Chapter Text
Charles can't help being nervous. He's going to leave everything he has ever known, after all. But if he can go he can return, and he wants to try freedom in Genosha. Here he's more free as a slave, with his family being the way it is. He wouldn't leave at all if Erik had not assured him that Raven could come to them on school holidays and would always have a home with Charles. He has it in writing as well, but he still frets and unpacks and starts over several times, and doesn't sleep at all on his last night in the palace. Of course he wants to go with Erik, but he'll miss this place and everyone in it.
The next morning he's exhausted enough that the wretchedness of farewells is a bit muted, and he sleeps in the carriage as they jounce along the road under a leaden sky. The darkest days are over, but light and warmth return slowly to the north. Charles sleeps for miles of the trip, waking up at the low winter noon. Erik is sitting across from him, gazing out the window for a moment before returning to the little leather-bound notebook in his lap. He looks appealingly studious, and Charles smiles.
"Travel journal?"
"Sort of," Erik replies, smiling back and tucking the book away again. "Wine?"
"Please." Being an ambassador, Erik travels in considerable style, and Emma has only added to it, so the wine is her own golden ice-wine. They sip it out of little silver cups as the white-shrouded landscape goes by. "Does Genosha have any mountaintops high enough to hold snow?" Charles asks, still watching the roadside.
"No," Erik says gently. "I remember missing it."
Charles smiles. "After last winter and this one, I think it will take me a long time." There's a pleased little shimmer to Erik at that, with a slow, semiconscious curl of possessiveness that makes Charles shiver. He drains his cup and sets it aside, crawling into Erik's lap, having asked and received permission to do so in a telepathic flicker. He sighs and curls up, resting his head on Erik's shoulder. He shows him how cold it got, and how endless it seemed, and how assiduously each tiny spark of life had to protect itself against the crushing weight of the winter. Erik shivers, holds Charles close, as if to warm him now.
It takes them two days to leave Lady Frost's lands, and three weeks to make their way to the coast. It's warmer here, and everything is grey. The houses are weathered grey wood under grey slate roofs and grey clouds. The snow is grey slush and the quays are grey stone and the sea is a sullen sheet of lead. Even the playing children are grey, mostly the large broods of fishermen in black and white blended wool. The only colors Charles sees are in flowing hair and a few bits of Genoshan red trim. He's beyond tired of the carriage, and is glad to go with Erik to get his Order of Manumission. They won't sign it on Westchester soil, but it will be good to have it properly drawn up with the red border and everything. The lawyer is an older lady whose appearance shows signs of Wakanda blood, and she smiles softly at them, wishing Charles well in his coming freedom. He thanks her politely, and takes Erik's arm as they leave.
"I don't suppose there's a bath house here, is there?" Erik asks as they walk the causeways while the Genoshan sailors who have come to fetch them rest, and reload and repair the ship. They've been here for a day or two already, but it's a substantial distance and it's good to take the time to prepare properly. Which gives them plenty of time to bathe, because there is a bath house here. The tradition isn't nearly as common here as it is in Wakanda, Genosha, or to the far north, but there is an old and renowned one here. It has a long history of being a place for dockworkers and sailors to get the salt off of their skin and out of their hair, an institution old and beloved enough to treat Erik like everyone else even though they recognize him from his arrival in the country months ago.
The walls and the basins are grey stone, of course, completely unadorned, but there are roaring stoves and immense, soft fur rugs to lounge on while drying off. They each strip down and take a towel from the pair of slaves working the door, paying the small fee and leaving their things at the desk, under the guard of a surly-looking one-eyed sailor. Erik feels amused and strangely nostalgic here, and shares a memory with Charles of his father's work as a smith, and the kind of men he drank with at the end of a long day.
The water is slick with minerals and almost painfully hot. Erik hisses as he sinks into it, for once not worrying about his scars at all. He stretches his long arms out along the edge of the basin, and Charles cuddles up to his side, affectionate but perfectly decorous. There's desultory talk about the weather and the price of fish with the interior so starved of game, as well as of women had and women longed for, before one of them turns to Erik.
"General Lensherr, you figure trade with Genosha is going to bring eel up or down?"
"Mm." Erik ponders this for a moment, eyes closed. "Probably up. We like eel quite well, and the ones near the island are tiny."
"Going back with him, boy?" another of them asks Charles, and he laughs.
"I am, sir. I'm looking forward to it."
They endure some good-natured teasing over this, and Erik is some of the most relaxed Charles has ever seen him when they finally get out to take their turn stretched out on the rugs.