Erik found the shoe box at the back of the closet—not their closet in the room they'd shared for the past twenty years, but the closet in the room Charles had moved out of when Erik had moved in. (He'd claimed it was drafty and small and that the only reason he'd kept it as long as he had was that Erik knew how to bypass the security system to get there, whereas he'd have woken the entire house trying to sneak in if Charles had ever moved. If Erik was going to stay, Charles had said, they may as well share something a little bigger, so as not to be tripping over one another all the time. And if Erik ever needed some space to himself, well, he should make sure to bring some extra blankets with him on his way down the hall.)
The box in question was covered in dust and very light. Erik had no particular guess as to its contents, yet once he'd removed the lid, it seemed somehow inevitable that he should find it packed full of letters, postcards, and even a few telegrams, all yellowed with age. With the exception of the telegrams, they were all covered in Erik's own severe handwriting.
Erik had meant to bring Charles his box immediately once he'd found the damned thing, but as he exited the closet, he headed toward the bed instead of the hallway, and sat down on the bare mattress. There he stayed, losing track of the time until he sensed Charles approaching in his chair. He was halfway through 1983 by then, though the letters didn't seem to be in strict chronological order and he'd been largely skimming them rather than reading every word.
"What are you doing?" Charles asked from the doorway, sounding bemused. "It looks like you've gone on a rampage in here—oh. You found it."
"I can't believe you kept these." Erik couldn't believe Charles would want to, either now or forty, thirty, twenty-five years ago, back when he'd first read each of them.
"Which one are you on?" Charles asked, approaching the bed.
"I'd just finished calling you a collaborator and a traitor to the mutant cause."
"Mm, well. That doesn't actually narrow it down much, you know."
It didn't. It had been any number of years since Erik had so much as remembered the letters he'd sent to Charles in their years apart, but from what he recalled, he'd written to Charles whenever he needed someone to lash out at, a target for the anger and frustration he felt. Even when things had been quiet on the political front, when some battle had just been won in that arena, it had been easy to fall back on his anger and frustration at Charles himself.
Erik put the letter he had been reading back into the box. He put the top back on and handed the box to Charles.
"Thank you," Charles said, grabbing it quickly, as if he thought Erik might snatch it away and tear each letter into tiny pieces, then set fire to the lot.
Not that Erik wasn't tempted, but Charles had thrown such a fit earlier in the day about having lost this box—even going so far as to say that if it weren't found, he would not be moving three days from now, despite years of promises that they could retire the moment, or at least the very week, that Logan came to tell them they had succeeded in making the world better—that he didn't dare, no matter how much his younger self had embarrassed himself, page after page of bile spewing out onto a younger Charles.
"That's not all that's in them," Charles protested. "There are a few love letters in there somewhere."
As if those weren't even more embarrassing. "You haven't looked at any of my letters in decades," Erik said. If Charles had, he'd have known where they were—and they'd have been in their bedroom, or Charles' office, someplace he ever went. "Besides, you have an eidetic memory." What difference did it make to have the letters themselves when Charles could remember every word Erik had ever written him? Erik was the one who should have had all Charles' letters to remember by—but he was the one who'd destroyed so many of them in a rage shortly after having read them. Even the ones he'd kept, he'd torn up in those last weeks and months they'd been apart, when he'd somehow been even more angry with Charles than he ever had been before. He'd been angry that Charles had asked him to come home. He'd been angry that Charles had taken so long. He'd been angry that Charles had been, if not totally right, then close enough to it that Erik had to be, in the end, the one who bent more, the one who came crawling back.
Charles seemed to consider a moment. "I like knowing I have them," he said. "I like knowing I can hold them in my hands again if I like. I used to re-read them relatively frequently, you know. Before." Before Erik had come back to him, was what he meant. "It's the difference between remembering what it was like when you visited, versus having you here in the moment. Having these letters to read made me feel closer to you. I may not need them now the way I did then, but I'm not going to throw them out, either."
"I didn't mean we needed to have a heartfelt discussion," Erik said, not that there was any point in protesting. As it had turned out, retiring, for Charles, meant remiscing about, well, everything that had happened up until now. They'd had three other such conversations so far over the last couple days.
Charles laughed, a low, fond sound. "All right, I'll let it rest," he said. "I'm really not trying to embarrass you."
***
They moved three days later, to a small house some ninety minutes away from the school—far enough away that Charles wouldn't be running back at the drop of a hat, but close enough that he could reasonably visit any time he really wanted to.
It was a stranger transition than Erik had expected, living together alone after decades of living together amongst all the others who lived at the school. It seemed less as if they now had an empty nest as that they were the ones who'd flown it this time, as the graduating class of seniors had every June that Erik had lived there. They got on each other's nerves more than either of them could have expected, had a few more silly fights than anticipated. It was astonishing how fully they both could dig into a screaming argument, when they'd spent decades never being able to argue too loudly or too long where any of the students, so many of them with telepathy or a heightened sense of hearing, could pick up on it.
In the aftermath of these arguments, they found that they both needed space, sometimes, and so they each came up with things to do outside of the house, even when they weren't fighting. Erik signed up for woodcarving lessons (which he quit as soon as he had the basic idea, preferring to work in his own shed in the backyard without a teacher nattering at him), while Charles discovered a new-found love of driving around the countryside by himself with no particular destination in mind, when he wasn't hiding in his home office working on secret projects.
"I'm going to run to the store," Charles said one afternoon a few months in. "Do you need anything?"
"No," Erik said. If he had needed anything, by now he knew to go himself if the timing mattered, which it usually did. Charles took an hour longer than necessary to run any particular errand, puttering around and chatting with old and new friends everywhere he went, which was why Erik so rarely went with him. Erik made new friends at a rate of one every decade or so, not three every time he left the house.
"Well, then, I'll be home later. I left something for you on the bed, by the way."
"You left what?" Erik asked, but by then Charles had gone.
Erik didn't bother to check to see what it was; whenever Charles left him anything interesting on the bed, he usually stuck around to help break it in. He almost forgot Charles had left him anything until he happened to pass by the open bedroom door and noticed a shoe box sitting on top of their comforter.
He somehow knew what was in it before he even reached the bed and saw the post-it tacked onto the top: I do have an eidetic memory, in fact.
Charles hadn't bothered to dress up the contents, which was fortunate. Erik would have been offended if he'd gone to the trouble of faking postmarks, or aging the paper or the ink he'd used. Instead, the letters were written on plain, new paper, each in a plain envelope marked only with a date. Unlike Erik's letters to Charles, these seemed to be in chronological order, the first dated 1976 and the last 1997.
Erik's hands didn't shake as he pulled the first letter out of its envelope and unfolded it, but even if they had, there was no one there to see as he began to read:
June 2, 1976
Erik,
I don't know why I'm bothering to answer your most recent doorstopper. It's not as if I can possibly expect anything to come of it. Not unless your reading comprehension is better than your hearing, which I somehow doubt. Your writing is certainly no better than your speech in front of the UN last week...
Erik laughed, surprising himself. He hadn't thought about how he'd feel to read Charles' letters to him, but if he had, he would have expected them to make him angry, as they had the first time—or, failing that, for them to make him sentimental about all the time they'd wasted writing nasty letters to each other when they could have been working together. Instead, he found himself chuckling all the way to the living room couch, where he sat down with a cup of coffee and proceeded to read letter after letter after letter.
Charles returned just as Erik was getting to the last few letters in the box. Around the time Erik felt his van a mile or two down the road, he also felt Charles' mind against his own, gentle, checking in on him for a moment before vanishing again.
"I didn't think my letters were comedy gold," Charles said in greeting as he came in from the garage. He had a few plastic bags on his lap, one of which clearly held several boxes of Kleenex. Clearly he'd expected Erik to have a much different reaction, as well.
"You were an ass," Erik said. "You're still an ass."
"You love my ass," Charles retorted, a joke he was very fond of indeed, judging by the way he still made it every single time, an old man repeating himself as often as possible. "Anyway, you were worse. I thought it was only fair to level the playing field somehow. It was very embarrassing for me, I'll have you know. It's not easy being selfless."
"Good," Erik said. "Come here and read the rest of these with me."
Grumbling but clearly pleased, Charles did.