Come Home (Cherik fanfiction)

Chapter Twenty-Four (Part One)

Sweet Lord it's been forever. 

Thank you, again for sticking with it, and I honestly love you all so much it's unbelievable. 

I promised a lot of things, and I'm so sorry that it didn't work out. I've been working on this draft for a while, and I hope it's good enough even though it's kind of short. (And the second part will hopefully be longer.)

Check out  Rhythm & Blues Goes a Long Way on Ao3. That one takes a bit of time to update too, but please, stick with it. From now on, I should have a steadier, more reliable flow of updates on all of my on ongoing fics, but I don't want to promise anything. 

Since I took a bajillion years, I decided to speed it up, but basically all you need to know: Charles's captors did experiments on Charles's brain, spine, and legs and somehow fixed him, but his memory was tampered with also, and he can't really remember who he is because reasons. Now, Hank, Emma, and (reluctantly) Erik and Raven are trying to make sense of it all.

Let me know if you want the couple of weeks of captivity and rehab worth of flashbacks written and I'll get on it before Chapter Twenty-Five (which I don't even know is going to go after I finish this chapter.) 

This chapter is an odd one, and I know you'll hate me for it, but I'm splitting this in to two parts because a) I sped through this and made it half-assed and know that you all deserve better, b) there's no way that I can't not do that way, and c) I made a cliffhanger on this chapter because I'm just that evil. 

I love you all so much. 

*

Erik

Everything happens very fast and Erik isn't exactly how it came to be, but there's a debate of whether any of it was necessary or not.

Surprisingly, it starts with Raven.

"I need you to tell Charles you love him." she demands one day, about two weeks after the track incident, and Charles getting his legs back.

Erik is sitting in the library on the east side of the house, closest to the gardens. Even though he's had very little experience with them, Erik's never particularly liked flowers. He understands them, though, and they're the only things that he can actually understand that aren't made out of metal. 

Charles's wheelchair? Erik's fault. The bullet in his mother's head? Erik's fault. The absolute silence beneath that (ridiculous) helmet? Erik's fault, with Shaw's design. But flowers? He stares at them, and they stare back at him. Neutral.

It's about the only thing in his life that is anymore. 

He's reading when she walks in, but when Raven's words truly hit him he chokes on air, visibly frazzled. "What?" he asks her, hoarse. He suddenly has the hankering for a drink, but he feels, somewhere in the pit of him, that he needs to be sober.

She sighs and gives him a look. "My brother: Charles." she clarifies slowly, as if she were talking to a child. "I need you to tell him that you love him . . . That you're in love with him - that he's the light of your life. Something."

He can barely manage thinking at this point, let alone words. "How the-" Don't bother denying it. He takes a deep breath. "Why?"

She rolls her eyes and sits in front of the desk. "Because it's time. Because you've both been licking your wounds long enough." she listed, almost bored. "Because he's . . ." she trails off, her bored tone wearing into a concerned, desperate one. "There are things you need to know, Erik; things that I just can't tell you."