Erik's homecoming is just as dramatic as Charles ever could have pictured it.
He arrives at the school on an afternoon in May, announcing himself by waving the gates open and driving directly up to the front door. By the time Charles catches wind of his presence and makes it out there, after having dismissed the day's final class fifteen minutes early, Erik's surrounded by people—Scott, Ororo, Logan, and now that Charles is looking, Hank and Jean are headed this way as well—Charles probably would have called off if he'd been a little less gobsmacked by Erik's arrival.
"Charles," Erik says testily the moment Charles arrives on the porch; he must have been following Charles' progress, these last few minutes. "Would you tell Cyclops I was invited before I'm forced to hurt him?"
Considering how much darker the sky has gotten in the last three minutes, Charles would personally be inclined to worry more about Ororo, but this is probably not the wisest time to start nitpicking. "Ah," he says, taking in Erik, the five suitcases bobbing up and down in the air behind him, "yes, in fact. I did invite Erik to stay here for awhile. On an indefinite—permanent?" He casts a questioning look at Erik; Erik gives him an impatient look back. "On a permanent basis."
He's not about to admit that the invitation in question was extended back in 1968, and that he's never repeated it since. It was an open invitation. If Erik took forty-five years to take him up on it, Charles isn't about to nitpick that either, at least not for the moment.
"An indefinite, permanent basis," Scott repeats flatly.
"Figures," Logan says. "I'm outta here."
"Yes," Charles says, to Scott. He means to say something to Logan (who's now headed toward the garage) along the lines of 'You had better not mean you're leaving when we have a month left to go before summer break and no one else to teach art,' but it's at that point that Ororo says, "Are you certain this is a good idea, Professor?" and Jean and Hank arrive simultaneously from opposite directions, and it's all Charles can manage to keep anybody from attacking anybody else for the next few minutes.
By the time the dust has settled, Logan's long gone on Scott's motorcycle, and Charles is working on a pretty good headache, but he has the one thing he's always wanted—or so he thinks at that moment.
***
Afterward, when they're alone, cleaning out several dresser drawers and half Charles' closet for Erik's use, it's much more anticlimactic than Charles ever thought it would be. Neither of them says much as Erik unpacks his things, and, once the last of the suitcases is emptied, Charles finds that he has no idea what to say. He hasn't caught up to this yet.
Back in his thirties and forties and fifties, he'd hoped. Every time they'd met, he'd hoped the last time would be the last time Erik would leave him. By the time he hit his sixties, Charles finally lost his patience, though not so much with Erik as with himself. Hope is one thing, hope is a good thing, but Charles' heart leaping into his throat every time Erik thought 'Anything,' while they were in bed together was nothing more than delusional.
So, he's spent the last twenty years telling himself he can be happy with what he and Erik have. That it's enough. Or, even if it's not enough, which it isn't, it is what it is. If he can't have all of Erik then he'll take what he can get.
And now, here Erik is, fifty years late, and though Charles has spent much more time rehearsing moments like these inside his head than he would ever admit, he has no idea what to say to Erik now.
"How was your trip?" he finds himself saying.
"It was fine. Not too much traffic," says Erik, who's never before shown the slightest interest in small talk and who now seems no more able to meet Charles' eyes than Charles is to meet his. "I left something in the car. I'll be right back."
***
It doesn't get any better when Erik gets back, more than half an hour later. In fact, for the next few weeks it doesn't get any better at all. Erik seems to be going out of his way to avoid Charles; every time Charles heads his way, Erik beats it in the other direction. He spends much of his time hiding up on the roof, evidently unaware that the elevator's gone all the way up since the renovations fifteen years ago.
Charles keeps meaning to talk to Erik about it—to talk to him at all—to corner him and force a discussion about what this is and what their future's going to be, instead of all the nonsense that comes along with Erik assuming Charles knows exactly what he wants; it's not like his mind came with an instruction manual, but try to tell him that—and yet, whenever Erik seems to be heading in his direction, which isn't often, Charles finds himself retreating instead.
Despite the tension that's come between them at times, despite the differences that have kept them apart for all these years, they've never before been unable to talk to each other. And they've certainly never before spent more than twenty-four hours under the same roof without raising their voices at one another, and then having sex.
Charles remains very busy through graduation, especially given that he's now teaching art, a subject for which he has absolutely no affinity, and he welcomes the distraction—but as soon as most of the students have gone home for the summer, he's left with too much time to worry.
Maybe they're not going to break through this cycle of awkward avoidance, the way he thought they would at first. Maybe Erik regrets coming here. Maybe he regretted it the moment he stepped out of the car. There's a difference between an ongoing fling and a life together, even if the fling was longer than the life together could possibly end up being, now. Maybe they aren't saying anything to each other because there's nothing to say. Maybe all that substance they thought they saw in each other's absence was really a whole lot of nothing after all.
"That's stupid," Mystique says, the night Charles gets drunk and maudlin enough to ring her around midnight and pour out all his sorrows. She used to get very irate with him for this kind of thing way back when, but that was when the maudlin parts of these phone calls were still about her (and when he still insisted on calling her Raven). "He loves you, and you love him. Look, if he's being an asshole, just kick him out for a while. He'll come slinking back in no time. Always worked for me."
And it has; to the best of Charles' knowledge, she's staged at least four coups of the Brotherhood over the years, whenever she and Erik had a difference of opinion over its direction. "I'm not kicking him out. He might think I meant it. Anyway, he's not being an asshole, as you so eloquently put it. It's just been...difficult."
"Well, then, I don't know," Mystique says, sighing.
"You don't need to know. You only need to sympathize with me," Charles says, though in all honestly he actually had been hoping she would have some sort of fix for this.
She sighs again. Charles can't read her mind—wouldn't, even if she were within range, as he enjoys having a relationship with her—and he's never been the best at interpreting emotions over the telephone or other social media, but he has the sense she's been trying to get him to wrap it up for a while now. He's starting to sober up just enough to feel bad about it.
"Hey, if it's summer break, why don't you two take a vacation?" Mystique says.
"I don't know..." Charles says.
By the time he's recovered from his hangover—a miserable process that takes at least four times as long as it did in his youth, or so it seems to him—he's realizes that that is, in fact, the perfect suggestion. A trip away is exactly what they need. He's never had a better time than all the occasions on which Erik kidnapped him and whisked him away.
***
"A road trip," Erik repeats, bemused. Charles can just about picture his old wry self peeking out. Perhaps if he'd suggested something truly off the wall, Erik might have sneered at him. Charles finds he rather misses being sneered at. He misses it nearly as much as he misses sex, which is a lot considering they hadn't had a chance to meet anywhere for six months before all this.
"Yes," Charles says. "I thought it would be nice to get away for a week or two."
They fell in love on a road trip, after all. They'd learned so much about each other over those six weeks, talking in the car during the day and exploring each other's body at night.
"Not a recruitment trip?" Erik asks, looking uncertain, as well he might—the only people he seems to avoid more religiously than Charles (who was forced to corner him on the roof for this conversation after tracking him around the house for the last hour) are the students. He was never shy about trying to recruit Charles' students away from him, giving speeches and all that, but mere coexistence is evidently beyond him.
"No. It would be the two of us, no one else," Charles says. "We wouldn't need to have any particular destination in mind—we could just head in whatever direction we felt like, see where it takes us."
"All right," Erik says. "Let's go."
Charles hadn't meant they should leave right this second, but Erik's always packed light, been ready to leave a place temporarily or forever on a few minutes' notice. Over the years, Charles, too, has made a habit of keeping all his necessities close together and close to hand, the better to pack quickly and without leaving anything important behind when Erik comes for him.
It takes less than half an hour for them both to be ready. It takes less than five minutes to let the others know they'll be gone for a week or two. Since school's let out for the summer, Charles doesn't even need to apologize to whoever would be taking over his classes. And he definitely doesn't have to keep a telepathic connection open long enough for anyone to start questioning his decisions.
***
An hour later, they've barely spoken a word to one another, and Charles is questioning his own decisions just fine without any help. Companionable silence is one thing, but a continuing silence is something else. If he spends a week in a car with Erik without any talking at all, this will easily be the worst suggestion he's ever made.
Just as he's about to ask Erik what he wants to talk about, Erik says, "Well?"
"'Well,' what?" Charles asks.
"Aren't you going to make your phone call?"
"What phone call?"
Erik waves his hand, as if Charles is some annoying piece of scrap metal and Erik's levitating him out of the way. "The one you always make. The annoying one."
Oh. That. Since the advent of the cellphone, Charles has been in the habit of calling the school whenever he goes anywhere with Erik at the last minute, just to make sure they can get along without him. Erik has been in the habit of pouting about it, and making snide remarks about how much more convenient it was for him when they'd stop at a payphone for ten minutes and then be on their way, as opposed to Charles (supposedly) micromanaging the school on his cell phone for hours upon hours at a stretch.
"I don't need to make any phone calls," Charles says. "It's summer break. You know, if you'd ever kidnapped me at a time that was actually convenient for me, I might have had to spend a little less time making sure the wheels would keep on turning in my absence."
The look Erik gives him now is hard to read, just as Erik's usually hard to read, but for a moment there's a sense of relief in the air, not Charles' own—as if Erik's been waiting for Charles to criticize just as much as Charles has been waiting for Erik's sneers.
"Good," Erik says.
***
"Do you remember the time you forgot me in 1962?" Charles asks a little while later. If current events are a bit much for either of them to jump into right off the bat, well, they have fifty years' worth of things to talk about.
Erik, who's just taken a sip of coffee, has to make a visible effort not to spray it all over the dashboard, and, when he swallows, ends up choking a little instead. "I didn't—"
Before Erik can manage to hack out the rest of his objection—'I didn't forget you, I left you on purpose,' and then he'll look stricken, and then Charles will get to manage Erik's feelings about his paralysis for approximately the six thousandth time—Charles says, "Oh, I didn't mean Cuba. I was talking about that other time. Don't you remember? We stopped for gas, I went to take a leak, then when I came back you had left me there?"
"I wasn't used to traveling with anybody else," Erik says. "And you were too slow. And out of my line of sight."
"I was wearing a wristwatch," Charles counters. "Which you'd been obsessing over for days. There's really no excuse."
***
"Do you remember the time you sucked me off at a rest stop?" Erik asks. It's the first time he's volunteered any of his own recollections. Probably he's gotten tired of hearing hilarious stories at his expense after the last seven in a row.
"Which time?"
"The third time," Erik says. "In Wisconsin. We almost got caught."
"We did not almost get caught," Charles says. He still can't remember exactly which time Erik means—there were several weeks where they pulled off the road at least once a day because they couldn't wait until they stopped for the night; while Erik may remember each one individually, the only one Charles recalls in any particular is the time a seagull landed on the hood of the car and watched the entire affair—but certainly no one else would have seen anything other than an empty car if they walked by during the proceedings. He always made certain of that much.
***
Several sex-related anecdotes later, and Charles gets the message. He lays his hand on Erik's thigh and says, "Do you remember our first time?"
"No," Erik says, which seems suspect since he seems to remember their other first thirty or so times in full clarity and detail. "Refresh my memory."
"We'd been on the road for a few days, dancing around each other," Charles says, running his hand down to Erik's knee, then back up. "Each of us shying away from making the first move. I remember I kept taking any excuse just to touch you, casually. To see how you'd react." Erik's getting hard already, primed from all those other stories. Talking about sex has always been the number one way to get him going. Phone sex has always been very good for them for this reason, though this—this has always been better, being able to see Erik's arousal for himself, feel it spiking every time Charles touches him.
"You'd get yourself off in the shower every night, thinking of my hands on you, all the times I'd touched you over the day. I'd listen in, and the next day I'd make sure to touch you even more often, but you never seemed to take the hint. You'd only take longer and longer showers. It was very frustrating."
"You could have said something," Erik says, following up with his usual argument: "You're the mind reader here."
Charles reaches down between Erik's thighs, now slightly parted, runs his hand up and down Erik's inseam, closer and closer each time to the bulge in his trousers. "Then, one day, I'd had enough, and I put my hand on your knee and left it there. You thought it must have been in error. You thought it for at least ten minutes, the whole time you were trying not to get hard." Erik's completely hard now, huge as ever, and Charles can no longer keep his hands off him; he squeezes Erik's cock through his trousers, stroking his length a few times before returning his hand to Erik's knee. "Then you pulled off to the side of the road and grabbed me. We didn't even make it to the back seat."
Charles isn't sure they're going to make it anywhere now that he's remember their first time so vividly. He doesn't know that he can even describe how arousing it had been to kiss Erik so fiercely, to more wrestle than embrace him that first time; how triumphant he felt when he leaned over to take Erik into his mouth and felt all Erik's lust and shock and even wonder.
"If we're going to reenact it, you need to decide whether you'd rather have my hand in the car or my mouth in a hotel room," Charles says, because there's no way he's going to blow Erik in the car. He'd have back cramps for a week. "Personally, I'd prefer to have you in my mouth, but I'll leave it up to you."
"Keep talking," Erik says. "I'm thinking."
Charles does. Erik's always liked hearing about the way he tastes, even if Charles has never found a way to describe the way Erik's groin smells in a way that doesn't make it sound like he really needs to take a shower.
The next exit is five miles off, the next rest area twelve miles farther, and there's no doubt in Charles' mind that time is a factor when Erik takes the exit.
***
With 'Anything' ringing inside his skull, the way it has so many times in the past, Charles watches Erik as he pulls away, feeling oddly detached as their heart rates slow. When he thinks he can speak without sounding breathless, he says, "Erik, what are you looking for, with all of this? What is it that you want?"
"Everything," Erik says—whatever that's supposed to mean. It might have sounded romantic, once, but he's not saying it to the person Charles was fifty years ago; he's saying it to the person Charles is now, the one who's weary of loving and of being loved vaguely from afar (or silently from across the house). And maybe Erik could say he's tired of precisely the same from Charles, but Erik's the one who left, so long ago and so many times since. He's the one who came back with nary a word of explanation.
"Be specific," Charles says. "You can't possibly enjoy sulking around the house avoiding me. I assume you're after something else."
Erik regards him for a long moment, his expression unreadable, though in more of a thoughtful way than that old, forbidding way, Charles thinks. "I want to get married," Erik says finally. "To you. I want to be where you are, every day for the rest of my life. If that's what you want."
Well, there's not much ambiguity there, is what Charles finds himself thinking. If he felt detached before, he feels almost as though he'd having an out-of-body experience now (and, considering his experiments with astral projection, he should know). At least he doesn't have to struggle for a response; he didn't expect Erik to propose to him, but it's not like there's ever been another answer.
"There's nothing I want more," Charles manages.
There's a moment, then, when it seems as though things might get awkward again. Before that moment can begin dragging out, Erik takes a little initiative for once and leans in for a kiss.
***
The next morning, Charles says, "I think this was a bad idea."
"What was?" Erik asks, looking a little alarmed, as though he thinks Charles is about to take his 'Yes' back.
"Road trips," Charles says. "We drove for, what, five hours? I'm stiff as that ironing board. If we do this for a week or more, I might keel over."
Erik, who seems a little achey himself this morning, doesn't argue. "Do you want to go back?"
"Not really," Charles says, because for all that they spent so much of the afternoon and evening kissing and cuddling and talking, feeling comfortable together for the first time since Erik showed up at the front door last month, there's part of him that worries that if they go back, things will return to the way they've been. He's definitely not ready to go home. "Maybe we could go on a vacation. You know, a real one. We could go to Italy, maybe."
"Italy," Erik repeats, which isn't a no, at least.
"We could get a villa," Charles says, warming to the idea himself. "No cities, no tourists, just the two of us. It would be relaxing. It would be fun. I think it would make a lovely honeymoon. And if we hate it, we can skip out early, try something else. What do you say?"
"All right," Erik says.
***
They obtain their marriage license that afternoon, and marry down at the Clerk's Office the following day. Charles doesn't know why he's so surprised that neither of them stop leaking through the entire small ceremony; they've cried together so many times over the years, so why not now? It would be more strange if they didn't, really.
Italy is wonderful. Even if it were terrible, it would have been worth the trip to see Erik in casual clothing for the first time ever, their first morning there and every day of their honeymoon after. His outfit involves a T-shirt, worn jeans, and (of all things) a red ballcap. Charles loves it. It makes Erik look like someone's grandfather (which, of course, he is; it occurs to Charles that this means he is now kind of, sort of, related to those children. He proceeds to have several crises about whether or not they'll like him, before deciding that small children are highly predictable in liking people who give them sweets and nice presents, so it'll be fine. He foresees any number of shopping trips in his future, that's all.)
They stay for a few weeks, relaxing and making love and soaking up the sun. By the time they return to the states, Erik has a delicious tan, Charles' head has almost finished peeling, and he's almost forgotten to worry about things getting awkward again the moment they drive through the gates.
By the time they're actually driving through the gates, he's remembered to worry—but the awkwardness he's dreading doesn't come as they're bringing their things inside. It doesn't come when any of the others give their mostly-dubious congratulations. It doesn't come when he and Erik start snapping at each other, tired and stressed from traveling. It doesn't come when they finally give in to jet lag and go to bed a few hours early, the first day of their marriage they haven't had sex.
Instead, at long last, it feels like something settling. It feels right. For the first time, it feels like Erik's come home to him, and it's even better than Charles ever imagined it could be.