#this is just the first of several | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

faellain · 8 months ago

Text

The Accidental Baby Trap Incident

Summary: About four years after the events of First Class, Erik arrives at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters with two little twins who he didn't know existed. Thinking he doesn't know what to do, he runs to Charles, not knowing the state his old friend is in.

Snippet 1

[prev] [next]

erik's chest is heaving as he arrives at the door step almost stumbling to the already in need of a clean mansion. he frowns. charles had been so fastidious about keeping the place clean once they arrived. perhaps he wasn't home.

one of the children, the whitish-silver haired one- oh, yes, pietro that was it, tugs on his sleeve, "is this an orphanage?" the names of these children still didn't seem real to him. everything felt like a nightmare.

"it's a school," he corrects, "an old friend of mind runs it."

"is it a boarding school?" the girl (wanda, he reminds himself, wanda. his daughter. not just a girl. not just any child.) asks.

"of a sort," he replies and knocks again, louder this time, tempted to just throw open the door.

pietro stamps his foot, "you're gonna leave us here aren't you?" before erik can respond, his young son slams his heel on erik's toes, "fucker!"

erik hisses, "pietro-"

"peter. i don't like pietro. it's a stupid name!"

pietro had been the name he picked out when magda had once teased the idea of having children. it had been his grandfather's name. wanda was the once she had chosen, a name she had always been fond of since she was a girl. now those children were real and one was yelling at him.

erik begins to raise his voice again when the door cracks open. from the crack, he sees hank's eyes and nose peak out. a second later, he's opened the door a bit more, keeping his body between the inside and erik.

"what are you doing here?" he snaps, "who are they?"

"why aren't you blue?" erik asks, genuinely, "how did you reverse-?"

"i'm asking the questions," hank growls and erik watches a ripple of blue skin and yellow eyes appear. ah. not so reversed then.

"i need to see charles," erik explains, "to talk about them."

"there's no school. charles closed it. he can't help them," hank replies, "go somewhere else."

"hank, they're my children."

hank blinks in surprise and looks at the two of them, pietro trying desperately to tug away from his father's hold on his wrist while wanda stands next to him with her chin high. he sighs, "what do you expect charles to do?"

"i- i don't know," he admits, hating the glare pietro gave him at the words, "their mother is gone. i don't know how to raise children. i didn't know where else to go."

hanks shakes his head, "charles won't be of any help."

At that exact moment, pietro decides to vibrate his hand so fast, he burns erik's palm causing him to hiss and let go. normally, he's prepared for this trick. it's one of his son's favorites . being caught up in the conversation with hank took just enough attention away from erik to not prepare himself for the burn.

his son is about to bolt when wanda placidly says, "i've got him."

with a single lift of her hand, pietro freezes and falls face first in the grass, wriggling there like an earthworm. wanda was in an agreeable mood then. that was good. hank stared at them with a slightly stunned expression. erik gave him a withering look.

finally, he steps aside, "you're not gonna like what you see." a pit of dread grows in erik's stomach as he picks up pietro like an american football to carry him inside.

american football... he remembers better days. he remembers sean and alex always teasing him for calling it that. for calling "soccer" any number of colorful variants of football: football, piłka nożna, fussball. it was almost a game in it of itself. this place had far too many tainted memories.

"is he in his study?" he asks.

"he's barely gone in there in over a year. he's probably in his bedroom."

"is he asleep? it's two in the afternoon." charles only slept in when he was hungover. and it was tuesday.

"i don't know," hank shrugs, activating no small amount of annoyance.

"well if he isn't alseep, then he would know i'm here by now. he probably needs help," erik tries not to wince, memories of the beach still fresh as he recalls pulling the bullet out of charles' spine, "go fetch him."

hank gives him a tired glance that's partially pity and partially screaming, i'm not a butler.

"hank?" he hears the call from upstairs, "is someone here?"

hank winces as erik immediately bounds up the stairs with only a terse 'wait' to his children. both promptly ignore him, the boy zipping to catch up and the girl bounding along as best she could. he sighs, rushing after them. maybe he can bribe them with cookies he bought. they're just from the grocery store bakery, but kids hardly cared about such things.

erik flings open charles' door, feeling like a man possessed. charles was so close. he could fix this— or at least help erik. this man adored children far more than he ever could. not to mention, his old friend lived a much safer life. he could only go so long ignoring contacts from azazel, emma, and mystique before they came to investigate his sudden no-contact. charles always had answers. charles had started a school. charles—

looks like a mess.

the charles of erik's mind, when not the nightmare of a man in pain on a beach, was polished and coiffed to perfection. his fluffy hair was always styled, always dressed to the casual nines (or just the nines), oceanic blue eyes brightened by his clothes, two perfect ruddy lips that dipped into a heart shape at the top.

this was not the charles of his mind. before him stands a haggard man, eyes dull, lips pale, wearing nothing more than dirty sweats and a dirtier robe. he smells, reeks even. days old sweat, vomit, and the distinct, overbearing scent of alcohol wafts off charles. his hair hangs long in greasy strands. those pale lips quiver.

"charles?"

and then he is being punched. faster than he can comprehend, a fist connects with his cheek, sending him careening back into the wall until he hit it. unable to get his balance, he falls rather unceremoniously onto his ass, grasping at his chin. pietro’s chorus of mocking laughter shrieks directly into his ear.

"he got decked!!!" the child squeals in delight, "good hit!"

erik rubs his chin, "pietro, i told you to wait."

"you're not the boss of me."

"i," erik grimaces as he tries to ease his aching jaw. he didn't know charles could punch that hard. by the sight of charles shaking his hand out, he suspects charles didn't either, "i very much am."

"you shouldn't be here," snarls charles but his attention is clearly caught by pietro who is rocking back and forth on his heels.

"good to see you too, old friend," erik grunts out and then watches as charles steps towards and bends get a better look at pietro, "and walking."

charles snaps his head toward him, glaring, "no thanks to you."

truer words had never been spoken. erik attempts to brace himself against the wall. all his thoughts jumble in his mind worse than normal, fighting a brain fog from charles' outburst.

"papa!"

wanda's little hands clutch his arm as she tries with futility to help him up. a very agreeable mood then. good. keeping wanda agreeable was top priority. her eyes narrow at charles, though, which make erik cup her face gently.

"i'm fine. my friend was just surprised to see me," erik assures her. red sparks at her clenched fists, "wanda, deep breaths."

his daughter nods and does so, with no small amount of panic on erik's part. this is why he needed charles. he was a calm in a storm. usually.

hank finally catches up to them, "why don't you two come with me to the kitchen to get some cookies and leave your dad and professor xavier to talk?"

"cookies?" asks pietro before taking off, leaving both charles' and wanda's hair swinging in the breeze he left.

hank sighes and looks to wanda. wanda looks instead to erik with big pleading eyes. he nods at her as she moves, taking hank's hand, smiling at him.

"what kind of cookies?" she asks, rather sweetly as hank leads her down to the kitchen.

erik looks at charles, "we need to talk."

"my study, then."

#cherik #x men #x men first class #charles xavier #erik lehnsherr #magneto #professor x #cherik fanfic #these are just short-hand-ish snippets that idk if i'm gonna turn into a full fic but i wanted to share it #this is just the first of several #the accidental baby trap incident

108 notes · View notes

ceilidho · 4 months ago

Text

fear of god

prompt: There's someone outside the spacecraft. You don't remember them being part of the crew. Part 1 masterlist

In the end, gazing out of the ship's portholes into the dark vastness of space proves to be less comforting than the architects must have originally anticipated. You can attest to this more than most.

Every morning, you get up an hour earlier than the rest of your crew and make your way to the galley to make your morning cup of coffee. A pack of instant crystals into your favorite mug and hot recycled water from the kettle. Sometimes you stay to have breakfast, but often you take your coffee with you to the main viewing deck for your morning sojourn.

There, you sit curled up in the navigator’s chair and stare out of the flight deck window until your breathing levels out. Early morning meditations. With the sun only visible through the rear porthole, the Milky Way stretches out before you, immeasurably vast. Ancient cosmic entities, some already long dead.

Stars fill your field of vision like an intricate latticework of varying brightness. The watery glass warps at the edges, bending the far off light. All things with their propensity for brightness and decay.

A deep, steady hum fills the room. It’s cathartic to be alone. Sometimes, when you look out into the depths of space, you imagine yourself as a cartographer of old, labeling everything beyond this point: “here there be dragons.”

Farah is the first person to join you, the ship’s maintenance technician already washed and dressed, floral cumberbund cinched around her midriff and her headwrap pinned in place. She greets you with a firm nod upon her entry, never one to mince words. In the months since your ship set off on its course for Jupiter, you’ve exchanged all of ten words, most of your conversation one-sided.

She glides in like she’s been up for hours, likely running through her routine maintenance checklist. Monitoring propulsion, life support, and all critical systems. You wouldn’t doubt if she had been, descending into the bowels of the ship and cataloging every minute difference from the day before. Nothing if not thorough.

Graves sweeps in not twenty minutes later, his uniform pressed and ironed. When he glances your way, you shrink under his gaze, self-conscious about something unidentifiable. He is every bit the commander you met briefly back on Earth, never a hair out of place. If he were less intimidating, he’d be insufferable.

“Morning,” you murmur, the mug still close to your lips making your voice reverberate. He doesn’t respond. You wonder if he even heard you greet him. It likely wouldn't matter.

Medic has a different connotation this far from Earth. Hierarchy out in space is typically determined by way of one’s importance to the ship, and the scope of your role does not, unfortunately, include maintaining the ship. What that means, unofficially, is that you speak when spoken to, and not for any other reason.

In the months to come, there may be moments or days when your usefulness is acknowledged, usually much to your colleagues’ chagrin. Though it’s not likely that any of the crew will encounter foreign pathogens while on a hermetically sealed ship in the middle of space, they’re all still susceptible to falls and cuts and worse. Nikolai, the chief engineer on board, had sprained his wrist during the first week of the mission, lending you immediate purpose and validation.

You make way for the second officer when he finally deigns to make an appearance, sliding quietly out of his seat and stepping to the back of the cockpit, back pressed to the wall closest to the door.

“Morning, everyone,” he greets, peppier than the three of you despite his rumpled appearance. His thick mustache twitches with the force of his smile. “Ready to seize another day?”

“Jesus Christ, Keller, let’s tone it down ‘til about ten o’clock, alright?” Graves sighs. He pinches the bridge of his nose as if to ward off a headache.

“Our clocks are off, commander,” Alex jokes, coming over to give him a little shake by the shoulder. It would be insubordination from anyone else. “I’m about ready to eat lunch.”

“Let’s just get through formation and then you can go fill up the bottomless pit you call a stomach.”

The morning briefing never takes up too much time. It’s as much of an excuse to have coffee together as it is to go through the day’s schedule. Graves spends most of the time reviewing the flight course, charting where the ship will be by day’s end.

“Almost through the belt,” Alex remarks, staring down at the monitor in front of him. It’s an incomprehensible jumble when you try to peer over his shoulder, but he must be able to make sense of it.

The crew had been on high alert since entering the torus-shaped region between Mars and Jupiter a month back. For the most part, they needn’t have been so on edge—the average distance of the asteroids in the circumstellar disc between the two planets tended to be quite substantial—but a collision the previous day had reinstated their earlier anxiety.

“Can we switch from manual yet, Farah?” Graves asks from his seat at the helm of the ship.

She shakes her head, lips tightening with frustration. “I still have to figure out what’s going on with cruise control—it’s not responding correctly.”

“Was that from that little ding the other day?” you ask, blurting out the question without thinking.

Farah’s expression is flat when she glances over at you. “That ‘little ding’ nearly took out our communications system altogether.”

You wince at that, staring down at your feet instead. Better to just shut your mouth than make a fool of yourself. Had you not blurted out the question, you might have even surmised the nature of the situation given the comm specialist’s notable absence from the cockpit.

When Nikolai eventually ambles in with a thermos of coffee and deep troughs under his eyes, Farah looks up and frowns. “Where’s Hadir?”

The man shrugs, nonplussed. “Cargo?” he grunts, rolling the toothpick between his teeth around the words.

She sighs. “I’ll go find him.”

No one says anything when she leaves, the double doors sliding open and shut automatically at her approach, and she doesn’t bother saying goodbye.

“Dismissed, I guess,” Graves sighs, collapsing into his chair and spinning around to face the stars proliferating in front of him.

The informality digs at you sometimes because you know you can’t indulge in it. The times you’ve attempted to, you’ve been rebuffed. Sometimes unintentionally, but often to remind you of your place.

This isn’t a crew you’ve ever worked with before. From conversations you’ve overheard, you’ve gleaned that they’ve all worked together in different capacities before, years of familiarity breeding an easy trust and companionship between them. Two of them might even be lovers—though Farah maintains a neutral facade at all times, the same can’t be said for Alex, the man always hovering nearby, eyes going soft at the sight of her.

You’re the only odd man out. The newcomer. And though you sit with them in the mess for meals and partake in conversation and pass jokes like small stones from hand to hand, you know deep down, in the dark well of your heart, that you are not one of them. You are a passenger that they picked up along the way. A straggler.

This wasn’t supposed to be the case. When you signed on to the mission months ago, the circumstances were wholly different. A newer ship, a different crew, some of which you’d worked with before. Then ownership changed hands and budgets were cut. Slashed to ribbons even. You had a chance to tour the ship before the launch date, and even down on Earth with all the glitz and glam available to trick the eye, you hadn’t been convinced of the vessel’s ability to withstand the extreme conditions of space.

But by then, you were locked into a contract so iron-clad that the consequences of breaking it seemed worse than simply seeing the mission through.

Most days, you feel like you’re waiting for something to give. You pass through halls that echo with low creaks and a deep, rhythmic thrum. Sometimes the walls of the ship groan so loud that you wait with baited breath for the hull to implode around you, to feel the metal crush the delicate eggshell of your body beneath its weight.

It’s not any better to just stay in your room, your quarters too cramped to nurture anything other than claustrophobia. A recent, unfortunate side effect of spending months on such a small ship. You’ve become accustomed to crews numbering in the tens and hundreds, ships so colossal in size that even months spent aboard weren’t enough to explore all of its nooks and crannies. Cargo holds with excavators and backhoes for excavations on Mars and humvees for getting around the rough terrain.

This ship barely holds six people and the payload you’ve been hauling to Europa. Pipes hiss in the corridors. Once a week, the radiator splutters or the intercom overhead crackles, kicking your heart into hyperdrive.

You leave formation more out of sorts than ever. Vaguely aimless. With nothing to do, you grab breakfast in the galley and eat at the counter, too uncomfortable to venture over to the mess. Your days consist mainly of hovering around the ship or sitting quietly in the medbay, waiting for something to happen. A morbid preoccupation.

The stairs clunk under your feet as you make your way down towards the medbay. You’ve long grown used to the sharp sound of your boots against the metal floor.

Rationally, you know they don’t dislike you. You might even venture to say that you get along with the majority of them, particularly the chief engineer and Farah’s brother. The big man likes that it only takes a single drink to get you plastered, often howls with laughter when you stumble out of the mess after drinking with the crew, always the first to turn in for the night. Farah herself is only frosty because she works twice as hard as anyone else, burning the midnight oil on the regular.

You swallow half-truths like stones to help settle your stomach.

It doesn’t replace real companionship though; it approximates, but doesn’t quite replicate it. You feel its absence most acutely in the sidelong glances you sometimes get of real affection: Alex grazing his pinkie across Farah’s when he thinks no one is looking; Farah’s eyes softening at the sight of her brother; Graves and Nikolai reminiscing about something a decade past, hardly even aware of your presence in the room.

It’s something you’ve endured before, but never for such an extended period of time. Prolonged isolation prickles at the mind, feathering the edges. It purples space; passes through the vents. The crew rarely goes on spacewalks (hardly any need for it), but sometimes you swear the ship’s oxygen has a faint sulfuric undertone, like rotten eggs. It permeates the air wherever you go.

Someone knocks at the window just as you walk by.

You pause mid-sip, the mug raised to your lips and just pressing into your bottom lip, not yet tilted.

“Hello,” you hear through the thick-paned glass, the voice muffled through the layers of glass and plastic partitions. “Could you let me in, please?”

Though your reflex is to look up, you don’t for some reason. The muscles in your neck stay locked instead. Shoulders stiff, weighed down by an unnatural force.

The thing outside the ship knocks again. “Love? Can you hear me?”

Your head turns towards the porthole, the hand holding your mug drifting away from your mouth. It tips in your hand and a drop leaks down the side. Your lips tingle, almost numb.

There’s a man outside the porthole, clear as day. He hovers outside the window, a hand raised in a friendly wave and full lips splitting to reveal perfect, white teeth when he smiles. He’s dressed in a spacesuit, no different than any of the crew on a spacewalk. Through the helmet, you can make out dark eyes and dimples. A close cropped beard.

It’s not a face you’ve ever seen before though. You think you might’ve remembered someone so handsome working on the ship with you.

Something needles inside of you though. A sickening feeling, like something you’ve forgotten but you desperately need to remember.

“Hi there,” the man says, voice as charming as you’ve ever heard, so velvety rich that you feel the blood heat your cheeks. “Glad you were passing by. Mind letting me in?”

#ceil writing #cod x reader #gaz x reader #kyle gaz garrick x reader #gaz/reader #gaz x you #this is my first attempt at scifi so im going to really concentrate on building the atmosphere over the next several parts #and i might edit this overall before it goes on ao3 so just know that

1K notes · View notes