Title: Return to Rehoboth
Fandom: X-Men First Class
Length: 789
Pairing: Erik/Charles
Content notes: no warnings apply
Author note: part of my Patterns of Light noir AU; thanks to kalypso and owl_by_night for helpful advice and encouragement with this one.
Summary: Erik's driving as fast as he dares, but everything feels slowed down, like something in a nightmare.



Erik’s driving as fast as he dares, but everything feels slowed down, like something in a nightmare. He’s got to be in time. Get to Charles before Shaw and Frost do. Can’t let himself think about the alternative.

All those years of summers at the beach, ever since he was a kid, traveling this road with Edie: the Bay Bridge, the Delaware coast. Rehoboth. And then he’d gone there with Charles, in a spring so cold it felt like winter. The images twist and untwist in his head as the road unfurls in front of him.

Charles pulling him close under the covers in the hotel room, the two of them clinging together, teeth chattering, laughing about the snow outside, then not laughing, staring at each other and breathing hard. Kissing as if they’d never stop, as if there could never be enough of this.

How can he remember that now, when Charles supposedly wiped his memory?

Ask him, why don’t you?, a voice in his head jeers. If you get there in time.

Shaw and Frost have to take the back roads, avoid the roadblocks. He’s got his badge, so the cops should wave him through. It’s a slim chance, but it’s all he’s got.

The sound of the toll machine for the Bay Bridge makes him think of that cramped seaside photobooth with the two of them kissing and making out, the whirr of the machine spitting out the shiny strip of pictures as Charles squirmed in his lap, grinding his ass against Erik’s hard-on, and bit down hard at the curve of his neck and shoulder.

Another image: the two of them back in his apartment in DC. Looking up from The Once and Future King to find Charles watching him with such open hunger, unashamed and irresistible. Marking his place with the strip of photographs, putting the book down, getting up and crossing the room and taking Charles in his arms.

A blare of sirens cuts through his reverie. Three weeks of being with Charles, and then he's standing at Moss's bedside in the hospital. Moss swathed in bandages, hardly able to speak. How was it that Erik had kept that memory, when all the rest had been taken from him?

You consented, MacTaggert said. More than consented, insisted.

Photographs on her desk. Shaw with his hands all over Charles. Hating them both, hating himself for wanting Shaw’s lover. But MacTaggert said Charles denied it -

A truck comes out of nowhere, missing him by inches. Watch the road, you fool.

He doesn’t know what’s real any more, how to separate memories from dreams or imagination.

Standing in the hallway of a strange building. Knots in his stomach from anger and self-loathing. A suitcase in his hand, not his, full of Charles’s things. Knocking on the door so hard he’d skinned his knuckles. Charles, pale and silent, answering the door and letting him in. Another suitcase on the bed, open, half-packed. Getting ready to go to Shaw. To go back to Shaw, Erik thought then. Bile in his throat. Handing Charles the suitcase, not looking at him. Saying “Here’s your stuff. I’ve cleared everything out.”

But he hadn’t, had he? The photobooth pictures were still there, waiting to ambush him and blow this pretence wide open. He tries to summon up the memory of clearing his apartment but there’s nothing. No way of knowing if he’d kept them on purpose or if it was an accident.

Edie would have said there’s no such thing as accident. (Don’t think about Edie now, you can’t.)

The familiar signs flash past: route 50, route 404, the Georgetown circle. Getting close now.

Even the memories he knew he had don't look the same any more. Standing outside the crooked house in New Orleans, just days ago, waiting for Moira’s star witness. That was the meeting he thought was their first. Stopping Xavier in the street with a hand on his shoulder, telling him he had to pack a bag and leave right now.

His mind is full of the things he said to Charles then, despising him. Gritting his teeth to stay polite, not to show his contempt too plainly for Shaw’s pretty, spoilt little fucktoy. Making his mind deliberately blank. Fucking telepath, don’t give him anything to play with. You can’t trust them an inch.

The things he needs to say now, if only he's in time: I'm sorry. I love you. I shouldn't have let you go.

He turns the corner fast into Theresa's street, not even sure if that's where Charles has gone but he has to start somewhere.

The sound hits him a split second before Kitty bursts through the front wall of the house, screaming.