"You must have been quite tired of playing chess alone," Erik crisps back, as if this is all he has to offer another person, especially when that person is uninterested in learning how to snap necks, for instance. "But you do that. And what you can't fix, that's where you'll learn I'm good for something."
Which unmistakably is about something like snapping necks, and they always talk this way to each other; there's no derision in Erik's voice the way there's no guile in Charles' blue eyes (if there were Erik could rid himself of him; in a way everything he does is always manipulative, and that's necessarily always a bad thing, just a product of an environment where he has learned that anything in his periphery must become a tool of some kind--he knows how to work with nothing when he's had far less, so he can shape or break or remake anything, but he won't tolerate such attempts on himself, not anymore)--he doesn't sneer, only looks mildly incredulous, the way he always is when Charles professes to believe in something invisible to Erik. Erik's god is an angry one, but Charles--Charles is a humanist, and he believes in people the way Erik believed in God as a child.
If he believes in anything stronger now, he believes in himself, believes in his ability to shore up the cracks where hope can't reach; if he has to mortar those walls in blood he'll do it; the mistake anyone might make about the two of them is thinking Erik wants Charles to be like him, and nothing has ever been further from the truth. Erik wants to believe in a world where people like Charles can still exist, that they won't inevitably be ruined by the damage human beings do to one another just by proximity when they aren't actively trying to wipe one another out. In Erik's world hope can only exist behind walls; to let it out into the world is to kill it.
His plate is empty by now; he gives it an idle turn on the table by sheer force of habit even if there's nothing left to be cleaned from its surface.
no subject
Which unmistakably is about something like snapping necks, and they always talk this way to each other; there's no derision in Erik's voice the way there's no guile in Charles' blue eyes (if there were Erik could rid himself of him; in a way everything he does is always manipulative, and that's necessarily always a bad thing, just a product of an environment where he has learned that anything in his periphery must become a tool of some kind--he knows how to work with nothing when he's had far less, so he can shape or break or remake anything, but he won't tolerate such attempts on himself, not anymore)--he doesn't sneer, only looks mildly incredulous, the way he always is when Charles professes to believe in something invisible to Erik. Erik's god is an angry one, but Charles--Charles is a humanist, and he believes in people the way Erik believed in God as a child.
If he believes in anything stronger now, he believes in himself, believes in his ability to shore up the cracks where hope can't reach; if he has to mortar those walls in blood he'll do it; the mistake anyone might make about the two of them is thinking Erik wants Charles to be like him, and nothing has ever been further from the truth. Erik wants to believe in a world where people like Charles can still exist, that they won't inevitably be ruined by the damage human beings do to one another just by proximity when they aren't actively trying to wipe one another out. In Erik's world hope can only exist behind walls; to let it out into the world is to kill it.
His plate is empty by now; he gives it an idle turn on the table by sheer force of habit even if there's nothing left to be cleaned from its surface.