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Erik met Charles on a spring day.
A cool, blustery wind was sweeping the streets of Düsseldorf, thawing the iced snow off the branches of the trees and sweeping away the last remnants of winter. Erik – like every chaotic scrawny seven-year-old without gloves or scarf and shivering because of it – was alone. There was no school this afternoon, Ruth had gone to the marketplace with her friends and his parents were both still at work.
No one was there to play with him, so he ran over the abandoned sidewalk and chased the petals which the wind had ripped from the winter-flowering arrowwood bushes. There was a sweet, metallic thrum to the air, a scent he had never tasted before, and as he skipped and laughed, it was to him as though he was starting to see the world with different eyes.
Then, the tip of his boot caught on a crack in the pavement and he stumbled and fought for balance and tripped into someone else who gasped.
“Sorry.” Erik braced himself on a shoulder – the stranger was smaller than him and wearing a soft coat which smelled of camomile tea and the winter breeze and something else, something entirely inexplicable – and took a staggering step back. “So sorry, I didn’t see you.”
The stranger stared at him, silent. His eyes were very blue, and his skin very white, and he looked almost like Ruth’s old porcelain doll. And just like Erik, he was a boy.
“Don’t do that again,” the strange boy finally said, in German just like Erik, “You must not touch me.” He sounded old, and it reminded Erik of that other student two grades above him, the one who always got top marks and spoke like an antiquarian, only amplified a hundredfold.
Erik frowned. “Why?”
“Because.”
“You talk funny,” Erik said, ignoring the weird not-answer. “You say the words so strangely.”
“That’s because I’m not from here.” The boy’s lips quirked up into a smile. Erik was sure that if they had been allowed to touch, he would have been offered a hand to shake, as though they were boring elderly businessmen. “I’m Charles.”
“Erik. I mean, my name is Erik,” stuttered Erik, dazzled by the friendliness which shone from the boy’s – Charles’ – blue eyes.
Almost as though he could read his mind, Charles giggled. “It’s nice to meet you, Erik.”
Erik nodded. Then, he blushed, and he didn’t want that, so he nodded harder and asked, “Do you want to play with me?”
The smile slipped from Charles’ lips and curled up on the dirty sidewalk, trembling. “Mother says no.”
Frowning again. Erik had a feeling that if he and Charles became friends, he would frown a lot. “But you haven’t even asked her yet.”
For a few heartbeats, Charles said nothing, and Erik was scared that his new friend would turn around any moment and walk away without another word.
“I don’t have a mother,” Charles finally whispered, almost inaudible over the howling of the wind. “I’m not like you, Erik. Where I come from, we don’t have mothers, or fathers, or families.”
And for the first time in his life, Erik felt his heart crack and break in two.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and his hands itched to grab and hug Charles, but Mama said to always respect someone’s wishes, so he just stood still and blinked the tears away. “You’re so nice! You deserve a family. I’m sure if you came home with me, you could stay and live with us.”
“That’s a very sweet thing to say. But I’m not here for a family.” Charles’ smile had picked itself up, as radiant as ever, and as he stood there with his small hands in the large pockets of his coat, with the spring wind tousling his hair and reddening the tip of his nose, the sun poured from a crack in the clouds and bathed the two of them in honey-golden warmth. “All I’m here for is you.”
Erik had barely grown into a young, impressionable man when the humans found him and took him away.
“Please,” he sobbed as they strapped him onto a blank plastic table in a blank plastic room with their blank plastic faces watching him, “please let me go, I’ve done nothing to you!”
They took scalpels and syringes to his flesh, carved their initials into his bones like secret messages for future generations to decipher, and all the while he cried and raged and screamed, “I’ll make you regret this! I’ll tear the skin of your skull and your eyes from your socket to make you wish you were never born! I’ll make you beg!”
And only when they said nothing, just kept on prodding at him until he fainted or did as he was told – only then, Erik fell silent.
His parents would not miss him. He had seen the blood splatters on the living room’s hardwood floor. Ruth would not miss him. He had heard the screams, had listened to them until they stopped.
Now, there was only Charles.
The boy Erik had met what seemed like a lifetime of pain ago had grown with him and become a man of charismatic beauty. Everywhere Erik went, he went. Other people could not see him, and when he talked – to Erik or to himself – his voice slipped away into the ether, unheard by anyone but the German kid he had chosen as his ward.
That accidental touch of clothed shoulders on that sidewalk in Düsseldorf had been their first and their last.
One night, when the gloom of the LED lights overhead seemed particularly low and the movements of the doctors around him particularly sluggish, Erik turned his head and said to the nightguard wearing Charles’ face, “Why do you keep letting them do this to me?”
Charles looked down at him with worlds of sadness behind his clear-blue eyes. “You know I can’t help you, even by taking you now. It would be to divert the flow of a river which is supposed to bring water to thirsty lands.”
“So you keep telling me. Your time hasn’t yet come, Erik. Calm your mind, Erik.” The glare of the lights brightened, and Erik winced before he turned his beaten-black-and-blue gaze back onto his companion by his side. The plastic restraint around his neck chafed burningly as he did so. “But look at what they’ve done. Not just to me, but to all the others in this cellar. I can feel the blood in their bodies cooling as we speak.”
Nothing came from Charles’ lips. Not a word fell, not a sigh.
Instead, the strange man turned and started towards the door.
“You know I can’t stand people who stand idly by, Charles!” Erik called, even though he felt like wailing, like curling up and crying as the only friend he had ever thought true walked away from him without a second glance.
He almost sobbed in relief when Charles stopped after all, turned his head – but it was not Charles, not anymore. Charles had disappeared.
“There’s no mercy for you here, mutie scum,” the nightguard hissed, hatred dripping sluggishly from her every word. “Now shut your goddamn mouth before I do it for you.”
Erik shut his mouth.
Embedded in the guard’s left shoe sole, there was an iron nail he had never noticed before.
In the twenty years it took Erik to forgive, Charles never hesitated to visit.
“Your children,” he said and smiled at Erik over the length of the park bench between them, “they’re beautiful.”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Erik and went back to giving Lorna her bottle of formula.
In the distance, mellowed by the shimmering air, he could see Wanda chasing Pietro, an angrily shouting Magda hot on their heels. Anya-Nina was sat beneath the yew tree by the pond, talking to the resident adder, and a squadron of wasps had encircled their picnic basket. It was a normal summer’s day in the Grygiel-Lehnsherr household.
“Thanks, I’d rather not,” Charles grumbled and returned to flipping through his weathered copy of The Once and Future King.
“You want to keep them safe so desperately. No matter what it takes.” Charles got up from the armchair in the corner and slunk over to the windowsill to watch the seven candles on the Menorah burn. The soft juts of his face stood out warm and honeyed against the dark of the winter night. “I think that’s what I like about you.”
“Oh, screw you,” Erik grumbled half-heartedly, glad that he and Charles were the last ones awake. On his lap and between the couch cushions, a dozen Gifted students dozed and snored. Some still had sufganiyot filling smudged around their mouths, and he itched to moisten the pad of his thumb and rub the marmalade from their cheeks.
Charles gasped in feigned outrage. “Erik!” His eyes sparked like sapphires when he turned back around. “No cursing in front of the children!”
Erik sent him the flattest look he could muster. “I’ve run this school for a decade now. I think I’ll manage another year or two without accidentally teaching my students swear words.”
Plopping himself down on the couch’s arms just a few inches from Erik’s bared forearm, Charles hummed noncommittally and plucked an imaginary mote of dust from his terrible Hanukkah sweater. The grey streak in his thinning hair shimmered in the candlelight.
Erik frowned. “You’re not going to take me before that, are you?”
“Dear me, no.” Charles snorted as though the idea had never occurred to him. “I won’t get to ferry you over for quite some time still. In fact, you still have a great chunk of life ahead.”
An involuntary shiver ran down Erik’s spine. Still so much work to do, so much time to spend. Chasing after happiness and ruin.
“Oh, darling,” Charles murmured, and just for the blink of an eye, Erik thought he would give in to the impulse and take Erik’s hands in his, “don’t go breaking your head about this. Look around you and tell me what you see.”
“My students.” Erik swallowed once, dryly. “Gifted children who are too good for this world and need my protection. Family.”
“Erik Lehnsherr…” Charles smiled, and Erik knew he had said the right thing. “You are meant for grand things.”
Ororo smiled at the assembled crowd, the perseverant black of her clear-cut suit stark against the red, white and blue of the US flag, and Erik just couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.
“Look at you, dear,” Charles murmured by his side and gripped the elbow of Erik's woollen coat tighter, careful not to touch any part of Erik’s skin before he offered a Kleenex, “and look at her. Erik, you made it.”
“We did.” With a silent nod of gratitude, Erik took the handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes, well-knowing that it would do nothing at all to alleviate his choked-up state. “We made it.”
“First black female mutant President of the United States. Incredible.” Charles shook his head, the lines framing his eyes deepening, his quiet chuckle of disbelief dissolving in the air like think gauze.
They had waited a long time for this. Where Erik’s hair had gone ash-white, Charles’ had thinned considerably, and moss had grown on Magda’s gravestone years before mutant persecution had begun to cease. Erik’s children had grown up while new students had joined his School, their numbers growing every year. And now, all of Erik’s hard work and fervour had come to fruition.
He leaned in close – so close that his breath gusted over the shell of Charles’ ear, so close that his lips almost touched the soft, pale flesh.
“Is this it?” he muttered, low and intimate. His words were all but drowned out by Ororo’s contralto as she segued into her inauguration speech.
“What do you- oh.” Charles turned his head and froze in place when he saw how they were almost brushing noses, their intermingling breaths warm in the spring breeze. “No, not yet. Just because you’re growing old doesn’t mean your life is over. You see, others like me like to call this last stretch of life the ‘twilight years’ or the ‘dusk days’…”
Erik’s breath stuttered in his throat. “And you?”
Charles’ smile was a promise – a promise of many more winter evenings to come, of aching joints and the splatter of summer rain against windowpanes.
“I prefer… ‘the truly happy times’.”
On a lovely morning in autumn, the door to Erik’s room opens not to reveal another doctor or one of his children, but Charles.
Lately, Erik has seen less and less of his old friend. Charles is away for hours on end, and when he returns, there is a certain air about him – a glow of youth discarded and retrieved. Every now and then, Erik wonders if he has already taken up his ward duties towards another human being.
On other days, he’d rather not think about that.
“Hello, old friend.” Charles smile is radiant when he approaches, the light of the sunrise caught in the lines on his face. Just like Erik, he has aged. Only his eyes are as clear and blue as ever.
“Charles.” When Erik draws himself into an upright position against the pillows heaped behind his back, he has to stifle a moan of overexertion. This eerie kind of exhaustion has been going on for days now, worse than all the other times before, and none of the doctors his children have sought out have been of any particular help. Still, Erik smiles back, even as he hates how weak and far away his own voice sounds. “It’s nice to see you.”
Charles sits – not on the chair by Erik’s bedside, but directly on the mattress. It barely dips under the weight of the man only Erik can see. “Likewise. I see Jean’s students brought you gifts.”
Erik glances over at the crimson leaves and chestnut animals on the nightstand. “They did. Jean sends them out as often as possible now that the weather’s still sunny and dry. But you haven’t come to fawn over the continued existence of the School, have you?”
For a heartbeat, Charles says nothing. A bitter note has bled into his smile.
“I’m afraid not,” he finally murmurs, eyes lowered, lined fingers fiddling with a corner of Erik’s bed covers. “Erik…”
“Don’t apologise.” Gently, Erik pulls the covers from Charles’ grip, even though he feels he lacks the energy for even the simplest tasks. “It’s what you’re here for.”
Charles looks up, all honesty and melancholy, and Erik wonders if other people’s Deaths could possibly ever be as stunning as Charles. Come to think of it, probably not. People don’t ever talk to each other about their Deaths – maybe it’s because they’re ashamed that theirs will never be as beautiful as Charles is.
“It is what I’m here for, and I’ve had a lifetime to prepare,” Charles agrees, voice soft like autumn drizzle, “but that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“But I’m ready.”
A quizzical look out of those sky eyes. “Are you really?”
Erik halts. “… No,” he chuckles. “No, I’m petrified. You never told me what comes after, so I guess I’m flying blind. And it can’t be avoided after all – or can it?”
“Hardly.” Then, Charles straightens up and draws in one long, deep breath, like he wants to steel himself. Like this is something official where every word counts, no wrong step is allowed, a ceremony which will define what comes next.
“Erik Lehnsherr,” he says, suddenly all seriousness and young, youthful eyes, “your time has come. Know that if you take my hands–”
Shaking with exhaustion, Erik reaches out and takes Charles’ hands in his.
His Death stares at him, gaping. “You didn’t let me finish.”
“Should I have?” Erik asks and smiles in that certain way which he knows makes Charles give in to him – the mischievous, slightly lopsided kind of way.
“Probably. I don’t know.” Charles’ hands are warm and a little sweaty in his, a stark contrast against Erik’s own paper-dry skin. And Charles holds his gaze. “No one has ever been so eager to hold my hands. No one before you.”
Erik snorts as best as he can with the little breath his lungs can draw. “How charming – to let me know that there were others.”
And if that isn’t a shy blush joining the smile on Charles’ waning face. “You’re a ridiculous man.”
Erik wants to answer. He wants to throw the jest back at Charles, wants to see him blush even more, wants to– wants to–
Charles’ hands are warm in his. There’s a certain pull to them, too, as though the molecules of Erik’s skin are being taken apart at the seams, split down into atoms, then into electrons and protons and neutrons, and finally into even smaller particles, undiscovered as of yet but clearly distinguishable if only scientists had the key of Death at their hands to decipher them.
Charles’ lips are moving. Erik feels his body grow distant. It’s like someone is dimming the light.
The autumn sky outside is blue and wide and far.
Charles’ hands are warm. They are warm and dry and safe and secure and loving. They hold Erik’s, and Erik’s hold them.
Blue. Sky-blue, calm and wide.
Charles’ hands.