Work Text:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self-place; but where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.
— Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
What a fucking ignoramus.
— Raven Darkhölme on Kit Marlowe
Erik Lehnsherr did not, Charles was sure, hate people, not really. He possibly resented them, but that was only because they had disappointed him.1 Charles understood that disappointment: when you had lived as long as they had2, it inevitably came to pass that you wound up seeing things you wished you hadn’t. Charles himself saw humans behave sickeningly to each other, nearly every week that passed. He also, of course, saw wonderful things: he saw generosity, and kindness, and the kind of love that should not have come easily, the kind of fierce and irrational that shaped you into the person you would be for the rest of your life. Erik, of course, was less prone to acknowledge the miraculous nature of these particular human emotions, but then he seemed to believe he had been condemned to an eternity of torture of the soul no matter what he did or where he went, where Charles was generally left to his own devices by the powers Up There, so he generally tried to be lenient when it came to Erik’s bleak views on humanity. Erik did not hate humans. He did not really hate anybody.3 He wanted people to be better than they were because he knew that they could be.
This, at least, was what Charles – once, a long time ago, known only as Xavier4 – was trying to tell himself as he watched his friend, dressed in his customary black, grin in a way that could only be described as “maniacal” at the hoards of Christmas shoppers trampling each other in order to get into the WalMart first, in order to procure the best possible deals on electronic devices that Charles did not pretend, or want, to understand. Two middle-aged women were actually physically fighting over a television directly in front of them. Slaps had been exchanged. Hair had been pulled. It was all in very poor taste, Charles thought, and stepped a little closer to Erik when one of the women’s arms swung worryingly close to his face. The humans weren’t going to notice them, and they were supposed to give them a fair breadth, but it never hurt to be too careful, in Charles’ experience.5
“I don’t understand,” he said to Erik. “It’s just a television. Don’t you think they already have sets at home?”
“This is an updated model,” Erik told him, still sounding far too delighted by the chaos playing out in front of them.
Charles looked skeptically at the picture of the television on the box, which was currently being dragged in opposite directions by the two women. “Is it any different from the earlier one?”
“The model number,” Erik replied, grimly gleeful.
“I don’t know why I ever agree to go places with you,” Charles told him as a third woman, coming out of nowhere, launched herself onto the television and toppled it with a mighty crash that he suspected meant that it was not going to be of much use to anybody.
“You go places with Erik because you want to have his little demon babies,” Raven told him matter-of-factly the following weekend over brunch. Charles choked on his French toast, and his sister6 watched him unsympathetically until he had gotten a hold of himself.
“Excuse me,” Charles replied faintly. Raven raised an eyebrow.
“You want to have lots of depraved demon sex with him, and his symbolic demon offspring,” she rephrased, which Charles did not consider much of an improvement.
“I – Raven,” he sputtered. “You know that we don’t – that we don’t – you know – ”
“Charles,” Raven said, in a tone that one might use to explain something very simple to a small child. “You cannot possibly think that I still believe that. It’s been almost two thousand years.”7
“You’ve known all this time?” Charles asked, mortified.8
“Charles,” she said somewhat incredulously, “what do you think Azazel and I spend all our time doing?”
“Please,” he told her, “don’t ever mention that to me again. I think I might be ill.”
“You can’t be, you’re stomach’s made of, like, titanium ore or some shit,” she said. “You only ever pretend to be sick to get out of awkward situations.”
“I most certainly do not,” Charles protested, outraged.9
“You’re getting us off the subject at hand,” Raven chided him. “We’re supposed to be talking about how you want to get into those creepy snakeskin pants of Mr. Lehnsherr’s, which for some reason I can’t fathom you find attractive – please don’t try to protest; I’ve seen the way you look at his ass, Charles, it’s not subtle – and have for the last six thousand years. That is way too long to have a hard-on for somebody, dude. It’s just wrong. And the two of you have become positively insufferable in the last fifty years or so, and I can’t take it anymore. So just get over yourselves, for fuck’s sake.”
“Raven,” Charles began. He was going, he resolved, to be as reasonable as he possibly could. “I do not want to – to get in Erik’s pants, as you so indelicately put it.”
“I think your sensitivities got stuck in the early nineteenth century and stayed there,” she muttered churlishly, which he generously chose to ignore.
“Erik and I are friends,” he continued, speaking slowly and enunciating for effect. “We have been friends for quite some time and we remain friends, despite our considerable and significant differences.”
“Seriously, if you start talking about inter-species dialogue right now, I will set your bookshop on fire,” Raven told him.
“You wouldn’t,” he gasped.10
“What’s so sickening about that scenario is that Erik would probably sense your psychic pain somehow and come running,” she mused.
“You are being absurd.”
“I am the only one in this scenario that is being remotely reasonable,” she said. “Trust me.”11
“We are not talking about this any longer,” he told her. “This discussion is closed. Permanently. Never to be reopened. It didn’t even happened.”
“I give up,” Raven said. “This is what happens when demons try to do nice things for people. People are stupid about it.”
“I am not stupid,” Charles told her huffily.
“You are simultaneously the smartest and the most unbelievably stupid person I have ever met,” Raven told him. “Please take that as the insult I intended it to be.”
“You’re a terrible sister,” he told her, before carefully spooning his strawberries onto her plate.
*
Charles Xavier owned and was the sole operator of a dusty, well-loved bookshop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Being a shopkeeper was in some ways an occupation ideally suited to Charles: he liked people so very much, and he also loved books, and was very happy to connect the two.12
There was, Erik had to admit, something patently fitting about the thought of an angel running a used bookstore, especially when that angel was Charles, who managed to be both immensely better than any of his fellows Erik had had the displeasure of meeting over the millennia, and also much more poorly behaved. He flouted the rules from Up There flagrantly on a daily basis, in all of the small ways that, as far as Erik was concerned, mattered not at all.13 But somehow he was good, too, good in a way that made Erik’s skin crawl, sometimes, because Charles was the type of person – the type of angel, he reminded himself ruefully – who could look at the world and understand it completely, or at least understand how he, Charles, thought and felt about it. There was something clear in Charles, behind all of the very human fuss and bother about books and cookies and tea, that Erik knew was, well, angelic. Nothing about the world was clear to Erik, when he looked at it, and nothing was simple. He lived his life in the darkness even when the sun was shining: and that was what hell was, of course. It was uncertainty.14
This kind of philosophical debate went out the window very quickly, however, when it was interrupted by the sight of Charles losing an argument with a customer over the sale of a book. Erik raised his eyebrows over his sunglasses as he pushed the glass door open, bell tinkling cheerfully above him. Charles looked over at him and made a truly pathetic face that Erik suspected was supposed to make him feel sympathetic to whatever Charles’ plight was, although it had somewhat the opposite of the intended effect. He smirked, and ambled over to one of the shelves, eavesdropping shamelessly.
“I’ll offer you $260 for it, and not a penny more,” the woman was telling Charles – Erik hadn’t seen her from the front, but she was young, and skinny in a way that he would have called brittle if she hadn’t spoken with such authority.
“I,” Charles said, floundering, “I – well, it’s –”
“It’s listed at $200,” she interrupted smoothly, “but as I’m sure you’ll agree, in light of this discussion, it’s worth somewhat more than that, which is what I’m willing to pay for it. If you wouldn’t mind,” she added, and Erik sneaked a glance at her over his shoulder, in time to see her gesturing with one delicate hand toward the register.
Charles rang up the book.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Xavier,” the woman said, and Erik could practically hear her beaming. “I’ll just take one or two of your cards, if you don’t mind; I have some friends in the department who will be interested in your store, I’m sure. Have a lovely day, won’t you?”
“Cheers,” Charles said faintly as she left. Erik turned around, leaned against the shelf he had been pretending to peruse, and looked at him over the frame of his glasses.
“She’s just walked off with my old copy of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,” Charles said, still sounding mystified.15 Erik winced at his pronunciation.16
“This tends to happen when one runs a bookstore, you know,” he told him. “People come in, and then buy things.”
“Well, theoretically, yes,” Charles said, still gaping at the door. Erik rolled his eyes.
“Anyway,” he continued, shaking his head and turning toward Erik before gracing him with a blinding smile. “Raven was here yesterday, she helped me fix up that busted leg on your chair.”
“Erm,” Erik said, eloquently.
“See?” Charles said, bounding out from behind the counter and walking over to the chair in the back corner of the room, which was indeed where Erik had spent a considerable amount of time in the past several decades, and in the past few years in particular, if he were being honest with himself.17 It was an imposing sort of chair, with a high back and black leather upholstery attached with gunmental-colored studs, and it suited him perfectly, which after all was why Charles had bought it in the first place, many years ago. It did not fit in with the aesthetic of the rest of the bookshop even remotely, which probably had something to do with the fact that while it was eminently appropriate for an angel to be in a bookstore, it was somewhat less appropriate for a demon, or at least in a bookstore like this. Charles’ chair sitting opposite, which was lumpy and worn-down and looked like it belonged in an old lady’s parlor, was entirely more appropriate.
“She’s brilliant at those sorts of things, is Raven,” Charles was saying fondly, admiring the shining new leg that had replaced the old fractured one. “Well, she let me try it first, until I hammered my thumb and moaned about it, and then she took over and did it perfectly, of course.” He held out his thumb for Erik’s inspection – it was indeed bruised quite impressively – and Erik felt his stomach lurch in a horrifyingly maudlin way: Charles should not have injured himself fixing Erik’s chair; he should not have hurt himself on Erik’s behalf at all, let alone for something as stupid as that chair.18
Charles was still holding his hand out, smiling up at Erik, apparently delighted to have so injured himself. His lips were very red, and his eyes were very, very blue.19
Erik hated Christmas, and particularly Christmas in Manhattan, which reached a pitch of fervid commercial intensity unparalleled, in his experience, anywhere in Europe. His reaction to the season changed from day: occasionally he took a vicious pleasure in watching the combative spectacle – he could always look forward, for instance, to Black Friday – and on other days he simply wanted to raze the city, if only for an hour of peace uncorrupted by the clambering, pervasive roar of millions of petty human conflicts. Utter silence for an hour – that is what Erik would ask for, if he could have one impossible thing.
Of course, Charles would very much frown on the destruction of New York for Erik’s personal satisfaction, and at some point Erik had apparently started caring more about what Charles thought of him than what he thought of himself, which was an unpleasant thought to be having. When the young woman from Greenpeace who was standing on the sidewalk holding a clipboard tried to get his attention he actually growled at her, which he probably should have felt guilty about but did not.
Fifth Avenue was decked out at always and he wished, not for the first time, that he could, like Azazel and those of his rank, simply go where he wished without the bother of actually walking or driving – he had had a car in England, but even for a demon parking in Manhattan was a nightmare – but he was a lowly sort of demon, about which he couldn’t really complain, because it kept him largely under the radar of the higher-ups. Still, teleportation (to use a quaint human term) would have been nice.
If he had been able to teleport, he would never have seen the girl with the red hair standing, alone, in the middle of the plaza overlooking the Rockefeller Center skating rink.20 She was staring up at the tree, evidently mesmerized, and Erik couldn’t remember why he had looked away from the skaters in the first place, or why he had looked there, exactly. He did not know how long he stared before he realized that she was only wearing a nightdress, and that her feet were bare on the salted pavement.
He had no paternal instinct – not like Charles, Charles who wanted to keep everybody he loved safe, Charles who loved everybody – but nevertheless he found himself walking urgently across the plaza, pushing angrily through the tourists who had amassed around the tree to the strangely uncrowded space where the girl was standing. She turned to look up at him when he was a foot or two away, and smiled at him in a way that reminded him of the way Charles smiled, bright and unfurling and painful to look at for more than a moment at a time.
*
“Hello – Erik? – oh, my,” was what Charles said when he opened his apartment door to find a very grim-looking Erik Lehnsherr on his stoop, holding a four- or five-year old girl, who was dressed only in a nightgown, awkwardly on his hip. He looked as though he thought she might break if he did something wrong. The expression of relief on his face when Charles reached out for her would have been profoundly amusing if Charles hadn’t been so preoccupied with the little girl, who was – not even wearing shoes, good heavens, what had Erik been thinking?
“What on earth, oh, she must be freezing – you must be freezing,” he cooed at her as he took her, and then stopped, frowning. She was quite warm, and smiled contentedly up at him when he settled her against his own hip. She radiated warmth, in fact, and he found himself staring down at her where she was pressed against his raggedy old jumper for entirely too long, transfixed, before he managed to snap himself out of it and look up at Erik.
“We need to call Raven,” Charles said before turning to look back at the girl. “We’re going to call Raven for you!” he cooed, bumping her up and down gently. “Won’t that be fun? Won’t that be the best?” The girl giggled and Charles felt himself smiling at her like a fool. “You’ll like Raven,” he told her conspiratorially. “She’s blue. Mhmm,” he added when her eyes widened, raising his eyebrows. “Blue all over. Her hair looks like yours, though, so pretty and red. How would you like to meet her?”
The little girl nodded, and he glanced up at Erik, who looked severely constipated.21 “Go call her,” he whispered. “Tell her it’s urgent.”
Raven arrived a half-hour later, at which point he was engaged in a fierce game of Concentration with the girl. They were using a pack of battered old playing cards, and Charles was somewhat concerned by how badly he was losing, which had never happened to him before. He waved at Erik to let her in when she knocked, and the two of them stood, whispering, in the doorway for a minute while the girl continued to rout him.22
“You’re entirely too clever you know,” he told her, smiling. “You should go on the circuit. Play professionally.”
She giggled, shy, and he reached out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
“Come on,” Raven said as she walked over. “Up you get, let the girls talk alone. Go keep Daddy company over there,” she added – meanly, he thought – jerking her head back at Erik.
“Hush, you,” he told her, trying to ignore the fact that he was turning distinctly pink in the cheeks, and pushed himself up off of the ground. The girl was staring at Raven – beautiful, blue Raven; Raven with the golden eyes – with an expression that Charles could only describe as awe, and he decided to leave them to it.
Erik still looked constipated. “Are you feeling quite all right, my friend?” Charles asked, frowning. “You’re not looking very well, I’m afraid to say.”
“I’m fine,” Erik replied, although he certainly didn’t sound fine – he sounded, in fact, as though he were being strangled. And he was quite flushed, on top of that. Possibly he was feverish. Charles stepped closer.
“Are you sure?” he asked, raising his hand to feel at Erik’s forehead, which only made him redder. “You feel quite warm. Perhaps you’re coming down with something.”
“Charles,” Erik managed. “I’m a demon. I’m always warm.”
“Even so,” Charles chided. “I’ll make you some tea,” he told him, smiling brightly, and bustled off to the kitchen to do so. There was nothing, after all, that a good pot of tea couldn’t fix.
And, he thought, a good scone: he didn’t often make use of the powers afforded to him by being an angel23, but he never could help himself from keeping his scones fresh and warm indefinitely. He considered letting a good scone go to waste a cardinal sin.
He returned to the sitting room a few minutes later24, tea and scone in hand, and forced Erik down into one of the chairs with the plate, although he did restrain himself from actually standing over him to make sure he drank and ate it all – he did, after all, have some self-respect remaining.25
“Where do you think she’s come from?” he whispered to Erik. It looked as though she was actually talking to Raven, although Charles wasn’t sure.
Erik grunted noncommittally in response, but Charles was not phased. If he had been put off by noncommittal grunting in lieu of conversation, he and Erik would have parted ways long before.
“We’ll have to get her back to her parents,” he mused.
“That’s if she has parents,” Erik muttered, and when Charles looked back at him something strange happened in his chest.
“Yes,” he agreed quietly. “That’s if she has parents.” He paused. “If she hasn’t, we’ll have to take care of her.”
Erik stared at him. Charles frowned.
“What?” he asked. “She wouldn’t have anywhere to go. And she’s quite clever, I can assure you.”
But Erik was shaking his head. “It’s just –” he began.
“What?” Charles prompted him after a moment of silence.
“Everything is very simple for you,” Erik said, almost – mournfully? Charles blinked at him, bewildered. Simple – the last word Charles would use to describe his life was – simple –
“Okay,” Raven said, and Charles started. “I have a theory.”
“Yes?” Charles said.
She sighed. “I think she’s the antichrist,” she told them, and Erik choked audibly on a piece of his scone.
Several moments later, when Erik had managed to swallow properly26, Raven continued.
“I mean, it makes sense,” she said.
“How does somebody being the antichrist ever make sense?” Charles asked, not at all shrilly.27
Raven ticked off reasons on her fingers as she went. “It’s 2012 next year, which everybody knows is supposed to be the end of the world. There’s certainly something weird about her, or else the two of you wouldn’t look so cross-eyed (well, more than you do normally), she doesn’t have any trouble with the cold, and she’s telekinetic.”
They both stared.
“That’s certainly compelling evidence for her being a demon of some kind,” Charles said a little faintly. “I’m not entirely sure where you get antichrist, though.”
Raven shifted a little, uncomfortable. Charles tried to remember the last time he had seen her look uncomfortable, and couldn’t.28
“Well,” she said. “I may have heard something from Azazel. About. Ah. You know.”
“Don’t say any more,” Charles said hurriedly. “Please, please don’t say anything else about Azazel. Ever.”
Erik blinked up at him. “Why –”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he interrupted, trying not to seem too churlish.
“Anyway,” Raven continued. “They may have… misplaced… her.”
Charles and Erik stared.
“You have got to be kidding,” Erik said.
“Nope.”
“Well, I’m not letting them take her,” Charles said. “Hell is no place for a girl to grow up – no offense, of course,” he added, being in the company of two demons.
“None taken,” Erik growled.
“And anyway,” Charles continued, thinking rapidly as he spoke, “if we let her back… that would mean… the end of the world.”
“I can think of worse things,” Erik muttered, and Charles frowned down at him.
“Oh, stop being so morose,” he chided. “If the world ended you wouldn’t ever get to drink another glass of scotch, and I’d have to spend the rest of eternity with Emma and her cohort, and they’re all dreadfully dull. And don’t pretend Lucifer’s a fun party guest, either; I know as well as you do – well, you know better, actually – that all he does is sit around and mope and rage self-righteously about eternal damnation, which isn’t exactly a lark.
“Besides,” he added, looking over at the girl, who was sorting the cards into stacks, “then she’d never grow up, and she seems marvelous.”
Erik’s shoulder sunk a little below his hand, and he squeezed reflexively.
“We’ll figure something out,” he said, determined. “We will. Right?” he added a moment later, looking first at Raven, who nodded, and then down to Erik, who wouldn’t meet his eye.
“Right?” he repeated, and rubbed his knuckles down his spine.
“Right,” Erik croaked.
Right, a whisper of thought trailed across his mind. His head snapped up, and there was the girl, smiling her child’s smile at him.
“Well that’s a handy parlor trick,” he said, impressed in spite of himself.
*
“Okay, seriously,” Raven told Erik as they left the apartment to find Azazel. “This has become an untenable situation. I can’t handle the eyefucking, okay? I just can’t. You need to just get over yourself and jump him, because trust me, he won’t ever make the first move.”
“I’m not talking about this with you,” Erik grit out, pushing through the throngs of people inconveniently clustered on the sidewalk.
“No, I mean it,” Raven continued, as though she had not heard him. “He actually spent, like, five-hundred years thinking he had successfully convinced me that we physically can’t have sex, which is basically the most preposterous thing I have ever heard.”
“I – really?” Erik asked, in spite of himself.
“Oh, yeah,” she said with relish. “Anyway, I remember what he was like back when he used to try to flirt with people, before he decided he wanted to fuck you silly five ways from Wednesday. It was dire. No wonder he never got any.”
“I don’t think I want to think about that,” Erik said.
“Yeah, well, I had to live it. I mean, flirting in the sixteenth century was pretty fucking dreadful in the first place, but especially so if you were Charles. I know, I know,” she said in response to Erik’s sharp look, “you were around in the sixteenth century. He just didn’t flirt with anybody else in front of you. Because, yes, you two have had giant boners for each other for like six hundred years, and that's not even counting the five thousand years of foreplay, which I don't want to think about. Basically, it needs to stop.”
They had reached Central Park by this point, and Raven led the way – as usual – to a high point along the Ramble. It was quiet in the darkness, the two of them only illuminated, faintly, by faraway streetlights.
“Is this where you meet him?” Erik asked, looking around. It didn’t look much like Azazel – or like Raven, for that matter, even in her blond human form.
“This is the emergency spot,” Raven said without further explanation, and tilted her head back, letting the cold breeze card through her hair. Erik closed his eyes and savored the frigid air for a moment: he was always so warm.
“What are you going to tell him?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“I’m going to tell him we’ve found the antichrist,” she said placidly, “and then I’m going to tell him that if he thinks even for a second about telling anybody Down There that I’m never going to touch him again except to rip his balls off with my own bare hands.” She paused. “Then we’ll discuss strategies for moving forward.”
Erik cracked open his eyes and looked at her.
“You are, without a doubt, the most terrifying creature I have ever met,” he said. “And I’ve met Satan.”
“Damn straight I am,” she said with a faint curl of a smile. “Remember that when you consider doing anything to hurt Charles in the future.”
“Noted,” he told her, and started when Azazel appeared with no warning directly in front of him.
When they returned to Charles’ apartment, it was to discover the antichrist dressed up in fuzzy reindeer antlers, helping an angel make Christmas cookies. The soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas was playing on the stereo, and there was a fire crackling in the hearth. Erik tried to remember whether there had been quite so many garlands hanging two hours previous, and then decided he didn’t actually want to know.29
Charles looked up from behind the counter, beaming at the three of them. He was wearing a Santa hat. Erik supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.
“Erik, Raven – ah, Azazel,” he said, turning pink. “Lovely to see you again. Jean, do you want to offer them some of our cookies?”
The girl jumped down from her chair – a little too gracefully, Erik thought, for a regular five-year-old girl – and practically skipped over to them, plate of sugar cookies floating steadily in front of her. She smiled up at them, and Erik noticed that her teeth were a little crooked. He was not charmed, he told himself sternly. He did not even like children.30
“Erik?” Charles prompted. “Go on, take one, we’ve been slaving away, haven’t we, Jean?”
“Is that her name?” Raven asked as Erik reached out tentatively for a cookie. It was shaped like a reindeer, and after inspecting it for a moment he bit off its head. The girl – Jean? – giggled appreciatively, and he raised an eyebrow down at her.
“Yes,” Charles said. “That’s what she says, anyway.”
“I don’t think I have to tell you how perverse it is of you to be sitting here playing Christmas with the antichrist,” Azazel said, but he sounded more amused than offended.
“Oh, Christmas hasn’t been about God for decades,” Charles said cheerfully, putting one finger to his mouth to lick off a bit of batter. Erik did not stare.31 “It’s gone commercial. Which is somewhat dreadful occasionally – as you know, Erik – but it also allows for lots of seasonal baked goods, which as far as I’m concerned should never be cause for complaint.”
“These are quite good,” Azazel admitted around a bit of cookie. Charles beamed.
“Maybe you should just march Down There with a plateful of baked goods,” Raven suggested. “Charles Xavier, singlehandedly preserving the universe with cookies.”
“Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” he retorted, and adjusted the angle of his hat so that it sat a little more jauntily on his head. Jean giggled. Erik was doomed.
“So,” he continued once he had put the next batch of cookies in the oven, “what’s the plan?” He glanced over at Jean, who was flipping slowly through an old illustrated book in front of the fire, and who was probably still listening but was doing a good job of pretending otherwise. “What have you found out?”
“Down There’s got everybody up Here looking for her,” Azazel said bluntly, although he somewhat undermined his tough tone by reaching out for another cookie and chewing on it thoughtfully before he spoke again. “Without some kind of divine protection, I’d say you’re looking at a week, maybe two, before somebody tracks her down.” He paused. “Somebody who isn’t one of the three demons sitting in this room.”
“Well, none of you are very good demons,” Charles said baldly, but his mouth quirked. “Of course, I’m an awful angel, so we’re all in good company, I think.” He frowned a little, thinking.
“Essentially,” Raven told him, “the question is: how would the people Up There react if they knew about her?”
“Poorly,” Charles replied immediately. “Come on, can you imagine Emma? Good heavens, she’d probably use her as an excuse to conduct some sort of horrifying crusade on all mankind.”
“So what do we do?” Raven asked.
Charles turned to Erik. “What do you think?” he asked.
Erik stared.
He didn’t know what he thought: damn it, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t feel capable of keeping anybody safe. Had he even kept himself safe, over the years? He was sitting in an angel’s kitchen with two other demons, and the fact that they were there together had made them less safe, had in fact put them in danger. Every time he had come into Charles’ store he had made himself less safe, and more importantly made Charles less safe. That was what he did. He was a demon: there was a shadow over him wherever he went. And now Charles was looking at him as though he had answers.
“Erik?” he prompted.
“I don’t fucking know, all right?” he snapped, and regretted it immediately when Charles got that wounded look in his eyes, like a puppy that doesn’t understand why it’s been kicked. “I don’t know,” he said again, except this time it was barely more than a whisper.
He didn’t want to sit there any longer, with Charles looking at him like that, so he got up and left, except the only place to go was away from the kitchen and into the sitting room, where Jean was curled up in front of the fire. She looked up when he came into the room, and he stopped in his tracks.
Come, said something, a soft spidery scratch of thread across his mind. Come here?
“Oh,” he said, but still he did not move.
Come here come see book my book lovely you think?
He walked across the room to where she was sitting, with the book spread open in front of her. It was a book of Greek myths – and there was something typically Charles about that, he thought – and there was a picture of Persephone on the open age, shrieking as she was carried off to Hell.
“Appropriate,” he murmured, and bent down to sit next to her.
Charles, she thought as he settled down. Charles Charles kind book good sweet fire.
“That’s accurate enough,” he murmured.
She looked up at him with her big blue eyes and smiled.
Fire, she thought again, definitively.
“That’s me, I think,” he said.
She frowned.
“Or not?”
She looked up at him, and suddenly he could see:
the sky the stars unbounded spinning at an almost sickening speed everything expanding the expanse of it the cold hot burning jewel light of the white star in the north –
and she nestled against him, content, and he wondered how she had escaped the heavy sheen of sorrow that he carried with him, always.
*
They were both asleep by the time Raven and Azazel left, some time later and no farther along with a plan. Erik’s head was thrown back against the sofa, mouth sagging slightly open, and Jean’s head was curled against his leather jacket. Charles felt himself smiling foolishly at the two of them, and sat down next to Erik, reached out to touch Jean’s red hair. Where did you come from, little one? he thought. Not straight from Hell. Out of the ether, maybe. A true changeling child. The sharp little brilliant light of her. Nothing evil about it. He smiled again.
Erik made a low rumbling sound but did not wake. Charles thought about curling up against him like Jean had, the solid reassuring bulk of him, the dependability of his body, of his smell. He chuckled to himself at the thought of them, all asleep like that, a kind of perverse Norman Rockwell. He settled for picking up one of Erik’s long-fingered hands and holding it carefully between his palms. Erik rumbled again and shook his head as he woke, trying to clear it from dreams, maybe.
“Charles?” he mumbled, blinking groggily.
“Erik,” Charles said easily, threading the longer fingers through his own.
“Time is it?” Erik croaked.
“Midnight or so.”
Erik winced. “Shouldn’t be this tired.”
“Yes, well, it’s been quite an evening.”
He was still holding Erik’s hand, and he squeezed it. Erik’s fingers never got cold; he was always jealous of that. Erik let out a long sigh.
“We’ll think of something,” Charles murmured.
“It’s very simple for you,” Erik said quietly, but he wasn’t looking at Charles but down at Jean’s head.
“What is?” Charles asked.
Erik shrugged a little, making sure not to dislodge the girl.
“Everything.”
“My friend,” Charles said with feeling, “it is no such thing.”
And now Erik was looking at him, with those eyes flickering between blue and yellow – and what color, Charles had taken to wondering, were they really, now? – and so unbearably sad, sad in a way that Charles didn’t like to think about.
“Nothing is simple for me,” Erik told him, voice still rough from sleep and sorrow. “Not a single thing.”
“It’s that you don’t trust yourself, I think,” Charles mused, and Erik stiffened next to him. “You should, you know; I do.”
“I can’t fathom why.”
“You’re horrible and misanthropic and I would trust you with my life,” Charles said, smiling faintly and squeezing Erik’s hand again. But Erik only turned away from him, so he watched the back of his head for a moment, the dark reddish hair glimmering in the fireplace, and was glad that he was where he was.32
“Come on,” he murmured. He untangled his fingers from Erik’s and pressed them into the warm space between his shoulder blades, and stood up. “Let’s get her to bed.”
*
It turned out that they didn’t need a plan anyway, because when Erik woke up in the morning it was because Emma Frost33 had materialized in the middle of the sitting room and woken him up from where he was curled up, not very comfortably, on the couch.
“Ungh,” he said, very eloquently indeed.
She raised an eyebrow. “You are terribly predictable, Lehnsherr. Although I can’t say I was expecting find you on the couch.”
“What are you doing here?” he managed. He was still very tired, and his mind felt fuzzy and slow.
“Retrieving something that was very egregiously lost recently,” she said, in a way that would have been prim if it weren’t so fucking awful.
“Wait – no –” he said as she turned on her heel and began walking purposefully down the hallway to Charles’ room. Where Charles was – with Jean –
“Stop,” he called more urgently as he lurched off of the couch, hoping to Hell – Heaven – anybody who would listen – that Charles would hear him and wake up. He barreled down the hallway behind Emma, and when he burst into Charles’ room saw that Charles had, indeed, woken up, and was standing protectively in front of Jean, who was peeking out from behind him with her wide blue eyes. He had a terrible case of bedhead, and Erik realized he was in love.
“Xavier,” Emma was saying coolly. “I must tell you, you seem to be acting much more like a demon than an angel recently.”
“I’d say more like a human, in fact,” Charles replied dryly. “Was there some purpose to this visit, pray tell?”
“Someone caught sight of your Mr. Lehnsherr with that –” she raised an eyebrow in Jean’s direction “– last night. We naturally concluded that they would come here, and look how correct we were!”
“Terribly clever of you,” Charles said, deadpan.
“Thank you. Now,” she continued, steely, “hand the girl over to us and nobody need get hurt, hmm?”
Charles sneered. Erik wasn’t sure that he’d ever seen Charles sneer before. It was noteworthy. “You sound like the villain from a bad spy film,” he said, eminently dismissive. Erik blinked.34
“And you forget that I outrank you, Xavier,” Emma retorted. She was beginning to spark, energy crackling ominously around her. Erik hated her: she was the type of angel that made him pleased to be a demon. “I really wouldn’t think of crossing me, if I were you.”
“Fortunately, you’re not,” Charles replied coolly. “And you can’t have her. I don’t even want to think about what you’d do with her.”
“She’s the antichrist,” Emma pointed out, cold. Her hands, Erik noticed, were blinding now, they crackled so brightly. “She ought to be exterminated.”
“That’s preposterous and you know it,” Charles told her. “And anyway, you’re not going to exterminate her. You’re going to do something much worse. And that I can’t stand for, I’m afraid.”
“What you will or will not stand for is of no particular concern to me, Xavier,” Emma said, and Erik could hardly see anything anymore. He knew, of course, what she would do: and he knew that she was right; she did outrank Charles. She could do things with her heavenly white lightning that Charles could not prevent.
It was surprising, to him, how simple it was in the end. Easy, too: only a few steps, taken at the right moment.
It was almost peaceful.
*
“Oh,” Charles said, feeling very cold and furious indeed, “now, you see, you’ve done something I really don’t like.”
He reached down to hold Jean’s little hand, buzzing with fire, and let himself be as angry as he had ever been.
When he opened his eyes, it was to the sight of his entire apartment on fire.
“Perhaps I should work on my aim,” he said faintly before scooping Jean up in his arms and stepping over Erik’s body.
Bloody hell, he thought irritably. It’s going to be weeks before they get him a new body.
In fact it was only two days before Erik was bursting into his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen35, which meant that either the bureaucracy Down There had gotten considerably more efficient in recent years, or that Azazel had put in a good word for him, which seemed more likely.[36] In any event, there he was, looking thoroughly winded and even more thoroughly panic-stricken. In retrospect, Charles supposed he should have left him a message somehow, but after all his entire building had been nothing more than a heap of rubble by the end of the day. Which was, of course, the problem.
“I – Charles – you –” Erik spluttered, wrung-out.
“We’re both quite fine, thanks to you,” Charles told him, trying to sound considerably calmer than he felt. “I do hope you don’t mind me breaking in, but there was the small issue of wreckage by fire. I’m afraid I may have, ah, overdone it with Emma.” He felt himself turning pink. “I don’t think we have to worry about her anytime soon, in any event.”
“And – you’re – I –” Erik said, or tried to say, rather.
“Oh, Azazel’s planted some story about Jean – where has she gone? Jean! – being snuffed out tragically in some accident or another, so I figure we have a good ten to fifteen years before they come banging down the door,” he told him. “Ah! There you are,” he added when Jean came into the room. She grinned when she saw Erik, who was still breathing quite heavily and staring, and in fact ran across the room to hurl herself at him, hitting him solidly in the legs. He reached down at patted her head, apparently dazed.
“Are you quite all right?” Charles asked, worried.
“No,” Erik croaked, and leaned down to cover Jean’s ears with his hands. “I want to fuck you six ways from Wednesday.”
Charles stared.
“That sounds like something Raven would say,” he managed to say. “I nominate her for babysitting duty.”
“Sounds good,” Erik said, sounding strangled.
“Oh, thank God,” Raven said emphatically when she arrived fifteen minutes later and Charles shoved Jean bodily out the door. “I’ll bring her back sometime next week.”
“Cheers!” Charles called through the door, which he had already closed, and launched himself at Erik with the enthusiasm of a much younger man.
“Oof,” Erik said, and smiled, Charles thought, quite demonically indeed.
fin.
Footnotes
1. Erik had often referred to humans as “the scum of the fucking Earth” in Charles’ presence, a fact that he chose, magnanimously, to overlook.↩
2. That is, forever.↩
3. He had hated somebody, once, somebody who had betrayed him, somebody who had forced him onto the losing side of a war, but he had spent the first thousand years of his life hunting that person down and then carefully – and effectively – orchestrating his demise. Charles, five thousand years later, though bygones had better be bygones. Whether Erik felt the same was debatable.↩
4. He had added Charles sometime in the 1350s, finding it considerably more approachable.↩
5. This was without question his only reason for doing so. It had nothing to do with, for instance, the fact that Erik looked like this in a leather jacket and sunglasses. Nothing at all.↩
6. Raven was not actually Charles’ sister, except in the way that all angels and demons were each other’s kin (this was a line of thought that Charles generally did not pursue, not at all because this brought up some problematical potential issues regarding himself and one Mr. Erik Lehnsherr). He had found her sometime in the Dark Ages (that time about which we Do Not Speak), and had helped her out of some unmentioned scrape that they had never discussed after the fact and that remained a mystery to the rest of the world. He was fiercely devoted to her, even though she insisted on taking up with Azazel and his ilk: she was his family.↩
7. Imagine Raven’s surprise when she realized, circa 1532, that that was the purpose of that particular trick of her anatomy. This had sparked a century-long quest to make Charles’ life a living hell (literally), after which point she had thrown up her hands and gone back to terrorizing humankind.↩
8. She’d given up because he hadn’t noticed.↩
9. He most certainly did.↩
10. She would.↩
11. "Are you being serious right now,” Raven had said to Erik Lehnsherr the previous day. “Are you actually trying to tell me you don’t want to fuck my brother into the next millennium, and have all his freakishly angelic babies?”
“As though I’d be the one having the babies” had perhaps not, Erik was later able to admit to himself, been the best way to respond to this question.↩
12. Unfortunately he liked the books in his shop perhaps a touch too much, because it pained him every time anybody actually bought anything. Erik had commented on this very frequently in the past – enough, in fact, that Charles had stopped listening. He was, after all, very good at only listening to what he wanted to hear.↩
13. Generally, Charles either pretended that he hadn’t done things – convinced an eager customer that she actually did not want that nineteenth century Milton edition; walked into Greenberg’s and sneaked out entire trays of pastries unnoticed; and so on and so forth – or spent an egregiously long amount of time trying to explain to Erik why what he had done didn’t count as a violation, not exactly, because, you see, well, under the circumstances – and so on, and so forth. Erik tried not to think about what it said about him that he put up with this, and had in fact come to find it endearing by at least the mid-sixteenth century. It had been four-and-a-half long, long centuries since then, during which time he was fairly certain he had gone completely out of his mind.↩
14. But, a small and treacherous voice told him, Raven isn’t like that – and she was a demon, hellfire, shapeshifter nightmare hellspawn – but she was so certain – so very certain about everything. What had Charles done to her, back in those lost years when Erik had been in the mountains? He had saved her – and yet she had stayed herself. Erik watched her, sometimes, with the worst kind of envy coiled tightly around his heart – if he had a heart, in this impossible body of his.↩
15. Charles had a soft spot for Nietzsche. Other acquaintances had expressed surprise, at the time, to hear this, considering the man’s stance on god. Erik had taken it as par for the course. “His ideas are just so interesting,” Charles had told him. “Apart from the part where they’re wrong,” Erik had prompted, to which Charles had replied, entirely seriously, “Yes, exactly.”↩
16. Erik had spent considerable time in most of the European countries, and spoke more languages fluently than he had fingers to count them. Charles had stayed in England for the tea. (And the scones.) They had come to America when, in the early 1960s, Charles had started using the word “groovy” with an appalling frequency.
“He’ll never survive anywhere but America like this,” Raven had said grimly. It had not occurred to Erik not to follow them.↩
17. When it came to Charles, he usually wasn’t.↩
18. This was the point at which Erik truly despaired of himself: he had turned, somehow, into a sentimental old fool, without noticing. He was doomed.↩
19. Doomed, he reflected gloomily, was far too innocuous a word. He was spectacularly, gloriously fucked. And not in the way Raven would have preferred.↩
20. Lest anyone believe that Erik was seized by a sudden pang of Christmas spirit, a clarification as to his activities: he was leaning on the railing, watching the skaters, and deliberately tugging their skates in the wrong direction when they were least expecting it Before he was distracted, he’d knocked over seventeen people, three of whom suffered serious bruises on their coccyges for several days following.↩
21. He was, in fact, besotted.↩
22. “Oh, my god,” Raven said. “Don’t even pretend you’re not an old married couple; you’ve somehow acquired a child –”
“She was outside without shoes –” Erik ground out, and Raven glanced up at him before looking back at Charles and the girl. He was saying something to her, and smiling, and reaching over to tuck one lock of her fire-colored hair behind her ear. Erik swallowed.
“Uh huh,” Raven said. “Tell me, Erik, does my brother playing with children do funny things to your ovaries? We’re all friends, here, you can be frank with me.”
“I hate you,” Erik told her, and she smirked. And I’m not the one who’d have ovaries, he added silently before he realized what he was thinking, and decided he hated himself, too.↩
23. That very day he had: tricked a man into forgetting he had ever wanted that first-edition copy of Of Grammatology, walked out of the nearest liquor store with a bottle of their finest merlot without paying, cleaned the windows to the shop by snapping his fingers, and stopped the radio from playing “Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey” not one but four times.↩
24. He may also have sped up the water boiling.↩
25. Not, admittedly, very much.↩
26. Charles had leapt out of his seat to pound Erik forcefully on the back, which had only seemed to make the problem worse, for some reason. He did keep one hand on his back, just in case. Erik really was very warm.↩
27. You can probably guess how he actually sounded.↩
28. It was in 1532.↩
29. “I’ll bet you can hang these considerably better than I can,” Charles said to the girl. “Can you raise it up to the mantle, just there, hmm? Oh my, that was very impressive. We’re going to have this done in a jiffy. Now let’s do one over this chair, Erik does so like the smell of pine, even if he won’t admit it.”↩
30. She really was very cute, though.↩
31. Especially not when Charles sucked on it for a gratuitously long time. Definitely not then.↩
32. Once, many years before, lifetimes before, in time he was spending in Ireland, he had gone to bed with a tall, russet-haired man. He had left him in the hay and walked out into the moonlight and wished more than anything that he was wherever Erik was. And that was where he had gone – and thus had this latest life of his begun.↩
33. Charmingly named by Azazel, in one of his better moments. Unfortunately, the circumstances of the naming have been lost to time (see: drunkenness), but the name itself did stick.↩
34. Charles had, after all, dragged him with an almost manic glee to the opening night of the most recent Bond film, and the one before that, and the one before that, and so on.↩
35. "This is tasteless,” Charles had told him when he’d gotten the place. “Truly, I am appalled.” Erik had merely grinned his shark’s smile and said nothing.↩
36. In fact, Erik had so terrified the demon working at the processing and claims desk that she had put him through as fast as possible without the typical review without any further prodding. She wasn’t sure whether or not it was possible to be blasted out of existence by a demon of such low rank, but she wasn’t about to risk it.↩