Title: The Big Picture
Author: Renata
Fandom: X-Men movieverse
Pairing: Erik/Charles
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Will I ever write an X-Men fic without some glimmer of a Tori Amos reference? Probably not.

Erik was always reluctant to leave Charles alone, despite Charles's perfectly accurate protestations that he had gotten along fine before he had met Erik, and was certainly still capable of doing so. The truth was that Erik sometimes forgot that there was a time before Charles and Erik had known one another.

He was not certain why, exactly-- Erik certainly remembered his own past quite distinctly, remembered vast stretches of time without the quiet American. But it always caught him by surprise to recollect that Charles had existed before he had met Erik. It was almost as if he believed Charles had emerged, Athena-like, from Erik's own head, precisely when and where he had needed him.

But no, Charles had come from mortal parents, and despite (or because of this), could, in fact, take care of himself, with or without use of his legs.

And so Erik was off to Toronto to present a paper (Measurements of Energy Losses in Pulsed Superconducting Magnets), and he was leaving Charles behind for a number of eminently practical reasons, not least of which was that in 1968, one simply did not bring one's lover to respected scientific conferences, not unless one's lover was Marie Curie.

Charles was not Marie Curie, and so Erik boarded the plane alone. The conference was-- not dull, no, many of the papers being presented are fascinating-- but all the same, Erik was pleased when the weekend is over.

He returned to their small apartment late Sunday night, and saw that the light in the crampted kitchen was still on. It relieved him to see Charles, seated at the kitchen table with an empty teacup and a Journal of Modern History. He would not admit, not even to himself, just how relieved he was to see Charles alive and well, finally putting to rest the irrational half-formed images he had had in his mind's eye, of Charles fallen out of his chair and unable to right himself, of Charles bleeding in an alley somewhere.

"Isn't 'modern history' a bit of an oxymoron?"

Charles looked up at him with a smile, as if he hadn't heard him enter, as if Erik hadn't felt the brief touch of their mental reconnection.

"Someone has to keep an eye on yesterday while you're off looking for tomorrow."

Erik grinned and got himself a glass of water.

"Speaking of which," Charles continued, "how was the conference?"

"Fascinating. You'd have hated it."

Charles laughed. "I imagine I would have." Charles was interested in people, not ideas. No, that was wrong-- he was interested in people and ideas, but if he couldn't see, directly, how something would help or hurt people, it was difficult for him to get involved. This, Erik knew, was one of Charles's frustrations with many of his psychology colleagues.

Erik would later wonder if the same traits that made him a good psychologist and a wonderful lover were what made him a poor leader of the mutant cause-- persistent. Compassionate. Unwilling to accept necessary losses.

But that night, those thoughts were far from his mind, and that night Charles told him "welcome back" with his hands and "I missed you" with his tongue and "I love you" with his lips, and Erik responded ino kind, and that night, the big picture was smply he and Charles, a couple reunited after a brief separation, with yesterday far behind them and tomorrow only a glimmer of an idea.

That night nothing was missing.

-- fin

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