finis initium

they lie in the field outside the estate, away from the house and the clatter and surprise of children that so often leaves them breathless and bleary. the sun warms their skin; the wind plucks at their shirts. the birds whistle. charles sighs, a breathy contemplative thing. he watches the head on his stomach move up and down. 

the moment is light and warmth and glory and it fills his mind: all the windows thrown open, dust blooming up and debris swept out, the echoes and ghosts usually haunting the untidy corners pierced by sunlight and scattered, until his are the only footfalls. the quiet affords him an opportunity to stretch, to walk and then run down the halls, taking corners too fast as only he can in daydreams, now, even august mornings cannot warm his legs. he reaches his hand to touch the side of erik's neck, and thus anchored gives himself a moment of depthless grief. but seas soon turn to blankets, enveloping instead of crushing, and charles knows everything (yes, even that) is a gift because it brought them here, with the grass and the cloudless sky together in a suspended moment. 

charles looks down at erik and finds he's already staring.  

unburdened by cacophonies, every tangle in charles is unknotted and threads flattened straight, paralleled and infinite.

erik lifts his head. 

"charles."

his tongue is honeyed with phonetic constraint, a purr-- or maybe a rumble. i want to kiss that sound, he thinks. his whimsy makes him grin. then: ((i want to kiss that sound)) and he wins a bemused smirk.

((use your words, charles)) in his head and oh: erik’s amusement is heated gold pounded thin; his want is the blinding white reflection of polished metal under the sun, a strumming in his chest; then angles of color when erik thinks of charles—summergrass green and pink skin perpendicular, concave skyblue eyes—morphing, shaping; and underneath, always, a bearing ball of tension keeping him apart, the slightest of hesitancies from the little boy who has never forgotten how painful it was to love, who doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to, to—

an abundance of warmth spreads through charles’ muscles. he presses his palms on the ground and pushes himself upward, needing their bodies to share as many points of contact as their porous minds. erik meets him more than halfway, anticipating, never needing telepathy to get the better of him. each surprise aches in charles' breast as sharply as the first, because charles harbors his own fears hidden behind bedroom doors and layered on the tops of ceiling fans. 

erik kisses him, and their lips taste of sweat.