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Charles was accustomed to Erik being irritable. He’d known Erik nearly as long as he could remember—Mrs. Lehnsherr had come to work as the Xaviers’ cook when Charles was only five—and they’d been best friends from the very first day. He knew exactly how prickly Erik could get, and he knew that it was usually a cover for something else—sadness, or worry, or hurt.
This was different.
On the surface, things seemed mostly normal. School was out for the summer, which meant they spent most of the day running wild on the grounds of the mansion; they climbed trees, went swimming in the lake, ravaged the library for old favorites and anything they hadn’t read before, pestered the polo ponies and their indulgent caretakers. During all of it, Erik snapped and snarled and complained about everything—not just his usual low-level impatience with the world and its flaws, but bursts of vicious fury that came and went as quickly as fireworks.
“It’s the heat,” he said after one such outburst, “it’s this miserable heat, Charles, I’m sorry.” He pulled off his shirt, used it to wipe sweat from his face, and threw it into the grass.
“It is hot,” Charles admitted, dangling his feet off the edge of the dock. Maybe he was reading too much into it—Erik being so moody, and sort of jittery, and hungry all the time… He was a teenager, those were common enough things for teenagers.
He was probably imagining that Erik smelled different. Not bad. Not even a little bit bad. Rather the opposite of bad.
But that was probably just being a teenager, too. Just because neither of them had manifested as alpha or omega yet didn’t mean they didn’t have hormones. And he couldn’t even say he’d never thought of Erik this way before. It was… considerably more intense now, but still. Nothing was really different.
“Ugh,” Erik growled, “my entire skin feels like it’s just—look, let’s go swimming, that’ll feel better, right?”
“Sure!” They’d never bothered with modesty around each other; Charles whipped his shirt, shorts and briefs off, and was only a step behind Erik in leaping off the dock into the lake.
Erik came up grinning, tossing wet hair out of his face. “Hey, you’re sunburned!” he exclaimed, poking at Charles’s shoulder.
“Ow!” Charles tried to splash him, but Erik dodged and splashed him back. Water went up Charles’s nose; caught off guard, he choked and flailed in the water.
“Sorry! You okay?” Concern dimming his grin, Erik drifted closer, one hand hesitantly touching Charles’s shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Charles said, rolling his eyes at himself even as he continued coughing and rubbing at his stinging nose. “Note to self: lake is for external use only.”
Erik laughed, but it sounded oddly distracted. Charles was surprised to realize how close together they were now, their feet brushing as they treaded water beneath the surface. He was even more surprised to realize how much Erik had filled out in the last year, shoulders grown broad, muscles shifting across his chest as the water lapped against him. Erik’s hand on his shoulder was right on top of his sunburn, and he didn’t even care. Erik smelled so good.
Charles swallowed hard and managed to draw away, if only a few inches. “It’s a shame Raven’s missing all the fun this summer.”
Erik snorted. “Raven’s probably the new queen bee of whatever that debutante charm-school camp thing is your parents sent her to. She’ll come back with minions at her beck and call all over the country.”
“She sent me a postcard. She hates it there.” Charles missed her and would be glad when she came home—but there was a certain guilty pleasure at having the place to himself. Having Erik to himself.
“Doesn’t mean she’s not ruling the roost. You don’t have to hold her hand walking to the bus stop anymore, Charles. She’s growing up. Like all of us.”
Somehow Charles had lost those few inches he tried so hard to put between them. Erik’s eyes were exactly the same color as the lake water, green-grey-blue. Somehow he’d never really noticed before. “Um,” Charles said shakily, and apparently he was going to talk about this after all, despite deciding very distinctly not to, “speaking of growing up. Have you thought about. Um. I mean, you are showing certain signs…”
“What are you talking about? Signs of what?”
“Haven’t you covered it in health class yet?”
“What, the Great Awakening?” The way he said it—eyes wide, voice falsetto—made it impossible not to laugh. “Not really, no. We’re too young still.”
Public schools. Charles wanted to scream. It was true that most people didn’t emerge as alpha or omega until late puberty, even the first few years of college, but it was bewildering to Charles that so many adults would rather keep their kids in ignorance as long as possible about something so important. Erik was fifteen; younger kids than that had awakened, even if it wasn’t a common thing.
“You’re already getting pinker,” Erik said. “Come on, you need to put on some sunblock. I think it’s still next to the dock from last time.”
Charles followed him up out of the water, trying desperately not to let his eyes linger on Erik's… everything. In his current state of undress, there would be no disguising it if his imagination got carried away.
“Here, dry off so it’ll stick,” Erik said, tossing his shirt at Charles, who obediently patted down his upper body with it. The shirt smelled like Erik and Charles felt a little dizzy. Erik was digging around in the weeds next to the dock, bent over at the waist, because clearly some supernatural force had it in for Charles and his sanity.
“All right, where did it go?” Erik muttered, followed by a spate of swearing that would have had his mother reaching for the soap—another of his suddenly-common bursts of temper, there and gone in the half-minute it took him to find the bottle of sunblock. “Victory! All right, Charles, turn around.”
“W-what?”
“Well, you can’t put it on your own back, can you?” Erik turned him around, and was rubbing cold lotion into Charles’s shoulders before he knew it.
Oh, heaven help him. Charles’s skin was tingling all over, warm and delicious, and he realized in horror that he was leaning back into Erik’s hands in a way he certainly would never have done last summer. He held his breath, mortified, terrified, trying as hard as he could to be still.
Erik’s hands slowed, stopped… moved again, down Charles’s shoulders, pulling Charles back toward him. Charles thought his thundering heart would stop when he felt the faint hint of breath on his skin, the tiny pressure of the tip of Erik’s nose, tracing up the side of his neck and under his jaw. Scenting him. Erik was scenting him and Charles couldn’t be still for a second longer.
He turned in Erik’s arms and bounced up onto his toes, pressing their lips together.
With a happy, surprised little sound, Erik melted into the kiss in a way Charles had never imagined someone like Erik could do—not that he’d spent much time imagining—alright he’d spent some time imagining. And he hadn’t imagined it like this, both of them sunblock-scented and bare as babes in the sunlight, but that wasn’t a complaint—at all—and Erik’s arms were wound tightly around his back and Charles was touching his face, holding it as if to make sure it was real as they kissed and kissed and kissed.
At some point their knees gave out and they were kneeling and then lying on the dock, sun-warmed planks rough against Charles’s palms as he pushed Erik down on his back, too much of their skin touching for his brain to be anything but a collection of sparks.
“Charles…” Erik sounded dazed, almost slurring, and Charles forced himself to freeze in place, trembling. Erik’s eyes were dilated in the sunlight, his skin hotter than even that bright sun could account for, and his scent was a cloud of silent pleading for something Erik himself didn’t understand yet.
“Erik,” Charles said, struggling heroically to articulate the words, “you’re in heat. Erik, this is your first heat. You’re an omega.”
“What?” Some of the glassy look left Erik’s eyes as they focused on Charles’s face. “What?”
All Charles could do was shrug, a little hysterical laugh bubbling out of him.
“Oh,” Erik breathed, his head thunking back against the planks. “That… makes sense. A lot of things make sense now.”
“We, um.” Charles swallowed. “We should go back to the house. To your mother. I have to take you to your mother.”
“But…” Erik pulled him closer, arched his body against Charles’s, and that was very nearly the end of Charles’s coherent thinking for the day. “No, I want you to—I want it to be you, Charles, I want—”
“I know. I want that too.” He choked back a curse as Erik rolled his hips. “But you’re not in your right mind right now. Maybe l-later. When you understand better what’s going on. Besides, we don’t have any—you could get pregnant and that’s the last thing we want—”
It was not anywhere near the last thing Erik wanted, judging by the tone of his tiny startled “oh” sound, and that was proof if ever Charles needed it that Erik was not in his right mind. With a herculean effort, Charles got off of Erik and onto his feet.
“Come on, stand up,” he said, holding out his hand. “Let’s p-put some clothes on and go back to the house.”
Erik let Charles pull him up, swaying a little on his feet. He did not let go of Charles’s hand.
They managed to get their shorts back on, at least, and Charles led them back toward the mansion, still gripping hands tightly. It was very literally all Charles could do not to back Erik up against every tree they passed and kiss him breathless, but he clung to the horrifying idea of having a baby while he was in high school to dissuade himself.
So Erik was an omega. That made Charles… well, he wasn’t showing many of the classic signs of an alpha awakening—he didn’t feel significantly more possessive or violent than he had the day before, hadn’t experienced the moodiness and sensitivity of shifting hormones—but these things varied. His extreme response to Erik’s scent was surely proof enough. And that was entirely aside from the tiny, delicate thing Erik was too distracted to recognize right now, the hot fluttering feeling between them, something that was somehow moth and flame simultaneously. A bond. An imprint.
Charles was fourteen years old and he was pretty certain he had just imprinted.
They came into sight of the house. Mrs. Lehnsherr, catching sight (and probably scent) of them through the kitchen window, dropped a dish in the sink, and ran for the door.
Erik balked, his hand tightening on Charles’s. “They’ll separate us. They’ll take you away from me.”
“No, they won’t,” Charles whispered, giving Erik a smile that couldn’t express half of the ecstatic glow inside him—though it seemed to come close enough to spark a half-voluntary answering smile in Erik. “They won’t be able to keep us apart. Ever.”
They turned to face the oncoming figure of Mrs. Lehnsherr, and the future that had changed so much in the last hour, hand in hand.