I Stand Where You Stood
Charles walks through the empty house opening doors, reluctant to touch anything. He feels he should apologize for being here. The house does not yet look unlived in; old mail is still lying on a table, and wilted flowers still sit in vases in the rooms downstairs. Upstairs he opens the door to his mother's room, where the dry rose-smell of her powder and perfume still lingers. He can't quite bring himself to go in.
The house is full of someone else's life, and he is trespassing here. He wasn't meant to see her nightgown draped over the back of a chair or the books left open on the nightstand. He could pick one up and see the words she was reading the day she died. It seems an unforgivable invasion. His whole life has been full of doors he wished he could avoid opening. He thinks for a moment of closing this one and leaving it closed, going back to the city and letting the house molder and gather dust.
It's a terribly Gothic thought, and he shakes his head at himself. He will do no such thing, of course. He will pack his mother's things into boxes and put them away, and then have the house cleaned and prepared for whatever he plans to do with it. He hasn't decided. They haven't decided.
There is the sound of equally hesitant footsteps downstairs, and Charles shuts the bedroom door (just for now, he tells himself) and goes down. The worn handrail of the stairs feels familiar under his hand despite all the years it's been since this was home. The third step down from the landing creaks. He will have to have something done about that if he plans to sell the house.
Erik is standing gazing into the mirror in the hallway with an odd expression. Charles can't tell if he's looking at his reflection or through it at something Charles can't see.
"Erik?"
Erik looks up, meeting his eyes in the mirror. "Well?"
"Well, what?"
"You're acting as though you're waiting for something."
Charles shrugs. "Maybe for her to come home."
"I'm sorry," Erik says, uncharacteristically gently. Charles isn't sure he deserves the sympathy. He knows how Erik pictures grief, and he's not sure this cold feeling that everything is a little wrong qualifies. Sometimes he thinks he feels more for Erik's mother than for his own; certainly he knows better what it feels like to want her back.
He turns away, holding himself awkwardly, as if facing a critical audience. "We didn't get along," he says.
"Even so."
"I just don't know ..." Charles begins, although he's not sure what he doesn't know.
Erik shrugs. "Well, there's enough room."
What to do with the house, then. Charles grasps the topic gratefully, although he's not sure what he wants to do. "For a school, you mean?"
"For an army," Erik says. Charles thinks it's likely that Erik is merely being sarcastic about the house's size -- it is huge, and he hasn't taken Erik upstairs or down to the cellars or up into the stifling attic. On the other hand, it's a telling metaphor. Or possibly he's projecting his own fears, there.
He's also aware that indulging in armchair psychoanalysis is a bad habit of his at difficult moments. "Certainly for a handful of children."
"And a laboratory."
"And a swimming pool, if we wanted," Charles says.
"Don't tell me there's no swimming pool. I thought all rich Americans had swimming pools."
"There's a tennis court."
"It's not the same."
"It would bring a lot of money if we sold it," Charles says.
"Do you need more money?"
"We could buy a house in the city."
"We can pass for human well enough to live in the city. What if the children aren't as pretty?"
Charles looks around. It's strangely unsettling to think about bringing mutant children here, like breaking all the walls between the person he was as a child and the person he's become in secret. And, of course, to think about bringing Erik here. He meets Erik's pale blue eyes in the mirror, trying not to feel like all their secrets are exposed to watching eyes.
"It's probably the best thing," he says. Maybe it will do him good to have some connection to the past, his mother and all the shadowy people who lived and died here since the house was built. If nothing else, it will remind him that he's not entirely unlike them. He thinks sometimes he and Erik both need reminding of that.
A hundred years ago, his grandfather must have come home after his mother's funeral and wondered what to do with her letters and whether to give her old clothes to the maid. Forty years ago his father carried his mother across the threshold as a bride. (Charles likes to think so, anyway, although he's not sure if anyone actually does that outside of movies.) And now he's here.
He takes Erik by the arm. "Do you want to see upstairs? I suppose we'll have to make some of it over as dormitories, unless you think the students should all have their own rooms."
"They could all have their own wings," Erik says, but he lets Charles draw him toward the stairs. His arm is stiff in Charles's, and after a moment Charles lets him go. It will take a while for Erik to be at ease here. It will take a while for him to be at ease himself, but he's sure he can manage it.
"This used to be the nursery," Charles says, opening the door of a room that now is largely empty, the sun slanting across the broad wood floor with its faded Oriental rugs, a bookcase still laden with what he hopes are some of his childhood books.
"Where you came from," Erik says, smiling as if he's amused but not particularly pleased. Charles has the urge to apologize, but there's nothing to apologize for. This is where he came from.
"Room enough for an army," Charles says. The words hang between them just a little too long, and after a moment he reaches out and closes the door.