten. It’s so obviously Charles, with his big blue eyes and floppy brown hair, and he’s grinning at the blue girl like she’s the most important person in the world.

“I have to be honest,” Erik says. “This is fucking adorable.”

He can almost feel Charles’s smug smile over the phone. “The correct assessment.”

“How old is she now?”

Charles sighs. “Seventeen—and she acts like it.”

“Ah, well I’m sure from the advanced age of twenty—”

“Says the man who’s all of two years older than me,” Charles says with a laugh, adding in a mock-serious tone, “I won’t be lectured by an undergraduate.”

Erik takes it for the light-hearted comment it is and joins in his laughter. It’s alarmingly easy to talk to Charles on the phone, and he’s starting to wonder why they’ve never done it before.

“Seriously, though,” he says. “Tell me about her.”

Tell me about you, too, he thinks. He wonders what Charles’s telepathic range is—if he concentrated, could he hear Erik’s thoughts from this far away?

“Hmmm, well,” Charles says slowly, like he’s carefully considering the question. “I suppose I can tell you one story that she’d absolutely kill me for sharing.”

Erik laughs as he reaches for the bottle to pour out more bourbon. “That sounds perfect.”

*

On the first Wednesday of the new semester, Charles calls him while he’s making coffee.

“Turn on the news,” he says without saying hello.

Erik frowns and complies, clicking through until he sees it.

“—and the teacher is in custody until authorities determine what exactly went on here.”

They cut to a grim-faced anchor in a studio, who shakes her head and says, “Absolutely horrible. We’re praying that the victims make a full recovery.”

“Charles,” Erik says urgently. “What the hell is going on?”

Charles sighs. “A mutant teacher in Ohio lost control of her powers this morning—and she brought part of a building down in the process.”

“Is anyone—”

“It’s a small miracle, but no, thank God,” Charles says. “Something about it being just the right time of day for the children to be in other parts of the school. A bunch of people are in the hospital, but it’s all minor injuries.” He pauses and sighs. “Still…this is not good.”

“No, it’s not,” Erik murmurs, watching the footage of ambulances outside a one-story brick school building that would look utterly ordinary, if not for the side of it that’s collapsed in on itself.

Erik clicks off the television and uses his powers to float his metal cup over to the couch. He sits down with a sigh. “They’re going to use this against us, aren’t they?”

There’s a pause, and then Charles says, “I think you of all people know the answer to that question.”

They sit in silence for a moment. Erik coughs lightly and says, “Well, I’ll see you tonight?”

“Yes,” Charles says quickly. There’s something in his tone Erik can’t quite identify. “I’ll see you later, then.”

Erik stays glued to the story all day as details trickle in. There’s not much more to learn about the actual events, so the networks fill up their coverage with large and completely pointless panels where people shout over each other as they debate “what this means” for mutant issues in the United States.

The worst part—aside from a bunch of kids getting hurt, obviously—is that the teacher hadn’t told anyone at the school that she was a mutant. If the anti-mutant movement was looking for a perfect incident to pin their abstract scaremongering to, well, they got one.

Charles is late to debate practice, and when he eventually rolls in, he looks harried and paler than usual. He positions himself next to Erik and sends him a little telepathic pulse as a greeting.

Are you OK? Erik asks.

Charles gives him a grateful smile. Completely unrelated to the news of the day, I’m sorry to say. One of my lab partners made a tiny mistake that set us back about six weeks this afternoon.

Erik sends him a feeling of sympathy, and Charles reaches out to give his knee a gentle squeeze.

“The competition in Boston is now just three weeks away,” Moira is saying. “So we need to officially decide who’s going to go, and we should choose an alternate while we’re at it.”

“OK, but what’s the point?”

They all look over at Kitty, who’s slouching low in her chair and scowling.

“What’s the point of what?” Moira says with a frown.

“Competition,” Kitty says. “Debate. All of this…” She waves her hands in the air. “I don’t know, artifice? Do you know what people are saying on the fucking news right now?”

“Yes of course, but—”

“I don’t speak for every mutant in this room,” Kitty says as she stands. “But speaking for myself, I guess I’m no longer interested in ‘debating the issues,’ especially things that affect mutants, when they’re about three seconds from passing some sort of mutant disclosure law.”

“Kitty—” Darwin says, but she holds up a hand.

“I know you agree,” she says, and then she looks at Erik. “And I sure as hell know you agree.”

Erik glances over at Charles, who’s watching him with a worried expression on his face.

Kitty rolls her eyes and grabs her coat and bag. “Whatever. I’ll see you guys when we all have to go to some government office to put our names on a fucking list. We can carpool.” She marches up the stairs to the back entrance and slams the door behind her.

They all sit in silence for a moment, until Moira clears her throat.

“I have to say,” Moira says. “That’s the speech I was expecting from you, Lehnsherr, not Kitty.”

“She’s not wrong,” Erik says coolly.

Moira sighs. “I know she’s not.” She stands and theatrically dusts her hands on her jeans. “All right, I’m calling it. Let’s go to the bar.”

Charles is unusually subdued through drinks, and Erik’s half-tempted to tell him they can make it an early night. But a louder and significantly more selfish part of him still asks Charles to come back to his place, and Charles agrees.

He’s sitting on Erik’s bed, still fully dressed and seemingly lost in thought. Erik sits next to him and presses their shoulders together.

“Do you want to do this?” Erik says.

“Have sex with you?” Charles lets out a little laugh. “Do you have to ask?”

“Well, I mean…yeah, I kind of do,” Erik says slowly.

Charles laughs in earnest. “OK, fair point, thank you.” He catches Erik’s gaze and studies him for a moment, raising a hand as if he’s going to touch Erik’s face, before dropping it again.

“Really though,” Erik says. “Are you OK?”

Charles doesn’t say anything, and then he turns and looks straight ahead. “I just….” He sighs. “I really don’t know when everything got so serious.”

“With the political situation, you mean?”

Charles turns back to look at him, one corner of his mouth turning upwards. “Amongst other things.”

He leans in and kisses Erik softly. Erik opens up his mind in a telepathic invitation, and Charles floods in, filling his head with a great swell of emotion. Erik kisses him back firmly, and presses him gently down onto the mattress.

When Erik pulls back, Charles is gazing up at him and smiling, and then he laughs and turns his head slightly to the side. “It’s not just theoretical.”

“What?” Erik frowns.

Charles reaches up and tugs on his collar. “Nothing,” he says, pulling Erik down for another kiss.

*

“What do you think?” Emma gives a little spin, and the dress—white, of course, this time in silk, with a plunging neckline that leaves very little to the imagination—flutters lightly as it falls.

“Appropriately sexy,” Erik says. “Without crossing over into trashy.”

Emma gives him a broad smile. “This is why I keep you around,” she says. “That and to open cans.” She turns her back to him. “Unzip me?”

He uses his powers to gently pull the delicate zipper. She lets the dress drop the floor and unselfconsciously crosses the room in just her underwear and bra.

“I know you don’t dress for any man,” he says with only a slight bit of mockery in his tone. “But we’re talking about Scott Summers here. This is like bringing heavy artillery to a knife fight. You could wear sweatpants and he’d be impressed.”

“It’s Valentine’s Day, you heathen,” she says. “You have to try a little harder.” She pulls on a pair of white jeans and puts her hands on her hips. “Speaking of which, have you finally removed your head from your ass and asked Charles if he’s free tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow is a Saturday,” Erik says, as if that means anything. Emma gives him a pitying look.

“I honestly thought we were past this,” she says with a sigh.

“I wouldn’t know what to—” He cuts off as his phone starts vibrating. He pulls it out and looks at the screen. “Do I answer an unknown number?”

Emma pulls on a sweater as she says, “Eh, live a little. You never know.”

Erik puts the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Erik Lehnsherr?” It’s a woman’s voice, but not one he recognizes.

“Yes, who is this?”

“Mr. Lehnsherr, this is Anna Howard, I’m calling from the National Mutant Defense Center.”

Erik’s pulse speeds up instantly, and he tries to keep his voice from cracking as he says, “Yes?”

“Mr. Lehnsherr, we were very impressed with your application,” she says. “We’d like to invite you to come down to New York for an interview.”

“I…” He scrambles for something smart to say, but all he can land on is, “Yes, thank you.”

She chuckles. “We’re looking forward to speaking with you. I’ll send you an email with all the details, but I just wanted to let you know personally first.”

“Thank you,” he says again, uselessly. “I also…look forward to speaking with you.”

They say goodbye and when he hangs up the phone, he stares at it for a moment.

“Who were you impressing with your eloquence?” Emma says.

“I got an interview at the National Mutant Defense Center,” he says. It feels surreal to say out loud. Emma’s expression softens and she gives him a genuine smile.

“Erik, that’s wonderful,” she says. “I know how much you’ve always wanted to work there.”

“I can’t believe…” He looks down at his phone, and then he starts when it begins ringing again. This time, it’s Charles. He answers it.

“Charles, you won’t believe what I—”

“Turn on the news right now.”

Erik stands involuntarily and walks to the door. Emma gives him a curious look and follows him. “Was there another incident?” he asks.

“Just turn it on,” Charles says. He sounds extremely tense.

“What’s going on?” Emma hisses as Erik flips through the channels. He gestures to the television with the remote. It’s a press conference—and the two most miserable people in American politics, Shelby fucking Whitmore and Robert fucking Kelly, are standing side by side.

“What the hell is that asshole—”

“Shhhh,” Charles says. “Listen.”

“—and I appreciate the work on this issue by many fine members of the House, particularly Congressmen Whitmore, Stephens, and O’Malley and Congresswoman Markham,” Kelly is saying. “So without further ado, I’ll pass the microphone to my good friend and colleague, Congressman Shelby Whitmore.”

“Thank you, Senator Kelly,” Whitmore says. He clears his throat and straightens his tie. There’s a long pause filled up by the sound of dozens of flashbulbs going off.  

“Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans,” he begins. “It’s been a challenging few months when it comes to the mutant question.” He pauses and affects a blatantly forced look of sympathy. “From the tragic incident in Cuyahoga Falls several weeks ago to countless other events that you’ve probably seen on your local news since then, this nation is waking up to the danger that certain mutations can pose. It’s clearer than ever that ordinary Americans are walking into their schools, their workplaces, their places of worship, and risking their lives every day.”

“Holy shit,” Emma mutters. She sits on the couch and absently tugs at Erik, still holding his phone to his ear, to follow.

“I’d never suggest that mutants shouldn’t be teachers,” Whitmore goes on. “After all, many mutations are perfectly harmless.” He pauses again, and this time he puts on a stern look. “But we need to know whether teachers are mutants. We need to know if the people who work with sensitive information, or handle dangerous equipment, or defend our borders, have a mutation that could put their fellow countrymen in harm’s way. We owe it to our neighbors, to our husbands and our wives—and, above all, we owe it to our children.”

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Erik says. Charles lets out a long breath over the phone.

“And that’s why this morning I’m introducing a bill that will help redress a problem that we’ve lived with for far too long,” Whitmore says. “The Mutant Registration Act will require all mutated individuals in this country to sign a form at their local municipal office. Those forms will be compiled in a national database, and law enforcement agencies will be able to work together to prevent future incidents like the ones we’ve seen recently. It’s a way to ensure that we can keep all Americans safe in the years to come.”

He smiles, showing a row of perfect white teeth. “Why don’t we take a few questions?”

Emma reaches over and hits the off button. “Christ,” she says. She stands and crosses over to the kitchen area. “I’m making a drink and I assume you want one, too.”

“Well,” Charles says. 

Erik presses the phone close to his ear. “What do we do?”

“What can we do?” Charles says. “They’re going to push this through. Public sentiment is very much on their side at the moment.”

“This is…it’s just…”

Erik suddenly remembers that ten minutes ago, he was offered an interview for his dream job.

“You got a phone call?” Charles says.

“Are you listening in telepathically while we’re also talking on the phone?” Erik says.

There’s a long moment of silence, and then Charles says, “Sorry.”

Erik runs a hand through his hair. “No, look, don’t apologize for your fucking mutation, especially not today. It’s fine. You’re welcome to listen in. But I’ll save you the time—I got an interview for a job with the National Mutant Defense Center.”

“Oh, Erik, that’s amazing,” Charles says, and Erik feels a sudden swell of Charles’s telepathic warmth in his head. “Truly.”

“Yeah, well, now it seems a little silly in comparison to—”

“What?” Charles cuts in. “No. That’s absurd. The NMDC is the biggest, most important organization that will be fighting this.” He pauses and adds, “And besides, you’re still allowed to live your life, you know.”

Erik feels such a rush of affection towards him that he has to grip the phone a little tighter. He blurts out, “Do you want to have dinner tomorrow?”

“On a Saturday?” Charles says slowly.

“On Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh,” Charles says. “Oh.” There’s a pause, and then he says, almost shyly, “Of course.”

“I, uh….” Erik coughs lightly. “I guess I’ll pick you up at eight?”

“OK,” Charles says. A beat passes, and then he adds, “Well, I’ll see you then.”

Erik hangs up and Emma’s crossing back over to the couch holding two martini glasses. “That took a turn,” she says as she hands him one.

Erik is hit with a wave of guilt over his distraction. “You know I’m still incredibly mad about—”

“Don’t worry, honey, there was never any doubt.” She gives him a small smile and clinks her glass against his. “But I’m very happy for you, no matter how terrible the circumstances.”

He takes a sip and nearly winces. “Emma, is this literally all gin. It’s ten in the morning.”

“Just drink it,” she says dismissively. “And then you can show me what you’re going to wear tomorrow.” She raises her glass like she’s about to give a toast. “After all, it’s your first proper date.”

*

He has to work a long shift Friday afternoon that stretches into evening, but he spends it blatantly not doing his job. Instead he pulls up as much commentary as he can about the MRA and its likelihood of going forward on the computer at the library’s front desk.

Luckily, he works in the law library, so every mutant law student who passes through stops to chat with him about it, as well as a few professors.

“Even if it does pass,” one older man who must be a professor tells him. “There’s no way they can make it stick. If I started listing all the relevant case law, we’d be here all night.”

“But won’t it take years to go through the courts?” Erik asks with a frown. “What are we supposed to do until then?”

The man gives him a sympathetic smile, and then Erik can almost feel something like sympathy inside his head. Erik looks around quickly, wondering if Charles is there.

“Empath,” the man says, waving his fingers. “When I was growing up I had no idea that I was a mutant, or that other mutants even existed. It was a strange power to have—people just thought I was incredibly sensitive.” He leans in and winks. “It went over very well in the seventies.”

Erik lets out a laugh, and the man gives him an assessing look.

“I shouldn’t downplay it,” he says. “This is an enormous step backwards for the mutant rights movement. But I think the odds of even a single scrap of data being collected are slim.” He picks up his stack of books and adds, “Though I’ve spent more than three decades teaching young people to trust the stability of our courts, so I can say with some confidence that you’re probably brimming with healthy skepticism right now.”

Erik’s eyes narrow. “Are you sure you’re not a telepath?”

The man laughs. “All right, well, here’s what I will say: if you’re wondering what we do while we wait, the answer is simple. We fight. We protest. We keep talking, or shouting, or arguing—however you want to make your case. And we don’t let anyone forget how wrong it is that our basic human rights are being litigated.”  

As he walks away, he leaves behind a lingering sense of something Erik can only identify as fortitude. It’s an uncanny sensation, but it stays with him for the rest of the night.

He’s so distracted by the MRA that he doesn’t get to looking up restaurants until Saturday morning. He grows increasingly agitated sitting at the desk in his room clicking around online: he’s not sure he can get a reservation on the busiest night of the year, but worse than that, he has no idea if he can afford a place that’s even remotely nice enough.

There’s a light knock at his door, and he spins the chair. Emma’s leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded, wearing an expression somewhere between sympathy and disbelief.

“You’ve never done this before,” she says. It’s not a question.

He frowns. “Gone out to dinner?”

“Taken someone out on a date.” She walks into the room and sits on his bed, cross-legged. “I’m not even reading you and I can tell you’re overthinking this.”

“I’m not,” he says. “It’s just…well, what if Charles wants to go to, I don’t know, a five-star restaurant?”

“Erik. Honey.” She shakes her head. “I don’t care how much money he has in the bank. We’re talking about a person who wears cardigans every single day.”

“I don’t know, they look like expensive—”

“Oh my God,” Emma says, burying her face in her hands.

“I…” Erik swallows, and then says in a rush, “I don’t want to fuck this up.”

Emma raises her head. “Now that’s just stupid,” she says flatly. “You’d have to actively try to repel him at this point. I say this as someone with a pair of eyes, not as a telepath.”

“I know that, rationally, but…” He rests his head against the back of the chair and stares at the ceiling. “It’s just actually real now, you know? Like, all of a sudden.”

Emma lets out a little laugh. “All of a sudden, sure.”

He looks back at her, and she’s got an enigmatic smile on her face. He takes a deep breath. “You really think he won’t care about going someplace fancy?”

“What about Alex’s restaurant?” she suggests. “They don’t have five stars, but it’s fairly nice. I’d say it’s an expensive cardigan sort of establishment.”

Erik’s already pulling out his phone. “You think Alex can get me a table? Wait, hang on…”

He has a text from Kitty: “MRA protest. 2 pm, the Green. Bring signs and bail money. :-)” He reads it aloud to Emma.

“Are you going to go?” she asks.

“What kind of question is that?” he says with a laugh. “More importantly: can I get you to go?”

Emma looks at him for a moment, her lips pursed, and then she nods slowly and says, “We should all go. But—” She raises an index finger. “I am not getting arrested. I have to draw a line.”

“That’s fair,” he says as he stands.

“And you’re not either—no matter how nervous you are about your date.”

“Shut up and get out of my room,” he mutters, pointing to the door.

Janos readily agrees to join, and Azazel only takes the slightest amount of guilt-tripping to say yes, too. Erik thinks about texting Charles, but then has second thoughts; if they’re going to see each other tonight, maybe making plans to hang out all afternoon is overeager.

Erik has done his fair share of protesting over the years; back in high school, he and the other mutants on the debate team raised funds to take a bus down to D.C. to protest an executive order about mutant spousal rights that the current administration has thankfully overturned.

The past few years, the campus groups he’s been a part of have struggled over both focus and methods. Erik’s generally one of the loudest voices arguing for direct, explicitly disruptive action, but it’s been hard when they can’t even agree on what they should be protesting. He’ll say exactly one positive thing about Shelby Whitmore: he’s given mutants a very easy cause to coalesce around.

There are hundreds of protesters, maybe even thousands, gathered when they arrive, filling up the Green and spilling out onto the surrounding streets. It’s a riot of color and sound as people display their mutations to the fullest. They’re erecting a makeshift stage in one corner, and several people are hovering in the air as they hold the beams in place.

It’s a clear day, and luckily it’s not too cold, since a fair number of people with physical mutations seem to have decided that the best way to protest is by stripping down completely.

“A quick route to getting arrested, but honestly, it seems like a fun one,” Emma says with an eyebrow raised. Azazel opens his mouth and she holds up a hand. “No. Keep your clothes on.”

She does shift into her diamond form, and the look of it against her ridiculous oversized faux-fur white coat is particularly striking in the sunlight. Erik spots some members of his mutant advocacy group a few dozen feet away, and he leads his suitemates in their direction.

“Erik!”

Erik stops short and spins in surprise. Charles is smiling up at him, tightly bundled and waving a fingerless-gloved hand. Darwin, Kitty, Bobby, and Moira are standing in a cluster behind him, writing slogans on colorful sheets of poster board.

“What are you doing here?” he asks without thinking.

Charles laughs. “Three guesses,” he says. He gestures at the crowd. “It’s a beautiful sight, though I have to admit, this whole thing’s a bit ad hoc when it comes to accessibility—”

“Do you need me to—”

Charles waves a hand. “No, no, thank you. I’m just going to park right here for the time being.”

“Then I can…” Erik trails off awkwardly.

“Erik, would you like to stand with me?” Charles says, giving him an innocent smile that’s only slightly teasing. “I promise not to use the really good anecdotes that I’m saving for dinner.”

Erik grouses as he steps closer, and Charles reaches out to capture his hand. His gloves are incredibly soft.

“Hey, man, good to see you,” Darwin says, coming over to clap Erik on the shoulder. He pointedly looks at their joined hands before looking back up with a smile.

“Seems like every mutant in the city’s here,” Erik says.

“I heard there are protests happening all over the country,” Darwin says. “They’re expecting half a million people to march in New York, at least. And half a million more in D.C.”

“Really?” Charles looks startled. “I guess public opinion is more mixed than we thought.”

“Oh yeah,” Darwin says. “This thing isn’t getting passed without a fight.”

Someone starts a chant on the other side of the Green and it rolls towards them, growing louder and louder. Erik looks around again and he realizes the crowd isn’t even remotely just students—there are older people here, too, and kids with their parents. A few feet away, a little boy with a beautiful set of gossamer wings is sitting on his father’s shoulders; he cups his hands around his mouth as he joins the chant.

Charles softly nudges his telepathy against the edge of Erik’s mind, and he squeezes Charles’s hand as he welcomes him in.

*

Charles lives what might be the fanciest building in the city, judging from the exterior, at least, and he meets Erik just outside the lobby in an exquisitely cut suit that peeks out from under his sharp wool coat.

“Not a cardigan,” Erik says stupidly.

Charles gives him a bemused look. “It’s Valentine’s Day, I thought I was meant to dress up.”

“You are,” he says quickly. “I mean, you look…fine. Good, actually.”

“Very flattering, thank you,” Charles says with a laugh. “You also look both fine and good. Which is the understatement of the century, because you look absolutely amazing.”

Erik only owns the one suit, a gift from Emma—and she had to spend weeks wearing him down to get him to accept it. Since she also picked it out, he knows it’s pretty damn flattering.

But something about hearing Charles say it makes him inexplicably nervous, which is ridiculous, because he knows Charles is attracted to him, and he’s seen Charles naked in the sorts of positions he blushes to think about.

“If it’ll put you at ease,” Charles says. “You should know that this is also my first proper date, and I’m also quite nervous.”

Erik raises his eyebrows. “But you—”

“Have quite a lot of sex, yes,” Charles says. “There’s never been any dating involved. Tends to make things messy, in my observation.”

Erik looks away for a moment, and Charles reaches out to grab his hand.

“For the record, I haven’t slept with anyone else in months,” he says. “Nor do I plan to in the future.”

Erik feels something lifting deep in his chest as he looks down at Charles. “That’s…good.”

“Well then,” Charles pulls his hand back to tap his armrest. “If we stay out here much longer I’ll barely be able to feel my fingers, so where are you taking me?”

Unsurprisingly, the restaurant is completely packed, but Alex came through—they’re seated at an intimate table tucked away in a corner on the ground level. Charles looks flushed even in the low light, and when he glances up, he catches Erik’s gaze and lets out a small, self-conscious laugh.

“This is stupid, I shouldn’t be so nervous,” he says. “We talk to each other all the time.”

“Yeah, but…” Erik rubs the back of his head. “I get it.”

“I’m very aware that you get it, because some of my nervousness is actually residuals from you that I can’t block out.”

Erik winces. “Sorry, I’ll—”

“No, don’t apologize,” Charles says with a smile. “I’m taking it as a compliment.”

Erik gives him a small smile back, but when he opens the wine list, he frowns. He has no idea how to pick a decent bottle, and even the cheapest one is $45, and he can’t actually choose the cheapest one, can he?

Charles clears his throat. “I know you have a narrative in your head about you taking me out,” he says carefully. “But if there are two things I inherited from my family, it’s how to read a wine list and the means to pay for it.” He pauses and reconsiders. “Make that three things: we’re also quite good at drinking it.”

He holds out a hand. Erik involuntarily pulls the menu closer to his chest.

“No, but I—”

“Fantastic, token protest registered,” Charles says, leaning across the table to snatch the wine list from his hands. “You can pay for the food.”

Erik glares at him as Charles scans the menu. He’s infuriating. Emma’s words from months ago come back to him: “smug and officious.” She certainly hit the nail on the head. It’s as if he—

“This is good,” Charles says, looking up at him with an eyebrow raised. “Keep this internal monologue going and neither of us will be even remotely nervous before long.”

Erik opens his mouth to snap back at him, but a waiter appears and Charles puts on a charming smile.

“We’ll have a bottle of the Bordeaux, please,” he says, closing the wine list and handing it to the waiter, who nods politely and retreats.

Erik folds his arms over his chest. “Funny how you never get carded. Especially considering you look so young.”

Charles smiles serenely as he takes a sip of his water. “It is strange, I know.”  

Erik just laughs and shakes his head. “I have always wondered if most telepaths have rules about these things. Emma seems to have a lot of grey areas, but then, so does Azazel, and he can’t read minds.”

Charles looks thoughtful for a moment. “I think that’s a good observation—it’s not like telepathy makes you more moral or immoral than the average person,” he says. “And we aren’t the only mutants who have to decide where to draw the line when it comes to our powers. But it does get a bit more complicated for stronger telepaths. My telepathy is always ‘on,’ for lack of a better phrase. It can lead to tricky situations.”

Erik leans forward, fascinated. “What do you mean?”

Charles smiles broadly, and Erik feels a light ripple of affection ghosting across his mind.

“Well, first of all,” he says. “Are you familiar with the work they’re doing at Johns Hopkins on psionic distribution?”

The wine is very good, not that Erik is any real judge of these things, and the food is delicious. They order dessert and coffee, because it seems like the thing to do on Valentine’s Day, and the waiter deposits a decadent slice of chocolate cake on the table with two forks.

“You know,” Charles is saying as he takes a bite, and then he groans, loudly. “Jesus Christ, this is good.”

“I’m not going to let you be around baked goods in public if you’re going to do this every time,” Erik says, his cheeks burning.

Charles takes another bite, slowly pulling the fork from between his lips and then running his tongue over the tongs. It’s such a blatant come-on that Erik buries his face in his hands.

“Please just eat the fucking cake,” he mutters.

Charles laughs and nudges the plate towards him. “But as I was saying, it’s sort of like…I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be a mutant in the world right now. Even before this MRA nonsense.”

“What do you mean?”

Charles sighs. “I guess…I’ve always enjoyed thought experiments, and hypotheticals, and philosophical questions. It’s why I joined the debating society at Oxford. And it’s not that I’ve stopped liking any of that stuff, but…”

“It doesn’t feel hypothetical anymore?” Erik suggests.

“More like it never did?” Charles says, sounding unsure. “Look, the accident aside, I know I’ve had a significantly easier go of it than the vast majority of mutants in the world. But being a mutant is still hard. And sometimes it’s easier to talk about being a mutant, to treat it like some sort of debate question, than to…”

Erik nods, and he reaches his hand across the table, palm up. Charles smiles and takes it.

“I’m also fully aware of the direct parallel of trying to overcome my fear of relationships here,” he says, shaking his head.

“Yeah, well,” Erik says. “I might be decent at being a mutant in the world, but I can’t help you on that second part.”

“You already have,” Charles says softly, then after a beat he rolls his eyes and adds, “Sorry, that was inexcusably sappy, I blame the emotional bleed from all the people in this room.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” Erik says with mock-skepticism, but he feels extremely warm all the same. He squeezes Charles’s hand before pulling back and picking up the fork to take a bite of the cake. 

“Fuck,” he says. “You really weren’t kidding.”  

“I know Alex probably doesn’t do the baking, but I’ll send over our compliments all the same.”

“Hey, do you…” Erik waits until he’s caught Charles’s eye. “Do you want to come back to my place?’

“You know,” Charles says. “I live by myself and my bed is actually designed for two people. If you’re looking for a change of scene.”

“What if I have trouble performing without Janos’s passive-aggressive soundtrack in the background?”

“That sounds like a challenge to me,” Charles says, raising an eyebrow.

Erik laughs and signals to the waiter for the check.

*

As he steps onto the street outside Grand Central, Erik has to remind himself that he’s lived in New York City longer than he’s lived anywhere else, and that there’s absolutely no reason to be intimidated.

But then, he’s never been inside a Midtown skyscraper for the most important interview of his life.

It’s a brisk morning, and even though it’s nearing the end of March, winter seems to be clinging to Manhattan just as stubbornly as it does every year. The edges of Bryant Park are still dotted with dirty snow banks, though the lawn in the middle is completely clear.

He sits at one of the metal tables and runs his power over it, and then the entire row, and then every table in the park. He’s holding onto all of them lightly, fanning out in a circle around him, when his phone starts vibrating and breaks his concentration.

“Did you get there 45 minutes early?” Charles asks. “In all seriousness, that’s too early.”

“Sorry we can’t all just swan about and show up whenever we feel like it,” he shoots back.

“Ahem,” Charles says, mock-offended. “I am rarely more than five minutes late to—”

“If you’re going to lie, at least make it more realistic and say ‘ten minutes.’”

Charles laughs and Erik joins him. He suddenly realizes that he feels exponentially more calm than he did before Charles called.

“All right,” Charles says. “I don’t want to distract you before your interview, but some important news has been going down while you’ve been on the train, and I wanted to make sure you heard in case they ask you about it.”

Erik’s stomach drops. “What—”

“Good news!” Charles clarifies. “I would’ve led with it if it were bad. But it’s great news, actually—they’re reporting that the MRA has completely stalled out in the Senate, and there’s no way they’re going to bring it to a floor vote.”

“Holy shit,” Erik says. “That’s fantastic. But wait—”

“Yes, they’re going to try to overhaul it and bring it again, without a doubt,” Charles says. “But the Republicans have such a thin margin in the Senate, and those few holdouts in the middle…”

“Plus the next election,” Erik finishes. “I know this thing isn’t dead yet, but this is fucking incredible news, Charles.”

“I know,” Charles says. Erik can practically hear him beaming through the phone. “And you’ll be fighting them directly working for the NMDC when this comes up again.”

“Well,” Erik says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“I’m not trying to jinx you,” Charles says. “But you’re brilliant, do you know that?”

Erik’s cheeks heat up and he holds the phone a little tighter as he says, “Thank you.”

“I can call the NMDC next and put in a good word—”

“Absolutely not,” he says firmly.

“Better yet, I can just pop into their heads and—”

“OK, I have to go!” Erik shouts.

Charles laughs. “I believe you now have 40 minutes to kill, but I actually have a meeting, so I’ll say goodbye.” He pauses, and adds, “But really, good luck. I’ll be thinking about you.”

“Thanks,” Erik says softly.

The National Mutant Defense Council’s headquarters are on the 20th floor, though there’s no view from the sleek, windowless lobby where he gives his name and waits. The glass doors to the main office open, and a middle-aged woman with tan skin and close-cropped dark hair comes out to greet him. She’s wearing a red pantsuit, and there’s a little “M” symbol on her lapel.

“Mr. Lehnsherr, I’m Anna Howard,” she says, extending a hand. Her grip is very strong, and something must show on his face, because she adds, “Sorry, my mutation is super strength. That’s the gentlest handshake I can do, but it’s still a jarring way to say hello. Does get the mutant conversation out of the way at the start, though!”

“All I can do by way of greeting is to play around with peoples’ watches and jewelry,” he says. “That or, like, fry the circuitry in their computers.”

She laughs. “Well, it’s nice to finally meet you in person after our correspondence. Shall we go inside?”

He follows her into the main open area of the office, where dozens of people are rushing from desk to desk, answering phones and shoving papers at each other. Behind them, he can finally see the view: they’re facing uptown, and Manhattan spreads out before them, a tableau of glass and concrete and, most importantly, steel. It nearly leaves him breathless.

“Apologies for the chaos this morning,” she says lightly, gesturing to the people literally running past them. “But it’s kind of a big day, inadvertently. I’m not sure if you heard about the Senate…?”

“I did,” he says. “My…uh, my boyfriend just called me.”

She smiles gently. “Is your boyfriend a mutant?”

He smiles back as he says, “Yes. A telepath.”

“What a coincidence!” she exclaims. “So is my wife.” She adds, “We’ll have to trade tips,” and she gives him a wink.

Erik follows her, wide-eyed, into a glossy conference room where two other mutants are waiting—an older woman with lilac skin and a younger white guy who, Erik sees when he stands, has a tail like a cat peeking out through a carefully-sewn hole in his suit.

“Harriet Liu, Josh Ableman.” She gestures at each of them as they smile and shake his hand. “This is Erik Lehnsherr.” She turns to him. “Why don’t you have a seat and we can begin.”

The interview lasts two hours, and afterwards, Erik barely remembers any of it, but he’s pretty certain it went well. Very well, actually, if their reactions had been anything to go by.

Charles texts him when his train is crossing the Harlem River. “How did it go?????????”

Erik snorts and types back, “I think it went well??”

Five seconds later he receives Charles’s “<33333333333333” and he actually laughs out loud.

Erik leans his head against the window and watches the scenery whip by. He thinks back over the past six months with only a little disbelief—and when he thinks about the next six months, graduating and maybe fighting for mutant rights at the NMDC and, above all, Charles, it’s almost too much to process.

When he gets off the train, he walks up into the main station and stops for a moment to feel one of his favorite things in the world: the big board of arrivals and departures, clacking away, thousands of little intricate gears whirring at once.

He’s got his power so focused that he doesn’t immediately sense what’s right beneath it—the outline of a very familiar wheelchair.

“What are you doing here?” he says as he crosses over to Charles, his heart picking up a little bit even though they saw each other yesterday.

“I peeked and checked when you got on the train,” Charles says. “I wanted to come and congratulate you in person.” He’s wearing a vivid blue scarf that makes his eyes look extra bright, and he’s smiling softly.

Erik doesn’t say anything—he just leans down and kisses him, slowly and deeply, and Charles reaches out and pulls him in with his telepathy in response.

When he straightens up, Charles is watching him with a sly smile. “Besides,” he says. “It’s Wednesday.”

“Yes…” Erik says slowly.

“I’m here to accompany you to debate practice,” Charles says. “I believe we’re matched up tonight, so I’m getting ready to blow you out of the rhetorical water.”

Erik laughs. “Is that so?”

Charles grins up at him. “Well, shall we?”

He nods, and the soft press of Charles’s affection sits on the surface of his mind as Erik follows him out of the station.