This thing ended up being quite ridiculously romantic compared to how it started out. Apparently my X-Men fic comes in only 'soul-destroying angst' and 'ludicrous fluff' flavours. Anyway, hopefully this can be read as either mild slash or romantic friendship, depending on how your like your fictional relationships fried. As you can probably tell, it's set during the mutant-recruiting sequence, and, in a new and exciting development from me, contains neither drunk Charles nor stoned Sean. I think I must be maturing. Although I still can't work out how to do proper paragraph breaks on here. Major kudos to J for the title.

It's been a long, disheartening day of mutant-chasing – one outright refusal of their invitation and one young girl with a latent talent for water manipulation and a home life so blissfully content that neither man could bear to disturb it with revelations about her true nature. The trip, which had started out with high spirits and the memory of the convivial conditions under which Angel Salvadore had been found, had rapidly become tedious and not a little depressing. Mother Nature, meanwhile, in her ineffable wisdom, chose the exact moment that Charles and Erik's car broke down to begin raining. By the time they stumbled into the local motel, dripping wet, to discover the place already fully booked, Erik was about ready to knot the railings outside into a giant metal octopus and set it on the receptionist.

"What, all of them?" echoed Charles disbelievingly as Erik seethed quietly in the corner of the lobby. "Every single room?"

The receptionist nodded; gaze fixed firmly on the middle distance, jaws working rhythmically around his gum.

"Are you sure?" This earned him a withering look; apparently such blatant idiocy didn't merit an actual verbal response.

"We couldn't sleep out here?" Charles suggested brightly. "You have sofas and everything; I'm sure we'd be quite comfortable." The blatant layers of charm in his voice had previously persuaded a prison guard, a drunken Vietnamese truck driver and a member of MI6 to give them the information they wanted, but the receptionist was apparently impervious. "No," he said, and folded his arms in a way that quite clearly indicated he was not to be moved on the subject. Erik would have congratulated him if he hadn't been trying so hard to restrain himself from strangling the man with his own chair legs.

"Well, then." Charles' shoulders slumped in defeat, but he kept up his forcedly bright tone. "I suppose we'll just have to sleep in the car. Where did we leave the car, Erik?"

"About four miles down the road, in the dark, and the cold, and the rain, and if you think I'm lugging this bloody bag of yours all the way back there, you can think again. What the hell have you got in here, bricks?"

"Books," replied Charles mildly, turning back to the receptionist. "Right, well, I suppose I don't have much choice—" He raised two fingers to his temple. "You're going to find us a room immediately. If that means throwing somebody else out, so be it. In fact" – his eyes took on the glazed look that Erik knew meant he was casting his mind out into the surroundings – "there's a couple in room 104, a Mr and Mrs Thresher, who have been arguing since 6pm and seem set to continue for the rest of the night. There could do that just as effectively out here, don't you think?"

"Sure..." said the man, blinking and shaking his head as control of his own mind was handed back to him. "I'll... get on that right away."

###

"I thought you didn't use your powers for evil," remarked Erik ten minutes later, as they entered their newly-vacated room. "And incidentally, if this place doesn't have a shower, I'm going to have to rearrange the plumbing."

"Well, our need was greater than theirs," said Charles, throwing his bag on the bed. "I didn't really want to sleep in the car tonight. Although I must say I feel rather sorry for that receptionist. He's going to have to spend the rest of the evening explaining to an irate couple with Texan accents a mile thick why he felt a sudden compulsion to turf them out of their room in favour of a pair of strangers whose names and faces he cannot, oddly enough, remember at all."

"Charles," said Erik, pulling his sopping turtleneck over his head, "sometimes I am very glad we're on the same side."

Fortunately for the structural integrity of the motel, the room did have a shower. When Erik finally stepped out of it, the last vestiges of his bad mood swept away by the scaldingly hot water, he found Charles sitting in the only chair, reading a genetics textbook and drinking whisky.

"Amongst my bricks, as you so kindly put it," he remarked without looking up, "it did occur to me to pack one or two more useful items." He gestured towards the bottle on the nightstand. "Help yourself. It's been a bloody awful day, hasn't it?"

"Mm," agreed Erik. "First that arsehole in the bar turns us down flat, then the girl..."

"We were right to leave her be, my friend. If she hasn't discovered her powers by seventeen, there's a good chance she never will. And happy families seem to be desperately rare among mutants. Let her enjoy her childhood. She can."

The corresponding unspoken negative rang almost louder than the words themselves. Erik made a non-committal noise, downing a mouthful of whisky and sitting heavily on the bed. On the one hand, the noise meant yes, the girl certainly should have her shot at happiness. On the other, it expressed anger for all those – like Erik himself, but also like Charles, lonely and isolated in a house far too big for him – who'd never had that kind of luck.

"Tomorrow will be better, my friend," said Charles, answering, as ever, the words he didn't say. "For now, we should get some sleep. We've got an early start ahead of us." Erik watched him quietly as he finished his drink and bent to put his book – one of many, apparently identical, mercilessly heavy volumes that he saw fit to carry around everywhere, or, more often, make Erik carry around everywhere – in his bag. He was wearing pinstriped pajamas. There was something so very Charles about this; so ludicrously, primly, charmingly, English, that Erik felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. He sat there, fighting the smile and sipping whisky as Charles bustled about collecting blankets. It wasn't until he was settling himself back in the chair with every appearance of intending to stay there that Erik felt moved to ask what he was doing.

"Well," said Charles, as though it should have been obvious, "there's only one bed and you're on it, so I'll sleep here."

"The bed can, in fact, take two people," Erik pointed out with equal patience. "That's why they call it a double bed."

Charles shifted uncomfortably. "But it's – well, it wouldn't be – I mean, really, Erik..."

Erik tried not to look like he was finding this amusing, with little success.

"Good Lord, Charles," he said when he thought the man had squirmed enough, "sometimes you carry this upper-class prudishness of yours too far. I have no intention of robbing you of your virtue; I simply know that you won't get a wink of sleep in that chair, and you'll spend all of tomorrow whingeing to me about it. Now, hush your protesting, if you please, and come here. I'm much too tired to argue."

A charming blush suffused Charles' face, but he apparently decide that debating the point would be more trouble than it was worth. Swallowing his objections, he dragged the blankets back across the room to climb in next to Erik, who, in deference to English sensibilities, was wearing substantially more than he normally did to bed. They lay there for a few moments, Charles ramrod straight and staring at the ceiling, Erik in a casual sprawl, darting mocking glances at his bedfellow.

After a minute, Charles stage-whispered, "What now?"

Erik didn't quite manage to stifle a snort. "I believe the usual practice is to go to sleep. Unless you want me to read you a bedtime story."

Charles flushed again, and switched off the light, keeping rigorously to his own side of the bed.

"Goodnight, Erik."

Erik hid a grin. "Goodnight, Charles."

###

As it turned out, all of Charles' inhibitions about physical contact vanished the instant he was unconscious. Within ten minutes he had annexed most of the bed and all of the blankets, and squirmed close to Erik in an apparent attempt to leech away his remaining body heat. Every time Erik, a light sleeper at the best of times, was on the verge of dozing off, Charles shifted or wriggled or laid claim to one of his limbs, waking him up in what felt like an orchestrated takeover of every inch of his personal space.

A subjective eternity later, Charles finally seemed to have found a position he was comfortable in: tucked against Erik's side with his nose pressed into his neck and an arm flung over his chest, effectively pinning him in place. Whilst this was still mildly annoying – how could any one person be so heavy? Did he have a mutation that meant his arms turned to lead at night or something? – it did have the advantage of returning a decent portion of the blankets to him. Besides which, there was something oddly reassuring in Charles' warm, possessive weight. Objectively, it was idiotic, because the telepath was about as imposing as a wet paper bag at the best of times, but it felt almost as though Charles was trying to protect him.

Erik reminded himself that emotion was weakness, that his one goal was killing Shaw and that he couldn't afford to jeopardise his mission by caring about people. He didn't let it stop him putting an arm around Charles' shoulders and pulling him closer before falling asleep.

###

The sun was already high in the sky by the time Erik woke, which surprised him somewhat. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept through the night, let alone on into what looked like late morning. Charles was still curled into him, having added a leg to the arm pinning him down at some point. His face was all but invisible tucked into the crook of Erik's neck; hair sticking out at wildly in apparent homage to his status as an eccentric professor. Erik smiled down at the sight, his heart doing something dangerously fond.

Perhaps Charles picked up on the thought, because he chose that moment to stir, yawn and raise his head slightly. Erik had expected him to leap away as soon as he realised the position they were in, but either Charles' filters for appropriate English behaviour were slow to get started in the morning, or he had decided that, already having spent the night pretty much wrapped around him, there was little point in trying to mitigate the situation at the eleventh hour. Instead, he smiled sleepily at Erik and flopped back down onto the pillow.

"Sleep well?" asked Erik, fighting a grin.

"Mmph," mumbled Charles, then, the vestiges of private-school courtesy kicking in despite his semi-conscious state, "Very well, thanks; yourself?"

"Likewise," said Erik, and that appeared to be it as far as conversation was concerned. Charles lay curled against him, all embarrassment long gone, apparently now regarding Erik merely as a very useful second pillow. His eyes were closed against the tufts of hair dangling into them, his brow relaxed, a faint smile curving his lips.

Erik swallowed hard, and definitely didn't fall in love.