Chapter 3
Charles's absence seemed to loom over the staff table, accentuated by Raven's glares in his direction. The other teachers gave Erik sidelong looks, whispered behind their hands; Erik wondered what stories Raven had been spreading. Some looked amused--particularly the Apparition instructor, Azazel, muttering some remark to Professor Logan, who had been teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts as long as Erik could remember--did the man age at all? Others seemed merely confused, though Erik rather thought that was the Care of Magical Creatures instructor's default expression.
"Something to say, McCoy?" Erik growled, and the lanky, bespectacled man flushed and looked away.
Professor Moira MacTaggert, the Hufflepuff Head, looked especially concerned; she and Charles had been casual friends in school, despite the two-year age gap and difference in Houses. In fact, now that he thought on it, Moira had been there the night Charles pulled him out of the lake.
And she'd been Charles's date at that end-of-term party--she'd retired early with what turned out to be the flu, and Raven, Erik's own escort that night, had snuck off with her friends to light fireworks over the lake. Leaving him and Charles alone in the furthest corner of the Hall, abandoned by their dates, maybe a tiny bit tipsy from vast quantities of butterbeer, with the party winding down but their spirits still high and the music still playing--a lot of old-fashioned Muggle stuff, Sixties music, and Charles couldn't believe he'd never heard of Elvis Presley, started singing along with exaggerated gusto--
"Wise men say
Only fools rush in
But I can't help falling in love with you…"
And Erik, laughing, sweeping him a grand, elaborate bow to beg the honor of a dance…
He shook off the memory and returned his attention to his dinner. The past might have been more pleasant than the here-and-now, but frankly it was no less painful thereby.
Finally, the meal ended, and Erik yearned to escape to his own rooms, but Professor Shaw caught his eye. Ah, yes. Why had he agreed to have a drink with the headmaster? Well, at least while he was with Shaw, he could be fairly certain Raven wouldn't drop on him from the ceiling shouting some particularly vile hex. Fairly certain.
"Brandy or cognac?" Shaw asked as they settled into armchairs before his fireplace.
"Brandy, thank you," Erik said absently, torn between contradictory desires to only sip a bit for form's sake, and to get as drunk as he possibly could. Impaired judgment, particularly in Shaw's presence, was likely the last thing he needed, and yet the mellow numbness of alcohol sounded frighteningly appealing right now.
"Well, Erik, do I perceive a certain animosity between yourself and Professor Darkholme?" Shaw asked, looking amused, as he poured the drinks. "Connected, perhaps, to her adopted brother's absence from the table?"
For all of Shaw's interest in Erik's academic and magical achievements, he had never taken any note of his social life; Erik was unsurprised, and frankly relieved, at Shaw's ignorance of any history between himself and Charles.
"We had a disagreement," Erik said, as casually as he could manage, and related the story of the Muggle-born girls and the snake painting. Despite everything, he caught himself downplaying the severity of Charles's reaction, knowing Shaw would be displeased to hear of him threatening Erik's position. There was no reason to get Charles in trouble with the headmaster over a personal conflict.
Shaw tsked, shaking his head. "Well, it shows I was right. The boy isn't ready to be headmaster. Too many ideals, not enough experience."
"I had wondered about that," Erik admitted cautiously. "About your being made headmaster when McGonagall retired, despite Xavier being deputy."
"Deputy for just two years, and teaching for only three. No, it wasn't hard to make the Ministry see that he was much too inexperienced. I myself was acting deputy headmaster for a year, prior to Xavier's arrival, and have near two decades of teaching under my belt."
"Of course." Two decades of teaching Potions. Erik chewed on the urge to ask about the missing vials from the classroom; if Shaw took them, he had every right, and wouldn't appreciate being questioned. If he hadn't, Erik would just as soon not reveal his inability to supervise his own classroom, at least not until he had a culprit in hand. He swallowed the question, and some brandy.
"Xavier will be ready enough by the time I retire," Shaw was saying, "if the Ministry insists on him. He's not incompetent, I have to admit, but--a Muggle-born Headmaster? Quite the queasy thought. Of course you, on the other hand, come from a very respectable bloodline indeed."
Erik disguised a grimace in another sip of brandy. He had no desire whatsoever to be groomed as a future Headmaster--thus far he was barely coping with being a mere teacher.
"Very skilled wizards, both your parents," Shaw was saying. "Their work was extraordinary--I've had the privilege of handling one of their wands, it was an amazement. Did they teach you anything of their craft, before their accident?"
"It was no accident." Erik's voice felt abruptly rough and heavy in his mouth. In his mind's eye he saw a flicker of the warm light and gleaming displays of his parents' specialty wand shop in Dusseldorf, and the brown stain on the sidewalk outside it. He rolled his empty glass in his hands. "Mugged by Muggles. It could be a bloody punchline."
"Not a very funny one, I'd say," Shaw said in the nearest approximation of sensitivity Erik had ever heard from the man. He reached to refill Erik's glass. "A crying shame, every bit of it--not just their lives but their knowledge lost, if they didn't teach you…"
"I was only nine," Erik said, and let that stand as a negative. The truth, he realized, his hand tightening convulsively around the glass of brandy, was that he didn't remember. When he tried to reach past that single flickering glimpse of the wand shop, there was nothing. He knew what it had looked like. He knew what their home on the floor above it had looked like, could remember his mother and father's faces. But it was like Muggle photographs, static images. He couldn't remember any particular incident, couldn't recall anything that had happened there, with them…
In his mind he heard Charles's furious voice. "Do you even remember what it's like to be a child?"
"I didn't mean to upset you," Shaw was saying, sounding more curious than contrite, and Erik realized he had spilled a slosh of brandy down his robes only when he saw Shaw holding out a large napkin. He took it and dabbed at the spill.
"I was just thinking of the irony," he said, and it certainly was something he'd thought about before. "Wizards, trained from childhood to wield powers Muggles can barely comprehend, and yet Muggle bullets cut them down just as easily..."
"That's true," Shaw said thoughtfully. "There's no spell faster than a bullet. Their one advantage, like a rabbit with a single fang… I wonder if there might not be some way to erect a shield of magical energy, if one had enough warning of course…"
Shaw continued speaking, but Erik was no longer listening. He was trying to remember his mother's smile, his father's voice, anything but the emotionless facts... He had spent his entire adolescence trying not to think about them, trying to forget the pain. He never imagined how bitterly he might regret succeeding.
At last Shaw stood and saw him to the door, with a handshake and hearty words along the line of "get the hang of it, my boy" and "do splendidly, I'm sure." Erik hoped he was making the proper responses. Then he was alone in the silent hallway.
His feet chose their own path, Erik swore. He did not intentionally direct them toward the suite of rooms always reserved for the Head of Ravenclaw House.
He ended up there, all the same.
Charles answered the door in his pajamas, those same ridiculous pinstripe pajamas or else their cloned brothers, looking sleepy and soft and a little flushed, and Erik knew exactly how he would feel in bed right now, warm and boneless and clingy-cuddlesome (chuckling "How are you not a Slytherin, Charles, bloody boa constrictor"), and the years hardly seemed to have touched him, still slight and pale and boyish with those gorgeous eyes to drown in (a little dilated now in the dimness and don't think about the last time you saw them that way) and those soft, sweet lips that he could and had spent hours…
Erik found he could hardly breathe through the burning need to just tug Charles over to the bed and curl up with him, possibly forever.
"What is it, Erik?" Charles said, wary.
"I need your help."
"What? Are you hurt?"
"No. I don't remember."
"Don't remember if you're hurt?" He visibly caught a whiff of the spilled brandy, face hardening. "Blast you, Erik, you're drunk--"
"No, it's what you said, Charles. You asked if I remember being a child. I don't. I can't really remember anything, nothing real, from before the orphanage. My parents, Charles, I've all but forgotten them. I don't remember."
Charles looked at him a long moment, searchingly. Whatever he saw in Erik's face seemed to worry him. "All right," he said at last, his voice somewhere between resignation and exasperation, as if he already knew he would regret this. "All right, come on in."
Neither of them spoke while Charles threw on a dressing gown, started up a self-boiling teapot, moved piles of books from the chairs before the fire, stoked the embers in the grate back up to a merry crackle. Erik sat, hands clasped together so they wouldn't shake.
Charles's rooms were exactly what he would have expected--an organized chaos of books and parchments and unwashed teacups, scattered with oddments and devices that might have been Divination tools or something Charles found on a sidewalk. The room smelled of tea and ink and the blooms of the little collection of plants on the windowsill. Aside from the fire and Charles's shuffling about, the only sound was the ticking of the clock on the wall.
Erik stared at it. It was an ornate, multi-layered, delicate-looking thing, with eight different faces (all reading differently, who knew what Charles had set them to) and stained-glass butterflies that would actually fly about the room when the hour chimed. He knew, because he bought it for Charles. Charles had pined after it for months, quietly, staring at it through the shop window in Hogsmeade, before Erik could scrape up the money to get it. Charles had actually teared up when he opened it, much to their mutual embarrassment. That had been… a good night. A really good night.
And Charles had kept it. Perhaps he'd merely been determined not to let Erik poison an object he loved on its own merits; Erik was glad to see it either way.
Finally Charles took the other chair before the fire, holding out a mug for Erik. He clenched both hands around its warmth, let the scent of peppermint tea coil around him.
Charles sipped his own tea and cleared his throat. "You need my help, you said. You want me to help you remember?"
"Yes." He waited for Charles to ask why he'd come to him with this. But after all, the answer was obvious; Charles was the Divination professor. No one in this building knew the workings of the human mind and memory better than he did.
They could both comfortably pretend that was the reason.
Charles regarded his tea almost grimly. "I've helped people recover lost memories before," he admitted. "But the process is rather… It can only work between two people who trust each other deeply."
"I trust you," Erik said simply. Whatever the context, whatever the consequences, Erik knew he would never hesitate to put his life, his sanity, everything he valued, into Charles's hands. That's where it was already.
He probably wouldn't be admitting that if he'd had a little less brandy.
Charles held his eyes a moment, took a deep, not-entirely-steady breath, then got up and went to a cabinet in a corner. He returned carrying a shallow stone basin covered in runes.
"Is that a Pensieve?" Erik had heard of them, but never seen one.
"Belonged to Albus Dumbledore," Charles confirmed, looking, for a moment, just slightly star-struck. "Headmistress McGonagall left it in my keeping. I'd, ah, appreciate your not mentioning to Professor Shaw..."
"Of course." Erik waved a reassuring hand. It occurred to him he had just casually promised to keep a secret that could theoretically get him sacked or even thrown in prison, and that his main feeling about it amounted to for Charles, yes. The brandy had definitely been a mistake.
"Right. Well, here's what's worked for me before." Charles situated the Pensieve on a little table between them, pulled his chair around to more directly face Erik. "I can put your mind into a state that lends itself to remembering, that pulls the memories you're seeking to the forefront of your mind, and then pull those memories into the Pensieve, where you can examine them at leisure."
"Sounds good."
"Settle back, then, until you feel comfortable and relaxed. Close your eyes. Now listen to me very carefully, my friend. You're going to relax now. I want you to imagine that you're in a calm, peaceful place. Somewhere you always feel safe and happy. Where are you?"
Erik thought for a long, awkward moment, unable to come up with such a place. "Here is fine," he said at last.
That seemed to startle Charles. "All right," he said after a moment. "All right then. Just focus on how calm and relaxed you feel. Let your breath come slow and deep. Let your feet relax, and your legs relax. Now your hips, and your waist... all the tension draining out until they're perfectly relaxed..."
He continued up the muscle groups, all the way to Erik's face and head. By then Erik felt strangely floaty, as if the darkness behind his eyelids were a warm, cocooning sea extending in all directions. Only Charles's voice anchored him to the world.
"Are you ready to remember, Erik?"
It took a moment to remember how to speak. "Yes."
"Do you trust me, Erik?"
"Yes."
"Good. Imagine you see a staircase. Feel it beneath your feet. The memories you're looking for, they're at the bottom of those stairs, waiting for you. We're going to go get them."
"It's dark down there."
"That's all right. There's no need to be afraid. I'm with you."
"…All right."
"Are you ready?"
"Yes." Erik could see the stairs, feel them, cold stone spiraling down into darkness. It looked like the staircase to the Slytherin common room.
"Let's go, then. Start walking down the stairs. As you walk, you're going to feel more and more calm and safe. Every step is bringing you closer to what you're looking for, what you need. You are perfectly safe and relaxed as you walk down the stairs. As you walk, you begin to think about your mother. Her face. Her eyes. Her hands. Her voice. Her smile. When you reach the bottom of the stairs, you will find a memory of your mother. But we're not there yet. We're going to keep walking down the stairs, getting more calm and relaxed the further we go."
Charles's voice led him downward for several minutes before he said, "We've reached the bottom of the stairs now. What do you see?"
"Nothing," Erik said. "It's dark. I'm not afraid, I know you're with me. But I can't see anything."
"There is a memory here for you, even if you can't see it. Reach your hand out and you will find it."
He reached out--it would occur to him, later, to wonder if his hand physically moved or not, he couldn't tell--and his fingers closed around something floating in the air. It was small and round, very much like a glow-ball, but warm to the touch. "I found it. It's here."
"Good. Very good, Erik. Hold onto it. We're going to bring it up the stairs. You'll find that going up is faster than going down. You have what you need now. You have that memory in your hand. You come up the stairs quickly--not running, you're still calm, relaxed, but happy. With every step up the staircase, you start to feel more alert, more connected to your body. You still have that memory in your hand. You are still calm and relaxed. But you are starting to come back to the room where you and I are sitting in front of the fire. When you reach the top of the staircase, you will open your eyes, and we will open up that memory."
"I'm here," Erik said, and opened his eyes.
Immediately, Charles leaned forward and pressed the tip of his wand to Erik's temple. It drew forth a long, silver thread that half-floated, half-fell into the Pensieve, and drifted there, a wispy shimmering thing halfway between smoke and liquid silver.
Erik stared at the memory, and then at Charles, whose smile had a happy, tired, so-proud-of-you glow that made Erik's breath catch. "You did it, Erik," he said. "Now let's see what you've found."
Erik took a deep breath, then reached out and touched the shimmering memory.
It opened around them like unfolding origami, and they weren't in Charles's chambers anymore, weren't in Hogwarts at all. Around them were the white walls and dark rafters of Erik's childhood home. Night was falling outside the leaded windows, and a little boy in short pants and a checkered shirt, perhaps seven or eight years old, was setting plates around a wooden table.
Erik stood, staring down at his child-self in open-mouthed wonder. Charles grinned beside him.
"Look at you, such a cute child," Charles murmured. "Wonder what happened?"
"Erik!" called a woman's voice from the next room. "Don't forget to light the candles!"
"Yes, Mama!" The boy set down the plates and narrowed his eyes at the little candelabra in the middle of the table. He held out his hands toward the candles, face settling into an almost comical expression of determination and focus.
Long seconds passed in silence.
And then the candles burst into flame, the room suddenly overflowing with golden light.
And Erik remembered now, he wasn't just watching the little boy, he was the boy, staring huge-eyed at the little dancing flames as his world changed, erupted with possibility, with the exhilirating knowledge that he could do extraordinary things, that there was wonder and magic in the world and he was part of it.
He turned to the doorway, where his mother was standing with her hand at her mouth, eyes wet in the dazzling light, and she swooped down to wrap her arms around him, laughing, stroking his cheek, saying over and over again how proud she was, how exciting this was, how her schatzchen was growing up, how proud his father would be when he got home. How very much she loved her little boy.
The memory folded back down around them, golden light fading to silver smoke in the bottom of the stone basin. Charles caught it with the tip of his wand and fed it back into Erik's temple. He could feel it settle, warm and solid, into his head. They were standing--when had that happened?
"You won't need my help to remember that now," Charles said. "It ought to open the way to your other memories, as well. Some of them, at least." His voice was unsteady, and he brushed a tear away pseudo-casually with his thumb.
Erik knew his own face was wet. His chest felt ready to tear open with the joy of having his mother's face--his mother's love--returned to him. Joy and pain, remembering his mother was lost to him now.
Charles had no counterpart to this memory, he knew. His wealthy Muggle parents had been distant at best, unsettled by their strange, extraordinary son. Far from greeting his magic with love and pride, they had done their utmost to ignore and deny it. As if Hogwarts were just another boarding school. As if Charles were something to be ashamed of.
Charles was hurting right now, and he had to do something, needed to let his own joy spill over somehow onto Charles, who needed and deserved it so much more. Erik pulled Charles to his chest, arms tight around him, and murmured, "Thank you" into his hair.
Charles didn't draw back, as Erik half-expected, but seemed rather to burrow in, arms snaking around Erik's waist. "You're entirely welcome, my friend," he said, muffled by Erik's chest.
And this, this was coming home, not the watery light of Slytherin, this--the warm pressure of Charles against him, the scent of him, the texture of his hair against Erik's cheek. This was where he belonged, where he should always be.
Charles made no move to pull away, and Erik made no move to let go. It was possible, even, through no conscious decision of his own, that Erik's hand in Charles's hair was angling his face up toward Erik's own.
Charles still did not draw away.
A sharp knock pattered against the door, and Charles jumped back with a gasp.
"Coming," he called. "Just-- just a moment."
He turned away and took a gulp of long-cold tea, then hurried to the door without looking at Erik at all.
"Moira! Do come in."
Erik suppressed a snarl as Moira stepped into the room, her gaze alternating between Charles and Erik with concern and suspicion, respectively. "We missed you at dinner, Charles. I saw that your light was still on, so I thought I'd just check in. Make sure everything was okay."
"Oh, everything's fine," Charles said, brightly artificial. "Just taking a moment to catch up with Erik, you know, haven't seen each other in such a long time."
"Mmm," Moira said, sounding as if she doubted whether this long separation were a bad thing. Erik wondered again how much she knew.
"But I was just leaving," Erik said. "Charles, if you could point me the right direction, I'm having to re-learn my way around this rabbit warren…"
"Of course." Charles flickered a smile at Moira and followed Erik into the corridor.
"The Great Hall's that way," he pointed, "down that staircase and turn right. From there, take the left fork at the three suits of armor…"
"I know the way," Erik said.
"Ah." Charles fell silent, and didn't quite look at him.
It would be a mistake, Erik thought, to push, however badly he wanted to press Charles against the wall and kiss him breathless. It would be a mistake. So he only raised a hand to brush the hair out of Charles's eyes, murmured "Goodnight, Maus," and walked away.
Charles had to lean his forehead against the door and breathe for several minutes before he could go in and face Moira.