Title: Goodbye, Cuba
Author: aisle_one
Fandom: XMFC
Pairing: Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~2000
Warnings: ableism, alcohol use
Author notes: For the fan_flashworks "self-portrait" challenge.
Summary: This is no happily ever after and it takes some time for Charles to adjust.

Charles rubs the mirror, at his reflection, and examines his fingertips. Strange. He looks back up and rubs his face, the stubble on his jaw rough. Coarse. “I think I’m disappearing.”

_


He can’t remember where he’s put it. He pulls the drawer harder, struggling to free it from where it’s caught in the back. He wins the battle when it rolls off, finally, and goes crashing to the floor. He’d kick it if he could. He bends down – too far. He sighs and maneuvers his chair. Minutes pass until it accommodates him. Closer now, he tosses each item out with reckless indifference: rubber band, notepad, pens, a roll of tape, more rubber bands. It’s not here. His eyes flash from this upended drawer to another and several more scattered around the room, to a fallen chair and a broken tumbler that had held two fingers of whiskey until Charles had thrown it against the wall. There’s a golden puddle where most of it fell, sharp spikes of glass glittering in the liquid.

“Fuck it,” Charles mutters and wheels backward. He crashes into the cupboard and curses again. It’s awhile before he manages past the door and out, into the hallway.

_


It’s not a picture he remembers taking. Flecks of copper catch in the sun, rendering Erik’s hair color more complex in the still frame. The lens is focused on him like a lover, attentive to every detail, every tired line and crease in his face. A cigarette hangs between his teeth. He’s looking straight into the camera, eyes like steel, determined.

“Do something you think you can’t. Something that would surprise you…or me,” Charles had urged.

How long had it taken him, Charles wonders, to tinker with the camera’s anatomy before he was able to capture this. He fingers the edges of the photograph.

Well done, my friend.

_


Charles wakes grasping at air. It sticks to his throat and he coughs, scrambling and trying desperately to move. It’s not until he’s half off the bed and upside down, clinging to the sheets and for dear life that he remembers – then reprimands himself because how could he forget. He drags himself up with a lot of difficulty, hating how it takes so much effort. When he’s burrowed again underneath the blankets, sweat drying at his temples, he sniffs into his pillow. Patience tastes like two days old whiskey on his dry lips.

_


No one visits. Not after he sends Moira away, then Hank, Sean and Alex, delegating to them the project of finding other mutants, wrapping his earnest pleas to be careful in promises that he would do the same and get the mansion ready for when they returned. They call. Sometimes, he answers the phone.

He picks at blueprints of Cerebro as he pours himself another drink. It’s still morning; today, he manages it. Hank’s new design is brilliant, more refined than the previous model. He has ideas of where they might build it and considers a trip to the cellar to inspect the space – ah, but then the stairs. Never mind.

The glass is cold against his mouth.

_


The next time he spies himself in the mirror, he is shivering and naked, his arms braced against the weight of his own body as he’s pulling himself out of the stall. His face is half-covered in a beard gone unmanageable from weeks of purposeful neglect. He is so startled he almost lets go of the bar above his head, gravity teasing at his precarious position, caught midway to his chair. He recovers in time and avoids the slip.

Awful, awful, awful.

_


His feet are propped on the metal plank of his wheelchair, where his feet would also be if he was sitting on it. The floor is hard and cold under his back. A half-empty bottle of Glenlivet is an arm’s reach away, close to his hips. He hums something that vaguely resembles an old English tune he’d learned from his third nanny. Ethel. She’d been his favorite. Still is. The rest of the song whittles away, along with his memory.

Lyrics, perhaps? Something he could sing aloud. He flips through his mental catalogue of songs and finds it pathetically lacking. Titles are easy, stanzas less so. But one stirs his recollection.

Sha la…baby it’s…

“Oh, bloody –” hell, he finishes in a good swig of reliable Scottish charm, propped on his elbows. He lies back down and thumps at his chest. “Now, then, Charlie boy,” he booms at the ceiling in a passable impression of his deceased stepfather, “let’s try it again.”

Sha la…

“La la la.” He grins and claps his arms. “Yes, yes!”

It’s not the way you smile that touched my heart.

“Sha la la la,” Charles sings softly.

_


“It’s not the way you kiss that tears me apart,” Charles joins in.

At the stoplight, Erik turns to look at him, grinning and with a wicked gleam in his eyes.

“What?”

“You’re tone deaf.”

“Wha – I’m.” His face heats up and he reaches for the radio, turning the knob past even the capacity of his eardrums. He winces and lowers the volume back down to bearable. “No such thing,” he mutters into his shoulder, blinking at the passing scenery as Erik shifts back to drive. The song continues, but he doesn’t open his mouth again.

Beside him, Erik suddenly erupts in a loud wail. “You should hear what they say about yooooooou,” he croons in a terrible parody, voice breaking when he attempts the higher notes. “They say you never, ever ever been true, ohoohohhhohhh.” He steals one of Charles’s hands off his lap and clutches it to his chest.

Charles feigns horror at first, but then surrenders to a fit of laughter when Erik perseveres and refuses to let Charles’s hand go despite a ferocious tug-of-war, and doubles over when Erik waves at a trucker peering down at them, his brows furrowed in confusion.

“Oh, dear,” Charles says, wiping at his eyes. At the chorus, he joins Erik, who kisses each of his knuckles –

_


“Baby, it’s you,” Charles sings, clutching at the Glenlivet, cradled in the crook of his arm. He glances past his shoulder. Used glasses crowd the sink and most of the counter surface surrounding it. There are none left in the cupboards.

Charles’s stomach growls. Bread. There are several slices left. And butter. There’s butter in the otherwise empty refrigerator. The next delivery of groceries won’t arrive for another two days. He’ll have to pull himself up to sitting and considers it: from the floor to the wheelchair and then he'll have to roll himself to the fridge; and from there to the cupboard, then to the kitchen counter and possibly back to the drawer where the knives are because he’d forgotten; and – decides against all of it.

“Who needs to eat, anyway, when I’ve got you.” He raises the bottle above his head and shakes it. The sound of liquid splashing, coating the inside curves of the bottle in amber before dripping back down to collect in a pool, closer now to the bottom, is a comfort. “‘Cause baby, it’s...”

_


“You,” Charles says, triumphant. “Finally.” He finds it where he should have looked in the first place: in Erik’s old drawer in their shared bathroom. He peers at himself in the mirror. Good lord. He looks like someone with half his teeth and subscribed to the practice of clubbing one’s mate and dragging him by the hair, all the way back to the cave – or the other way around, perhaps. He tugs at the uneven waves sticking to the back of his neck. It’s certainly long enough.

The boys will return in a few days and it isn’t just the mansion that needs scrubbing, from head to floor, toe to ceiling.

He reaches across the sink and fusses with the levers until the water is tempered to his satisfaction. He lathers his face next, pulls up closer to the mirror and brings the razor to his face.

“Charles.”

He startles and drops the razor, cursing when it skims over one finger on its way down and cuts it. “Shit,” Charles mutters, clutching his finger and quickly wrapping it in toilet paper. It’s hardly an injury, but it hurts like hell and it’s gushing an unbelievable amount of blood.

Erik. Erik. He’s frozen at the door, his mouth open. “I –” he says. It’s all that comes out.

“What, why – you…” Charles is just as speechless, shocked into it by Erik’s sudden appearance. As this sinks in he remembers that he’s almost nude, dressed down to his boxers. He looks around desperately, but the nearest thing is a hand towel and the rest are in random piles on the floor in his bedroom, a hasty trail that stops close to Erik’s feet. “Could you –” he points at a crumpled bed sheet “ – please?”

Erik moves swiftly. “Of course.” He picks up the sheet, hesitates, and at Charles’s nod rushes forward again.

“Thank you,” Charles says, adjusting it over his legs. He still looks ridiculous, but at least he’s got some bit of his dignity back. He looks up at Erik staring down at his covered legs and stiffens. Erik catches it and flinches, his eyes quick to find Charles’s.

“I,” Erik says again. He swallows. “I didn’t know. Not until.” He sighs, raises his hands up in surrender and taps at his helmet.

Charles narrows his eyes, but says, “Fine. I won’t.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Erik takes the helmet off and kneels before him. He dares a tentative tug at Charles’s hand and when Charles doesn’t resist, he lifts it the rest of the way, gathers two fingers together to his temple. “Just until I say so?”

“Why?”

“Because –” Erik closes his eyes.

I don’t know how else.

When Mystique – when, finally, she’d learned herself – had come to him with the news, shaking with rage and tears and a fresh, new grief, he’d launched a bullet into the wall and ricocheted it the floor, to the ceiling, then to the wall, again, and into a door, from surface to surface until the inside of his motel room was pockmarked with holes. He didn’t care about the damage, or the police that showed up soon after, the threat of being smoked out from hiding.

He ran from it. He'd kept running until he couldn’t.

Some things are –

Too difficult for words. For some things, there are none. The enormity of some hopes, some fears, some emotions swallows them in all of their inadequacy. And this – this is too wretched, too heart-splitting… To find him, now, near naked, paler than he remembers and too thin, oozing a distillery from his pores, as absurd as the Christian myth he resembles, half his face obscured by white cream, but –

Those damn freckles.

Charles laughs, chokes a little on it.

Blatant and in stark relief under the harsh fluorescent lights of the bathroom, they dot his arms, his shoulders, as familiar to him by sight as by touch, beauty in their random pattern, and this is Charles – Charles in a wheelchair.

Regret is the bullet he carries in his pocket.   And the only thing that comes to him, that he can think to say is –

“I’m sorry.”

Erik lowers Charles’s hand, kisses each of his knuckles and returns it to Charles’s lap. His eyelashes are wet.

Finally, Charles says, “Could you? Maybe – ” He gestures to the razor.  Erik picks it up off the floor. “Is it all right if we do it this way? This time?” Erik asks, his fingers light under Charles’s chin as he tilts it up.  “Yes,” Charles says, holding onto Erik’s wrist, feeling the pulse there, squeezing briefly before letting go. “Yes.”