Logs:Who in These Realms of Love

Who in These Realms of Love
cn: discussion of abusive relationship, allusions to violent death, mild sexual content
Dramatis Personae Charles, Hive
In Absentia Erik, Jax, Cerebro, Dawson, Dusk, Matt, Ryan, Lucien, DJ	2023-09-26 "{That seems like a grave oversight.}" (Many hours after Erik's visit.)
Location <XS> Xavier's Bedroom - Third Floor
Charles Xavier's apartment has remained more or less unchanged through the decades of renovation that transformed his family's huge ancestral manse into a school. It is modest by the standards of the wealthy, but then it had only been meant to house him in his youth. The receiving room just inside the door is sumptuous with old world aristocratic splendor from the intricate Persian rug underfoot and the furniture in purple and gold to the gold-framed paintings on the walls. Double doors in each of the walls -- all fitted with automatic openers -- lead to a large bedroom, a moderately sized dining room with its own kitchen and pantry, and a small study. Tall windows and skillful placement of its burnished antique furniture make this bright corner room look more capacious than it actually is. Granted, it is by no means small. Much of the wall space is taken up by floor-to-ceiling mobile bookshelves, the rest cerulean blue with gold molding that frame a ceiling painted as a fanciful star map. The large canopy bed is hung with sapphire curtains to match the drapery on the windows. There's a cozy reading nook in one corner beside a bay window seat and on one of the interior walls are doors to the bathroom and a walk-in closet. Before the stone fireplace is a small table flanked with armchairs, and on the mantle above it beautiful blue and white Chinese vases frame Antonio Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss. Elegant glass doors open onto a balcony with a stunning view of the glittering lake nestled in the woods of the mansion's extensive grounds. It's half-way between midnight and dawn, the night outside grown crisp and autumnal and the mansion as quiet as it ever really gets. Usually, even Charles is asleep by this hour, and though it isn't exceptionally out of character for him to be awake still this is not his wonted psionically induced insomnia. He's wrapped in a blue and gold dressing gown and one of his innumerable Kinross tartan blankets where he's parked his wheelchair -- some lightweight prototype he's been testing -- in the reading nook. He hasn't cracked the hardbound book in his lap (Le Temps Retrouvé by Marcel Proust), on which a sleek gray mackerel tabby is dozing peacefully, and a cup of tea has gone cold on the tablet beside him, untouched. His mind had been elsewhere for many hours, and though he's recently coaxed his charge to rest and taken his gentle leave, he's still not exactly all here. He's trying without much success to gather up his loose ends, his attention finding little purchase on the nightmares that have slipped their proper places to roam the labyrinth of his memory, to say nothing of the nightmares that don't have a place yet. If not for the ungodly hour, Hive's longsuffering physical therapists would be extremely pleased to see him up and about. After weeks of their pleading and cajoling and bullying him to please try and remember that he actually lives in this physical body, he has finally deigned to exit his room voluntarily. He's even got calories with him -- admittedly, not very many, but there's a very large thermos cradled far too carefully in his arms (his initial attempts to actually decant this into mugs instead and bring those over ended only in disastrous mess.) It's been years since he actually visited this private apartment and yet, when he arrives, he does not bother with politenesses such as knocking, aware well before he actually reaches the door that Charles can easily feel him making his clumsy careful way over to this part of the manse. He's dressed for bed, soft flannel pajama pants and an ancient soft Theta Tau sweatshirt and crimson and gold striped fluffy-grippy socks, and despite all this warmth, as he's entering his arms still shiver where they're wrapped around the thermos. Should he offer a greeting? He does not, though perhaps the heavy-squeezing press of his mind up against Charles's is something like one. Whatever anger might have been there earlier has bled away to a low background rumble of concern that isn't yet taking a defined shape. He slouches over to drop heavily into the window seat of the reading nook and then fumble, awkward, with the cup-lid of the thermos. It's hard to tell when Charles became aware of Hive's approach, but he has made some progress reeling himself back in by the time his guest sits down. He hasn't actually stopped dissociating, just improvised a workaround with conceptual mirrors, lenses, and prisms to focus his scattered light. His mind still feels alarmingly cool, but his reflexive lean back into the harsh psionic greeting is reassuring, at least. His eyes track to Hive at a delay, and it's a longer delay before he manages something like words. Like, but not quite: a prim distant worry that he'd woken Hive, who had been and maybe should be asleep. Hive's agreement comes kind of blandly, a ready confirmation that Charles's dissociative tumult had in fact woken him. He doesn't seem upset about it -- well, not about the missed sleep, anyway. He's dismissing that worry with a casual mental swat. He's painstakingly slow in pouring the cocoa, and after this has a brief and muddled logistical confusion about the next step in this process -- it takes him more thought than it probably should before he works out putting the thermos down, moving Charles's cold tea, setting the rich hot cocoa down in its place, a somewhat outsized flicker of triumph accompanying this when unlike back in his own room none of it spills. Only then does he speak, gruff as ever if a bit slower than usual: "Sit your worrying ass down and drink with me." Less gruff, less casual, is the slow reach of his mind -- not quite digging roots in as is his (hungry) (yearning) instinct, but wrapping them with care around the fuzzy boundaries of Charles's fragmented light in a sheltering awning. Charles hasn't made it to Facial Expressions just yet, but he conveys his faintly pinched reaction at Hive's dismissal. He ought to have been shielding better -- he's good at that! -- lest the horrors creep into the dreams of the slumbering school. The worries do ease, though, with the bracing of Hive's roots. << "{...spread over us your sukkah of peace...}" >> a much younger Charles is asking a god he doesn't not believe in, exactly. At least he's found language again, even if not the right language. Really, Chaz, not even the right language family... Ah! There. He opens his mouth to speak and -- nothing in the disorganized scattering of "sawadee khrup", "chai", "mai", "kop khun khrup" answers from where his facility with the Thai language should be. Did Erik's trauma upend his mind that thoroughly? He settles for the next nearest one, his French coming slower and more Metropolitan than usual before he adjusts Quebec-ward, "{I'm already sitting.}" But he's picking up the cocoa, his hands at least in solid working order, and taking a slow sip. Somewhere in the jumble of the self he had temporarily set aside, his metabolism sings relief for the long-awaited sugar. Some of the warmth returns to his psionic presence, as if it's somehow seeped through from the physical temperature in his physical body. << You don't speak Thai, motherfucker, I speak Thai. >> There's amusement solidly there in Hive's voice, and it's strong enough to displace the ache and discomfort underneath at the missing connection that Hive strongly feels should be there. "{Tonight you're you.}" It's a very mildly judgemental vous here where normally it would be tu, and the strong bolstering reach of Hive's mind around Charles's is feeling out where Charles has recently shifted from plural to singular. There's a ripple that whispers in gentle flutter through the destabilized landscape of the other telepath's mind, breathing additional gently dappled light into the ugly shadows clawed there by his borrowed traumas. Hive's enjoyment as Charles sips the cocoa is not quite as visceral as it should be; the sweetness doesn't roll down his own senses as he expects. Nevertheless there's a quiet pleasure, equal parts at the cocoa itself and at the slow warmth seeping through the other man. "{Like fuck you are. You're upside-down over there.}" There's a questioning, here, without pressure but colored with what fracturing and stress he has overheard from Charles tonight: << (I'm here, if you need) >> Need is open-ended: talk not specifically suggested so much as the shared warmth of being. Charles frowns, but after a faintly skeptical survey of his language center concedes that he does not, in fact, speak Thai. "{That seems like a grave oversight.}" He's mildly indignant on Hive's behalf, though amused in far greater measure and even solaced in some obscure way he cannot currently tease out. Of course it doesn't matter terribly much when he's them whether the language lives in one or both of their heads, but it does matter, now. "{I will learn.}" At the thought of learning there's a flutter of something almost like joy -- almost like excitement -- through the uncertain light Hive is rekindling. "{I'm terribly glad you are here, but you needn't to have gone through the trouble.}" The words sound stilted and reserved, but the flush of grateful warmth behind them is not. "{I'm just tired. It was a lot of work, but the people down there needed him, and he needed...}" Here he trails off, the "moi" left unspoken as his eyes track the wisps of steam rising from his cocoa before losing focus. "{He needed --}" -- vengeance. But Charles has Essex now, the other man's mind thrashing wildly against his control. Through his foe's eyes he sees Erik standing over them, sees the coin rise like the ax in an executioner's hands. While Essex cajoles and curses and pleads with him he's pleading for Erik to stop, to reconsider, to give him just one moment. When he doesn't, Charles starts to pull away, but then what would Essex do to Erik if he gets free? He cannot shut his eyes tightly enough to keep out Essex's (his) agony and terror and he's coming apart and he's dying but if he can just hold on a little longer -- Charles scrambles to shove the flashback -- he can't even find where it goes right now, but away from Hive and his many vicarious deaths. "{I'm so sorry,}" he whispers, frantically piling shields onto that memory, and everything nearby, wherever it's landed. "{Now I'm doing it to you.}" "{I'll teach you.}" This is in Thai, but even if Charles can't understand the specific words, the meaning is clear enough, as is the flush of companionable warmth that stirs in Hive along with it. << {I know from tired and you are not just --} >> He shakes his head, teeth clenched hard and then relaxing. He's carefully marshaled the protective ire that's been stirring in him, just in time for that flashback to rise. His eyes go slightly wider at the agonizing memory, his bony shoulders clenching and his mind reflexively starting pressing in deep in familiar re-orienting merge. Both these impulses ease deliberately; he leans back against the window, his mind withdraws and settles once more into its structured canopy. He isn't intentionally trying to hold this up against his thirdhand perspective of tonight's events, seen through Cerebro's social media trawling and through Charles-in-Erik's unreliable-narrator trauma-clouded memories, but the comparison is there all the same as he thinks through it -- Charles's echoed pain briefly illuminated in Jax's ferociously brighter glow after chunks of concrete batter his shield and rain down upon him. The slow grind of his teeth creaks audibly in the quiet room. There's a slow tendril of his mind reaching -- he isn't trying to stop Charles's frantic shielding, isn't trying to break through, but the gentle touch comes with a sure feeling that this scrambling is not necessary. His voice is less gentle, sharp through his teeth: "{You are not the fucking same}." And here there is comparison, deliberate in its consideration. Erik imposing himself on Charles's private space, heedless of the danger it poses to Charles or the children; Charles trying to cope in his study and Hive seeking him out with offer of care. The long (long) history between the two older men and the many pains Charles's abusive ex has visited on him; the winding arc of Charles and Hive's relationship, caring and painful and fraught but certainly never marked with such violence. A different Greymalkin curled dozing in Charles's lap years ago on the only other time Hive has visited him here, I beg you to consider his -- circumstances. echoing in memory across the years; {you need to hear this} echoing across only hours and reflected through Cere's anger and Hive's own. << {You only stand up to him when you thought it would help every-goddamn-body else. When do you get to say he's hurt you enough?} >> Somewhere beneath Hive's fury there's a worry, an ache, and he restrains the shivering impulse again to join his mind to Charles's. Instead, it's a heavy push of effort to sort through his exhausted and broken neurology and lean forward, rest his hand on Charles's instead, calloused fingers curling down around the other man's. He's shoving down further acerbic commentary about Erik's mistreatments over the years though he's not shoving down his anger about it. It's simmering there, sharpened rather than muted by the love it stews in. "{What matters to me is what you need.}" Charles takes another sip of cocoa, leaning on Hive's deeply ingrained associations of comfort with the beverage, and sets the cup back down. He's stopped trying to bury the intrusive memory, though this does not feel like relaxing so much as just relenting. It's fetched up in the wrong part of his labyrinth altogether, jarring against the idyllic early days of Utopia. Half-formed excuses flit through him like shadows, but he's heard them all, knows they're absurd, and resists the urge to voice them. He gasps when Hive's hand closes around his. The chaos of his dysregulated mind is suddenly much louder, much more present. The walls of his labyrinth loom taller, the shadows flitting through them grown larger, too. It's not that he thinks Hive is wrong, but hasn't Charles allowed, even welcomed it when -- -- Erik's hands slide down his body, possessive and demanding. He arches, careful to keep the blinding pain from spilling over with the equally blinding pleasure he shares. Breathless and aching with need, he wants nothing better than to just come apart and stop worrying for a while. But Erik in the throes of madness is incalculably dangerous, and he doesn't really want Charles, does he? The other lovers written behind his eyes are young and beautiful and whole, and Charles feels pathetic for letting him do this, but it's been so long -- Possibly the fact this makes him blush is actually a good sign, little comfort though that might be to Charles's dignity. He hasn't pulled his hand away despite the embarrassment, and though he's keeping his breath even with a will, the tears come anyway. << {I don't know.} >> He swallows, turning his hand slowly to clasp Hive's. << I want him, because I'm a bloody fool. I don't know what I need. >> "{Apparently a goddamn hooker.}" Though this is voiced with all of Hive's usual gruff tactlessness, his mind fleshes this out in more nuanced colors. Flicker's grateful leaning into the soft drape of Dusk's wing on Geekhaus's couch, aching with days of school-friends and church-friends shying uncomfortably away from their usual casual affection when their eyes and thoughts linger too long on the healing stump on his arm. Matt's sweet-sharp snark over so many people's habitual awkwardness around Wheelchair Hugs. Soft moans from the back bedroom undergirding bright Game Night laughter and Hive can feel Lucien's deft hands and even defter mind playing skillfully against Ryan's skin and ravaged neurology. These thoughts complete themselves in motion, Hive shifting to the edge of the bench, leaning in to wrap his bony arm around Charles's shoulder in a hug that is not as tight as he feels it should be; the slow squeeze of his mind takes over where his uncertain muscles cannot. << this does not seem wise. >> echoes Charles's mental voice across the years, and the grief here twines with exhilaration, << (something new) >>, the blinding intensity of DJ's pleasure in their intertwined minds as their mouths press together. << {Love makes fools out of a lot of us.} >> He can't, from this vantage point, simply tidy Charles's disordered labyrinth the way he feels he should, and in place of the easy facility this task should be he is approximating: wrap that memory up in carefully protective vines, quietly highlight for Charles where it actually belongs. The same, too, with the next memory of Erik's manic visit to the hotel -- taken, bundled with a gentle suggestion of a better place to rest it. He's having many thoughts about what Charles might need. A lover who hasn't tried to murder him << {setting the bar in hell} >>. The school's incredibly good fucking security keeping his batshit abusive ex off the grounds as they could easily actually do. Some frequent reminders that he is part of this community and Erik's abuse and endangerment of him has ripples out to the rest of the school and mutant world. Some frequent reminders that he is part of this community and deserves to have support and not just be it for everyone. What he finally says, though: "{-- maybe some fucking sleep.}" He's kind of thinking through how he should be able to help with this, too, but then sets aside thoughts of what his brain Can and Can't currently do for, instead, an offer of some of the strong sedatives in a prescription bottle in his bathroom right now. There's a flash of frustration here that Charles cannot suppress with quite his wonted alacrity. << {It's not about sex (mostly,)} >> he almost doesn't say, but even to the extent that it is -- He breathes in, breathes out, and whatever his mind was about to throw at him next subsides. For a moment he just leans into Hive's embrace, mental and physical. << {And it's not as if I haven't looked for...companionship since he left me, but that bar is actually quite high when you take into account the requirements, caveats, and ethical considerations beyond "hasn't tried to murder me".} >> He's too exhausted now to feel anything but resigned about this. << {Sleeping with someone else isn't going to make me love him any less.} >> Even though it hurts his back -- already aching worse than usual from bending over the bathtub, an operation he is scrupulously not picturing -- he's very reluctant to let Hive go. "{You are right. I can't just keep waiting for him to come around.}" Somewhere behind this, Liza Minelli is giving voice to his "maybe this time he'll stay", and he's not too miserable to find some self-deprecating humor in it. "{But for better or worse he is a leader in our community and someone needs to...}" What? Guide him? Check him? Clean up after him? His shoulders slump again. But then he just nods, slow and abstract. Whatever else, he certainly needs to rest -- he's got an early class and traumatized students and staff to see to. Cere will fetch the pills, he's sure, if asked. He reflects with wry amusement that Hive probably saved him from several hours of Cere's abuse over his decision to help Erik that evening, nevermind that it was Cere who had let Erik in, precisely because he needed help. "Kop khun khrup," he says, with a faint and faintly lop-sided smile. << {It won't,} >> Hive agrees easily. He doesn't say that most humans need touch and that hurting less on that axis might clear up some small part of his mind for thinking through what he actually wants. He doesn't say that he's Somewhat Familiar with companionship coming with an entire boatload of caveats and ethical considerations. He doesn't say that at some point, allowing someone the access to hurt you again -- and again -- and again -- in the same ways isn't helping them, either. But he also doesn't hide those thoughts as they surface quickly and then quickly subside. For a while, he doesn't say anything. Just holds Charles through a few long breaths, a soft puff of laughter at the end that trails into mentally annotated Thai: "{It's a start.}" --- (Much, much later, after overnight visit to L'Entente...) <XS> Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters - Psionosphere The uncannily warm January day just got fractionally warmer, and though it is a psionic and not meteorological phenomenon it is not particularly noticeable except to those with relevant sensitivities or familiarity with its source. Charles Xavier does not often leave his school overnight without prior planning, and among the senior administration and X-Men, at least, there has been much curious if largely unconcerned speculation on how his nonprofit negotiations could possibly have kept him late enough to make coming home last night impractical. But he is back now, even if not with much time to spare before his first class. The staggering strength of his telepathy is briefly apparent in the ease with which his presence blankets the grounds, riffling solicitously over faculty and staff and students and sundry others to reassure himself all is as it should be. To familiar minds, his psychic shields are newly -- and wholly, which might be alarming if he didn't seem otherwise unharmed -- remade far more dynamic than before, aglow with the inner light they shift fluidly to contain. To familiar minds, he's singing Ryan Black's Safer quietly to himself -- singing, not just playing back a performance or recording from memory -- only distantly wary of adolescent eavesdropping. To familiar minds, his psionic touch is warmer and brighter and more immediate in some indefinable way, as though a crushing weight has been lifted that he'd carried so long it seemed inextricable from his being. When that touch envelops Hive it whispers love and gratitude and joy he's not shown since the early years of their acquaintance. Maybe just a touch of embarrassment, too. Somewhere in sundry others the light and warmth illuminates the hanging root-branches of a twinned banyan tree, compact in size but sturdy and flourishing. Though the part of this mind actually, physically at the school has been asleep, at the enveloping touch he's unfurling readily if crankily (<< fucking 8 am who the fuck is awake at 8 am >>) at the casual (<< (he's home) >>) prompting from his disgustingly chipper other half (somewhere across the city they're now quietly singing "Safer" as they wait in line at Evolve to pick up a large coffee order for all the Mendel Clinic guards on their floor.) The pile of blankets tugged up over Hive's head are not keeping out the psionic brightness and, half awake now, he's thinking a mild << told you he's -- >> in Cerebro's direction, but this pauses. Refocuses with a heavy squeeze of extending mental roots that twine down around-but-not-through Charles, drinking in the newfound lightness and the joy and the embarrassment. The susurration of warm breeze through their branches feels like a ripple of laughter, smug and pleased with a told you so imbued in every approving rustle of leaf. << You old minx. >>