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Charles lit himself a cigarette with an unsteady hand. He hadn’t smoked in almost twenty years. It was unbecoming, set a poor example — but he made an exception today. He was sitting beside the window in his study. The door was locked, and a half-penned speech sat abandoned on the desk. His black suit had been carefully ironed. He had to wear it far too often in recent years.
Always another funeral, another eulogy, another of his little soldiers in the ground. He exhaled smoke through his teeth.
Dozens of other drafts were balled up and scattered across the ground. He had stayed up through most of the night trying to figure out what there was to say. Supposedly, he was the eloquent one, the sycophant in the nicely-tailored suit, giving charming speeches on the evening news. He shook the hands of diplomats, and he turned the other cheek when the crowds spat back. He delivered sermons with the self-assurance of a priest, laid hands on the sick and the lost, and fashioned himself like a small god — preaching about finicky things like love.
He did not feel like a god now. He felt like a man. He felt old. A headache pulsed behind his eyes, and his back was sore, and the tremor in his hand made it hard to hold the cigarette steady. Jean had made him breakfast — toast, eggs, and a cup of tea — which went untouched. He would let them go cold.
Erik Lehnsherr was dead. What was there to say about that?
The funeral was supposed to begin five minutes ago, and Jean was knocking very urgently against the study door. They would be waiting for him. They would look at him the way one looks at a god, and he would disappoint them. He would not be able to keep his voice from shaking this time.
He tapped his cigarette into the teacup. “Again, please.”
Cerebro obeyed.
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It was July in Rome, and they were drunk on Aperol. In their early twenties, both pretending to be older than they were, pretending the world was a better place than it really is. They had spent the last nine months working together at the field hospital in Haifa, in Hell, among orphaned children with tear-streaked cheeks and broken men and mothers with voices hoarse from screaming.
It had been Charles’ idea, heading to Italy for the weekend. Erik, always stubborn, hadn’t wanted to leave his patients for a moment, but months of little food and little sleep and little good had begun to gnaw at him. Be selfish for once in your sorry life, Charles had told him with a smile, shoving a pamphlet about the Tiber River into his chest. Just for a little while.
And now here they were. Erik’s accent had begun to slip, and his hair was rumpled, and he had slowly started to become human again. He was always so tightly strung, but the liquor loosened him up. Charles liked him when he was drunk. You could see in him, however briefly, the man he might have been.
This was an Erik who smiled, who launched himself into energetic debate and had poignant opinions on contemporary literature. Now, he was talking excitedly about the essays of Nietzsche and other long-dead philosophers. He had forgotten, however briefly, to be angry.
The air was sticky with humidity, and the night was warm. They were sitting at a small rusted table outside of some duff alleyway bar. “[If I ever fell in love with a human being, I would soon go to ruin,]” Charles quoted in clumsy German. He had had far too many spritzers and was leaning dizzy and flushed against his fist. “You talk about him like some kind of god, but he seems to me to be a drab little man.”
Erik wrinkled his nose. “Lord, your German is abysmal. You sound like some sort of dying animal.”
“That’s not fair. Your French isn’t any better.”
“Like a cat being drowned in a bathtub, crying out for help. It’s grating.” Erik downed the last of his glass. “And my French is wonderful. But you’ve read it wrong. Nietzsche isn’t ‘drab.’”
“How should I have read it, then?”
Erik swirled his glass and leaned backward, staring seriously down at his ice. “It’s pragmatic. People are fastidious. They demand things of you that you can’t give up. Inevitably, someone ends up hurt. Some part of you is lost.”
“Oh, cowardly,” Charles declared, slapping a hand on the table. “So we should all march into oblivion, islands on our own? Bunch of cockroaches, self-flagellating — that sounds exhibitionist to me, my friend. The line between the penitent and the masochist is a thin one.”
Erik set his glass down, a flush having crept up his collar. “It isn’t about that. It’s about doing what you have to, to stay alive.”
They were always bickering about things like this. Erik, with his persistent nihilism and his jargon-filled philosophers and articles written by chain-smoking journalists — and Charles with his poetry and his anecdotes and fondness for softer human things. How they arrived on the topic of love, Charles wasn’t sure. They were several bottles deep, and it was late, and he would have argued with Erik forever, if only to see that wolfish glint in his eye, to hear him speak in that quick, clipped way he did when he was excited.
“Then we should demand more of life,” Charles waved him away and withdrew his wallet from his inner jacket pocket, tossing a wad of too-many euros on the tabletop. “Damn pragmatism. Damn pessimism and stoicism and all the rest — I want more, and I’ll have it!” He stood, folding his coat over his arm.
“Says the rich boy with the world in the palm of his hand,” Erik quipped with a shake of his head. “Lose a little more, and you might change your mind.”
A barb, there, a slight strain to his voice — and that old anger, that old fear, that old grief, glinting in his mind like a blade in the dark. Charles frowned. “Live a little more, and you might change yours,” he countered, grabbing him by his arm and tugging him to his feet. “Come on. I want to see the church at night.”
“It’ll be closed.” Erik struggled to keep up with Charles’ clipped pace, snatching his sweater from the seat back.
“Exactly.” He grinned. “I want to see the chapel without the crowds.”
Madonna dell'Archetto was, according to the little guidebook Charles had purchased at the train station, the smallest church in Rome. Purportedly, one of its paintings of the Virgin had eyes that would miraculously follow the viewer.
Charles, of course, did not believe any of that, nor did he particularly care for god, but he had always found the whole exercise to be very alluring: The incense, the priests in their minutely embroidered cassocks, the cheap wine, the chanting, the stained glass, the congregants of sinners in their best Sunday shoes… It was fantastic.
The chapel itself was tucked in an alleyway not quite wide enough for you to outstretch your arms. A tomcat lounging on a windowsill above the iron gate looked at them suspiciously and made a decidedly displeased sound — but otherwise, it was quiet. For such a large city, it got lonely at night.
“This is a very terrible idea,” Erik grumbled, watching as Charles tested the fence, finding it closed with a measly padlock. “You’re drunk.”
“So are you,” Charles countered. “And isn’t the entire point that all are welcome? Surely god doesn’t keep opening hours.”
“It’s breaking and entering. We could be arrested.”
“Oh, woe. I have an excellent lawyer.”
Erik narrowed his eyes. Then, with a sigh and a begrudging wave of his hand, the lock popped open. “Fine.”
Inside, the air was stale and cold and smelled faintly of mahogany. Light from the streetlamp was streaming lazily through the windows, casting shadows of elongated saints on the ground. It was as beautiful as he thought it would be, the crucifix above the altar in stark shadow, hollow eyes lost in thought.
“Were you raised religious?” Erik asked, falling into step behind him. He was speaking at little more than a whisper, but his voice still echoed.
“No,” Charles replied, seating himself in the front pew. It was lined with velvet and creaked beneath his weight. “Well, we were Protestant by technicality. I was baptized, I think, but we didn’t go to church — were you?”
“Yes,” he said softly, then nothing more. He sat down beside him, staring up at the stained glass window above them — an angel of some kind with a trumpet to its lips. Charles did not press him on the subject, merely shifted closer so their shoulders barely brushed. He withdrew two cigarettes from the pack in his jacket pocket and handed one to him. Erik accepted it, tucking it between his teeth.
“I still pray the Kriyat Shema before bed, sometimes,” he said after a while with a sad sort of laugh, looking down at his cigarette. “It reminds me of my mother. We used to recite it together. It’s supposed to keep you safe through the night and protect you from bad dreams. ”
Very rarely did he ever talk about his life before. He had only ever spoken about his childhood in a whisper, as though talking about it too loudly would take it from him all over again. He sounded angry, tears gleaming in his eyes as he took another drag of his cigarette. “Little good it’s ever done for me.”
They finished their cigarettes in silence. It felt like some kind of ritual, some kind of soft blasphemy, tapping ash onto the mosaic floor. Then Charles kissed him, because he didn’t know what to say.
Erik flicked his cigarette to the ground and kissed him back. He tasted of smoke, and his hands were mean, pulling Charles to him like he was afraid he might run away.
“Es ist mehr Vernunft in deinem Leibe als in deiner besten Weisheit,” he said as he drew back. He looked wonderful in the soft gold light streaming in from the cathedral’s stained-glass window. He was crying, tears shining on his cheeks. He looked to Charles like an angel. A divine thing, sharply cut. “Nietzsche said that, too.”
“What does it mean?”
“There is more beauty in your body than in your deepest philosophy,” Erik whispered, lips brushing the skin of his collarbone. With trembling hands, he began to undo the buttons of his shirt. Charles’ skin goose bumped where his knuckles grazed. “I hate you,” he said in a voice that was almost pained, pushing Charles’ shirt from his shoulder. “You’re ruining me, and God is watching.”
Charles smiled to himself and caught Erik’s lips once again with his own. He could taste the Aperol on the other man’s tongue, and it burned so sweetly. “I thought your darling philosopher declared god to be dead?”
Erik nipped the skin of his throat almost hard enough to draw blood. Charles drew in a sharp breath and drove his nails into his scalp, but Erik merely hummed, peppering kisses on freshly bruised skin.
They were always tearing one another apart like this. There really wasn’t much of a difference between their fighting and their fucking. Both were enacted with a certain hunger, a certain animalism — and left them feeling vaguely regretful and vaguely sore, bodies speckled with bruises and mouths tasting of blood. Erik always kissed him like he was keeping score, like it was a game to be won. His hand creaked, white-knuckled against the pew.
If there was a god, and if he was watching, he would have seen two drunk fools tangled together in the soft light, creating their own sort of heaven. He might have taken pity on them; they did not yet know they were doomed.
They were interrupted by a sharp yelp. An old priest in his slippers, with his glasses askew, bristled like a startled cat, the linens he had been carrying strewn about the floor. Both men went very still and became very pale. “Che cavolo!”
“I—” Erik sprang from atop Charles, caught his head with a thunk against the pew, then scrambled to his feet. “Er—”
Charles frantically worked at the buttons of his shirt and managed in a high-pitched voice: “Forget this and go.” As an afterthought, he added an apologetic: “Please.”
The priest’s mind gave beneath his influence like a hot blade to butter. An odd expression crossed his face, and then, blinking and looking vaguely dazed, he turned on his heel and retreated the way he had come, leaving the altar linens where they lay on the floor.
Both men watched him leave in frozen silence. Only when he had left the chapel and was well beyond earshot did Charles bark out a laugh, his ears burning red. “Hell.”
Erik took his hand and tugged him to his feet. “Yes,” agreed, laughing beneath his breath and piloting him violently towards the door. “Come on.”
Charles allowed himself to be led. And really, they didn’t need to run at all — the priest would not be back, and the unfortunate image of the two of them was long gone from his mind. His shirt had been unevenly buttoned, and his hair was mussed, and he looked ridiculous with the bruises down his throat, but it was fun. Running beside Erik like they were schoolchildren, both of them stumbling over their feet in the dark.
Erik was holding his hand. Erik had never held his hand before. This man had fought with him, kissed him, fucked him, seen him naked, seen him cry — he had never held his hand.
He felt fuzzy from the liquor and the feeling of Erik’s hand in his. He felt like he would never die. He felt like a teenage boy driving his mother’s car too fast. The night air was warm, and it felt like maybe the world would be alright. Maybe everything would be alright. Maybe there was a point after all, and all of the philosophers were wrong, and it was this: Erik holding his hand.
He started to laugh again when Erik pulled him into an alleyway and kissed him, softly this time. It made him want to cry.
Later, in their hotel room, in the dark, tangled in soft hotel sheets, he will think: I love you. He will still be drunk then, and it will feel for a moment like it might really be true, but in the morning, they’ll both sober up. In the morning, Erik will struggle to look him in the eye, and they will ride the train out of town and will not touch.
Charles will light himself a cigarette and close his eyes. If the world were different. If they were different. If you were a woman, Erik had said against the shell of his ear once, I would have married you.
But for now, it was only the two of them in the dark. If there was a god, and if he was watching, he would have seen a man with tears in his eyes and a hand wrapped in his lover’s hair, playing pretend, if only for a little while.
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Charles’ cigarette had burned itself to its filter. He snubbed it out as the taste of Aperol dissolved on his tongue, the ghost of Erik’s touch fading from his skin. And then he was not a young man, and the world was not beautiful — he was old and crying silently, and the dead were dead again. Jean was still calling for him outside the office door, but he couldn’t bring himself to answer her.
If I ever fell in love with a human being, I would soon go to ruin.
Lighting himself another cigarette, the smell of ash heavy in his funeral suit, he smiled because Erik had been right all along. He had lost a little more, and he understood it now. Someone always ends up ruined.
“Again.” He brought the cigarette to his lips and took a shaky drag. “Please.”
Cerebro obeyed.