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“Dr. Xavier?”
Charles pauses mid-stride and muffles a sigh into his cup of coffee. He’s at the tail-end of a sixteen-hour shift, and all he wants in the entire world is to crawl into an Uber, be chauffeured home, and collapse on the couch with a bottle of brandy whilst Project Runway plays in the background. He’s halfway through his binge of Season 13 and had been up half the night yesterday alternatively swooning and openly weeping over how sweet it was that one of the designers had proposed to his partner on-air after receiving news that gay marriage had been legalized.
If Brandon didn’t win the entire thing, Charles fully intended to… to… well, perhaps just to write a strongly-worded letter to the judges for ignoring his brilliance. But it would be very strongly worded, and would make some random assistant feel quite inferior for not having tried to persuade Heidi Klum to keep him.
But in the here-and-now, he was at work, was without his Runway and his brandy, and some parent had tracked him down. How the man had gotten past the nurses and waiting room was a complete aside from the point. So Charles pasted on a pleasant smile and turned, lowering his cup of stale hospital coffee. “Yes, how may I help y-ou?” He tries to ignore the fact that his voice warbled like that, vocal cords shaken in the face of the fact that he is staring at quite possibly the most beautiful man he’s ever seen in his entire life.
“My name is Erik Lensherr.” The man offers him a slow smile, sliding his hands into his pockets, and Charles tries not to focus on how oddly shark-like the expression is, or the fact that he rather enjoys it. Maybe Raven had a point about the therapy, he thinks, and tilts his head as he returns the smile readily. “I’m Lorna’s father. You performed her laparoscopy yesterday.”
Lorna. Charles recalls her immediately; a sweet child with large green eyes and hair that she had proudly announced that her father had let her dye green in preparation for her surgery. Charles had been charmed by the sweet attempt to bolster the kid’s spirits and had listened to her chatter about this for several minutes. The girl, if he remembered right, only had a father as her mother was out of the picture. She and her father were close, if her nervous babbling was anything to take seriously.
One couldn’t blame the child for being nervous before a surgery at only six years of age, though. She’d honestly been remarkably brave and had barely cried when the nurse had put in the IV.
“Lorna. Yes, of course.” He sets his coffee on the windowsill and turns to focus on Erik Lensherr, modern-Adonis quickly, dismissing both his exhaustion and his attraction to the man. “Is something wrong? You can expect her to be a bit fatigued after the operation, as well as somewhat sore, but if she seems like she’s in undue pain—”
“No, no,” Erik assures him with a smooth wave of a long-fingered hand. “She’s doing great. She woke me up at the crack of dawn this morning to watch cartoons and eat breakfast with her in bed.” Well, that’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life, Charles thinks rather grimly as he feels the father’s level of attractiveness rising. “No, I wanted to talk to you about her bear.”
Charles pauses, mentally calculates his chances of having overstepped his bounds.
Yes, he’d sewn the teddy bear back up. Lorna had enlisted his help seconds before falling unconscious, her tiny face so earnest and sad, and he hadn’t fully been able to resist that. Moira had laughed herself silly when she had found him post-op, leaning over a surgery tray and carefully stitching up the long tear in the bear’s back. You are the biggest softie I’ve ever seen in my life, she had informed him gleefully, snapping a picture. One of the legs had only been holding on by a string, so he’d reconnected that as well while he was at it. Lorna had been pleased when he checked in on her briefly after the surgery, but she’d also still been coming off anesthetics and had barely even registered that he was the one handing the bear back to her.
Was Mr. Lensherr annoyed that he had stitched up the bear? Or had he perhaps sewn it up wrong? Yes, he stitched up surgery wounds frequently, but maybe she had possessed unmentioned requirements for the toy-surgery. No matter how much he watched Project Runway, sewing flesh and sewing fabric were, in fact, a little different. Perhaps he’d messed up somehow.
“Mr. Bear,” Charles agrees somewhat cautiously as the name strikes him. “Yes, she said that he caught on a car and tore in the parking lot on her way in. She asked me to sew it up ‘like a person’ right before she went under.” He’s unable to keep the smile from creeping across his face at the memory. Alex, one of their nurses, had even popped in and brought him gauze with which to wrap the bear’s ‘injury,’ so that Lorna and her bear could match when they left the hospital.
“So she said.” Erik appraises him, grey-green eyes unreadable for a moment, then, “Dr. Xavier, would you like to have dinner?”
“Dinner?” Charles blinks at him quickly, hand loosening around the Styrofoam of his coffee cup, completely thrown and lost between who wouldn’t want to have dinner with you and since the surgery’s over, does that break any rules? Erik grins, his shark-smile spreading across his face again as he watches Charles process this request.
“Dinner,” he echoes, eyes sparkling. “At a restaurant. It seems like the least I can do to pay for Mr. Bear’s surgery fees. I just feel like insurance won’t be willing to cover that.”
Charles isn’t prepared for the laugh that startles out of him. He runs a hand through his hair, glancing around as he grins in response. “That sounds… acceptable,” he agrees. “I wouldn’t want you to have to deal with insurance bouncing your claim.”
“I knew you’d understand.” Erik grins and tucks what looks like a business card for a contracting company underneath Charles’ coffee cup. “I’ll see you on Friday, then,” he says, and turns on his heel, sauntering with far too much confidence down the hall.
Charles covers his mouth with a hand to hide his growing smile, glancing down at the name on the card as he picks up his cup. Erik Lensherr of Magneto Contracting…
So Project Runway wouldn’t be the highlight of his night, after all.