Archive of Our Own

Erik waits in the rafters and watches as Charles finishes his last lesson for the day, puttering about at the front of the classroom while the boys and ghouls concentrate on their pop quiz. It's a bit drafty up there, and rather dusty - he had to scare off a few rats - but it's a good enough place to sit, propped between the beams with his elbow propped on his knee and his chin on his hand while he waits.

None of them know he's there, of course, least of all Charles, who has very underdeveloped Frightening skills considering he's the Scare School teacher. Any Frightener worth their salt knows when they're being watched. Instead the ragdoll man is grading workbooks, tidying up his tea mugs and pencils, and generally going about his daily life as though Erik doesn’t turn up at unexpected moments on a fairly regular basis. Charles doesn’t even check the ceiling! Looked at like that, it’s practically essential for someone to drum some sense of paranoia into Charles’ head, even if Erik rather finds his cluelessness endearing.

So he waits until two minutes before the end of the test, right as the children are concentrating their hardest trying to check their answers, gets to his feet silently, dusts off his pinstripe suit with both hands, and leaps down out of the rafters above them with a bloodcurdling roar.

The children scream like banshees and desks fly everywhere as they scramble to escape, knocking each other over and leaving destruction behind them, a blast radius like a nuclear explosion; at the front of the room Charles has flung himself backwards against the blackboard with a hand clutched to his chest like he's having a heart attack, and Erik lands in the cleared centre of the classroom grinning with his shark teeth on full display, sharp and gleaming in the gloomy light, crouched and snarling almost playfully when the kids finally turn to look.

“It's the Pumpkin King!” one of the children exclaims; another one says, “I knew it, I was totally faking!”and a brief squabble starts over who was or wasn't scared and who wet themself and who just has glandular issues.

“Erik, what do you think you're doing?” Charles hisses from the front of the room, and finally stands back upright, still a little breathless. He's covered in chalk dust where his cloth body has wiped the writing from the board, the chestnut-coloured yarn of his hair all patched with white. It’s ridiculously attractive. “This is my classroom!”

“How are they ever going to be able to scare anyone else if nobody ever scares the bejeesus out of them first?” Erik asks, propping his hands on his hips and trying to look regal instead of giving Charles the sort of soppy look he suspects he defaults to when he loses concentration. He straightens up, and the tiny, narrow-roofed classroom makes him feel like a giant, towering over everyone else there. “I'm only doing my civic duty.”

Charles covers his face with one of his hands, the one with the tweed-patterned fingers, and sighs. “Oh, for darkness’ sake - if you're that bored, go wait for me in the office and I'll be in when we've tidied up this mess. Come on, children, let's get this room back in order. Nobody goes home until the desks are all upright and in rows.”

“But Mithter Charles, I gotta dentitht appointment,” says the littlest vampire.

“Except for Bartholemew, nobody goes home,” Charles says, making a rude gesture at Erik that he certainly hopes the children don't know the meaning of.

Erik makes his bow - to applause from one or two children - and goes down the dark schoolhouse corridor to Charles' office as he's been told. It's not because he's scared of Charles, because Charles is about as Scary as a wet kitten, but it would be rude if he didn't at least pretend to be a little frightened. He doesn't like to mention Charles' Scaring deficit - Charles gets a little touchy about it sometimes. It's not his fault how he was made (Professor McCoy's failures as a mad scientist and iffy sewing skills had already resulted in two ragdoll hellhounds which cried miserably if you so much as scolded them, three ragdoll rabid bears that had been rather cuddlier than they were vicious, and a ragdoll vampire bat, by the time he decided to try his hand at people. The bat was a vegetarian).

The office, if possible, is even pokier than the classroom, filled to the brim with Charles’ dusty old books and abandoned mugs of tea. The windows are crusted over with ancient dirt, and the groaning plant in the corner whines and mutters to itself until Erik tosses it some of the kibble Charles keeps in an urn on the side. Two overstuffed armchairs are set across from one another in front of the fireplace. Erik perches in one of them for a bare second before getting to his feet again and pacing around the room as he waits for Charles. How long could it possibly take for them to tidy up the room, anyway? Erik is the Pumpkin King! He’s here on very important business! Or he could be, anyway. And besides, it’s getting close to Halloween - what are the children doing having lessons? They should be helping with this year’s preparations! Charles should be helping Erik get ready for Halloween.

Erik pauses in front of the cobwebbed mirror above the fireplace and stares at himself in it, trying to decide if he made enough effort on his appearance today. Pale, bloodless flesh - check. Sharp-toothed grin - check. Pinstriped funeral suit - check. He’s very fond of the suit, it makes his long limbs look twice as elongated and weird as normal.

“I’m a catch,” he says to himself in the mirror, though his reflection says nothing back. “I’m the scariest person in this town.”

“You’re something, all right,” Charles says crossly from the doorway, and Erik absolutely does not jump, because he totally heard Charles coming. He turns his head slowly and grins at Charles, who is standing watching him with arms folded across his chest, scowling. “Did you really have to interrupt my lesson?”

Erik shrugs and drops into the nearer of the two chairs, folding his hands over his chest so his fingers steeple together. “I was giving a lesson! I was helping shape the minds of tomorrow. You like that sort of thing.”

“Not when it disrupts my shaping the minds of tomorrow,” Charles grumbles, but his expression has softened at least a little with fondness. He comes into the room to sit down in the chair opposite Erik’s, reaching up to loosen his shirt collar at his throat, rumpling it up under his cardigan until it leaves his collarbones bared. After a moment he cracks entirely and laughs. “Did you see their faces?”

Erik laughs too, and it’s as though his laughter feeds Charles’, because he breaks into fits of helpless giggles, eyes creasing shut in ways he’ll have to iron out later. And Erik - Erik, through his own amusement, wishes he could be the one to help him do it, to hold Charles carefully still while he presses his fabric flat again with the hot metal so close to his eye, so close to hurting himself. Nobody else makes sure to carry extra needles and thread around with them in case Charles has forgotten his today - he never does - or makes sure to scare off the moths whenever they get a little too interested in Charles, shooing them away and then pretending not to have been doing anything when Charles looks around to see what Erik’s up to. Yet Charles never seems to notice that Erik is stupidly in love with him.

Which is why Erik has resolved on his greatest Halloween plan yet.

“Charles,” he says, leaning forward in his chair, and Charles’ laughter catches in his throat; he leans forward too, still chuckling, bracing his elbows on his knees.

“Yes, Erik?”

“I want you to come Scaring with me this Halloween,” Erik says, and Charles is so surprised his mouth falls open, but no sound comes out. He looks so flabbergasted at the suggestion that Erik thinks - oh, shit, he’s not interested, his stomach sinking down through his feet and far under the ground, slinking back off to his grave to sulk. Before Charles can reply he continues, fast, “You never come out for Halloween, and it’s really not acceptable for the Scare School teacher to be shirking. So as Pumpkin King I am ordering you to come Scaring with me.”

There. Now they both know it’s not a date and Erik’s not going to be humiliated when Charles gently turns him down.

The silence… stretches, and then Charles’ expression crumples - Erik could swear he sees disappointment there for a moment before it turns into a glare, Charles’ mouth tightening into a flat line, shoulders set and stubborn and he leans back in his chair and away from Erik. “No.”

Oh.

“But I ordered you,” Erik says, nonplussed. “I’m the King.”

“Come off it, Erik,” Charles says, folding his arms over his chest. “I don’t want to, and because you tell me is not a good reason for me to change my mind.”

He looks determined, and Erik isn’t sure what to say - Charles has to come, because otherwise Erik’s plan is completely useless. It’s no good being terribly impressive and scary if Charles isn’t there to see and be impressed by him. He thinks better on his feet, so he hops up out of the chair and paces the tiny bit of floor around the rest of the office, though it’s only three paces from one side to the other on Erik’s long legs, so he ends up turning rather quickly, hands behind his back while he thinks.

“Don’t try to Scare me into it, because I’m not afraid of you,” Charles says, still sounding cross, and Erik makes a little hurt noise despite himself, stopping dead in the centre of the rug and staring at Charles, stung. Charles looks sorry after a moment, but doesn’t take it back, settling in his chair and tightening his mouth until he’s practically pouting, trying to hold in whatever other insults he wants to fling Erik’s way.

“You’re coming, and that’s final,” Erik says, and Charles says, “I am not.”

“You’re setting a bad example for the students.”

Charles gets up from his chair then, coming to stand in front of Erik on the rug, head tipping back to meet Erik’s eyes where his tall, lean figure towers over Charles’. His face is utterly determined. “Why does it matter to you so much if I come or not?” Charles asks. There’s still chalk in his hair from the board earlier.

Erik finds himself reaching for it before he’s even thought about it. “Hold still.” The yarn is soft under his hand as he brushes the white dust from Charles’ head and shoulders, and Charles says nothing, just looks up at him and stays there while Erik tidies him. “Look, you can’t be that bad at Scaring,” Erik says eventually, when he’s done and there’s no excuse to keep touching Charles, his hand coming back to hang awkwardly at his side. He feels like a gangly giant, which is ridiculous - he is spiderlike, bony, terrifying! “I know everyone teases you about it, but I just think you should come out with me and we’ll go Scare some humans together, and I can help you be more frightening.”

Charles pauses, then says, slowly, “You think I don’t go because I’m not Scary enough.”

Erik shrugs and looks away, folding his arms across his chest. It’s getting early, he should probably let Charles go home for dinner. Raven will be worrying. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

The office feels too small for him and Charles both, and he’s about to make his excuses when Charles - Charles laughs, and when Erik looks back at him Charles’ eyes are glittering with amusement, mouth curling in a suppressed smile. “That’s very sweet of you, Erik, to offer to help me.”

It’s not the reaction Erik was expecting, and he looks at Charles, trying to puzzle it out - at Charles’ seams and stitches, the mix of paisley and tweed, plain and rococo patches that make up his body, the wisps of cotton that escape some of his more troublesome joints, soft and mouldable where Erik is rickety and hard, at the repaired rip in his shoulder fabric where Erik had first tripped and caught him with one of his metal fingernails. Charles hadn’t been upset then, either - had simply asked Erik to help him hold his shoulder together while he deftly stitched it shut with the other hand, sitting on the steps outside the Town Hall and chatting cheerfully about his students.

“Alright, I’ll come,” Charles says, before Erik can think of how to answer him, and pats Erik on the cheek before turning to his desk and gathering together his books, tossing a long, ragged scarf around his throat.

“Oh,” says Erik, and lets himself be ushered out of the schoolhouse onto the street. He doesn’t let his sharp-toothed grin of victory show until he’s halfway home, and it scares some of the pumpkins so badly that they explode in showers of orange pulp.

The square is crowded with all manner of creatures in the late Halloween afternoon, long before any of them are usually awake, shambling and pouncing around to talk to their neighbours and friends, making plans for where to visit first - the mummies always insist on starting in Egypt, while the werewolves like to run wild in the old European cities in a great pack. It’s a good-natured sort of gathering, everyone getting ready to go, putting in their best fangs and practising their Scaring on one another.

The light is fading in the sky when Erik joins the crowd, slipping out of nowhere and nothing to watch them all. He’s wearing his best funeral suit, cut so close and straight to his limbs that it might as well be sewn onto him, the long, jagged-edged collar jutting out at either side of his face, and he casts a terrifying silhouette on the walls as he passes, stark and whip-thin, his fingers fitted with long claws over his regular nails for the night. His shadow appears five minutes before he does, and everyone falls silent, waiting for his appearance - when he lets himself be seen finally atop the hill by the gates that lead to the cemetery there is a long, loud roar of approval from the crowd, rattling the windows all around. Erik has never been one for speeches, so instead he simply opens the spindly cast iron with a wave of his hand, then steps aside.

The roar gets louder, triumphant in its release, and the creatures of Halloween Town break into a run, stampeding towards their King then rushing past him, heading for the graves that will take them through into the human world. Heads and tails and spiny wings pass by in a multi-hued rush, and Erik leans over them all, looking out for one in particular -

“Erik!”

A patchwork arm waves above the rest, and there’s a counter-current through the crowd as Charles and Raven push their way through across to Erik. A loud snarl from Erik stops everyone else in their tracks and clears a pathway for Charles to trot through, amusement on his face as he comes to stand beside Erik.

Charles looks wonderful - instead of his usual patchwork cardigan and pants he’s wearing a patchwork greatcoat with enormous lapels, which is at least a little striking, if no scarier than usual. Raven follows him through, damnably self-confident in her scariness.

“Raven,” Erik says politely, and she snorts, propping her hands on her naked hips where she stands easily against the tide of monsters pressing forward again, not even the roughest of shoves so much as rocking her on her feet. Her blue, scaled skin is exactly the way it is every day - she tailors her appearance to the victim, so for the time being she is just her normal self, sarcastic expression and all. Professor McCoy had engineered her once he gave up on sewing and moved on to genetic manipulation, and by all accounts she is his most terrifying creation - fast and adaptable to every fear, some unholy blend of kappa, lycanthrope and dragon, with some few dozen other things thrown in.

“Your Horrible Highness,” she says wryly, and rolls her eyes at Charles. “I hear you’ve bullied Charles into coming out with you tonight.”

Erik scowls, but Charles just shakes his head at her. “That’s not quite what I said.”

“Either way, I can’t wait to hear all about it later,” Raven says, and Charles grins, leaning forward to peck her on the cheek, velveteen lips bussing against her skin. Her arms around his body are very gentle in contrast to her usual rough behaviour, and Erik cannot fault the way Raven cares for her brother, even if he is a little jealous of their easy contact and the way Charles looks at her when he says, “Have a good Halloween, dearest.”

“You too.” Raven turns her eyes on Erik, where they crease up as her mouth stretches into a predatory grin. “Erik, you’d better have him back before dawn, alright? Charles, don’t Scare him too badly,” and she gives her brother an overexaggerated wink before swaggering back into the stream of creatures, where she is immediately swept away.

The rush is slowing down now, the slower townsfolk following the faster - a few slime monsters, some of the older dead ones, staggering along in companionable twos and threes. Erik straightens to his full height and looks at Charles, who is looking back at him with that same amused expression, mouth curled up at the corners. “Shall we?” Erik asks, and Charles says, “Let’s go.”

He takes Erik’s arm, and his hand is light, but his grip is firm. There’s a moment where everything is slow and honey-loaded, then, without needing to say a word, they take off down the hill at full-tilt towards the graveyard, running over the uneven, skull-studded ground fast enough that Charles laughs out loud as he stumbles to keep up with Erik’s long legs, leaping over pumpkins and dodging the stragglers.

The sound of screams echoes from the open graves around them, and Erik tugs Charles along to the hole in the ground Erik so carefully picked out, then, without pausing, over the edge, earth crumbling under their feet as they drop into the bottomless darkness side by side.

It’s a long fall. It’s no distance at all.

Erik glides out of the shadows on the other side like a knife in the night, and Charles follows him out into the fancy human graveyard. The October air is cold and frost-tipped, the moon above them slit-sharp and grinning. He can feel the bones all around them, ones he might once have drawn from the ground for warriors, in the long ago time. Nowadays he leaves them be, but it’s a sweet siren call, nonetheless, once that feels good in Erik’s head as he listens to the sounds of the no longer living shifting restlessly in his night.

“Where are we?” Charles asks, climbing up onto the nearest tombstone and gazing out across the dark space, hand cupped to his eyes. In the moonlight Charles is beautiful, the white light picking out all the texture of his fabric, the fine twist of his yarn.

“Suburbia,” Erik says, pointing across the memorials and angel statues towards the warmer orange sodium glare of human streets. Charles hops down, and Erik takes his arm again. “Come on.”

The pathway between the gravestones is winding and bumpy, and Erik lets out an experimental cackle to warm up, one that sets dogs to barking all around when it echoes louder than it has any right to. This Halloween he is going to be so terrifying, so shriek-inducing, that Charles will have to be impressed! He looks sideways at Charles and bares his teeth, drawing back his gums to make sure they’re on display like a carved pumpkin grin.

The ragdoll looks like what he is - soft, eyes glittering and hair windswept by ghostly fingers, but not scary. The glance he gives Erik is uncommonly fond. “You love this, don’t you?”

“I take my role as King very seriously,” Erik says, and tips his head back to let out an unearthly howl that shakes the trees all around them into dropping their leaves - there are voices up ahead, outside of the graveyard, that shriek at the sound of it, and when they reach the railed fence they can see abandoned candy buckets on the far side, spilling chocolate and brightly-coloured packets onto the sidewalk where children have dropped them in their fright.

It’s easy enough for Erik to scale the fence, leaping agilely onto the top in one bound and balancing there while he reaches down for Charles, taking his hands and drawing Charles up after him, holding carefully to his waist once they’re both atop the narrow metal bar. They’re stood terribly close together, and Erik feels his heart give one hard thump in his chest where it’s usually still and frozen, before he can look away from Charles’ flushed face. “Careful getting over these spikes,” he says, and lifts Charles over them as he lifts his feet so as not to catch himself on them, then drops him down to the sidewalk, jumping down himself to stand beside him.

Once on the sidewalk Charles stoops to the ground and starts picking up the candy, dropping it into the long pockets of his coat. “I’ll have to take some of this back for the children.”

“They’ll get their own,” Erik says, shrugging. “Most of them go trick-or-treating themselves early on, and get told they have good costumes. Later on they use it to get people to open their doors. Come on, we’ll miss the best part of the night.”

“Okay.” Charles straightens, and Erik jerks his head towards the streets beyond, then leads on, stalking from blackness to blackness and drawing himself up into his best Scaring posture - joints stiff, every part of him pointed, his shadow moving of its own accord and ignoring the lights around them, hopping from place to place, peering in windows and cackling silently. When they reach the main road that passes through the neighbourhood Erik waits for Charles to come up beside him and points ahead to where a crowd of teenagers are huddled together outside an old house, passing around a cigarette, the end of it gleaming cherry red in the night.

He grins, glancing sideways at Charles. “Easy pickings.”

Charles smiles back. “Are you going to give me a demonstration, then?”

Instead of answering, Erik just grins wider, and slips into the darkness.

By the time he’s scared off three batches of humans - the last was a burly night guard outside some factory building, who turned white as a sheet and fell over twice before he managed to run away - Erik is in a terrific mood, St Elmo’s fire sparking from his fingertips as he prowls around looking for their next targets, Charles following and laughing still from the last one.

“Your turn next,” Erik says, when they round the corner into a wide open park, barely lit by the moon and a few spotty streetlamps - off in the distance he can see shadows around a bonfire, probably more teenagers camping out for the night and telling scary stories. Erik will give them scary stories so frightening their grandchildren will be born wailing. “You just need to be confident, Charles.”

“Thank you for the pep talk, but I think I’ll manage,” Charles says dryly, and before Erik can try to offer any more advice Charles is already walking slowly towards the bonfire, fingers reaching for his own temple.

Erik goes after him to offer support - what if they throw Charles on the fire? What if they’re not scared? He’s just about to pounce forwards when all of a sudden the night explodes in a black mist of terror and red eyes and claws, everywhere, and the teenagers freeze like frightened rabbits, their fire blackened out in an instant as they’re surrounded by pure fear, diffuse and awful. The darkness starts to grow limbs, drawing together into solid things, and the humans scream so loudly that the dogs start howling again. They leap to their feet in terror, ready to run, only to turn and find Charles standing staring at them, limbs limp and head tilted crazily to one side, like a puppet - they scream again, and two of them pass out, crumpling to the ground in heaps that the others abandon in their headlong flight away towards the town, crying and one of them even vomiting.

It’s all over in a matter of seconds, and Erik stares, gobsmacked, too surprised to be impressed.

Charles is laughing ruefully when Erik’s brain unfreezes, and he kneels down beside the two that have passed out, adjusting them into the recovery position one after the other. “Oh, dear. That was a bit too much, I think.”

Erik comes to stand next to Charles and just looks, astonished, after their (conscious) victims, who have yet to slow down. “I thought you didn’t like Scaring,” he says, blankly, while Charles adjusts the alignment of the girl’s neck to keep her airway clear.

“I like it fine, I just find it hard to hold back.” Charles stands up and brushing his hands off on his thighs. “Hank forgot to give me a limiter on the telepathy, so sometimes it gets out of hand. It’s better for everyone if I just stay at home, I don’t like to ruin everyone else’s fun by scaring them all off too soon.”

“Telepathy,” Erik says, blankly.

“Oh, yes - didn’t you know?” Charles asks, but his voice is so sly that it’s very clear he knew all along that Erik didn’t know anything of the sort. “Hank was terribly worried someone would send an angry mob after us with pitchforks and torches when he made me. Apparently I’m his most terrifying creation. He wouldn’t come out of the closet for days after I woke up the first time.”

Erik thinks of all the embarrassing things he’s thought about Charles since they met, and promptly tries not to think of them, but doesn’t think about them so hard that he catches himself coming the other way and trips himself over. “So you - ”

“Yes, Erik. I heard. And I really was very impressed at how terrifying you were,” Charles says, smiling, and leans up on his tiptoes to press a kiss to the corner of Erik’s mouth, before drawing back and bouncing on the balls of his feet, frightful energy crackling from his eyes. “Now come on, before they all get away.”

Charles reaches out and takes Erik’s hand in his soft one. Erik does not protest when Charles laughs and drags him off into the night.

“Wait a minute,” Erik says a few nights later, lying on his back in the middle of Charles’ bed, Charles draped across his body, ragdoll limbs comfortably loose and boneless. “Does this mean you weren’t really surprised when I jumped out at you all those times?”

“You tried so hard,” Charles says, and pats Erik’s chest absently, yawning. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”