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]

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.