Chapter Text
It’s not always Charles, staring at Erik’s back as an FBI agent dries him off on a boat off the coast of Florida. That’s not always how it starts.
Sometimes it’s in Haifa, in a military hospital, and Erik looks too damnably handsome in his ward uniform. It’s the 1960s, most of the time, and the X-Gene is not yet named.
But sometimes, it’s 2010, and there is no X-Gene at all. Sometimes there is. Charles and Erik play chess over iPhone apps and text each other too much.
Sometimes it’s further than that. Humanity could be in space and the concept of either Erik or Charles could be a created personality inhabiting the body of a machine. That being the case doesn’t stop them from learning love.
And sometimes it’s further back. Prohibition, maybe, or the trenches in Normandy. Maybe it’s New York at the turn of the century and Erik and Charles share a kiss in private when the hour ticks from 1899 to 1900.
Sometimes they meet in peace, and sometimes in war. Sometimes it’s already too late and sometimes it’s far too early.
Sometimes they’re childhood friends. Edie takes a liking to the little Xavier boy and lets him stay over as much as he likes (Erik coerces him into staying up past their bedtime).
If it’s not that, then they’re high school friends in the gender-sexuality-alliance club. Or they’re college students, staying up late in their dorm to paint signs they’re bringing to the campus protest planned for the next day. Either way, they compete against each other in grades constantly, and no one knows why they keep at it.
But sometimes they’re not friends at all.
Sometimes Magneto is the terror of mutantkind and Professor X isn’t able to stop him from slaughtering humans in his quest for worldwide domination. Sometimes Erik forgets he whom he used to be, but Charles remembers, and he regrets.
Sometimes they’re destined to hate each other. Charles is rich while Erik is poor - Charles is a good anglo-saxon christian boy and Erik is an angry jewish kid from down the block - Charles is the prim and proper heir to a great and civilized kingdom while Erik is a battle scarred warrior-king. Sometimes it’s not fair.
Rarely, it’s something extraordinary. There’s scales and gills, or maybe there’s fangs and claws, or there’s pointed ears and gossamer wings. There’s peace, and there’s war, and there’s death, famine, pestilence, conquest.
Chaos. Most of the time, there’s chaos.
Sometimes Charles fails.
Sometimes Erik fails.
It’s hard to get everything just right, if the sheer number of universes out there says anything about luck and random chances, but sometimes they make it. It’s one out of a million, billion, trillion, but they make it.
Sometimes Erik gets tackled by his kids when he walks through his front door at the end of the day, and Charles laughs at him from the kitchen. Sometimes they cheer too loudly for their daughter at her soccer game. Sometimes Charles gets a job at a prestigious university and Erik gets a pay raise that erases any concerns about rent for the month.
Rarely, so very, very rarely, Charles and Erik meet and they stay. They’re both flighty things, prone to wanderlust and curiosity and an allergy to commitment, but they find a way to stick together. They stay.
Sometimes they bind it with a ring, with a hushed prayer in a dark room, under a blanket, with tears in their eyes, with blood on their hands, while trying to hold onto each other whilst something else tries to tear them apart.
If you gave a primate a typewriter, Charles might say, and it hit keys at random for the rest of eternity, it could very possibly write the complete and collected works of Shakespeare. But the probability of that is next to none.
There’s still a chance, though.
In every universe there’s a chance.
Even if the typewriter’s a chisel and stone, ink and quill on parchment, code in a telegraph, keys on a phone or computer. There’s always a chance.
Whether they stay, or they break apart, or they drift, or they abandon each other, hate each other, miss each other, hurt each other, they always manage to find each other.
And it’s like the primate typing out that first R in the title of Romeo and Juliet, Charles might also say. It’s a start, balancing on the edge of something incredible.
Erik might say he’s over exaggerating things. Charles might laugh and try to convince him that he’s technically not wrong, so in some way he must be right. Right?
It’s an infinitesimally small probability that anyone’s ever born at all. It’s an even smaller chance that two people, who are Bookends of the Same Soul and all that, meet and fall in love.
And yet it always seems to happen. Every single time. Without fail.
And sometimes, while Charles watches Erik in his wetsuit get dried off and watches him snap at the government agents trying to ask him questions, he thinks back to that typewriter. And Erik turns and meets his eyes, still disbelieving of the voice in his head.
Yes, Charles thinks to himself. This is it. This is the chance.