They didn’t talk about the phone call all through breakfast. They drank their coffee and passed sections of the New York Times back and forth across the breakfast table wordlessly. There was no breath of air from the open windows; the sun was already beating down on the Manhattan rooftops, turning the fire escape outside the window into a grill.

Finally Erik leaned back in his chair and sighed. “She has a point, Charles.”

Charles played with his coffee cup. He didn’t say these are isolated incidents probably blown out of proportion by the media because he was not, in fact, stupid, and had learned something in twenty years about bad things to say to Erik. Besides, he didn’t really believe it.

“Moira’s just a bit worried,” he said. “I told her not to believe everything she reads in the Times. Well, what else was I going to say? I’m glad she cares, but there’s no sense in her worrying about us.”

One corner of Erik’s mouth quirked upward. “About you, you mean.”

“Moira likes you,” Charles said. “We’ve really both moved on.”

“Yes, of course,” Erik said skeptically. Charles found Erik’s assumption that no one in her right mind could get over Charles terribly flattering if not particularly realistic. He tried to take a sip of coffee and remembered that his cup was empty. He frowned at his own lack of composure.

“Of course we’d never leave America,” he said.

Erik looked at his coffee cup rather than at Charles. “Wouldn’t we?” he asked in a very neutral tone.

“It’s our country,” Charles said.

“Yours,” Erik said, his voice suddenly sharp. “I take no responsibility.”

“You vote.”

“No one I vote for wins.”

“Even so,” Charles said. “You’re an American citizen. You’ve been here for decades. You’ve made an investment.”

“Investors don’t throw good money after bad,” Erik said.

“Do you think it’s that bad?”

“What do you think, Charles?”

“We knew the first public appearances of mutants were going to be …” Charles searched for an appropriate word to sum up high school children beaten bloody in locker rooms and slavering tabloid stories about “nuclear monsters” on a rampage. He couldn’t find one, and set his cup down, putting his hands carefully on the table and taking a calming breath.

“It won’t get better from here,” Erik said. “Things never do.”

“You do not seriously expect me to accept as a premise for debate that nothing, anywhere, has ever gotten better,” Charles said, rubbing his temple a little wearily. It was early in the morning for this. He held out his coffee cup to Erik, who took it into the kitchen to refill it.

“Humans are always afraid of outsiders,” Erik said loudly from the kitchen. He reappeared and set the cup down in front of Charles, leaning against a wall himself. “That’s their nature.”

Charles turned the wheelchair to face him before picking up his coffee. Erik had developed a bad habit lately of taking positions that made Charles turn awkwardly to look him in the eye. “Consider the race issue,” Charles said when he could do so without craning his neck.

“Which has been entirely solved, yes?”

“It’s better,” Charles said. “What do you want? Massive social problems to disappear overnight?”

“I want you to seriously consider the possibility that the human reaction to mutants will not get better in our lifetimes. That it will, in fact, get much worse. That is what I want,” Erik said, turning away again. Charles rolled the chair closer and put an hand on his arm.

“All right,” Charles said, “what do we do?”

Erik turned, feeling surprised and relieved. He looked down at Charles, and frowned in the rueful way Charles liked rather than the acid way Charles didn’t. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

“It’s hard to think with this heat,” Charles said. “Come in by the windows and we’ll talk.”

He wheeled into what he liked to think of as the living room, although to be honest the apartment was one room with a few half-walls as dividers. He stopped where he could lean on the windowsill with one elbow and look down at the traffic.

“You’re blocking the breeze,” Erik said. “Such as it is.” The chair moved of its own accord to the side of the sofa that had no arm. Charles considered protesting either being moved like an inanimate object or the fact that moving to the sofa would leave Erik free to pace and him unable to follow. He didn’t, because he knew that Erik needed both the proximity and the slight edge it gave him.

He got himself onto the sofa and Erik curled up on the other end of it, knees to chest, his coffee cup balanced on his knees. It made him look twenty again, despite the strands of gray in the his hair, and Charles smiled at him.

“What?” Erik said, raising one eyebrow suspiciously.

“Only that we’ve had a long time to think about this.”

“We’ve had a long time to avoid thinking about this,” Erik said.

“I’m thinking,” Charles said. “I don’t think Scotland is really an option. Besides the fact that you’re irrationally jealous of a woman I haven’t dated since the days when I still had hair—“

“What a vivid imagination you have. Have you ever thought of writing romance novels? I’m sure with your astonishing insights into the human psyche--”

“Erik.” Charles could feel his fear, sharp under his racing words. Erik stopped in mid-sentence, turning his coffee cup around on its saucer. “Do you want to go to Scotland? I'm not insisting we stay here.” You’re not trapped, he added telepathically, pitching the thought to Erik’s subconscious in an attempt to avoid being told Erik didn’t need to be handled with kid gloves.

More like asbestos ones, Charles thought, and firmed his shields to avoid letting the thought slip out. It wasn’t fair, anyway. Erik wasn’t the only one who was bothered by reading the news. He was just louder about it.

“It rains too much in Britain,” Erik said after a while of sitting with his feet braced against Charles’s leg, his coffee cup forgotten in his hands.

Charles shrugged. “There’s Australia,” he said.

Erik snorted. “If you like living in a cultural desert.”

“Australia is not a cultural desert,” Charles said patiently, repressing a smile. “The Sydney Opera--“

“I hate opera,” Erik said. “As you well know.”

“Hmm,” Charles said. He did. “We don’t really have a foreign language in common, with the exception of German, and I won’t even suggest Germany.” He sighed. “I suppose South Africa—“

Erik raised a single eyebrow.

“I thought not, no.”

Erik sighed and closed his eyes. In the sunlight from the window, Charles could see the faint lines around his eyes, the frown lines that cut down from his mouth. He wondered for the first time what it would mean if Erik was right. Would they still be doing this when all that dark hair had gone gray? Could they?

Of course we can, if we must, he thought. We’re us.

He banished the thought firmly and reached for Erik’s mind, making it a gentle touch, repressing the urge to force his way in hard enough to be payback for any number of times lately Erik had been high-handed about moving his chair. He wasn’t that petty. We’re in this together, Charles said reassuringly, and Erik rewarded him by opening his eyes and smiling faintly.

“Israel?” Erik suggested, without much hope in his voice. “We could try it again.”

“Has anything really changed?” Charles asked.

Erik shrugged. “You care less now when people ask me why a nice boy like me isn’t married yet?”

“But you don’t.”

Erik turned up his hands. “And there’s the small matter of not wanting to go into a war zone.”

“It’s not our war,” Charles said.

“No,” Erik said bleakly. “Our war will come to us.”

Charles smiled at him, feeling for a moment perfectly serene. “I still have hope that what will come to us is peace,” he said.

Erik sighed and set the cup down, shifting around on the sofa so he could lean on Charles’s shoulder. Charles looked out the window, although from this angle he could see neither street nor sky. “I’d miss New York,” Erik said finally.

“Although maybe not in the summer,” Charles said, feeling sweat starting to bead at the back of his collar.

Erik smiled wickedly. “It’s better than Australia. You’d have to sell the house in Westchester just to be able to afford central air conditioning. And we’d still have to go outside every now and then.”

“You know absolutely nothing about Australia, Erik,” Charles said. “You’re shamefully slandering a very pleasant country.”

“I think Australia can take care of itself,” Erik said.

Charles rested a hand on his hair. “So can we.”

“Oh, yes,” Erik said. He put a hand on Charles’s shoulder and kissed him hard. His mouth tasted like coffee with cream. The air crackled with the force of what might have been Erik’s power gathering around them; Charles suspected that should worry him, but he chose to hope it meant the weather was about to break.

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