October 1963 (2)
At bedtime, Erik is nowhere to be seen, and when Charles flips the light on he sees that there's a pair of red silk pajamas lying folded on his side of the bed.
"Really," he says to no one in particular. "This is ridiculous."
But he puts them on anyway, and can't seem to keep himself from snickering.
*
As soon as he's nearly asleep, he's awoken by a finger poking rudely at his shoulder.
"Do wake up, Charles, and don't try to struggle," Erik says, and Charles can hear the grin in his voice.
"Oh Erik, please don't hurt me," Charles responds, and he can't help it, he's snickering again. "Really, Erik, don't you think you ought to cover my mouth or something? I might scream."
"...I'm not that stupid."
October 1963 (1)
"I'm really very sorry, Erik," Charles says. "Though I have to admit I don't know what you expected me to do."
Erik has a bandage wrapped around one hand and a prescription for an antibiotic crumpled in the other as he drives; his face is stony under the streetlights they pass under.
"I didn't," he manages through clenched teeth, "want you waking the house. That's all."
"Telepath," Charles reminds him, tersely. "I could wake every house in 250 miles if I wanted to, without ever opening my mouth."
Erik is silent for a few minutes, then finally says, "Did they buy the story?"
Charles doesn't think anyone in the world would have bought the story, considering that it consisted of 'Charles, here, fell out of his wheelchair and landed on my hand. With his mouth.'
"Well," he says, "no one thought of 'kidnapping', but the nurse thought it might be a 'weird sex thing.'"
This is the absolutely wrong thing to say, for Erik's thoughts immediately light up the air with want and need and pain and Charles.
Not that half of everything hasn't always been the wrong thing to say; not that three-fourths of everything won't be, now. Charles will never be quite sure what will or won't set Erik off.
'It's been a year,' Charles wants to protest. 'And we only knew each other for two damned months, and we never even...how can you still - what is wrong with you?'
But that would be cruel, and the inside of Erik's head is cruel enough already; Charles can't bear to make it worse.
"I disabused her of the notion; she now thinks it's a dog bite, which you don't wish to report because you got it burgling someone's house. Good thing you gave an alias, isn't it? Though don't worry, I did make sure the name on the prescription is different so you'll be able to fill it. I wouldn't want you dying of infection, after all."
Charles is not entirely certain why he shouldn't want Erik to die of infection, all things considered; but he doesn't.
"Now please, take me home. I'm really very tired."
"I thought we might do some catching up," Erik answers, sounding stricken, and there's grief and guilt and he must hate me in the air, along with a nice toxic dose of well, shouldn't he?
'I don't hate you,' Charles could say, wants to say; but that's so wound up with everything else inside Erik that admitting knowing that would be tantamount to admitting knowing all the rest, and that he won't do.
So what he says instead is, "Well, I suppose we could at that," and ignores Erik's thoughts then as they tumble delightedly in the air around him. "Is Raven well?"
She won't answer any of his letters, and stopped responding to Hank's upon learning from whom Charles had finagled the address of her post-office box. Not that it could have taken much learning, given Hank is the only one she's written to begin with.
Charles catches the I shouldn't from Erik, but then Erik begins, hesitantly, to speak of Raven; little things, only, but it's enough to make Charles want to weep. And if he wanted to weep before he ever asked after her, well, it's not worth examining why.
October 1963 (2)
They never even manage to make it off the bed, for Charles drags Erik down and Erik doesn't protest, his hands roaming over the silk and then under it, so desperately, much more so than usual, anymore.
"If we're going to roleplay, we might want to try to do a little better at it next time," Charles says somewhat breathlessly, right after they've both finished.
"...I thought it went well," Erik says.
Charles makes a face, and projects it for good measure since Erik can't very well make it out in the dark like this. "You think all sex, ever, should go on right in this room."
"I like this room," Erik protests. "It's been very...accommodating."
"Well, I thought we were going somewhere. Surely you have fantasies of fucking me in some seedy hotel room?"
"...Not particularly," Erik says. "But if that's what you want - maybe next year?"
"I look forward to it." Charles runs through what Erik has just said, then adds, in horror, "Please tell me you don't think today is our anniversary."
"...You've had forty-one years to file a complaint if you didn't like it. It's a little late now," Erik says, testily.
Charles sighs. "I'm not sure why I ever thought you might be high maintenance. Really, no idea."
1990 (1)
"But I want to," Charles whines, sounding very nearly as pathetic as Erik is for him. "I know you want me to; why won't you let me?"
Because he wants Charles, but he wants him sober; because the fantasies he leaves out for Charles to see aren't the real ones, breathtaking as the imagery of Charles' mouth around his cock may be.
"Because I don't need you biting it off," Erik says, gesturing at the old scar on his hand.
Erik has long since figured that he's never getting what he wants, despite what Charles says when he's plastered; so he's long since decided as well that this, this is hilarious.
He turns the camcorder on.
"Come on, say it again."
"...Don't think I will," Charles says, suspicious suddenly even though Erik's been holding the camcorder right in front of him for a good ten minutes now.
"For posterity, Charles," Erik urges.
"...I don't want posterity."
"Of course you don't. That's the whole problem with you." But that's much closer to the heart of things than Erik likes to get out loud or even in public thoughts these days, so at Charles' confused expression he backtracks with, "You have a drinking problem, Charles."
"Only around you," Charles mutters, then gets his thoughtful drunk face on.
Erik waits for it, waits.
"Erik," Charles says carefully after a few minutes, "I want to suck your cock."
Got it!
December 2002 (1)
Erik has been many things over the course of his life, but he has never been a coward; so, after, he stays and waits for Charles to come to.
When Charles does, the look he gives Erik is flat, unreadable, as he says in a tone equally so, "If you do not get out of my sight, you won't live to see what you've wrought."
Erik walks away with his head held high.
As much as he loves Charles, the man is a short-sighted fool who cannot see, will not see, that in the end that in the end it was always going to be us or them.
That night, Erik sleeps the sleep of the just; and when he wakes in the morning, he knows that he has for all intents and purposes become Shaw.
September 1962 (2)
Erik stays awake as long as he can, that first night, wanting to postpone waking up again in his own personal unending nightmare.
This all feels so real; but he can't believe he'll be allowed to stay here.
Eventually he does sleep; and he wakes up in the dark of the morning to his hand on Charles' waist, to the quiet sound of Charles' breathing, to the whisper in the back of his mind of tons of steel flying past on the highway.
He thinks back to the night before; of Charles offering himself, Charles' mouth on his, Charles' startled gasp when he comes in Erik's mouth, Charles on his knees.
Erik files the memory away with great care, knowing there's some game here; not knowing as yet what it might be, although he already has his suspicions.
He dresses quietly without turning on the lights, and heads down for the continental breakfast, where he sits at the far corner table for hours with a plastic cup of orange juice and a muffin, watching the people go in and out.
It's a Wednesday, and so it's mostly businessmen in suits with briefcases in hand, sweeping in to grab a cup of coffee and then leaving again. But several families with young children come in too, and sit to eat together; and Erik finds himself wondering who they'll be, forty years from now.
He sits until the sun's up and his juice has gone room temperature; then, feeling a rising hysteria, he returns to the room before he can burst into laughter or weep or both.
Charles, always a lazy slug in the morning, is still in bed; Erik drinks him in for a long moment, then hears himself saying, in barely a whisper, "What did you do; you perfect; you -"
Charles stirs, then; and Erik clamps his mouth shut, and does the same for his mental shields; and then he undresses again and goes to take a shower.
He discovers he feels like singing, and has his first slip-up when it takes him a minute to accurately date the first sixties' song that springs to mind.
His remembrance of pop culture prior to 1962 isn't much to speak of, probably because he'd been too busy on Shaw's trail to worry about that kind of thing.
Thankfully, Charles doesn't catch on; and it doesn't take long for Erik to stop worrying about slip-ups.
*
His suspicions about what game this is are confirmed that night in another hotel room, when Charles, gorgeously naked and flushed, attempts to bring in politics as part of their foreplay.
Erik has never met anyone as transparent as Charles is when he's trying to be manipulative without the advantage of his telepathic tricks.
"Let's talk about it later," Erik says, laughing, and reels him in.
Knowing Charles' game now, already knowing the stakes, Erik starts plotting. Not about how to change the past; he's had forty years to agonize over his mistakes, could have should have would have; but about how best to work things out so that he can have the best chance of keeping Charles, when everything else is finished.
It doesn't take long for him to realize how much fun he can have along the way.
December 2002 (2)
They don't talk about the significance of the day.
Erik, tempted to trail along after Charles like a pitiful puppy, avoids him, which on later reflection is just about on the same level of pathetic.
Charles tracks him down in the evening, looking out the window at the satellite dish.
"Marie's looking for you," he says, coming up from behind and wrapping his arms around Erik's middle. "Boy trouble again, sounds like."
Being reminded of this, the strangest and most ironic attachment of his life, somehow breaks the oppressive spell of the day.
Erik turns around and kisses Charles, sweetly, never having in all his second life kissed Charles without feeling this same sense of wonder.
"I would appreciate it," Charles says before Erik goes, trying and failing to look stern, "if you would refrain from threatening to castrate Mr. Drake with a rusty teaspoon, this time. It's rather inappropriate, Erik, really."
"...Depends on what he did, doesn't it," Erik says, and stalks off to find out what the trouble is now.
fin
November 1966 (1)
Erik comes that year bearing a photograph for Charles to keep: Raven, weary and proud, holding a newborn infant in her arms.
"They've named him Kurt," Erik says, beaming; a proud uncle.
Charles, the child's real uncle, didn't even know Raven was expecting.
As the next few years go by, every time Erik comes he brings more photographs: little Kurt mouthing at his tail as other babies might suck on their thumbs; little Kurt standing on top of Azazel's feet, tiny blue hands held within large red ones; little Kurt posing like a superhero on top of a kitchen table for whatever reason a three-year-old might have; smiling, always smiling, such a beloved, happy boy.
Charles is never permitted to meet him, and the birthday and Christmas gifts he sends are returned unopened; he's never quite certain, in this life, what he's done that is so unforgivable that Raven won't trust him around his own nephew.
July 1972 (1)
Erik comes, for once, in the middle of the day; face drawn, eyes red.
"There's been an accident," he says.
The day is sweltering, but Charles quite suddenly feels cold.
September 1963 (2)
"I'm pregnant," Raven says, out of the blue one day.
Charles can read her face, her body language now, the way he never could in their unshared past life; and so he can see the expectation all over her face of - disapproval, a lecture, something like that, for there is no ring on her finger and this is 1963.
She obviously does not expect the great huge hug he gives her then, or the incoherent blubbering.
March 1964 (2)
Azazel and Raven's child is a girl; a tiny red-furred girl, whom they name Maggie.
Only for Erik and Charles is her joyful welcome tinged with grief for the boy who isn't; the boy whose chances of ever being are so low they are no chance at all. For even if Raven should conceive a boy child later, even if she should give him the same name, what is the likelihood he would be the same Kurt whom Erik loved so well, whom Charles knew only through a handful of snapshots?
January 1968 (2)
Maggie manifests several years before Kurt did in that other life; Charles, deeply attuned to her and monitoring her to some extent every moment in order to short-circuit her teleportation until she is old enough to understand more how to be careful, is more than startled one day to walk into a miniature version of himself wandering the halls.
Not a teleporter, then; good.
Charles tells her how wonderful, how marvelous, how very groovy she is, with a smile; and if she notices his tears, he knows she doesn't understand them, and doubts she'll remember by the time they're done showing her mommy and her daddy and her Uncle Erik what she can do.
October 1963 (1)
“I have a question for you,” Charles says when they’re almost back to the house.
“What?” Erik says, giving Charles an expectant look, like he hopes the question will be ‘Do you want to get a room?’ (on further contemplation, Charles realizes that’s exactly what he’s hoping for; a realization helped along by Erik’s mind singing it out so very loudly).
“Your, ah, cape,” Charles manages, cheeks going hot as it takes him a minute to remember just what he was going to ask.
“…What about it,” Erik says.
“Why is it necessary, again? Really, Erik, it’s gotten closed in the door every time you’ve gotten in or out of the car. And you’ve stepped on it several times as well, and you almost got twisted up in it when you did that dramatic flair thing as we were leaving the hospital. It seems to be a great deal of trouble for no gain that I can see."
”…When I want your opinion about my wardrobe, I’ll ask for it,” Erik says; but though his jaw is clenched, his thoughts are crestfallen, deflated.
Ridiculous as the cape is (and it’s very nearly as awful as the paint job on the helmet), Charles still feels bad; and so he says, in what he hopes is an encouraging manner, “I really prefer the turtleneck look, myself. You can’t go wrong in a turtleneck.”
Erik brightens, a little.
More telling is that the next year when he comes, neither helmet nor cape is anywhere to be seen; and in all the years to follow, he always comes to kidnap Charles wearing a turtleneck.
November 1962 (2)
Charles puts up the Christmas tree on the first day it occurs to him that he can, now.
"But it's not even Thanksgiving yet," Raven protests. "Who starts decorating for Christmas before Thanksgiving?"
As Charles sets the ladder up, he tells her, "I'm trendsetting, just you wait."
He can practically hear her rolling her eyes as she wanders off.
*
It is, perhaps, inevitable that a section of the lights gets stuck in a branch Charles can't reach from his current position. So he leans over a little, then a little more, and a little more, and he's just about got it when the world goes a bit sideways -
The tree does not break his fall; rather the opposite. And when Charles hits the ground, he hears a peculiar popping sound, like one might get when stepping on a plastic Coca-Cola bottle, the kind that don't appear to be in production quite yet.
Charles realizes in a distant sort of way that he may have screamed, either aloud or not, when Erik comes rushing in, face draining completely of blood when he sees the position Charles is in.
"Can you -" he begins.
"Yes I can, thanks, and it bloody fucking hurts," Charles snaps.
*
Charles hates hospitals, having spent far too much time having pneumonia in them over the past few decades. Therefore, when Erik goes into a monosyllabic black sulk the second it's confirmed that Charles' leg is in fact broken, it seems like a completely unnecessary attitude to Charles.
So, the moment they're home and alone, he says, "Alright, Erik, out with it."
"...One week," Erik says.
"Oh, is that all it's been?" Charles says, trying to make light of it.
Erik is having none of that. "One week," he repeats.
"Well, Erik," Charles says, "I hadn't been up on a ladder in forty years. I'd rather forgotten how they work."
"...Gravity," Erik says, which is a point.
"Well, physics never has been my strong suit, has it?"
"You have a Ph.D. in physics," says Erik through gritted teeth.
"Actually, it's in biophysics," Charles corrects. "And I don't any more."
Erik just stares at him, incredulously; then walks out, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Charles has a feeling he knows exactly what he's muttering about, and is grateful he didn't say it, because 'you could have broken your back, you could have broken your neck,' is not something he particularly wants to dwell on.
When Erik then proceeds to melt or smash every ladder on the premises depending on their composition, Charles considers that it to be a bit of an excessive overreaction on his part.
December 1962 (2)
"It itches," Charles says, though he's already informed Erik of this at least three other times since they've gone to bed.
"I can break the other one for you," Erik offers, having at no point during all this shown anything like sympathy towards Charles' plight (Charles is fully aware of why, of Erik's fears; but it still stings, a bit).
Charles lies there in the dark and tries to resist any more futile scratching at his cast.
*
That night, Charles dreams that there's a very large grape under his skin, moving down the back of his leg, and it hurts -
And he starts awake and it still hurts, and oh; he manages, somehow, to stumble out of bed, and thankfully the cramp releases the second he's standing, though it still leaves an awful ache behind.
"What's wrong?" Erik asks sharply.
"Nothing," Charles says. "So glad to hear that you care now."
"...What's wrong?" Erik says after a short pause; softly, this time.
"I had a cramp in my calf," Charles says, trying not to sound pathetic because really, he's happy, he really is happy to be able to feel his cramps; it's just that it's quite a bit easier to be philosophical about itching, cramping and stubbed toes after the fact. "It's gone now, so sorry to have woken you, you can commence to sleeping again now."
Erik sighs.
Once Charles is back in bed, he somehow ends up with his leg in Erik's lap, Erik kneading and massaging the hurt out of his calf. He's frowning, Charles knows, though he can't see his face in the dark, or feel anything from his mind.
"Your hands feel heavenly," Charles says, because they do, and feels that Erik's frown is slightly less frown-y upon this statement.
Just a minute or two later, Erik's hands start having an entirely different effect, and after thinking it over a moment, Charles says, "Erik, I have another itch, would you please scratch it?"
It's not a fantastic line, as lines go, ranking perhaps several notches up from 'you can fuck me' at best. But Charles has always been just a bit lazy, and his lines don't have to be good with Erik.
Erik chuckles, and Charles imagines the frown to be all gone now as one of Erik's hands start sliding up his leg, the other continuing to work on his calf. When Erik reaches Charles' knee, his hand pauses lightly on it, and he says, "...Tell me more, about my hands."
Charles does; and Erik's hand slides up and up and up.
And that's better. Though his other leg still itches.
December 1962 (2)
When Platt comes to the house to visit for the first time - bringing the blueprints for Cerebro and his daughter along with him - Charles does his absolute best to keep 'it's so adorable that you have a human friend, Erik' from showing on his face. Erik makes Charles' effort rather difficult, by speaking animatedly to the man one minute, cooling off and eying him as though he expects to be bitten the next; rinse and repeat.
Charles observes the proceedings from across the room, pretending to be enthralled by some of Hank's work lined up on the shelf (it really is brilliant, as ever, but Charles has seen it all before).
Hank himself is nowhere to be found. It's hardly surprising, considering everything; and not for the first time Charles wonders if he shouldn't have chosen differently, in this one thing. Hank has no conception of the relief his other self would have felt, at the reality of Platt's survival; this Hank knows only that he is blue, and that he is ashamed.
Charles is sufficiently distracted that it takes him by surprise when he hears a small voice say, "Hi."
Startled, he glances down to see a young girl standing in front of him. He is shocked to realize, that he knows her. Minds are more unique than even fingerprints, easily identified at any age, so that even though he first met her much later in that other life when she was in her forties at least, he knows her now in an instant.
Charles has come across any number of people he knows, these past several months, but never anyone who is younger now than they were when he first encountered them. She's the first, no doubt to be followed by others.
"...Hallo, Theresa," Charles says, in that particular voice he reserves for puppies and small children.
"Why do you have a cast?" she asks him then, cutting right to the chase as children do.
"I'm afraid I fell off a ladder," Charles says with the strangest feeling of deja vu; after all, how many times has he fielded similar questions about the chair? (As a matter of fact, 'falling off a ladder' had been one of his most often-used fibs about how he came about his injury, after he discovered that telling the truth made some of his students become much more agitated than necessary whenever Erik came to whisk him off.)
"Why were you on a ladder?"
"Because I'm a very silly old man who doesn't know what's good for me," Charles says - euphemistically, Erik's explanation being hardly suited for small pitchers.
Apparently this answer satisfactorily closes that line of questioning, because then Theresa says, "How did you know my name, anyway?"
Charles beams at her, leans down as far as he reasonably feels he can without toppling right over, and says in his most conspiratorial tone that is not the least bit condescending no matter what certain people might think, "I was so hoping you'd ask. I know your name without your saying it because I am a telepath, which means I can read your mind." When she looks skeptical on this matter, he adds, "Now, before you say 'there's no such thing as mind reading,' I can prove it. Think of a number and I'll tell you what it is. Alright?"
"...Okay, I thought of one."
Charles looks, then chuckles. "That's really quite clever of you, Theresa, but I'm afraid that 'apple' isn't a number."
Theresa's eyes go very wide, and she runs across the room back toward Platt and Erik, exclaiming, "Daddy, daddy! Guess what!"
*
The Theresa that Charles once knew neither like nor trusted mutants, which was more the usual than not when it came to his students' parents. Charles never looked to see what, exactly, the reason was in her case, because by that point in his life he thought he'd heard it all, every potential reasoning behind that sort of thing. To him it never really mattered why. The parents of his students might distrust mutants, but those with eyes opened enough to enroll their child in his school at least cared about their mutant, and in the end that was what mattered to him.
It occurs to him now, watching a little girl chatter away at her father with frequent pointing toward Charles, that if he'd looked into her mind at any length when he first met her, he would have found that her reasons came down to the story that broke in the eighties about a covered-up attack on a CIA base in 1962. She'd have been somewhere in her late twenties, early thirties when that was all over the news.
Platt laughs at something Theresa says to him; and Charles, overcome then to the point that swallowing has become laborious, swings himself out into the hallway on his crutches. He only intends to be gone a few moments, but ends up taking several minutes, long enough so that Erik ends up following to check on him.
"I know that girl," Charles says, before Erik can say 'What's wrong?' He's wearying of that, and even moreso of the way Erik looks when he says it, like he more than half expects Charles to strike him, or recoil. "That's Kitty Pryde's mother."
"...That's the one that walks through walls," Erik says.
Charles hesitates, for only a moment. He sees Erik see it, and there's that damned look he was so trying to avoid, though he knows better than to remark upon it; knows that all Erik would say is, 'Don't,' that he'd be an impossible safe to crack for the entire rest of the day.
"Yes," Charles says instead, because trusting Erik means trusting Erik all the time, and that's the only way this thing is going to work, long-term. "That's the one. Now let's go back in before they start wondering where we've gone."
*
Over the new few decades, Charles will find that some students he expects to enroll to his school don't, and that he rarely learns for certain whether they were even born this time around, or what circumstances were altered to affect the change. There are others - a surprising number - who enroll that he never knew the first time around, who may or may not have existed formerly.
Kitty Pryde, though, is one of the more confusing ones. She looks the same as he recalls, she's the same age, has the same name and the same parents and the same gift; but yet, though he can never quite put his finger on why, he's never entirely certain that she's the same girl.
October 1984 (1)
Erik's later than he intends to be, and by the time he gets there Charles isn't in his room. After considering, Erik casts around mentally until he finds the familiar shape of Charles' chair in the kitchen.
He hasn't been in Charles' kitchen for the better part of a decade, and as a result gets turned around twice in the halls on his way there.
"You're up early," he remarks when he arrives - knowing that Charles will have sensed him coming, so that to stand in the doorway to watch him without being noticed isn't an option (much as Erik enjoys that particular activity).
Charles doesn't so much as glance up from his newspaper. "It's more like late, really; I haven't slept. I'd rather given up on you for today, you know."
Erik doesn't respond to this, distracted now by realizing he can't feel any of the knives in the knife block on the kitchen counter. He walks over and pulls one of the knives out, turns it over in his hands as he regards the blade.
"...Ceramic, Charles?" he says, trying not to sound plaintive.
It doesn't work.
"Erik, really," Charles says, "if I were worried about your killing me with my own knives, what earthly reason would I have for going around in a metal wheelchair?"
That's a point. Erik grimaces at the knife and slides it back into the block with its equally offensive fellows.
"No," Charles continues, "I only purchased the ceramic ones because they're better than the stainless steel ones I had previously."
Erik stares at Charles in disbelief because now - now Charles is not only insulting Erik, but insulting metal, and he can't allow that to stand. "There's nothing better than stainless steel."
Charles waves a hand at him, then takes a sip of his coffee. "Of course you'd say that. But I don't equip my kitchen with your convenience in mind, I hope you know."
Erik does know - it's just one of the many symptoms of the problem with Charles - and when he hides his hurt this time, he's marginally more successful than the last time, at least in that Charles misreads the cause.
"At any rate, even if you did decide to muck around with my chair, I could drop you dead in a second." Charles pauses a moment, then adds, "With my mind," as though Erik would have missed the implication without Charles hand-feeding it to him.
"Should I have brought the helmet?" Erik asks, dryly.
"Good god, no. My eyes," Charles says, which is exactly what Erik expected him to say. He closes his newspaper, folds it once, then unfolds it and says, "Would you care for some breakfast before we head out? French toast, perhaps?"
Erik considers; the idea of Charles cooking him breakfast is appealing. "What about your students?"
Charles chuckles. "No need to worry, Erik. It's Saturday."
Erik doesn't know what this has to do with anything. "Screaming gives me a headache," he says.
"Erik. It is Saturday. They are teenagers. Not one of them will be up and about for at least another five or six hours, if not halfway through the afternoon."
"...French toast would be acceptable," Erik allows.
"Wonderful! The whisk is in that drawer there -" Charles points "- and the mixing bowls are in that cupboard -" more pointing "- along with the skillets."
Erik considers further and decides that the idea of cooking Charles breakfast is in fact more appealing than the reverse, even if it involves more stooping than Erik is accustomed to.
"I'm not entirely certain about this, so don't hold me to it, but I believe we may have some turkey sausage left in the fridge, if you'd like some," Charles says.
Erik grins and starts rummaging through the cabinets. Although he won't fool himself by thinking that Charles stocking turkey sausage means anything significant, it has to mean something. He'll take what he can get.
in the late 90s sometime (2)
“I never had high blood pressure the last time,” Erik points out as he backs them out of their parking space.
“I think it’s quite likely you did,” Charles says, “considering you used to sweat like a pig then, too.”
In a former life, Erik might (would) have been charmed that Charles had noticed. But in this life, he ignores him for the rest of the drive home.
a year or two later (2)
“You never had arthritis in your knees the last time,” Erik points out as he backs them out of their parking space (maybe a different one, and maybe not).
“It’s hardly comparable,” Charles says, “so do shut up about it.” Then, a few minutes later: “I’ve decided to be philosophical about it.”
‘Philosophical’ is, of course, Charles for ‘I’m going to whine and groan about it continually, until it gets bad. And then stop.’