daphnasworld replied to your post “help hElp HELP OH MY GOD. I’m back at work and everyone is still on...”
maybe an Soulmate AU? Both still Teenagers, something cute and full of fluff. :)
soooooo I wrote the first part of this thing, and then came back to the prompt and realized you wanted fluff...so I wrote more and...well...yeah. There's not much fluff in this. BUT LET'S JUST SAY IT ENDS WITH THE DEFINITE POSSIBILITY OF LOTS OF FLUFF IN THE FUTURE??? (I dig this verse a lot and will most likely be writing more in it :DD) Thanks for the prompt!
***
Erik remembers the moment his bond ignited because it hurt more than Sebastian Shaw punching him in the face. One moment there was a fist looming in his peripheral vision, the next his veins twisted and lit up like an electric shock. The punch knocked him to the ground, but the bond kept him there writhing in agony, clutching at his chest where it felt like his heart was tunneling toward the surface of his skin.
Ever the opportunists, Shaw and his friends began to kick him in the ribs. They laughed when Erik began to weep, not knowing that the tears were because of the swell of crystal emotion pouring over him, a pure hope and joy that Erik had never experienced before, entirely disorienting and overwhelming.
When it was almost too much, the pain, the tremulous, all-encompassing happiness, the door to the locker room burst open and everything stopped. When seconds ticked away with no more violence, he cautiously uncovered his head and peered up at Shaw, found his sneering face frozen as though suddenly turned to stone, his foot paused mid-kick. Erik turned incredulous, watery eyes toward the door and saw a boy standing there, his shaking fingers pressed tightly against his temple, his lips pressed together in a narrow line.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Slowly Erik stood, his eyes locked on the wide, blue gaze of the boy as he stumbled past Shaw, past his cronies, until he was standing before him. The boy was short and there was pen smudged on his lip and Erik loved him so much it frightened him. He reached out and grasped the hand that was dangling loosely at the boy’s side and felt every drop of blood in his body, every cell and atom align and settle and sing out.
“Who are you?” He asked, his voice loud and echoing over and over again off the tiles of the room.
“I’m yours,” the boy choked out, his hand gripping Erik’s tightly. He looked scared, as scared as Erik felt, and they clung to each other. “I mean—“ his face reddened, and he swallowed nervously, “I mean, I’m Charles. I’m new.”
Erik wanted to press his palm against his cheek to see if he could feel the heat beneath his skin. Instead he said,
“I’m Erik.”
Charles smiled and Erik felt his heart twist.
“Erik,” he repeated, his accent rolling over Erik’s name lovingly. He smiled wider as though the name was exactly what he wanted to hear.
Erik felt hopelessly and utterly bound to him. He’d always rejected the idea of soulmates because he never wanted to belong to anyone; had believed that the bond was a kinder form of slavery. And yet in this moment he wanted to collapse into Charles and never let him go. It terrified him.
“I’m yours too,” he replied, his voice cracking. “I don’t even know you.”
Charles lowered his fingers from his temple and clasped Erik’s hands in both of his.
“It’s okay,” he said, “We have all the time in the world to get to know one another.” He smiled again, beautiful and bright and Erik felt another pulse of joy wash over him. Inside his head a voice whispered,
Don’t be afraid. You’re not alone anymore.
Yes, Erik agreed, allowing Charles to pull him gently from the bathroom and out into the bustle of the hallway. I’ll never be alone again.
He pretended that the dread he felt belonged to Charles, or to someone else entirely.
***
“Is it…” Charles trailed off and Erik suppressed a surge of frustration. He bent closer to his textbook and hoped that Charles would get the hint.
Charles, despite the fact that he claimed to know everything about Erik and that their thoughts and emotions were eternally tangled together, remained irritatingly obtuse.
“Is it because I’m not a girl?”
Erik looked up at him, surprised. Charles’ gaze was fixated on his notebook. On top of his calculus equations he was scratching a pencil back and forth, digging a grey line deeper and deeper into the paper.
“What?”
He watched as Charles chewed at his bottom lip.
“Is that why you don’t want me? Because you’re not...because you only like girls?”
Erik rolled his eyes and refocused his attention on trigonometry.
“Charles, please. You of all people should know I’m gay.”
Charles’ pencil snapped in half and Erik jumped as he threw both pieces across the table.
“Then what is it?” He snapped, loudly enough to attract the attention of a group of students sitting at the table next to them.
When Erik looked up at him again, his face was red and blotchy, his eyebrows twisted together. Erik had never felt Charles emote anything less than calm and serenity, but now his distress was echoing so loudly between them that it nearly overwhelmed him, like the opening of a flood gate.
Charles looked down at his hands, overly aware, as always, that they were attracting the attention of others.
“What is it about me that you hate so much?”
Erik sputtered for a moment, trying to untangle Charles’ emotions from his own.
“You didn’t--I don’t hate you?”
Charles’ fingers twisted into his notebook, crumpling the paper. The red flush had spread down to his throat and into the open collar of his sweater.
“You forget, Erik, that not only can I feel everything you’re feeling, but I can hear everything you think too--”
“I never asked for that!” Erik exploded, thumping his hands down on the table. “How do you think I feel, knowing that I’ll never have a moment of privacy for the rest of my fucking life?”
Charles flinched, and Erik felt bad for half a second before he remembered his anger and allowed it to surge forward again.
“I don’t hate you Charles,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, “but I hate this. I hate it. I hate that we didn’t get to choose. I hate that we’re stuck together. Don’t you wish you could have your own life?”
There was silence beyond the sound of the blood rushing through his ears. Distantly he was aware of the librarian telling them to take it outside, of the whispering of the students sitting and watching them like spectators, but his attention was locked on Charles, on the way the flush faded from his skin at the same time as his hands relaxed their grip on the notebook, leaving him pale and drawn and somehow smaller than usual.
Slowly he closed his books and slid them into his backpack.
“Look at me,” Erik said. His anger was gone, leeched from him in an instant, and he felt sick. “Charles.”
Charles slid slowly from his seat and swung his bag over his shoulders.
“I’m really sorry Erik,” he said quietly, his eyes locked on the table next to where Erik’s palms were pressing sweaty prints into the wood. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”
After he was gone, Erik realized that his mind was clear for the first time in weeks. Clear and achingly empty.
***
“How are you feeling today Erik?”
Erik slumped slower in his chair.
“Erik?”
“How come Charles gets to skip this stuff now?”
Dr. Munroe tapped her pen slowly on her desk and Erik followed the rhythm of the metal, tried to ignore her direct gaze.
“I thought maybe it would be best to see you both separately,” she said finally. “The transition into the bond can be difficult. Sometimes it helps to have some space. Especially when you manifest so young.”
Erik snorted.
“Young. My parents were fourteen when they bonded.”
She smiled and set her pen down, folding her hands together.
“Your parents were from a small, traditional community. In many ways it was a lot easier back then, especially when finding a soulmate early on was traditionally considered to be a kind of...blessing.”
Erik scowled. A blessing. Yeah right.
“It’s harder now. Attitudes about soul bonding are shifting. Diversifying. That kind of traditional bonding is rare. I doubt you’d see anyone as young as fourteen committing to one another nowadays.”
Erik plucked at the loose threads in the frayed knee of his jeans.
“I’m not saying that what your parents had was wrong,” she continued, gently. He clenched his teeth together. “It’s just different. You and Charles have options that your parents would have never even considered.”
“Is that what Charles wants?” he blurted. “Is he thinking about...does he want to reject the bond?”
Dr. Munroe watched him quietly for a moment.
“Is that what you want, Erik?”
He tilted his head back against the chair and stared up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles. If she had asked him that a week ago, he wouldn’t have hesitated to say yes. But now…
He hadn’t seen Charles in days and he missed him. Not just the bond, and the chemicals and hormones that were fucking with his head. He missed Charles being around. He liked Charles. He was friendly and kind and brilliant and also kind of dense and Erik liked him. He dreamed sometimes about Charles and woke up with his smile hovering just behind his eyelids. Sometimes he imagined what it might be like to wake up and see that smile first thing in the morning. Sometimes he woke up disappointed that Charles wasn’t there.
“It’s not easy to Dissolve,” Dr. Munroe was saying, “But there are treatments--”
“I don’t know,” Erik cut in, closing his eyes. “I don’t know.”
***
Two weeks later Sebastian Shaw was beating the shit out of Erik again.
This time it was in front of a fairly substantial crowd of stoners after school behind the bleachers, people that cheered when Erik landed in a particularly large puddle of muddy water. Erik wanted to kill them all.
“Where’s your mate Lehnsherr?” Shaw asked, delicately wiping a drop of mud from the sleeve of his jacket. “Not so tough without your bitch in heat.”
Erik’s hands twisted furiously in the sparse grass and he pushed himself to his feet, turning on Shaw quick enough to land a punch square to the jaw, and then another down across his cheek. It wouldn’t hurt him, not with his mutation, but it was enough to tumble him backwards and onto his ass in the mud.
Erik watched as Shaw went still, taking stock of his dirty clothes and the laughter of their fickle audience. Something like dread settled in Erik’s stomach as Shaw stood, slowly. Now was the time when a smarter person might run away, but Erik had never backed down from a fight. Not even one he knew he couldn’t win.
He swung and Shaw caught his fist. He squeezed just a little and Erik felt his hand break, fell to his knees in agony. He shouted when Shaw bent his hand a little to break the wrist, his stomach wrenching bile up into his throat, his vision blurring and growing black along the edges.
“Let’s see how many bones I can break before you pass out,” Shaw said curiously, his voice strangely loud in Erik’s ears. The crowd was silent now, but over the field, on the other side of the bleachers, Erik could hear someone shouting.
Shaw eased up the pressure, but kept a loose grip around Erik’s hand. Erik tried to breathe, craned his neck to look back over his shoulder and caught sight of Charles barrelling out from between the bleachers.
“Sebastian please,” Charles said, his voice ragged and desperate, “please let him go.”
Shaw smiled at Charles and tightened his grip on Erik’s hand just enough to pull a strangled scream from his throat as the bones ground together.
“No.”
Charles lurched forward, his feet coming into Erik’s line of vision, his head hung low toward the ground as he struggled to breathe.
“Stop!”
“Gonna make me, Xavier? You know the rules about telepathy on school grounds. This time there are witnesses.”
There was a pause and in the quiet Erik became aware that he was leaking sweat and saliva, and that each exhalation was louder than normal.
Abruptly there was movement. Shaw released Erik’s hand as someone charged him and knocked him off his feet, narrowly missing Erik as he slumped toward the ground. Erik looked up in time to see Charles kneeling over Shaw, pummelling him in the face over and over again, breaking his skin open, his knuckles growing bloody.
“No,” Erik choked out, “No don’t--”
Before he could utter another word Shaw tossed Charles from him easily, his body flying through the air and crashing into the bleachers with a resounding crack before tumbling to the ground like a limp rag doll.
The world went red.
All at once the metal of the bleachers, of the cars in the parking lot, the lamp posts on the street and the sewers and the pipes running through the ground, everything was alive and at his fingertips. The very earth seemed to tremble and the crowd ran from him screaming, all of them except Sebastian Shaw who sat and stared at him, and visibly shook.
Distantly he was aware of the world around him crumbling, metal crunching into compact pieces, or bursting through the ground in hot showers of water. He turned it inside out as his vision diminished to one person only, Shaw, and the way he had thrown Charles away, easily, like garbage.
Shaw yelled and struggled as the bleaches broke apart and collapsed on top of him, each piece pinning him to the ground, melting over his skin in layers so that he couldn’t peel it away.
“Should we see how quickly you can suffocate?” Erik asked, detached and smiling.
Shaw was pleading with him now, the metal slipping higher and higher up his body and Erik laughed. He laughed and laughed until he became aware of someone shaking him, two hands gripping tight onto his shoulders.
“Erik! Erik, please stop!”
Erik.
The voice was inside his head and he stopped laughing, turned to look at Charles who was bleeding, a laceration through his eyebrow pouring blood into his eye, but who was steady and alive and pressing calm into his brain.
Everything’s alright now. Don’t worry.
He raised his good hand and gripped Charles by the front of his shirt.
“Charles?” Charles pulled him close, tucked Erik’s face into his shoulder and Erik realized he was sobbing, that they were both sobbing, and that Charles, all of Charles was flooding into him, filling up all the vacant, aching parts inside him that had been throbbing in misery for weeks.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said over and over and Charles shushed him, raked his fingers soothingly through Erik’s hair. Slowly his heart calmed and he became aware of the devastation around them, of Sebastian Shaw crawling shakily away, of the agony in his hand.
“We should get you to a hospital.” Panic slithered in around Charles’ words, and he held Erik a little tighter.
“I don’t want to be alone anymore,” Erik said. There was a moment of silence, the bond thick with confused emotion as Charles wound himself close, like a flower blooming in reverse.
And then slowly, tentatively, the opening of a petal:
“You’re not alone. We don’t have to be alone.”
