Title: Twenty-two Isn't What It Used to Be
Fandom: XMFC
Rating: R
Length: ~1800 words
Content notes: Mpreg. Depression.
Author notes: Written for the "the other side" challenge. Takes place in my Father of the Bride AU. (No knowledge of the film or the other fics in this series is necessary to read this.) Thanks so much to firstlightofeos for beta'ing. This fic is set around 1990-1991.
Summary: When Erik is six months pregnant with Lorna, Charles gets shot at a rally.



Erik's about six months along, and this whole pregnancy thing is going just fine. Better than fine: it's going great. He loves looking at himself in the mirror, taking in the changes in his body from what has to be the coolest secondary mutation ever. He loves going out in public like this, talking loudly about his last doctor's visit so everyone around him knows he's not just fat. He loves having sex with Charles two or three times a day because he's horny all the time and Charles can't get enough of him. Life's never been better.

Then Charles gets shot at the rally.

*

He'll remember it only in flashes: the sound Charles makes, a gasp instead of a scream (wouldn't you think it'd be a scream?); the asphalt digging into his knees, Charles' blood slick between his fingers; the glassy look in Charles' eyes, some voice Erik doesn't recognize saying "don't you dare don't you dare I can't do this by myself I mean I could but I don't want to don't you dare"; a different voice, later, saying "you shouldn't have moved him" in the same breath as "you probably saved his life."

He'll remember everything about the wait at the hospital. Long hours sitting in one of those stupid chairs until he has to get up and stretch or pace or run to the bathroom for the fifteenth time. Sharon showing up piss-drunk two hours in, leaving thirty minutes later saying she can't do this. (Charles will forgive her, someday; Erik won't.) The doctors refusing to tell Erik anything so he has to hear it all through Raven. (For the first time in his life, Erik isn't as loud about it as he could be, for fear they'll take it out on Charles. He wants to gag on the taste of his own silence.)

*

Erik's never seen anything more beautiful than Lorna in Charles' arms, minutes after she's born. It would be a great picture anyway, her full head of still-damp green hair, her eyes squinted shut, her little hand grasping Charles' index finger. But Charles is grinning at Erik when he's not beaming at her, and that makes it twice as great. He almost looks like Charles again. He still looks tired, there are still huge shadows under his eyes, he's still way skinnier than he should be, but Erik thinks maybe the hard part's over now.

*

Lorna comes home when she's two days old.

"Home" is a ground-floor apartment in the same building they were in before, renovated over the past couple months so that Charles will actually be able to get around. Erik spent weeks fighting the landlord over the more extreme renovations. Then he got the quote on them and spent days fighting with Sharon over whether he'd let her pay for everything. When the bank turned down his request for a loan, he'd still wanted to tell her no, no to all of this, just on principle. But Charles needed to be able to get around. You never knew when he might decide he felt like burning ramen noodles in Erik's favorite pot. Anyway, at least he'd managed to convince her not to buy them a house.

*

For the first couple weeks, Erik's mom and Charles' sister visit almost every day to check on things. For a while after that, it's every other day, then every few days. They really are a big help, except Erik has to grit his teeth and pretend he's not irked that his mom criticizes every damn thing he does with Lorna. (She also gives him a running commentary while she picks up around the living room. He's not sorry when she downgrades to mostly phone calls.)

When people stop coming over so much, Charles stops getting out of bed. Erik probably should have seen it coming. He'd noticed Charles sleeping in way later than he used to, and going to bed earlier, but he'd figured he was still recovering and needed his sleep.

Now that it's just the three of them, Charles no longer even pretends to cope. If no one's coming over and he doesn't have an appointment, he doesn't bother to make the effort. He'd probably blow off his doctor, his physical therapist and his shrink if he didn't know he'd end up with Raven on his ass for it.

*

A few weeks of this, and Erik feels like Charles is drowning, close enough to see but still way out of reach; and Erik's up to his neck in the ocean, too, with no idea how to swim and no boat, no lifejacket, no nothing. All he can do is stay there watching, treading water, powerless to save him.

*

One day, Erik's trying to get Charles out of bed. He's not cooperating at all, no matter how much Erik threatens, wheedles, or even begs. It's the fourth day in a row he's done this, and Erik is so, so tired of it. He's tired all the time anyway, but Lorna's been colicky lately, keeping him up most of the night for the past few nights, so it's even worse than usual.

"Why should I? So I can sit?" Charles asks, with a bitter little laugh that isn't really a laugh. It's at least the third time today he's said it. It's got to be the hundredth time he's said it over the past few weeks.

Lorna starts crying in the other room. Erik's going to go take care of it as soon as Charles gets into the goddamned wheelchair — but Charles keeps being stubborn, and she keeps crying, and pretty soon Erik throws his hands in the air.

"You know what? You can deal with that," he says, before storming out of the apartment and going for a drive. It takes him forty-five minutes to even start calming down; he's not sure what would have happened, or what he would have done if he'd stayed home. As it is, he takes his aggression out on the road, going way above the speed limit and cutting off everyone who gets in his way.

On his way home, he comes this close to rear-ending some guy at a stoplight.

When he pulls back into his parking space, he's half-convinced (or maybe he's just hoping) that when he walks in the door, he'll find that Charles really did get up out of bed to take care of Lorna. Maybe this will have been the push he needed.

But Charles is still in bed. The baby's still crying. Erik changes her, soothes her, feeds her, burps her, then ends up changing her again.

By the time she's happy and quiet, he's decided against taking her and going to stay at his mom's for a while. He's thought about it. He's thought about it the whole time he was driving around. He already can't believe he even considered it. What kind of person does that make him? An asshole, that's what. A coward. He doesn't know when he became the kind of person who'd rather run away than stand and fight.

He carries Lorna into the bedroom and climbs under the covers beside Charles.

"Do you want to hold her?" he asks. He doesn't wait for an answer before handing her over. "Go see Dad."

Erik watches them; he can't tell if it's helping or not. He wishes he knew, one way or the other. Lorna's babbling now; she's getting so big, so fast. Charles doesn't seem to see her even when she's right in front of him. He's missing everything. Erik wishes he knew what to do or say to get him back, to fix it, to make things okay again. But he doesn't.

When Lorna gets cranky, he gets up and puts her down for a nap. Then he comes back in and stands beside the bed and says, "Okay. Okay. You need to get up now."

*

There's no one turning point, no specific thing that changes things. Nothing Erik will be able to point at later and say, "There. That's what it was. Everything was okay after that." He'll always know: whatever it was that changed things, it wasn't anything he did.

*

One night, Erik gets into bed and waves the lights off. A minute later, he's already starting to drift off when Charles' fingers brush his arm.

"You should come over here," Charles says.

He's barely let Erik near him since the shooting, not unless he actually needs help — but now he lets Erik touch his arms, his chest, his upper back and shoulders. When Charles reaches into his boxers, Erik sobs his orgasm into his neck, coming hard and way, way too soon.

Charles doesn't invite Erik over to his side of the bed again for almost two weeks after that first time. Erik doesn't push it; he does enough pushing for them both during the day.

*

One day, Erik wakes up around noon, freaking out that he didn't hear Lorna crying. He lurches out of bed in a panic, only to find her with Charles in the living room, asleep with her head on his shoulder as he rubs her back. Charles still has his nightshirt on, but he's brushed his hair. There's a half-empty bottle of formula and a mostly-empty bowl of cereal on the coffee table.

Charles looks over and sees him. "Hi."

"Hey," Erik says.

Charles spends five days of the following week refusing to get out of bed, which is the worst he's been in a while — but out of all the bright spots, this is the one Erik hangs on to.

*

On the night Charles' mind brushes his for the first time since before, Erik sobs for real, choking out, "I love you. I love you so much."

He's missed Charles. Oh, God, he's missed Charles so much. He hadn't even realized how alone he'd felt inside his own head until now.

"I've missed you, too," Charles says quietly.

*

One day, years from now, Erik will have a moment where he suddenly realizes that things are okay — that things are better than okay — that things are actually pretty great. That they have been for a long time now. That while he could look back and sort of see where things went from being completely awful to being okay some of the time, he can't remember when things started being just...okay. It's like having a headache all day, then waking up the next morning and not even realizing the pain is gone until sometime in the afternoon.

He'll realize this, and it'll feel so surreal that the only thing he'll be able to do is go track Charles down, climb into his lap, and start kissing his neck.

"What's gotten into you?" Charles will ask, laughing and vibrant and Charles.

"Let's skip the movie tonight," Erik will say. "Let's drop Lorna off at Mom's like we were going to, then come back here and get freaky."

Charles will frown at him, and when he insists that he really does want to see this particular film, Erik will give in with less of a fight than usual, even though he still doesn't get what's so great about Steve Martin.