"This shouldn't have happened."
"Funny," Charles said glibly. "I remember saying something like that the last time we did this."
The last time they'd slept together had been in 1973, on the plane. Charles had regretted it immediately afterward. He'd spent the last ten years regretting it. He'd regretted it before he'd invited Erik into the bathroom with him, in fact.
Now, watching the line of Erik's back as Erik retrieved his clothing from the floor, Charles regretted not what they'd just done, but his glibness about it. It was all too easy to see why Erik would wish they hadn't done this. Easier for Charles to see than anyone else that Erik's reasons for wishing they hadn't were miles away from what Charles' reasons had been a decade ago.
"I'm sorry," he said, though he felt he'd been apologizing rather a lot lately for someone who had recently been kidnapped, psychically beaten, and all but possessed. At least Erik was unlikely to hit him in the face, as Moira had done the moment he'd been on the upswing. "I don't mean to be—insensitive."
He was tuned in enough to Erik's mind to know that the apology wasn't the part that stuck, cutting through Erik's grief and guilt long enough for him to turn to look at Charles again. He was red around the eyes—Erik was always crying, these days, openly and without seeming to realize either that he was crying or that everyone could see it—but nonetheless there was a certain reluctant fondness there when he said, "You never mean to be."
"Everyone has some sort of talent," Charles said. "This is only one of mine."
He'd just demonstrated a few of his others—though, probably better not to point that out. Sadly, this meant he also wouldn't be able to point out that discretion was, every so often, another one of his talents.
He'd lost Erik already, anyway. The thread of their conversation had fallen from Erik's mind, drowned and forgotten beneath everything else. It happened at the end of every day's construction work, the moment he stopped being distracted—by the work, by speaking with Charles' students, by Charles himself. Once everything slowed down, there was little left for Erik to do but remember the family he had lost. Not the family taken from him when he was a child, not this time, but the one he hadn't been able to protect.
Charles had never met them, hadn't even known they'd existed until they were already gone—but he knew their names, had seen their faces night after night, right along with Erik. Magda, whom Erik had loved as much as he'd ever loved Charles, and more; whom he'd come home to, lain down next to each night for the better part of ten years. Nina, for whom Erik would have lain down his very life from the moment he first held her in his arms; so like her father and so desperate not to lose him, she instead was now the one who had been lost.
Erik dressed quickly, efficiently. Charles couldn't hold his attention for longer than five minutes, had barely kept Erik with him long enough to finish, and he didn't try to slow him down now.
***
In the end, it wasn't all that surprising when Erik left, several weeks later. The work which had caught his attention for a while was now done; the students he'd shared a rapport with in the rebuilding now reminded him too much of the daughter he had lost; as for Charles himself, he was to be avoided, lest Erik betray Magda's memory in Charles' bed a second time.
'I don't think I'm a replacement for your wife,' Charles could have said. Hadn't, because he'd learned already that if there was nothing he could say that Erik would want to hear, there was even less he could say that would actually help. 'My students aren't a replacement for your daughter. The good you could do here, if you stayed—it would be a gift, that's all.'
There was no point in saying any of it, and so, when Erik did leave, Charles kept their parting light, kept it friendly, the way Erik clearly wanted it.
He made one thing clear, though; Erik would always have a place here, if he wanted it—as Charles believed and hoped he would, some day.