Title: in the darkness, the trees are full of starlight
Fandom: XMFC
Rating: PG-13
Length: <400 words
Content notes: none
Summary: Erik has memories of things that never happened.

Erik has memories of things that never happened.

It's one of the benefits of having a telepathic lover. At first it was just a game: lying side by side, eyes closed, not touching, and Charles creating detailed telepathic scenes for the two of them to share. They would both be left panting and exhausted and sated without having moved much if at all -- except for the times Erik, laughing at the absurdity of it all, interrupted by rolling over onto Charles and taking over physically what they'd started mentally.

But then Cuba -- and Charles, eyes fever-bright with pain, looking up at a helmeted Erik and saying no -- and Erik standing and walking away from the best thing in his life -- and everything changed.

Some rifts never close; some wounds cannot heal. But some, given time, can.

It took years for Charles and Erik to reconnect, longer still to them to speak civilly, eons until they were cautious friends again. The trust between them had shattered, the love splintered, but slowly they wove themselves back together into something that was warped with scars and regret but no less strong than what they’d had before.

And sometimes, on a quiet evening, Erik would take off his helmet, and Charles would reach out with his mind, and they would be together a while. Sometimes for wild primal sex, made more desperate by the gulf between them; sometimes for slower, more tortuous lovemaking, until Erik would be breathless from the litany of begging inside his mind; sometimes just for connecting in a more basic sense, lying tangled together and staring up at the stars.

None of its real in a technical sense -- when Charles breaks the connection, they are once again alone from each other, sometimes even on opposite sides of the world -- but Charles is a skilled enough telepath, strong enough and deft enough, that it feels like reality; Erik can sometimes feel the lingering warm echoes of Charles’s touch on his skin. And even though Erik would much rather have Charles with him, both in the sense of being on the same side of the inevitable mutant-human conflicts and in the sense of being physically there, he prefers this to the long lonely absence when Charles wasn't in his life at all.

Erik remembers.