Inception
by Zelempa
Thanks to Crouton Shield for beta and for going with me to see the movie! Additional beta thanks to Sasha Feather!
Feedback: [Archive of Our Own]
“Listen to that engine purr!” Charles cries joyfully. It’s wonderful to be in an American car, on the proper side of the road, pushing the accelerator on a woodsy stretch of Route 66. It’s wonderful to be heading to a new city to meet someone he feels he already knows. It’s wonderful to have the wind in his hair and a good new friend by his side.
Beside him Erik leans against the window, looking like a brooding Hamlet in his black leather jacket. His blond hair is ruffled in all directions. “I still don’t understand why it was so important to get a convertible.”
“It’s a Corvette!” says Charles.
“Well, then.” Erik turns and flashes one of his less-and-less-rare smiles. “That explains everything.”
“Can you make her go faster? Erik! Have you been?”
Erik raises his hands innocently.
“Well, don’t start,” says Charles. “I don’t want to waste a precious minute in Jeanine. That’s what I’m calling her,” he says decisively, but with a sideways glance at Erik grimacing in the passenger seat, he thinks better of it. “That or Steve. Perhaps Colin. I don’t see why cars are always women.”
“It’s a rental. Don’t get too attached.” There’s a paternal note in Erik’s voice that Charles resents.
“All the more reason to enjoy it while the love is pure,” says Charles philosophically, gunning the clutch. “Ahhh, there she goes! I’m surprised at you, Erik. I would have thought you, of all people, would appreciate hot greased metal in a sexy chrome chassis.”
“I move metal, Charles. I don’t want to fuck it.”
Hearing the Anglo-Saxon verb fall casually from Erik’s lips sends a shiver down Charles’s spine. Erik fucks men. Not that Charles has peeked, not on purpose. He just has a sense for these things, as easily as other people tell men from women, or tall from short from somewhere in between.
He nods at a grassy knoll up ahead. “Shall we turn off there? This looks like a nice picnic spot.”
Erik’s look makes his thoughts obvious.
“Well, we have to eat,” says Charles defensively. He slows rapidly--the response is just wonderful--and pulls off onto the shoulder. He pops the trunk. “You get the blanket, I’ll get the Chardonnay.”
“Chardonnay,” Erik repeats, as if to make Charles realize how ridiculous he sounds.
“It’s a celebration! Our first successful recruitment mission.”
“Which we have not yet completed.”
“We’ll toast our future success.”
They unload the trunk. Erik’s expression makes clear that he is suffering himself to be loaded with a basket and a blanket only out of the purest martyrdom. For a moment Charles feels genuine guilt -- is it obnoxious to parade luxury in front of someone who has been so deprived? But it isn’t as if he intends to drink all the wine himself while Erik watches. Even if that’s what Erik intends. He’ll give Erik some carefree joy if it kills him.
Erik leads the way into the woods. Charles would have stopped much closer to the road, but Erik has specific requirements regarding visual cover and defensibility. When Erik finally stops and spreads the blanket on a pile of dry leaves, Charles has to admit he’s picked a perfect spot. The clearing is small but bright, especially at noon, with the sun shining directly down into the gap in the trees. New green leaves frame the golden shaft of sunlight. Little yellow flowers grow in a ring around the clearing.
They sit cross-legged on the blanket. Charles unpacks the basket, feeling more foolish with every item. Crusty French bread, brie, fresh strawberries and cream. When he did the shopping this morning, drunk on the optimism of a new endeavor, it hadn’t looked quite so plainly like a seduction lunch. Swap the bread for chocolate croissants and it’s exactly the menu he used to woo Genevieve Richards. Come to think of it, Genevieve had the same haughty, Germanic way of looking not quite at you, but through you, as if someone less irritating might be standing on the other side.
Erik breaks the bread in two with his hands and tears into his half with vicious incisors, politely pretending to be unaware that this food is ridiculous.
The air is silent except for the sounds of chewing and the gentle hum of the woods. Leaves rustling, birds calling.
Charles has a sinking feeling that he would know by now if he were wanted. Even when he’s not listening, desire has a way of making itself heard.
Michael Avon, for example. The outwardly shy poet had wanted Charles so loudly that basic human decency compelled Charles to invite him up to his rooms for a bit of a grope. This was Charles’s only foray into homosexuality to date and he’d found it surprisingly satisfying. Raven dismissed it as narcissism. “You’re not queer, you’re hung up on yourself.”
Erik is different. He’s not a panting, undersexed, over-imaginative schoolboy. He’s not a co-ed putting on an untouchable air because he thinks it makes him interesting. He’s real and serious and strong in a way that Charles has never known. He has a depth of pain that would make some men crumble, but instead he has become tempered steel. And he can still smile and laugh, joke, play a killer game of chess.
Sitting here with him amongst the little yellow flowers, Charles admires the sunshine in his hair, his wide jaw and blue eyes, his biceps taut in his tight black T-shirt as he eats one strawberry after another with ruthless efficiency, leaves and all.
Erik looks up at him suddenly, pausing with a strawberry halfway to his mouth, and Charles forces his mind to go blank.
“Enjoying the fruit?” he asks inanely.
Forcing his mind to go blank may not have been the best idea.
“Why do you ask?” says Erik.
Charles shifts uncomfortably. Forget seduction. His new goal for the afternoon is simply to make it through lunch without being socked in the jaw or finding a fork through his shoulder. “Just making conversation.”
“No, why do you ask?” Erik repeats, with confusing emphasis. “You’re always asking questions. Can’t you just read me and find out everything you want to know?”
“I don’t enter my friends without permission,” says Charles, realizing the double entendre a moment too late. He looks down at his glass.
Erik, luckily, doesn’t seem to have noticed. His voice is serious. “You’ve already been in my mind.”
“That was before.”
“Before we were friends.” Erik says the word experimentally, as if he’s trying it out.
“Yes. And even then I wasn’t trying to read you specifically. You were broadcasting on all frequencies. I couldn’t have kept you out if I’d wanted to.”
“Good,” says Erik, and Charles doesn’t know what that means.
“May I read you now?” Charles asks hopefully, knowing it’s probably too much to ask.
“No.” Charles wasn’t really expecting a “yes,” but Erik says it so firmly, so immediately, that Charles is taken aback. He can’t help but feel disappointed--not only that Erik is denying him access, but that evidently, his mind is still in so much turmoil that it’s in no state to be seen. Charles experiences a fleeting and unfamiliar sense of failure.
Erik watches Charles silently, not moving his gaze as he fastidiously licks strawberry juice from his fingers. “Don’t think I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?” he asks in an unnaturally tight tone that he hopes doesn’t betray his nervousness.
“You’re trying to plant happy memories on me.”
Charles shakes his head. “I told you, I’m not doing anything to your head.”
“No, you’re doing it the old-fashioned way.”
Charles lowers his eyes to his Chardonnay. Has he been that obvious?
“Hm!” Erik leans back against a tree, crossing a leg over his knee. At least he’s enjoying being right. “If you don’t think I have any good memories, you didn’t look hard enough. You’re not my first friend, Charles.”
“I never dreamed that I was.”
“I’ve had many friends. Hans and Augustus and Francois...”
Amused to be given a list, Charles shoots Erik a playful grin. “And where are Hans and Augustus and Francois now?”
Erik gazes off into the flickering leap canopy and doesn’t answer.
Charles drops his smile. “Oh.”
“No, no, they’re all alive,” Erik assures him. “As far as I know. Things ended in the usual way things end. You begin to argue over nothing... you become angry... one day the knife drawer shakes in its moorings, and you order this man out of your home before something happens that you’ll regret.”
Charles nods. He’s beginning to get the feeling that the word “friends,” for Erik, doesn’t mean mates from the pub.
“You get a lead on your lifelong enemy and leave town without a word... that sort of thing.”
“Oh, of course,” says Charles. “That happens to me all the time. At least I don’t have to worry about you leaving, anyway. I can always find you.”
Erik shoots Charles a quick, hard squint before pouring himself another glass and Charles realizes he’s just made a rather forward comment.
“That’s two of the three,” says Charles quickly, moving along. “What happened to the third?”
Erik tips back his glass and says, “Oh, the sex went bad.”
“Oh, well!” Charles feels light and bubbly as the Chardonnay. He’s right. He’s right about friends. And Erik has already called him one. He can’t help beaming, but he manages to tilt it into a cheeky grin. “You don’t have to worry about that with me, either. I’m brilliant at sex.”
Erik gazes at Charles for a long moment, his face unreadable. It’s all Charles can do to keep out of his head.
Finally Erik stretches out on the blanket, folding his hands behind his head. “Tell me, Charles.” A slightly sinister smile curls the corner of his mouth, and he shifts his hips ever so slightly. “How far are you willing to go to make this a truly happy memory for my golden years?”
Charles swallows. He does his best to quell the warmth creeping up his face. He raises an eyebrow, trying to look confident and infinitely experienced. “May I show you?”
"By all means.”
Charles takes a breath and edges closer on the blanket until his legs are just brushing Erik’s. Erik watches him curiously but doesn’t move. Charles raises two fingers instinctively, but stops himself, and instead reaches out and places his hand along the side of Erik’s face. Erik’s lips part, and he looks up at Charles with wide open blue eyes, free from their usual guardedness. Charles leans forward and presses his forehead to Erik’s.
He has barely begun imagining how it might be to kiss Erik when Erik’s wide mouth is open against his, enthusiastically parting his lips. Charles happily allows himself to be kissed, mind blank, before pressing the fantasy onward. His hand still firm against Erik’s face, he imagines letting it drift down, unbuckling Erik’s belt... Erik understands immediately, and without further ado he broadcasts a full-color three-dimensional image of the impressive piece of equipment he’s packing. Charles responds with an only slightly exaggerated image of his own. Erik moans in his throat and his real physical hand grips Charles’s backside through his slacks.
This is where more experience with men would come in handy. Charles can’t broadcast his eagerness and joy at the idea of taking Erik’s cock inside him; not with enough specificity to be convincing. Instead he calls to mind all the vivid memories of his last encounter with Sheila Hendrickson or, more accurately, Sheila Hendrickson’s ass. He remembers her tightness around him, the excruciatingly slow, controlled pleasure as he slowly, slowly pushes deep into her...
And to his surprise Erik responds with just the information Charles needed a moment ago. Charles gasps as he feels himself, through Erik’s memories, completely filled by another man. Waves of pleasure rock him as Augustus or Hans or Francois or whoever thrusts into him again and again. Erik fucks, or gets fucked, hard, fast, and no-nonsense; it’s completely unlike Charles’s usual gentle sonata of passion. At this moment Charles can’t imagine anything hotter.
He’s stretched out against Erik’s warm, hard body, shoving his tongue urgently into Erik’s wet mouth and pushing his erection into Erik’s hip in perfect rhythm with the thrusts in Erik’s mind. The memories and sensations have melted together and it’s impossible to tell where Charles ends and Erik begins. They’re in complete harmony, collaborating on a single image: Charles on top of Erik, Charles buried in Erik, Charles’s hand gripping Erik’s forearm. Erik’s head tilted back as his mouth fixes in an open smile (this is admittedly probably Charles). Charles’s lips, red and shiny and parted (probably Erik, Charles realizes with satisfaction). Both of them moaning and shaking with the simultaneous pleasure of penetrating and being penetrated.
The moaning is a real sound and it’s Charles’s voice. Erik is gently rolling him onto his back and back onto the blanket. Charles clings to him, hands tight on the back of Erik’s sweaty T-shirt, face buried in Erik’s neck. The front of his slacks are wet. He flushes with embarrassment. He hasn’t come from kissing alone since he was a teenager.
Erik brushes Charles’s hair from his face and smiles serenely down at him. He pats the side of Charles’s face. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
The End