Title: Jalousied
Fandom: X-Men First Class
Length: 425 words
Content notes: references to somnophilia
Rating: R
Author's note: part of the Patterns of Light series
Summary: Charles thinks of waking in that motel room, only days ago but it feels like years, with the early morning sun coming through the blinds.



The afternoon sun casts stripes of shadow through the blinds, falling across the floor and the bed. Charles thinks of waking in that motel room, only days ago but it feels like years, with the early morning sun coming through the blinds.

Waking with his mind full of confused images he didn’t recognize at first as Erik’s fantasies. Bare skin striped with light and warmth: at once felt and seen, experienced and imagined. Erik staring at his naked back, wanting to trace those patterns of light with his tongue. Imagining the taste of salt on Charles’s skin, the heat of him.

Charles felt the stare before he saw it, before he opened his eyes and saw Erik, fully clothed and sitting on the hard chair by the window, striped with sunlight and shadow. Erik’s face, intent and serious, gazing at him. Nothing to show the riot of images in his mind that had made Charles cry out on waking, a desire so strong that Charles could almost feel the shock of Erik’s tongue against his flesh in that intimate caress.

Joy and rage flared up together at the knowledge that Erik still wanted him. Wanted him even thinking he was a stranger, thinking of him only as Shaw’s lover, as an assignment, a means to an end. Wanted him so much that it left no room for other emotions. That would come later, like an echo of the emotions Charles had locked away in Erik’s mind, at his insistence.

He knows he shouldn’t be lying here thinking about all that, but he’s too exhausted to push the memories away: Erik’s scalding anger, his incredulous disgust when he found out why MacTaggert wanted to recruit Charles for the undercover mission.

“What does he have to do with Shaw?” Erik wouldn’t even look at Charles. Spoke to MacTaggert as if Charles wasn’t in the room.

“There was a party at his house last summer,” Charles said, his gut clenching at the recollection. “He made it clear he was – interested.”

How stupid he’d been, to think he could turn down Sebastian Shaw’s advances with impunity. He’d tried to get out of it gracefully, saying it wouldn’t be fair to his date for the party if he went off to have sex with the host, though in truth he hardly knew the man who’d brought him. He should have known it wouldn’t end there.

Charles stares at the bars of sunlight and shadow till the colours dance in front of his eyes, and tries to think of nothing.