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Erik’s first reaction is one of straightforward outrage: who are you, and what have you done with Charles Xavier?
He remembers Charles, and this pale, scrawny, wild-haired, bearded man glaring from the wheelchair is not him. Erik used to tease him about his professor look, the tweed jackets and waistcoats, the Brooks Brothers shirts. Charles wouldn’t have been seen dead in a shirt like the patterned monstrosity he’s currently wearing.
The clothes and the hair are just surface stuff, easy enough to fix. Erik entertains a brief fantasy of summoning razor and scissors from the nearest bathroom, but Charles’s little gang of X-Men would probably think Erik was trying to kill him, and it’s not worth it. And that part of Charles’s new look is not entirely unattractive, on reflection –
Erik shakes his head, trying to shoo away the distracting thoughts of what that beard would feel like with Charles kissing his neck, his stomach, his thighs, how it would feel to pull Charles’s long hair as Charles sucked his cock, he always used to like that, they both did… Stop it.
The helmet keeps Charles from hearing his thoughts, of course; but this Charles doesn’t look as if he cares what Erik thinks any more. Doesn’t look as if he cares about anything any more, least of all himself. Erik wonders when was the last time Charles had a square meal, and something in that thought makes his heart clench painfully.
Of all the fantasies he’s ever had about Charles – and he’s had more than he can count, over the years – this is the one that knocks him most off balance. It’s so powerful that he can see himself there in the kitchen at the mansion, furiously wielding knives and pots and chopping-boards, onions and carrots and pearl barley and a proper old-fashioned boiling chicken, the sort his mother would have chosen, cooking it long and slow till the smell of chicken soup steals through the house and reaches Charles’s study –
Erik’s never had an olfactory hallucination before, but he seems to be having one now. His stomach rumbles, embarrassingly loud.
Nobody says anything; nobody even sniggers, though Alex looks as if he’s having to fight the urge.
Latkes, Erik thinks fiercely. He’d make latkes as well, and noodle kugel, and dumplings. And he’d make Charles eat the lot, till he stopped looking scrawny and lost and wild, till he looked sleek and well-fed and contented again, the way he used to, like a beautiful spoiled cat…
“What do you want, Erik?” the pale angry ghost of a man in the wheelchair says, and Erik has no idea how to answer him.
I want you not to look at me like that. I want it not to be my fault you’re in that chair. I want things to be the way they were before Cuba. I want to grow old with you and help you run your stupid school, and sleep in your bed and hold you when you have a headache from working too hard. I want to take care of you. I want to make you well again. I want a million impossible things and I can’t tell you any of them –
Erik’s always been one for actions rather than words. This is probably the craziest thing he’s ever done, after all that’s passed between them. They’re enemies now, everyone knows that. But the yearning is too strong.
Slowly, as if in a dream, he takes off his helmet and lays it aside. Then he takes Charles’s hand and guides it to his temple, shivering a little at the touch of Charles’s fingers on his skin after so long.
“See for yourself,” he says, and waits, head bowed, to hear his fate.