Charles Xavier's time would forever be filled with events of great importance, but not all of it was due entirely to circumstances beyond his control. Even placing his telepathic powers outside of the equation, the economical and business aspects of owning a large company operating on an international level, financing and operating what amounted to a counter-terrorism paramilitary operation (far under the purview of the government), operating two different schools with exceptional students of varying needs out of pocket, and being on the forefront of multiple socio-political movements for the advocacy of minority rights: disability, race, class, gender, sexuality, HIV-AIDS, and, of course, mutant. And all that would entail.
Rarely ever a dull moment, he had to admit.
Ah, there would be the occasional lull in activities where perhaps he only had 8 desperately life-or-death meetings a month, and he considered himself well at rest in between, and the panel on the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act to Mutant- American citizens for accommodations was a tiring one.
The opposition, at this point, seemed quite dead set on highlighting the very many differences between the physically disabled and the genetically mutated. Even the pointed look down at his wheelchair during a very eloquent speech (if he did say so) had not garnered any understanding from the half dozen other members at the tables spread out before the auditorium. And though it was very clearly a reluctance to take up the mutant cause, it was hardly their obstinacy that wore him thin.
He sensed Erik out in the audience. Near the back, standing room near the door.
Charles may not be able to see him directly in the ballroom's breakdown of seating, yet he knows just where he is in the room. He can't forget those thought patterns and the lacing of bitterness and iron through them. They would stand out to him no matter where Erik was.
He supposed the man had his reasons. The helmet would have brought ever so much more attention on a broader scale. In this case it was only Dr. Xavier that knew of his presence.
While he wondered what it meant for Erik to show his presence, he didn't bother dissecting it. They had an agreement on the usages of telepathy for years and Charles was willing to keep to it. But Charles had not received a message--grandiose, subtle, or otherwise--that they would meet here.
Over the years it was not uncommon for them to meet on their own terms. Frequently on neutral ground, and not always during peace times, they would share a room for a weekend and talk. Like things once were and so little happened otherwise. Like they were never less than good friends. Lovers again.
The panel began to drag its heels and Charles felt a deep headache brewing while he tried to actively avoided that tempting and unprotected mind. He was willing to keep to their agreement, but it didn't mean he wasn't tempted to break it.
And the last time they met with their guards down, they’d discussed the ramifications of the end of the Gulf War. Being in direct and intermittent opposition could make it difficult at times, but perhaps that's what this was…
It must be that his headache distracted him. Charles found himself stumbling over words, and the smugness radiating from those who needled him for explanations became too much. As the conversation shifted, he didn't bother to stop it, and instead took the shoulder of the moderator nearest him and excused himself with a bit of poor health.
As he found his way out through the door to the side-hall along the ballroom's side, he sensed Erik standing and leaving. Waited for him by the door as Charles made his way to his rooms.
It felt easy now after all these years, to come to that familiar cadence of casually equalizing their motion. It felt like a straightforward dance they'd performed for decades, even just cutting through small groups of attendees consulting their schedules.
"You look exhausted," Erik said by way of greeting, and there were no indications towards it being overly kind. Just the kind of brutal honesty that he thrived upon.
"Worse than I have been in ages," Charles agreed, not bothering to look up. He knew Erik didn't look down towards him either. His voice soft and his eyes discerning a path to the elevator, he asked, "Are you well?"
He could feel that smile more than see it. There was some heaviness in the air as they both seemed to weigh the consequences of the usual banter. 'Can't you just check and see for yourself?' and then he would be forced to counter about their agreements, and Erik would--
"I've missed you."
"And you have even been aiming!" Charles replied with the kind of sarcasm only they can share, though he felt he should be breathless.
That particular phrase didn't tend to make its appearance in their interactions until, well, the more dire moments. After a particularly harrowing game of chess, or one of those excited conversations that ran well into the early hours of the morning over bottles of wine, or an orgasm.
"Our paths crossed by chance. I thought I would mend the rift, as it were."
It was difficult to ignore that bait as the entered the elevator that seemed to be waiting just for them, doors yawning open longer than the mechanism allowed and straining. "It's not as though I haven't been keeping up with you."
"Ah?" Erik tilted his head, the smile crinkling his eyes asking him if he'd broken their little agreement.
"alt.soc.mutae.moderated," Charles said in reference to the newsgroup he'd found not long ago.
The internet was an interesting place these days, where branching access allowed subcultures to cobble together helpful information to send out into the network and to the nearly one million users worldwide. He and his old companion both found the newsgroup a few years back, and though his main interest remained in collecting and archival of information, Erik offered reams of articles and rants. Frequently peppered with quotes and references to Magnus Hirschfield in his more salacious reviews, a particular favorite of his. Charles still had a copy of "The Homosexuality of Men and Women" on his shelf.
He returned that too-clever smile.
"Your essays on the complexities of mutant sexuality are quite riveting, Max."
Charles was certain he saw him blush.
"Also quite inflammatory." Erik squinted. Asked, "XIVIX?"
"No. But a good guess," he said with a laugh. He redirected. "I think that Raven might be posting under several different names--"
"Yet you're never entirely sure which one she is," Erik finished for him. They both broke down laughing before the elevator door opened to the eleventh floor.
It was a terrible joke at the most inane thing, and yet Charles found tears in his eyes as he made his way towards his room. He'd made it near the sharp turn to the left when he realized that Erik was dawdling a few--and growing--feet behind him. Charles came to a stop.
"Are you not coming?"
"Am I invited?"
"Of course. I'd like to hear any more of your sociological theories that you may be debating, my friend." Charles fished the key to his room out of his pocket as he continued on down the hall. "Maybe I can help you in refining them."
---
Drinking this close to bedtime had a devastatingly poor outcome on his sleep, as he found as he drew ever-closer to 60, and Charles kept to a glass of ice water as Erik helped himself to a beer in the minibar.
It seemed that his friend would let him go about his normal evening routine as though he'd been around it for years. Even the way he leaned against the frame of the door, gestured with his beer as Charles went about his business, gave him a sense that maybe it had always been like this. It was comfortable to hear Erik's warm voice ramble about the myriad relations between his sexuality and his mutant powers, touching a few points he'd highlighted in his essays, while he finished up in the toilet and set into dressing himself for bed.
It was a pretty little fantasy of a domestic life which they could never have, but he entertained it as he aligned his chair next to the bed, turned down the blankets, and prepared himself to figure out how to mount yet another strange bed. Shattered by the rare occasion of Erik's hand closing over his shoulder.
"May I?" he asked, beer finished and down to his shirt, belt and trousers.
Charles hadn't noticed when he'd removed his jacket, he was so lost in deciding on which method would be best to get into the relatively tall bed and becoming exhausted from the very idea of it. For a short moment he was reluctant to accept his help at all, but they both knew why they were there. No denying it now.
He agreed. Felt Erik's arms slide down his sides, intimate in the way his hands pressed at the small of his back, where feeling faded, and then wrapped both of his own arms around his shoulders in return. The easiest way to get into a strange bed, most certainly. And one of the more pleasant ones. Simple, but vulnerable, he was reluctant to let go. Erik drew back instead.
"You really do look ragged," he murmured, sitting on the edge of the bed as Charles arranged himself and his pillows. "I'll leave. You need sleep."
"Whatever happened to mending the rift?"
Touching Erik's wrist, feeling his pulse beneath his fingertips, urging him to stay and trying so damned hard to keep inside their agreements.
"It's not so wide as the bags under your eyes," Erik argued but then he laid back, his head on the pillow, kissed his ear, didn't press any more. And he was glad.
He hadn't the energy to beg.
Erik helped him to arrange himself into a seated position against the headboard and into a nest of pillows while nipping at his throat. He was picking at the buttons of a linen shirt and Charles drank in these moments where he could feel comfortable in intimacy. Knowing for certain it was reciprocal.
"I missed you," Erik said again. Insisted.
His lips drifted down over the collar of the undershirt Charles wore to bed, his hand rolling up the hem at the same time.
"So you've said," he replied, laying his head back. Charles let those rough-gentle fingers crawl up the span of flesh that faded from nothing to a spike of motley sensitivity in the breadth that wrapped around his stomach.
"Are you not going to reply?"
Lips round Charles' nipple, flicked it with his tongue, the scruff on his chin skimming his side, setting shivers down his spine, but the brittle edge to the question was undeniable.
"I've missed you, too," he said, pushing his shirt from his body and oh, he was covered in scars and all the marks of age and a life of battle, but everything is so well known to him that he couldn't help but sigh.
There was the one across his left shoulder--somewhat fresh, compared to some--that Charles himself gave him in a battle, and the flash of guilty-pride when he traced his calloused palm over the shiny and smooth skin. Erik mirrored his fascination, his fingertips following the path of a faded cut across Charles' shoulder blade that left an indent in the skin to this day. Not to mention his, well, the one midway down his back.
No fear left in where they laid their hands, these days, it seemed.
Just where their minds went were of concern.
"You're holding back, Charles," Erik said, almost growled, one hand bracing the back of his neck in a way that made Charles feel near boneless.
A pause.
"You're in my bed, aren't you?"
"You know exactly what I mean." He paused. His voice quieted. "You read my essays, after all. Our powers are no lesser an extension of ourselves than any other limb or organ we possess--"
"I'm familiar with the theories." Charles folded a pillow beneath his elbow and took up Erik's gaze. "What I'm asking is the purpose. What does it matter to you?"
"I've missed you," was his only excuse, gripping at the other man's waist. No, wait. Not the core of it.
"I've missed you in my mind. That intimacy more than all others."
Charles agreed immediately, the wall coming down without hesitation. It seemed easy enough to break his own restraint, to intermingle their energies like was once so common in their younger years. Even in some of their middling years as well.
Sensation, relief, joy, all washed over him as he closed their world in just to exist between their bodies, the surface of a hotel bed and the way it warmed and pressed against two bodies feeling as one.
That kind of naïve wonder struck him again to slip into Erik's skin, and with the same wonder that Erik took up residence in his. It was no longer odd, feeling the shape of his body and the half-hard swell of his cock against the other man's hip, the pillow braced between them and that looping feedback. Knowing the marvel of feeling each touch, each emotion as it washed through them.
They gasped for breath in unison, broke the kiss that he hadn't remembered starting, and burst into soft laughter.
"Like that," Erik confirmed out loud and with that pressure of joy in his chest bleeding into the telepath's many flooded senses. He pulled the edges of blunt nails-manicured out of necessity rather than vanity-from Charles' hips to his collarbone and commanded/pleaded, "Feel me." as he moved to straddle his knees.
Charles closed his eyes and complied, touching and feeling himself being touched in an infinite spiral. Fingertips smoothing along that line of demarcation between sensate and insensate, watching the reactions of his body flexing and straining, all doubled through Erik's sight and colored lightly by his lust. He knew to feel those thin lips over the curve of a softening pectoral muscle before they landed, but the flicker of tongue down the longitudinal line of his solar plexus made him gasp.
"Erik," he moaned, hands gripping with anxious anticipation at his upper arms as the man's silvered head traveled down, down, down. Tongue dipped into his navel and sent a jolt of pleasure through both of their bodies, reminding him of a multitude of long nights spent wrapped around Erik through the years. "... Erik!"
A moan of agreement surfaced but he did not lift his head, tongue running the rim of the indentation and running sharp teeth over Charles' vulnerable areas--waist, nipples, that spot inside his elbow where his heartbeat pounded...
"Erik, please," he begged.
The man seemed to know better than himself just what he needed.
Trousers opened and his hardening cock free, Erik pressed the underside of his length along the line of Charles' stomach, slowly rolled his hips. Each of them feeling the hypersensitivity energy crackling between their bodies, the drag of his sex across a field of pleasure that sparked out in a thousand directions, and a chokingly acute perception of touch. He craned up towards him and claimed his mouth in a kiss.
For a few moments they broke their frenzied grinding, wriggling to set Charles comfortably upright, arrange the pillows just so, and remove what was left of their rumpled clothing.
He allowed himself to admire his long time friend-and-enemy's body as he revealed himself piece by piece astride his knees. Perhaps not that same lean muscle of their youth, but it seemed like the magnetism he controlled kept him in good condition, and there was a fondness at knowing his body through its stages over all these years. Charles stroked Erik's hair as he worked on tugging off his underpants, leaned in.
Sensation between his legs was much up to pressure and reflexive response at this point in his life, but they both knew that Charles liked a little show.
Erik's thoughts rotated around the same memories, a hundred experiences of salty skin on tongues, hands climbing and gripping up the bunching curves of the muscle along torsos and arms and shoulders, wet lips and soft groans. His mouth locked fondly around Charles' cock, coaxing him harder with drawn cheeks. And as he angled himself so that Charles could watch himself grow to full length, and gave over the subtle sensation of accessing a set of powers both like and unlike his own.
From the pocket of the jacket across the room rose three rods, each the length of Erik's hand and no thicker than his thumb. Stainless steel in an unsuspicious form, until each unwound into strings, thinner and thinner still. They braided into chains that glittered in the low lamp light, and then ended their transformation as a band that wrapped itself snugly around the base of Charles' hard earned erection.
He wondered if maybe Erik had been influenced by his own idle fantasies, but he was quick to reassure him with a gritted groan and a, "I want to feel you rut against me just as much as you do," on his lips.
Charles could feel the pressure of his own cock against Erik's stomach, and Erik's stomach against his own as he situated himself. He hissed, wrapped both arms around his waist, and they pressed tight. Slid skin to skin and the friction resounded, hands grasping and grabbing and everything that they felt and sensed and were colliding into a cacophony of two people twining into one and then…!
It collapsed creating a yawning void of light and heat and an excess of emotion they could share with no one else, Charles felt them be devoured by it all in tandem.
Falling back into the nest they'd created he took his joys in that boneless crumple of Erik's body over his, capping off their completion. Though Charles was certain they had both made an ungodly amount of noise, he couldn't gather up the ability to care.
In fact, all he could manage to think about was the dribble of hot semen and cool sweat down his belly, and Erik's panting breath on his throat.
Which was fine.
Soon, the world would crash in on the private retreat they made away from it all, and the conflicting responsibilities and differences in philosophy would take their indomitable forms.
For now, they could take their rest together.