Archive of Our Own ^beta

"What's the best one?" Spike asks. They're lying tangled in the sheets, naked, his hand on her hip, but with no more intent than that.

It makes her smile to think of, even if there's some bitterness to it, too. "Cody, the guy I—back home. It's his. He went to a baseball game with his dad. They were sitting behind home plate, and they had cotton candy. His fingers were sticky and tasted like sugar."

"How old was he?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know. I only have the memory, the sensations. But pretty little, I'd guess. His legs were dangling off the seat, and he was squirming back and forth in it—he didn't take up the entire thing—because the plastic was hot. I always wondered why he remembered that, in particular. Nothing happens—I have no idea whether their team even won the game. I just know that he was happy, and there was so much sun that his hair felt hot to the touch, and his dad put his arm around him."

Later, when they've put on clothes and walked over to Eighth Avenue to have dinner, Marie thinks of another memory, clearer now that she's spending so much time in the city herself. It's the interior of an apartment, unremarkable, probably a cold-water walkup in a ramshackle brownstone. She can't see what the young Erik Lehnsherr looks like, but she knows what he feels like, at least in this moment: the buried anger and fear and fathomless grief, but a lightness, too, as though he's letting himself hope for the first time in the presence of this tall, gangly only-just-a-man, young and tender and awkward and already on the way to bald. Erik's eyes fall closed when Charles lays a gentle hand on one side of his face, and she can feel Charles's fingers in Erik's hair. Erik is forcing himself not to tremble like he's going to break apart, and then he gives up, overwhelmed by nothing more than touch. She doesn't have the memory of the kiss, but she's sure it follows.

In other circumstances she might be horrified at the idea of Professor Xavier kissing anyone, but right now she's filtered through Erik. It's hard to hate someone who survived a war by making himself forget what it was like to be loved—it's hard to hate him when you can feel him remember.