Work Text:
Everything was made of cosmic energy. That's what Nikola had always said, as long as Erik had known him. Erik had believed him, of course—he could never have worked so long and so hard beside him if he hadn't—but he hadn't fully understood just what it meant until that night.
A night of music and magic, returning from the opera to find Nikola ecstatic and ready to finally put all their hard work to the test. Jelica had protested, but Erik had faith in Nikola. If he said the machine was ready for a human trial, then it was ready.
And so it had been. There was no disputing that. Their escape had succeeded, all three of them travelling as pure energy to the tower, the culmination of their years of effort. He'd never felt anything like it before. He'd been mostly aware the entire journey, from the first freeze of his brain to the giddy weightlessness as he shot through the skies, only to have his shaking body reform inside the dome. The experience had changed him, then—made him more aware than ever of the power pulsing inside, that he was everything Nikola had said he was, cosmic energy in the form of a man.
But men were fallible, and the accident had been his own fault. If he hadn't been holding the plasma lamp when they activated the machine...
The wounds no longer pained him, at least not in any physical way. The scars only made his heart ache now. Every time he turned away from a mirror, or the glass of a shop window, always too late to avoid catching sight of the metal mask that covered half his face, knowing what lay beneath would only repulse the people around him.
Jelica had tried to tell him it didn't matter, but he'd seen how she flinched when they parted at the station. Whether it was because she was horrified by his scars or because she didn't want a reminder of the disaster, it all amounted to the same thing. She'd written to him, since he'd been living in Zagreb, but he'd left her letters unopened. Letting her forget him would be kinder than giving her hope.
Besides, Erik had no hope to spare for anyone else—he needed all he could hoard for himself. Nikola didn't care about his face. Faces, bodies... they'd never meant anything to him. Erik hadn't understood that when they'd met but he was grateful for it now, that Nikola could look at him and still see the same friend he'd made at university, who'd become his partner in all the ways that Nikola cared about. Nikola had made the mask only because Erik had asked, not because he himself had thought it necessary.
It had been necessary, if Erik were to live, and he wanted, very much, to keep living. Nikola had fled to America after the accident in the hopes of keeping his inventions out of the clutches of men who only saw them as potential weapons, but Erik hadn't been ready to join him. Not yet. His recovery had been slow, and it had been a long time before his face had healed enough to bear the weight of the mask. Only then could he attempt to rejoin the world.
The half-life he'd built for himself in Zagreb had only ever been intended to be a stepping stone to allow him time to improve his English. Every day, he studied and practised when he could, and every night, he dreamed of following Nikola to New York. In his dreams, his scars didn't exist. His body didn't exist. He became the pure energy he'd been on that night, streaming through the skies in search of Nikola.
He knew where to look. Nikola's letters, he opened, each one a nourishing meal that sustained him during their separation. Nikola wrote not of the past but of the future, of the electric age he sought to bring about with Erik at his side, and he had never been short of ideas. Creativity, inventiveness, and determination, he had in spades. What he lacked, Erik knew well, for that same emptiness made itself felt in his own life. Sharing smiles over cups of coffee as they discussed their plans. Bumping elbows as they frantically scribbled equations together on a blackboard. Throwing their arms around each other in celebration when an experiment proved to be a success.
All these things and more, Erik missed. The Nikola he saw in his dreams missed them too. Every morning, Erik awoke with a certainty that Nikola was waiting for him with an encouraging smile, hand extended, as if all Erik needed to do to reach him was cross a room, not the Atlantic Ocean. It felt impossible.
When he emerged from a dream to find himself standing on an enclosed platform hundreds of feet in the air, with a view he knew from Nikola's letters to be New York City, he thought himself not yet awake. How could he be? This was the Statue of Liberty, where Nikola had been granted permission to replicate the tower he'd built in Croatia. Thousands of miles away from where Erik had lain down to sleep. Only in his dreams could he have crossed the ocean already. Only as lightning could he have travelled through the skies.
But only as a man could he see Nikola's welcoming smile and take his outstretched hand.