Charles has had three cups of coffee already, but that doesn't stop him from heading back to the bedroom as soon as he's done speaking with Logan in the kitchen. He's not going to be able to get back to sleep, but Erik won't be up for at least another hour, and Charles doesn't want to wait.
His side of the bed has cooled in his absence, but it's easy enough to make up for: All he has to do is snuggle up close to Erik. Erik's always radiated heat like a furnace—and groused when Charles wakes him up with cold hands. The look he gives Charles upon waking now is quite a bit cooler than room temperature.
"Good morning," Charles says brightly. "It's my birthday today."
"Is it," Erik says dryly, with a glance at Charles' party hat. "I hadn't realized."
Charles is a fan of birthdays, particularly his own. He likes planning his official party. He likes pretending to be astonished by the surprise party he's never once been surprised by. He likes opening presents, blowing out candles, being sung to and blowing into party horns. He likes being made much of for no reason other than having existed for yet another year.
He also likes anticipating the day for weeks ahead of time, in a manner which is evidently rather annoying. Erik, on the other hand, likes to pretend he finds the entire affair tedious every year, even as he also tries to take over the planning for both parties. ("Tries" being the key word most years, thankfully; despite Erik's efforts, only Charles' eighty-fifth birthday has thus far involved red and maroon as part of the color scheme.)
Charles beams at him. "Yes, you had. And do you know, I just saw the most lovely thing inside Logan's head?"
Erik scoffs and throws off the covers. He hasn't been at all impressed by any of the things Charles has seen in Logan's head since he came back—if "came back" is the correct term; it's hard to say, but Logan now has both sets of his memories, both beginning in the same way only to diverge in 1973—and now Charles barely manages to grab him before he gets out of arm's reach.
"Indulge me?" Charles asks. When Erik gives him a look, he adds, "It's my birthday, after all."
Erik rolls his eyes at this trump card, but settles back into bed. He mutters something indistinct, in that grumpy old man way he's done more and more often over the past several decades, but when Charles snuggles up close to him again, he throws his arm around Charles' shoulders and says, in a rumbly voice that's really more sleepy than it is disgruntled, "So. Tell me about what you saw inside Logan's head this time."
"I'd really rather show you."
Erik sighs. "Show me, then."
Charles obliges, leaning into Erik a little more, brushing the tips of his own fingers against Erik's long-since grayed temple:
(It's dark, is the first thing, but that ain't the problem. Logan's always seen just fine in the darkness. It's the candle that makes it hard to see anything outside of this circle of light. That's dangerous in times like these, but it's not like there's anything else to see in this tiny cabin they're holed up in anyway. They've got the windows blacked out, too, and he's already been outside to make sure. If he can't see in, neither can anyone else, and that's not what Sentinels are looking for anyway.
Meanwhile, he has to sit here and babysit. Not exactly his idea of a good time—or at least it isn't until Xavier sticks a party hat on his head and tries to hand another one off to Magneto, who does not look impressed.
"I'm not wearing that," Magneto says dryly, crossing his arms.
"It's not every day I turn ninety," Xavier says.
"No," Magneto says, like he's above sparkly hats or something. Pretty rich for a guy who spent the last however many years wearing a butt-ugly helmet.
Xavier laughs. He winks at Logan, then says, "What if I were to draw a penis on it? Do you think you'd be more likely to wear it then?"
"No," Magneto drawls, "but you'd be more likely to put it in your mouth."
It's not a bad comeback, but Logan knows what's coming next, because it's the same thing that always happens when Xavier and Mags start bickering: They're going to start making eyes at each other, and then pretty soon the entire room's gonna smell so much like sex that they may as well have fucked right in front of him. No, thanks.
"I'm going out," Logan says. "Get this shit out of your systems before I get back."
He doesn't go far. He can't. The good old days when he could just go roaring off, long as he wanted, and expect everyone he left to still be more or less alive when he got back—those days are long gone.
At least by the time he gets back, the candle's out, and Xavier and Magneto are settling down for the night, their cots pushed together the way they always are these days. It's almost stopped being weird, after two years of being on the run together, but Logan doesn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it if he doesn't have to.
He does notice that they're both wearing party hats, now. There's a third hat, too, sitting on the table beside half a cupcake.
"And yes," Xavier says, "I do expect you to wear that."
"Well, you're shit out of luck," Logan says, but he does take the cupcake.
It's Logan's turn to take first watch, so he does. Ain't too many Sentinels this far north, last they heard, and they haven't seen anyone in weeks. There's hardly anyone left to see, but they didn't think anyone was around when Hank got himself blown up a few months back, either, and they were being careful then. They were being careful when they got split up from Ororo, too. They're not going to be less careful now that they're just a couple days out from meeting up with her again, not to mention only a couple weeks out from their meetup with Kitty's group.
There's something about that, something Xavier's not letting anyone in on yet...)
Of course, there's more to that memory. Logan's thoughts and feelings about seeing Kitty and 'that punk' (meaning Bobby, apparently, though the two of them have never interacted that much in this lifetime) again, for the first time in years, after years of them being in the 'maybe dead' column of people whose whereabouts were unknown to him. Logan wondering if he'll be the last mutant, or even the last living creature wandering the earth by the time it's over.
Logan skeptical that any plan could bring them back from extinction, personally or as a whole. Logan hoping anyway, because if anyone could pull their asses out of the fire, it would be Charles Xavier. He was wrong—Kitty as Charles has never known her was their salvation—but his faith is touching, even now. Even more so, in a way, than it was back in 1973, when it had been more frightening than anything else.
But none of that is Erik's business, and Charles wasn't even meant to pick up on most of it himself. All Logan had agreed to was for him to see what Logan had seen of the two of them on that day.
"Well?" Charles says, eager to hear what Erik thinks.
"I haven't had that helmet in decades," Erik says. "I don't know why you always twit me about it. You haven't anything new to harass me about, I suppose."
He's not angry, though, as he used to be so long ago now, when the helmet was still in play and Charles had the nerve to say something about it.
"Three days before that, the other you broke into a snack machine to get me a package of Hostess cupcakes for my birthday," Charles says brightly. "Since you couldn't exactly bake me anything."
Charles finds this incredibly sweet; Erik, predictably, finds it rather more humiliating, and pulls a face. "And it was necessary for me to know any of this because..."
"Because it's beautiful," Charles says. He's been explaining sentiments exactly like this to Erik for so many years, and Erik still doesn't get it. Maybe he never will, but if he doesn't then that's fine, because the world they live in is one they've made a thousand, a million times better than it was for mutants or for anyone in that other life. "Even when things were at their darkest, we found some light together, didn't we?"
Erik opens his mouth, but closes it when Charles presses his fingers to Erik's lips. "I know we didn't, but we did. It must have been so terrible, and it must have been so hard, but we still found one another in the end. We were together." Logan's memories may not seem like much, when they're not filtered through Charles' own feelings—neither version of Logan has ever been invested in Charles' and Erik's relationship, and his strongest feeling about Erik in any of those memories always seems to be distrust—but Charles is able to appreciate them now, in a way he couldn't back in 1973. He didn't know, then, that he and Erik would end up together in this life. In that other life, it had taken them forty-odd years and the end of the world. It had hurt to see, and he had shied away from every glimpse, not knowing that in this life it would take Erik only twenty years and change to come home to him. "You were with me on my birthday, and I'm sure it meant the world to me."
"Your ninetieth birthday," Erik says, and for once he doesn't sound smug about it, the way he usually does when they're making these kinds of comparisons. Maybe it's because he's already had nearly a year to be smug about it; maybe it's because it's finally hitting him, the same awe Charles always feels when he thinks about it. "You're ninety-one today."
"Yes," Charles says. He's older than he's ever been; both of them are. It's been many years since what they knew of that other life had anything in it to guide them. Now there is no future but the one they'll live, the one they're living now. "And I'm so glad you're here with me."