if words could make wishes come true

[morethanhuman]

"Would you stop that?" Erik said, the exasperation in his voice not quite enough to cover over the laughing undertone it held. "You're the one who was put so out of sorts by my levitating an olive jar, and here you are nearly setting the hotel on fire."

Jordan shot him a look, an arched eyebrow and a pursed mouth that were somehow unmistakably her own, despite appearing on features that had yet to become familiar. She also ignored his request, and continued to pass a ball of flame back and forth between her hands with little flicks of her fingers. The fire was self-contained, but every now and then a little tongue of orange would fizzle up into the air, hissing as it dissipated. He hardly noticed them; his eyes were fixed on the fiery sphere and the corona of flame that clung to Jordan's palms as she tossed it back and forth. Incredible. He could barely contain his excitement.

He hadn't believed it at first— neither phenomenon, and Erik couldn't decide which was more preposterous: that passing through one of the hotel doors could grant mutant powers to someone who hadn't been born to them, or that going through another could send a person back out with a completely different body than the one they'd gone in with.

Well— not completely different. Jordan still had neat, dark hair and bright blue eyes, pale skin and a wry, soft mouth. But they looked very different on her usual body than they did on the trim, smartly dressed man currently sitting beside Erik, playing catch with a handful of fire. "Don't be such a killjoy," she admonished, but she was laughing too, and it was still Jordan's laugh, even if it was an octave or two lower than normal. "I'm not going to set anything on fire."

"You say that now," Erik teased. "But when the arboretum goes up in flames, don't think for a second I'll stick around to share the blame."

Comments

[incurablydishonest]

"I should set you on fire, might make you a bit more lively," Jordan was quick to reply, a teasing tilt to her mouth as she lounged back against the bench, watching him. This new body she was still getting used to, but the core of her felt the same, new flesh on an old frame, and her bearing was unaltered—Too masculine to be entirely feminine, and now too feminine for masculinity. Either way, she liked it.

"I don't simply start fires, darling, I control them," she continued, watching Erik as he watched her hands, licks of fire now leaping from finger to finger, reflected in his wary eyes. With a quick flick of her wrist, she clamped her hand shut, and when she splayed it out again, there was nothing but a wisp of smoke in her palm.

"Or perhaps you could be more lively without it." Blue eyes still fixed upon him, Jordan arched one aristocratic eyebrow and gave the slightest nudge—Just the hint of a suggestion, really—and waited to see what Erik might do.

[morethanhuman]

Twin impulses warred in Erik's chest; a laugh tickling the back of his throat, and a quick flash of warning that sparked in his eyes, even as the laugh spilled out. "I wish you wouldn't do that," he said, helpless against the mirth bubbling out of him. "It's terribly rude." But there was no weight to the words at all, and he sprawled back against the bench, one arm flung out along the back, his head tipped back as the laugh tapered off and he was left catching his breath, still grinning.

Jordan's smug little smile was unchanged, too, and Erik found it difficult to look away. Her having a mutation— he could scarcely believe it. It was a marvel, the only inequality between them erased by a simple trip through a door. Then a sudden thought struck him— the memory of waking up to the soft hiss of medical machines, the Proserpina's infirmary laid out like a barrow with every powered person stricken by some unknown illness— and his eyebrows drew together.

"Do you think it's permanent?" Whatever magic or science made this place work, they couldn't trust it, and as much as he'd like to think Jordan's powers were here to stay, he'd be a fool to assume that was true just because he wished it would be.

[incurablydishonest]

Jordan took a long moment to stare blithely back at Erik until she was able to effectively trace his mental sidestep. She'd nearly scoffed at the idea of her being permanently rude—Her reputation was neither lost on her, nor of any particular concern.

"Well, no," she finally allowed with a quick shake of her head. "It's the doors, you know. I suppose there is a chance that I might not find the same ones again, but somehow I doubt it."

She couldn't have said why she felt so secure in this answer, only that it seemed a fundamental truth. This place was unexpected, but not without its own skewed sort of logic.

"Why?" Regarding Erik, she arched her eyebrows with the slight upward tilt of her chin.

[morethanhuman]

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask why she'd ever choose to give it up, but he bit it back. Jordan didn't share his opinion on the superior part of homo sapiens superior, and he was more likely to get an eyeroll for his trouble than he was to be taken seriously for trying to convince her to keep her powers.

"Just trying to figure out how much damage we can do while you're still powered up," he said, his shoulder lifting and dropping in a careless motion. "For a given value of 'damage', anyway— I promise I'm not suggesting you set fire to anything important." A smile was determined to manifest on his face, regardless of his efforts not to act like a child at a birthday party.

"For example, I'm sure you could convince whoever's currently tending the bar to give us a round for free."

[incurablydishonest]

"Naturally," was Jordan's easy reply, accompanied with a delicate flick of her wrist, which was still slim and elegant despite being more masculine now. Taking Erik's declaration as intention, she pushed herself smoothly to her feet and proceeded in the general direction of the Smoking Room with the unspoken expectation of being accompanied. Her hips swung less naturally than they had before, giving the sensation of perpetually being half a step off from where she ought to be, but outwardly she was as calm and secure as ever.

"My setting fire to something means it's unimportant," she clarified with a backwards glance, eyebrows arched.

[morethanhuman]

"Especially if it belonged to someone who'd irritated you, I'm sure," he replied, mirroring her coolly amused glance.

Erik strolled a pace behind Jordan on her way into the lively bar, his eyes briefly sweeping the room, not really taking any of the details in, his gaze drawn back to Jordan as she cut a path through the usual late afternoon crowd. He couldn't seem to stop watching — her elbows settling on the bar, her easy slouch, her eyes narrowed as she used her power to make the bartender especially eager to serve them.

"Two martinis," she told the man; then, when he brought them back, favored him with a demure smile, more sly on her new face than it ever had been before. "That'll be all," she said, turning away with a little toss of her head.

Erik picked up his drink and followed her to the cozy table they preferred, though they had to detour around a particularly rowdy pack of young people who'd pushed a bunch of tables together to play a card game. One shot to his feet with a roar of victory, forcing Erik into a quick sidestep, his drink sloshing.

"Dammit," he swore, breaking free of the throng and pausing to get his bearings. He looked down and almost jumped again, an expression of stupid surprise painting his face as he realized the solitary occupant of the table in front of him was Charles.

[hopeagain]

Charles hadn't intended to be there, at least not consciously. Months it had been—Nearly a year—since his garden argument with Erik and last trip to the Nexus. For the better part of that time, he had taken great pains to place a mental emphasis on how little he cared to return, and whether due to these efforts or some cosmic understanding of his emotional fragility, he'd remained in New York. He might still be there were it not for Hank.

Clever Hank, who was now right back to being precisely the man he'd most desperately wished to be, mutation be damned.

No, Charles hadn't intended to be at the Nexus, but he had distinctly wished to be anywhere but home. To the hotel's credit, it had deposited him neatly in the bar, and as he'd rolled immediately up to one of the small tables, he'd had the ridiculous thought that perhaps this one time, he might go an evening without seeing Erik. He'd felt him, of course, an itch tugging irrepressibly at the edges of his awareness, begging—and then demanding—to be scratched.

Hand clamped over the reassuring coolness of his tumbler of whiskey, Charles held Erik's gaze for a long, tremulous moment, and then slid his attention to the leggy creature beside him. Dark hair, bright blue eyes. Not mutant, but not human— He narrowed his own eyes, the young man (woman?) affording him an imperious look—

Pyrokinesis, yes, and…

And some kind of telepath.

It hit him like a punch to the gut, the breath huffing abruptly out of him with a faint sound of disbelief. Almost immediately he twisted in his chair to motion to a passing waitress, his expression too brittle, too bright.

"Another, love," he requested with a tap of his glass. It was still nearly full.

[morethanhuman]

For a brief, thunderstruck moment Erik wondered if Charles was ordering a drink for him— but then Charles's head tipped back, baring the lean arch of his throat as he poured half the tumbler of whiskey down the hatch in one neat swallow. He set the glass back on the table without so much as a tremble, the sharp percussion of glass on marble echoing the snap of his eyes back to Erik's, flatly defiant.

Erik could feel the anger and accusation in that look— could have felt it from fifty yards distant— and found he was unable to summon the requisite self-righteousness to respond in kind. "I'm surprised to see you here, Charles," he said, arching an indifferent eyebrow. "I'd have thought your liquor cabinet was far superior to the hotel's."

And if Charles wanted to drink in resentful solitude, there was no reason he needed to leave the house to do it.

But Charles's eyes had slid away from him again— to Jordan, Erik realized belatedly, and glanced over his shoulder to see his friend giving his ex-lover a desultory once-over of her own. "This is Jordan Baker," he said, unable to help himself adding, "though no doubt you've gotten that much on your own already."

He tried not to think what else Charles might be seeing in Jordan's mind, tried to keep down the flash of alarm that wanted to recall that afternoon she'd listened to him pour out his heart along with most of a bottle of gin. What had he told her? It didn't matter at this point— Charles had already made his contempt clear, and Erik was enough of a pragmatist to know that wasn't likely to change no matter what he saw in anyone's head.

[incurablydishonest]

They were so alike, Erik and herself. Most of the time the fact of it got lost in the easy comfort they shared, but from time to time their similarities stood out bald and brash, a crisp jolt like splashing cold water on your face on a hot summer afternoon. What a tall, cool liar Erik was, his wall of diffidence as neat as his suit, not a hair out of place. Had he been dressed for golfing and slouching in an oversized chair, he could have been her.

I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for awhile.

On a different day, in a different context, she might have openly admired him for this display of aloofness, but here, now, the connection was too poignant, too acute, and she merely sipped from her glass as she shifted her attention back to Charles.

Charles, who was as collegiate and buttoned-up as Nick had been, lacking only a borrowed sport coat and a dogeared book, dark hair artlessly tousled over his strained expression. His eyes, though, were of a different species entirely, bright and piercing and uncannily familiar, although Jordan couldn't quite place why–

Oh.

Blinking, she openly stared a moment, and then swiveled a look of cynical disbelief back to Erik.

"She's a sharp one," Charles said, and knocked back what remained in his first glass, apparently giving up on seeming disaffected. "He's not put it together yet," he added to Jordan, and reached for the fresh drink.

[morethanhuman]

The sting was too quick for Erik to dodge— being talked about rather than to, as if he were the one behaving like a petulant child— between the snide condescension and watching Charles toss down whiskey like it was water, Erik found himself abruptly at the end of his patience.

"Charming," he said, irritation giving the word a chilly edge. "Unfortunately, I didn't come here to be used for verbal target practice, so I'm afraid we'll be saying good night."

He had no intention of asking for an explanation, or of admitting that he had no idea what Charles was talking about. Unsettled, something worried at his stomach like acid, but he ignored that too, whisking it away into the category of things he didn't need to pay attention to. He simply wanted to get away, politely if possible, but quickly, whether it was polite or not.

[incurablydishonest]

Jordan's instinctive frown registered only as a firm press of her lips. Despite their undeniable similarities and considerable length of time in each other's company, she still found it impossible to entirely forgive Erik's vulgar outbursts of emotion on the rare occasions they cropped up. Whether she could sympathize seemed quite irrelevant when secondhand embarrassment and irritation was twisting her gut.

"Calm down," came the abrupt, beleaguered directive from Charles. "No one is using you for target practice, Erik." Jordan was watching him with careful curiosity, his fingers trembling before he clamped them back over his glass. "I'm only wondering whether I ought to be flattered," he quietly added, flicking a glance Jordan's way.

"Darling," Jordan began, lighting a hand upon Erik's arm, and then halted, as Charles was now staring at her in open astonishment.

[morethanhuman]

With obvious effort, Erik reined himself in, clamping down on the strident objection to being soothed like a wild animal, reminding himself that it didn't matter what Charles thought of him, it didn't— but what Jordan thought of him mattered a great deal.

"I'm sorry," he addressed her directly, making eye contact and deliberately softening his tone, for all that he could feel his face warm with embarrassment. "I know you hate it when I make a scene."

In the calm breath after he spoke, the understanding of what Charles had meant about being flattered bowled into him, full force. The height, the soft dark hair, the riveting blue eyes— he'd been an idiot not to realize. A willful idiot, maybe, but if anything that made it less excusable. Was he really so unaware of his own mind? How miserably predictable it was.

But that seemed to matter less now, the edge of his astounded shame dulling while Jordan just looked at him, til at length he turned back to Charles with a more relaxed expression. "You should be used to my temper by now, Charles," he said. "Strange— I never took you for the forgetful type."

[hopeagain]

“I was never used to your temper, Erik,” Charles replied. “I would have thought you would have remembered that." While he wasn’t precisely calm, a slight hum of anxiety still lingering in the delicate bones of his fingers, the edge had gone from his voice nevertheless, replaced by resignation. No, he hadn’t forgotten, not any of it.

“Forgive my rude introduction, Miss Baker,” he continued, swinging Jordan a look more like his old self, charming and self-effacing, if a bit forced. “It’s a pleasure to meet you…”

Head tilting, his eyes narrowed as he trailed off.

I promise you, he told her, it’s no good trying to push me, love, although I do applaud your initiative.

The only response Jordan gave was the slightest bored lift of one thin shoulder as she sipped at her martini.

Charles didn’t have the heart to examine her motives or even look much deeper than her surfacemost thoughts, too afraid of what he might discover, but she’d thrown the gauntlet down first, and he couldn’t really be blamed if he caught onto things like her love of a well-tended golf green rolling away into the morning mist, or the way he reminded her of Nick, or her complicated feelings for Gatsby–

Blinking, Charles shot a look to Erik. Did you know that she’s Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker?

[morethanhuman]

Erik shrugged, almost a mirror of Jordan's expression. She's not the first person I've met who I'd previously believed to be fictional, he replied, his mind skating over Holmes and Watson, Aubrey, the grey alien girl. There were times he still struggled to understand the existence of so many other worlds than the one he'd thought himself confined to all his life, but after everything, accepting that Jordan existed in his world in the pages of a book, and in her own world as a real, breathing person, was hardly a chore at all.

He was startled, too, to remember how new this still was to Charles. The genuine curiosity in Charles's thoughts had hooked him like a fish, the sudden bright flash of his interest bursting in Erik's mind, irresistible. Charles forgetting to be distant made him forget for a brief instant as well, and he was halfway to asking if Charles wanted company before he remembered that even if he did, he wasn't going to want theirs.

But he hadn't asked Erik to leave yet either.

The silence since any of them had spoken aloud was stretching, and Erik glanced at Jordan again, hoping she'd oblige him with a suggestion that they move on. But she was looking between the two of them, cool and distant, like a theater-goer waiting for the play to get interesting. Erik's sense of awkward desperation grew, and finally he spat out what had been on the tip of his tongue for the past minute. "Do you mind if we sit?"

He hadn't counted on Charles speaking at the same moment he did, but was abruptly grateful for the competing noise drowning out his words. Coloring with embarrassment, Erik pressed his lips together and waited for Charles to repeat himself.

[hopeagain]

Any other day, and Charles might have immediately put an end to it. Whether he legitimately wanted Erik to join him, and whether some part of Erik legitimately wanted to be there ought to have been soundly immaterial, as should have Jordan's undoubted good intentions for them both. Any other day and he would have snapped her flimsy influence in a blink and issued a stern warning on the moral implications of mind control, even when it was well-meaning.

But it wasn't any other day, and he was on his second scotch, and he knew, with the certainty of one who knows someone better than they know themselves, that nudged by Jordan or otherwise, Erik's impulse was coming from somewhere.

There may also have been, in the back of his mind, the acute awareness that he'd utterly failed at getting this far alone.

"Please," he said, motioning to the chairs with all the affect of a generous host despite how stiff the word felt in his mouth.

[morethanhuman]

With a graceless clatter that felt even more out of place after Charles's unflappability, Erik pulled out a chair and settled himself into it, stiff and upright and with his elbows tucked neatly onto the chair's arms. Jordan sprawled easily beside him, her loose posture a direct contrast to his obvious nerves.

"I haven't seen you in months," he said to Charles, hearing as the words left his mouth that they sounded more accusing than the polite observation he was attempting. Softening his tone, he added, "How's New York?"

He'd been asking after the school, but it wasn't the mansion he thought of, the city suddenly looming large in his memory. They'd stayed there just the one night before finding Darwin, and he'd barely bothered to protest before letting Charles drag him out to dinner, to a club, to several martinis more than he'd ever have drunk under normal circumstances. Russia hadn't been far off, then; he'd been on fire with wanting Charles, torturing himself with it, and that night was a hazy buzz of arousal and color in his memory. He'd almost given in and made a move, and damn the consequences— couldn't remember, now, why he hadn't. Two weeks later it had all been moot, anyway, but the memory stood out nevertheless; one more missed opportunity.

Erik realized he was letting his mind wander and snapped the train of thought off as fast as he could, glancing at Jordan with a thin smile. "Someday the hotel will let me out so I can take you for a visit. New York in the '60s— it's a singular experience."

[hopeagain]

To Charles' credit, his wince was minute, just a slight squint of his eyes and twinge at the corner of his mouth as if he were briefly struggling with his already-strained facade. It was akin to torure, the flash of Erik's dizzying nostalgia followed so quickly by the reminder of his own reality. The question hadn't intended to be barbed, but it stung all the same.

"The school's doing well enough," he allowed, which was true when placed against the larger context of the absolute debacle the president's assassination had been, but an outright lie under any other circumstance. "I'm afraid that you'll find the world as a whole much changed in these last years. You're better off here, I'd say, with the way things have been going."

He tipped his glass Erik's way and then took another gulp. It had been awhile since he'd been properly drunk; today seemed more and more like the opportune time for it.