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1.
Cerebro may be the best kind of high for a telepath, but the come-down is rough. Erik learns this when he walks into the rec-room to find Charles face-down on the sofa, passed out in a dead man's float. There are papers on the coffee table and on the floor, some of them weighed down under one of Charles's hands which is trailing on the floor and which must be entirely numb by now. His mouth is slightly open, and there's a damp patch on the sofa cushion. Delightful.
"Charles," Erik says. He circles around the sofa and sits on the edge of the coffee table, pushing papers out of the way, and leans forwards until he'd be eye-level with Charles, if Charles's eyes weren't shut tight in a sleep so deep it looks almost effortful. "Charles."
"'M awake," Charles says, after a moment, in a voice that sounds like it comes from twenty leagues down. "Just resting my, um. Eyes."
"Go to bed, Charles," Erik says, fighting a losing battle to keep the amusement out of his voice.
"'M fine," Charles insists, struggling to sit up. The arm has indeed fallen asleep and flops around uselessly as he levers himself up with the other, and Charles stares at it with a sort of baffled incomprehension once he's wrestled himself upright. "Fell asleep," he says, thickly, though Erik's not sure whether he's referring to himself or to his arm.
"You look ridiculous," Erik tells him, because it's true. Charles only blinks at him, rumpled and sleep-worn, his cheeks flushed and his eyes bright. Right now he's a far cry from the well-pressed professor, his clothes helplessly creased and his hair a disaster.
Charles makes an incoherent noise in reply and leans forwards, resting the elbow of his good arm on one knee and propping his face up in that hand, like it's too heavy to hold up without support.
"Sifting through every mind in the United States will tend to take it out of one," Charles says, and offers Erik a sleepy smile before he breaks out into an enormous, jaw-cracking yawn.
"You should be more careful," Erik says. "McCoy has no idea what the side-effects might be."
"Why, Erik," Charles says, with another slow, somnolent grin. "I didn't know you cared."
2.
"Come get me in the morning when you're ready to leave," Charles tells him, waving a sleepy hand as he disappears into his room and Erik, by habit an early riser, takes him at his word. Charles had professed to know everything about Erik, but clearly this is a gap in his understanding, if the way Charles appears in the slight crack of the door after several minutes' knocking and two or three increasingly insistent calls is anything to go by.
He blinks effortfully at Erik; once, twice, huge and slow. "What on earth sort of time do you call this?"
"Morning," Erik says, plainly.
Charles makes a pained noise and lets the door fall open a little more so that Erik gets a better look at him: yesterday's clothes, shirt rumpled and askew over one collarbone, and the sweater he's clearly thrown on in an attempt to hide this fact buttoned up entirely wrong, with two buttons stranded without loops at the top and a huge gap over his midsection. His hair is a mess of curls, flatter on one side than the other where his face was mashed against the pillow. Charles reaches up to rub at his heavy-lidded eyes and at a patch of reddened pillow marks across one cheek.
Erik makes a deliberately amused show of looking Charles up and down. "Did you fall asleep in your clothes?"
"It was a long day," Charles returns, defensive, and Erik bites back on a grin.
"You're not at Oxford now," Erik says. "Sometimes in the real world people are out and about before noon."
"Are you always insufferable in the mornings, or is this a special case?" Charles asks. "No, wait, don't answer that. I'm afraid I'll find out soon enough. Go away and let me attain full consciousness in peace."
"Be at the car in fifteen minutes, or I'll leave you behind," Erik warns. Charles shuts the door in his face.
3.
Erik's never seen anyone like Charles for sleeping in cars. Give him more than an hour or two in the passenger seat and it all goes quiet, and when Erik steals glances over Charles's head will be nodding against his chest or resting against the window. He sleeps as easily as a child, in the unguarded way of someone who's never been alone and watchful; quick to sleep and slow to wake because he's never worried about knives in the night.
"Wake up," Erik says, a hand on Charles's shoulder to bring him round. "Come on, Charles. We've stopped."
"Mrmph," Charles says, or something like it. His eyes are still closed. "Where are we?"
"Where we're supposed to be," Erik says.
"Oh, don't be abstract when I'm half-asleep," Charles says, thickly, finally opening his eyes. He pushes himself up from his half-slump against the passenger-side door, stretching and straightening his spine in a transparent effort to fake being alert until he actually is. There's a round red mark on his temple from being pressed against the window glass, and it looks ridiculous. Erik smothers the equally ridiculous urge to reach over and smooth the redness away.
"Perhaps if you could stay awake for more than fifty miles at a stretch," Erik says, instead, but without heat.
"Mph," Charles says, eloquently. He opens his eyes as wide as he can as if that will convince them to stay open. It's a little more endearing than Erik really cares to admit.
4.
Somewhere in the Midwest, alcohol and a persistent sexual tension turn the possible into the inevitable, and they tumble into bed together. It might be more accurate, Erik thinks, to say that they drag each other into bed. It's all sloppy kisses, clumsy touches, clothes shoved just far enough out of the way to get at the requisite amount of skin, over too soon. Charles pants laughter hot against Erik's throat and thinks, next time, a thought the colour of a promise, and Erik brushes sweat-damp hair away from Charles's forehead and kisses him messily until they fall asleep together in a tangle of limbs and wrecked clothes.
They wake when Charles, unconsciously turning, rolls entirely out of bed. His startled yelp sets off Erik's hair-trigger nerves, and he bolts up reaching for a knife under the pillow that isn't there before he registers first the pounding of a hangover in his temples and, second, Charles's small embarrassed, "Oh, bugger."
Erik leans over the bed. Charles blinks up at him, dazed. He is an unholy mess, resembling nothing so much as a debauched pile of dirty laundry, dropped onto the floor from a height. He has only one arm in his shirt, which is missing more than half its buttons, and his undershirt is rucked up over his stomach. He's still wearing his stained slacks, but barely. His cheeks are flushed with embarrassment, too, which serves only to make him look more obscene.
Charles licks his lips, a movement which Erik follows with interest.
"Ah," Charles says, voice hoarse. "Yes. Well."
Erik would laugh if he thought it wouldn't make his head worse. Instead he only smiles and reaches out a hand. "Get back up here."
5.
Erik's life so far hasn't offered much scope for sexual encounters beyond the perfunctory and utilitarian. If he's ever had someone to wake up with, he doesn't remember it, and anyway, if he ever had, he can be certain it was nothing like the experience of waking up with Charles.
If Charles can speak at all when he wakes, his first words are generally, "Oh, God," delivered with much feeling into his pillow or Erik's shoulder, wherever he happens to have mashed his face against on any given morning.
And Erik, because Charles is ruining him by degrees, grins. "Time to wake up, Charles."
To which the reply is generally a second, even more heartfelt, "Oh, God."
Erik has never been a man given to indulgence, and he doesn't intend to indulge Charles's weaknesses just because he happens to be excellent in bed. In the mornings Charles is blurry and soft-focused, less careful about the boundaries between their minds. He huffs against Erik's shoulder, where this morning he happens to be hiding his face against the reality of being awake. "I heard that."
"Then listen to this," Erik says, and thinks several vivid things about the various possibilites of the morning shower. Charles lifts his head, stubble scratching against Erik's throat. Up close his eyes are enormous and vividly blue, if a little bleary and heavy-lidded this soon after waking. Erik's not a telepath, but he can just about see Charles weighing effort and reward in his mind. The effort of dragging himself out of bed versus the reward of the things Erik's thinking about. Erik smiles slowly, and cards fingers through Charles's unruly hair. Charles lets his eyes flutter shut again and presses up against Erik's fingers with easy, feline enjoyment.
"You were sent to try me," says Charles, sighing.
Erik snorts out a laugh and gives Charles's hair an affectionate tug. He can live with that.