Title: Unlocked
Fandom: X-Men First Class (noir AU)
Rating: R
Length: 1000
Content notes: some ableist language/responses
Author note: part of the Patterns of Light series; this is not quite the end, but we're getting there...
Summary: “I want it back,” Erik says. “All of it.”



The hospital room is hot and sticky, even with the electric fan going full blast. Charles is exhausted from the seemingly endless round of tests the doctors insisted on after the operation, days and days of them until the final sombre conversation with the consultant neurologist today. He’d sent Erik away after that, needing to be alone so he could shake and cry with no one to see him. Needing not to have to hold it together for anyone else.

Erik came back a few hours later, pale but determined. “Don’t shut me out, Charles.”

“I’m not!” Charles snaps.

“No?” Erik’s lips tighten. “It sure as hell looks that way.”

Christ, Charles doesn’t have the energy for this. “I needed to be alone for a while, that’s all,” he says, struggling to rein in his temper.

It’s not fair. Erik has no idea what this is like. Why should Charles have to be reasonable about it? Erik’s not the one whose life just got irretrievably wrecked.

“I told MacTaggert I quit,” Erik says, as if in answer to Charles’s thought. Which Charles certainly didn’t intend to broadcast, and doesn’t think he did.

Charles stares at him in disbelief. “You – what?”

“I quit,” Erik says. “I can’t do this any more.”

Charles isn’t trying to read his mind, but he can’t help picking up flashes of that conversation with MacTaggert, Erik saying “I crossed a line. We crossed a line.”

The first one, meaning what he did with Charles when he thought he was Shaw’s boy. But the we who crossed a line isn’t Erik and Charles, it’s Erik and MacTaggert. He’s talking about what they did, sending Charles to Shaw like that.

“I want it back,” Erik says. “All of it.” He gestures to his head, as if Charles could mistake his meaning.

The whirr of the electric fan is loud in the silence that follows. Charles wipes the back of his hand across his forehead, feeling quietly sick. He’s never done this before, locking someone’s memories away, and he doesn’t know what will happen when he tries to reverse it.

Erik knows now why he did it; MacTaggert told him, before the news of Shaw and Emma’s escape sent him racing to find Charles, to rescue him. Erik said he’s not leaving. But what if Charles can’t undo what he did? Or if he can, but Erik finds he can’t forgive him after all, changes his mind about wanting to be with him?

There’s reason enough for that anyway, Charles thinks miserably. Erik didn’t know when he said it that Charles wouldn’t be able to walk again. Why should Erik, who could have anyone he wanted, want to stay with him, like this?

But whatever Erik decides, he needs to do it in the full knowledge of what happened between them. Of what they had, what they lost. And if the gap between that and what they could have now is more than Erik can bear, Charles is not going to beg him to stay.

“OK,” he says, and touches his fingers to his temple. He can’t let himself touch Erik, not yet. Not when he doesn’t know if Erik’s staying for real.

He’d imagined a door in Erik’s mind, like the door of a safe. The door cracked when Erik found the strip of photographs from Rehoboth, but it’s still in place. He imagines the slow turn of the dials this way and that, feeling his way with care.

After he’d locked those memories away, he’d watched Erik walk out of MacTaggert’s office without a backward glance. Charles was nothing to him, not even a stranger to be looked at out of curiosity. He might as well have been invisible.

The way Erik looks at him now, fierce hunger and wariness, makes Charles’s throat tight. What if he can’t do this? What if it’s too much for Erik? What if it works and Erik decides he wants to leave for good?

Get on with it, he tells himself. You owe him the truth, whatever he does with that. Give it to him now.

He twists at the imaginary dial.

Erik gasps and clutches his head, doubling up in pain.

It’s like a flood coming through a space too small to hold it. Charles feels it in his own head, the force and pressure of that rush of memories. He breathes hard as Erik shakes and cries out. Charles can’t control it, can’t make it stop or slow down. Images of the jazz club, of Rehoboth, the two of them staggering along the boulevard in the snow, making out in the photobooth, fucking in the hotel room, cooking and kissing and arguing about politics and playing chess in Erik’s apartment. Charles in his lap, riding him. Charles on his knees in the shower sucking him off, Erik gasping and bracing himself against the tiles. The two of them ravenous for each other, falling into bed together over and over again. And then the phone call summoning Erik to the hospital. Charles's hand on Erik's arm, trying to comfort him unobtrusively. Standing at the bedside of Erik's friend and fellow agent, Ray Fletcher Moss, his body swathed head to foot in bandages like a mummy after his escape from Shaw.
MacTaggert’s office with the photographs on the desk, image after image of Charles and Shaw…

The rush of Erik’s emotions – panic and rage and pain and longing, the ferocity of desire – batters at Charles till he’s faint with it. He grips the bedrail to keep from falling. And then it drops, as suddenly as it came, leaving only flickering aftershocks.

Erik’s hands drop to his side. He straightens up, breathing raggedly.

Charles’s face is wet with tears. He puts up a hand to wipe them away, but Erik leans over and brushes his fingers across Charles’s cheeks. His touch is careful, gentle, as if he’s holding himself in check.

“Erik – ” Charles begins.

“It’s all right, Charles. I’m not going anywhere.”