Chapter Text
Nothing is immune against the implacable march of time. It had taken from him many things, his mother's employment, her life, but most alarming to Erik was the slow but constant loss of memory. Things that had once been so clear in his childhood rusted and corroded under the weight of time.
There are some things time has not taken from him: the dimple at the corner of the boy's mouth, his warmth beneath the summer sun, and the blood that constantly ran beneath his skin. But these are not things that will bring him to the boy again. He does not remember enough to draw his face, but he remembers enough to always take a second glance when he sees flushed skin and blue and bright eyes.
Once, Erik could sing in perfect pitch the song the boy had sung to him. But, being young, he thought he could never forget something so important. But now, the inconsistent flow of memory has receded and taken with it the melody. He remembers a line or two here, a note there, matching the snatches with the face and smile he remembers. If only he could remember, he could let the boy know, I'm here. I remember. Do you?
*
When he isn't helping his mother with her work around the estate -- his hands covered with flour or gardening gloves -- he works on his figures and reading because his mother wants him to be well-educated. He still speaks English with a slight accent because his mother taught him German first -- to spread his mind, she said -- and he's working on that. In the time he has between helping his mother and studying, he finds time to tinker.
Around the house, he picks up knick knacks here and there. Lost washers, screws in need of replacement, metal discarded into the trash. He finds these things, broken and in disuse, in need of mending, and in these he sees potential.
Laying these objects across the workbench in the gardener's shed, he decides how he will repurpose these lost items.
He's done practical things like clocks and wrenches and metronomes -- quite similar to clocks, really. It is the toy animals he wants to make the most though, the closest thing to a pet he has. He feels guilty about it, animals so impractical when there is so much else to do, but he treasures the way his mother's face softens when she looks at them.
He started making the gadgets as a low-risk way of him exercising his talent for metals, and his mother found it harmless. She brought him a pocket watch for his tenth birthday, and by that night, he'd taken the whole thing apart, each cog and spring revolving in his room held in place by his talent. She merely raised her eyebrows and asked if he could put it back together as well.
"Don't take something apart if you can't put it back together better," she said.
It is clear though, his mother enjoys his work, her smile soft each time he shows her his latest item. This is what he thinks of when he shirks the practical and creates clockwork animals. He's made the mouse beneath the kitchen sink, the raccoons who prowl the roofs and the squirrels who chitter at them. But the birds in the garden his mother so carefully tends, although that is not her primary job here -- Those would be a challenge to make; four legged beasts that crawl the earth are easy enough, but to make something steady enough to fly, now there. There is a challenge to occupy his mind and hands as the summer wears on.
There are no children on the estate. Other staff with young children send them to live at relatives' or friends' homes or boarding schools. His mother is adamant he stay with her. It's not very hard. It's a live-in staff, and he is lucky to get his own room, a walk-in pantry repurposed as a maid's room.
He'd quite forgotten entirely that other children could exist here when the boy appears one morning, sweating in his wool trousers.
His mother's just finished fussing over him and gone to do work. Erik remains, standing behind for a little, watching her disappearing figure.
"You speak German?" a voice says from behind excitedly.
Erik looks behind him. Wary, he nods at the rich boy in his shiny penny-loafers and pressed pants.
"I've always wanted to learn languages," he continues on, entirely oblivious to how deep Erik's frown is. The boy draws closer across the well-kept lawn as he speaks. "See, they think I'd be a quick study of languages, but they make it so dull by making me sit with tutors and workbooks. It's not the same as actually talking with someone you see?"
No, he doesn't see, but Erik still nods.
"I have some old German books if you'd like. I don't need them anymore," Erik says, hoping to stop the boy from coming even closer. As it is, Erik can already see the drops of sweat across the boy's face.
"That would be great!" The boy grabs Erik's hand, and Erik wants to pull away but doesn't want to insult the boy. "Oh, thank you! Listen, I have to go, but will you still be here? Of course you will, I'll see you then!" The boy runs back into the house, his feet leaving marks in the wet grass.
Erik goes his own way, thinking it's just like boys like him to leave like that. He looks at his hand and shakes it out, hoping to get rid of the remainder of his touch like excess flour. He decides to avoid the boy.
The boy eventually corners him though, and to stop him from continually pestering him, Erik goes off in search of the German books his mom taught him from. Of course, the boy doesn't take the hint to wait for him. Instead, he follows Erik to the garden shed where he's taken to storing the few things that won't fit in his room.
The boy sees the toy bird on his desk, and heads straight for it, making no remark on why Erik is storing things in a tool shed. He scoops it up, cupping the body and the limp wings like it's something precious.
"Did you make this?" His joy is naked on his face, like he's never had to hide it for fear of losing it.
Erik nods.
"That's amazing!" He lifts the bird and looks up at it, trying to see through it with the sunlight. "I've never seen anything like it."
Erik flexes his power and then the bird flaps its wings and flies around the room.
"Does it sing too?"
"No," but Erik's already thinking of how it could.
The boy hands it back to him, but Erik shakes his head. "You can keep her." He closes the boy's fingers around the bird.
The boy forgets the book entirely, and Erik is left staring at the book in his hand.
Erik makes it a point to avoid the boy with the bright eyes and pretty flush. But it seems some things are unavoidable, especially with people like Charles who possess that powerful, overwhelming charisma of someone who's never been denied anything. It is a powerful thing, especially when tempered with Charles' kindness.
With the promise of more of Erik's old German books to teach himself from, Charles wanders into Erik's room and looks around with his wide eyes. Erik reaches under his bed and flips through the old books, thinking which is most suitable to learn from at first. He finds an appropriate book in the middle of the stack, but he has fond memories of the next book, so he opens that one up too.
As Erik flips through a book with music in it, Charles asks, "What is that?" His arm reaches around Erik's and his fingertips follow the black music lines.
Alarmed Charles had grown so close without his notice, he speaks to hide his unease. "It's a song my mother tried to teach me. I don't like opera, and I don't know how to read music."
"Well, I can read music just fine; I play piano. But I don't know how to say any of this. It's German." He tries the first line, and when all that comes out is incomprehensible despite the grammar books, Erik teaches him each syllable.
Patience is not a strong suit of Erik's so they only get through that first line. At its end, Erik hands the grammar book to Charles.
"Oh! I completely forgot about that!"
I know, Erik thinks.
"Would you mind teaching me the rest of it?"
"This book is mine."
"Well, can I keep coming by to learn the rest from you? If you help me with my German I'll help you read the music."
Charles smiles at him, his pleasure still open upon his face. Erik thinks that as naive as that may be, he would like to keep that look upon Charles' face, wonders what it would be like to be so open.
"Alright," he replies.
Erik finds himself teaching the boy German, and Charles seems to have no concept of personal space, always leaning in close, staying close, and Erik knows Charles is younger than him but maybe --
Erik lets those thoughts go no further. Charles' exuberance and love and affection is shown to all.
Charles has his hands on Erik's shoulders and leans on his toes to peek over. With Erik's additional height, Charles can't see, so he sits across from Erik, their knees knocking together and their heads close together. Erik doesn't pull away. It is, perhaps, because of the natural kindness of Charles or the fact he is too close that compels Erik to say more than he wants to.
"I have a small talent for metalwork," Erik confesses at the end of their music lesson.
Charles grins. "And I have a knack for minds." He stacks his book and straps them together.
Erik is taken aback. "Minds?"
"People worry we pry at the vaults of their minds, but we really don't. Who'd want to know all that anyway? It's like I'm a radio; I can receive very strong thoughts and feelings, and I can send back, but it's much easier to people like me. Too much effort when I can just talk to people." Charles takes a deep breath. It's the closest Erik's seen him come to being upset.
"People ask you a lot?"
Charles laughs, his prior passion turning into something easier. "Yes. Don't people ask you if you're making weapons here?"
Erik grows quiet, and as their eyes stay on each other, the space between them negligent enough Erik can smell the sugar from Charles' tea on his breath, a connection is made between them.
"Do you play chess?" Erik asks.
Near the end of summer, once Erik has taught Charles all the lyrics in his mother's songbook, he asks for the bird back.
"Give me the bird back," Erik says.
Charles bites his lip and looks away, clearly torn between doing the right thing and doing what he wants. Erik is surprised the dilemma even occurred to him. Erik tries to erase the uncertainty on his face. "I'll give her back. Do you remember how you asked if she sang?"
Charles' face lights up, and Erik feels satisfaction. He runs back into the house, up the stairs to where he occupies a medium-sized guest room with a bed far too large for a boy his age. Charles looks expectantly behind him when he goes in, waiting for Erik in the entryway. Erik shakes his head.
"Come on," Charles insists.
Erik shakes his head. "I've never been there while there are people staying there." He's only been there to help clean out the rooms, open the curtains, lay new sheets and make sure everything is as if it's never been locked up and dusty.
Charles comes out of the cooled house and into the heat where Erik waits. He offers his hand. "Won't you come with me?"
Maybe it's curiosity at what the inside of the house is like from this side of things, maybe it's something else. Erik takes Charles' hand, and Charles closes his fingers around his palm and leads him to his room. Erik doesn't notice too much about his surroundings, more worried he'll be caught not just here but with Charles.
The bird lies on a wooden desk that has a feast decorating its sides. Charles returns the bird to him wholeheartedly, and Erik wonders if he could keep him like a bird in his garden, all shining gears.
He makes it so she sings on her own. Working on her whenever Charles leaves him alone, he changes out the eyes from plastic beads to ones of blue-green glass. Polishes her feathers and etches in the feathers beneath her wings. It will be fitting he thinks, to make the bird sing the song they've spent just as long learning as it's taken him to make her fly. He imagines the wonderment on Charles' face as he realizes not only can he read the music on his own, but that the bird can fly. Its flight will be his quiet thanks.
Erik knows Charles was thrilled to see the bird capable of flight. He remembers the rush of pleasure that could only have come from Charles' reception of the bird. But the memory is blurred, a palimpsest, overlaid by his own anger.
Instead of remembering Charles' excitement, he remembers the way Charles stood helplessly as the man who came for him took the bird and tossed it to the ground. Its legs, thin, delicate, and weak snapped. Erik cannot remember Charles' face, but he remembers Charles did nothing.
The bird's feet were broken, and what good was a bird who could fly if it could not land?
"We're going," the man says, and Charles is pulled away. The man gives Erik a look that makes him feel dirty, common, and poor. "You should never have been consorting with his like Charles." The comment, Erik knows, is directed at him.
Charles doesn't come to see Erik. Erik spends the night and day in anger at the way Charles let the man dictate his fate to him.
Charles leaves without a word, the only sign he was ever here the absence of the clockwork bird, which, in his anger, Erik never had a chance to fix. When he sees the bird gone, the anger leaves his body, leaving him alone once more in the large house.
*
Once he is old enough to leave his mother, training to become an engineer seems the logical thing to do until a transportation wizard by the name of Azazel -- he never gave out his last name, only the people who wrote his checks know that -- discovers his talent for clockwork animals. It is Azazel who encouraged him to make his own way, independent of the major engineering companies.
"I can't make a living doing this," Erik replies flatly.
Azazel raises an eyebrow, saying nothing and letting that single arrogant expression say it all.
"Okay," Azazel replies, quite clearly thinking otherwise.
It is only when Erik was older he realized why his mother indulged his tinkering. Azazel brings up the subject of Erik's tinkering again, saying, "What are you doing working as a mechanic?"
Azazel avoids Erik's gaze and examines the mole Erik brought in his pocket, scratching its stomach, rubbing its ears, watching the way it squirms and crawls about on the floor.
"Saving money to be an engineer. Upward mobility," Erik sourly replies as he examines the blueprints for a new cross-country train.
"Erik, don't you see though? Engineering will bring you a secure future, but for that, you must work for other people. With clockwork, you would answer to no man but yourself."
"I'd be well paid enough to do so?"
"Of course. The rich will pay much for their luxuries and none at all for their necessities." And Azazel continues observing the mole, letting it scurry across the wood-chip strewn floor.
Azazel is the first man Erik meets whose talent could not be hidden. With his red skin and pronged tail Erik wonders how he'd even made it to adulthood. However, Azazel lives as if he is not marked, and Erik admires that. Before becoming an engineer, Azazel had been a magician making his living off of sleight of hand, illusions, and escape acts.
Erik likes him. He learns much from him, Azazel shaping and refining raw talent with technique. With the amount of time Erik spends with Azazel, he hears a lot about Janos, but Janos is surprisingly shy.
"Not shy," Azazel corrects, "merely selective about who sees him." Before Erik can reply from the metal stool with his feet hooked in its rungs, Azazel continues, "Ah, my small siren, here he is."
Janos walks in, and Erik recognized him as the mute boy who ran the numbers. Only someone working at a desk would wear a white suit.
"Don't be confused Erik, he sings just perfectly." He presses a kiss to Janos' neck. Azazel looks up at Erik. "What, did you think you were the first man to like men?"
Erik doesn't know whether to be shocked at Azazel's bluntness, confused at being read so easily, or envious at Janos for sidling even closer into Azazel's lap and Azazel's tail wrapping around him.
"Why do you call him your siren?" Erik asks one day.
Azazel looks up from the engine that is currently in its prototype phase. "I call him that because he is one. You will never hear him speak, but ah, to hear it..."
Janos, sitting at his desk with his ledger, rolls his eyes. Erik wonders if that is Janos' talent. Azazel continues, "I am honored to be the one he lets hear it." He takes a few steps over to Janos and nuzzles him. Janos pats his head and then shoves him away to finish his numbers.
"Why not make him talk, wouldn't that make everything easier?"
Janos glares, and Azazel shakes his head.
"I do not think you understand," one of them says. "You cannot force such things."
As a mechanic, Erik has a sizeable sum saved, and when the house his mother worked in is placed for sale, he buys it. The original owners had lost favor in a political scandal, and subsequently lost their fortune. He finds it just they live to see the hired help take their home. He views it as justice at its purest.
He knocks the main house down, rebuilds it into a more modest home. He leaves everything else, the gardens, the old workshop out of sentiment, but connects the orchid room to the main house.
With the new home renovated, even as small as it is, it is very empty. Even though very little of the original house remains, he still remembers Charles running through it. He vaguely regrets not saving that staircase and path to Charles' room, but then he remembers his maid's room and does not regret at all. And yet -- Charles has stayed on his mind, a constant pleasant memory; something inescapable each time he makes the animals. Is it wrong to see if they still shared that?
It occurs to him, then. He has no connections to find Charles; Charles was clearly from wealth and Erik knows nothing of that life. But it is the wealthy who would buy his trinkets. And, well, if Erik could make a living as his own master, let that stand as well.
It is at this point, with money and land, that he thinks fuck it, and makes his first mail-order catalogue.
*
After creating the mail-order-only catalogue, Erik spends no money on additional publicity. Azazel expresses his dismay that Erik relied, and continues to rely, solely on person referral.
"They're so lifelike!" people exclaim as they discover his work. "Why, if I didn't see the mechanisms and gears, I would think it the actual thing!" And the news spreads so on and so on, enough that even Azazel limits his complaints.
These people pay him in money and compliments, falling over themselves with lavish praise, both sincere and false. He takes their words and their money, but he knows these people would never look at him twice with his dirty hands if he wasn't working for them.
He likes the ability to make the cynicism melt right off their smug faces and replace it with that childlike wonder. Those are hidden faces, and he is reminded most of Charles when he kneels to give an animal to a child and their faces radiate like a small sun. There is nothing hidden there, everything is freely given, and Erik grows warm next to their warmth. Erik wonders if Charles has kept that light in him to adulthood. Erik knows he certainly hasn't.
What was once a business he could handle on his own -- from invoices, to packaging, the creation, the shipping, the payment -- has grown into a paperwork monstrosity he cannot handle alone. He needed no one at first, but when he advanced from mail-catalogue to custom-orders it became much harder to keep ahead of the growing mountain of papers. Hiring someone seemed the solution, but he ran through aids like water in a sieve.
One man's misfortune though, is another's fortune. Angel Salvadore, soloist at the Royal Ballet, returns from abroad after injuring herself and needs work. Erik's only met her a few times, but she's a friend of Emma's. Angel needs a job while she recovers, and Erik needs help.
She does good work, she's cranky, he's cranky, they put up with each other's moods. She keeps the paperwork away from him and he is immensely pleased. Although her ability to keep ahead of orders can be trifling when he wants to bury some orders like the Xaviers'.
Standing in the middle of the doorway, just a foot over the threshold, Angel looks down at her clipboard. The clipboard, he knows, is for. She never comes unprepared. Slowly raising her eyes, she looks around the room in organized disarray and back at him. "Erik, you have another gift from the Xaviers."
He scowls, setting down the screwdriver, but leaves the screws hovering in the air with his talent. "Tell them no. They can wait for their order just like everyone else. Just because they're rich -- "
"No need to continue, I got it." Angel checks a box on her clipboard, and then hands it to him. "Sign here to confirm you received their package."
"What did they send this time?"
"Alcohol."
"You can have it."
"I already helped myself. It's good stuff. You're loss."
Emma Frost is the opera's finest soprano. She loves the fine things in life, and it shows from her tailored clothes, to the patent leather heels she loves, down to the diamonds she wears even to visit Erik.
Peeling off her elbow-length gloves, she proclaims, "I've come to see how Angel's adjusting."
Angel's been here awhile, and Emma hasn't visited her, even in her roughest spells. Erik grunts, knowing it's a thin excuse for Emma to see him and read him with her strong talent for minds. Why exactly, he doesn't know, but Emma had remarked when they met he'd one of the most closeted off minds she'd ever encountered.
"You're so cynical," she replies.
That's why I distrust you, he thinks sourly.
She smiles, draws a finger across the top of a bureau, and finding no dust, sets down her folded gloves.
"You got a smoke?" she inquires, smiling like a cat. She looks at home in his sitting room with the sunlight coming in from the windows. You should put a piano here.
"I thought you said it was a disgusting habit I should quit." I don't play.
"For you, yes. For me, it's classy."
He goes into the kitchen and digs out a cigarette and lighter from beneath the sink. He holds both out to her.
"Ahh, thanks, Erik."
They each take a seat, smoke filling the room until Angel comes roving in with her nose scrunched up.
"Who's smoking those ugly fags?"
Erik tenses for a moment, and Emma pauses, cigarette poised between her fingers to stare at him.
She was in England for the ballet many years, she sends.
The moment passes and Erik remembers he heard something like that before.
Emma takes another drag and exhales more dramatically than necessary. If you'd just gone on that European tour like I'd told you to..., she continues.
"Ugh," Angel says, swinging the window out from its hinges. "I should've known it was you Emma. He only smokes when someone drives him to it. You certainly would." She moves on to the next set of windows, leaning up on the tips of her toes to reach the latches.
Emma raises an eyebrow. "I thought that would be you. Goodness knows you drove me to that and more."
She lowers her eyes, a perfect picture of demureness, and Angel clenches her fists. "Just because you got me this job --"
Looking between the two of them, Erik intervenes, not wanting the slow haze of nicotine to dissipate so soon.
"What will I do when you decide to return to dancing?"
Despite the metal casings suspended throughout the room, Angel is at ease. Erik suspects it's because she has a talent, but what it is, he doesn't know. He'd lost many employees who were uncomfortable with his more-than-modest talent.
"You mean, who else will put up with your PMS?"
Erik floats a ball-peen towards him, and Angel weaves her way through the room, careful to not touch the metal. With her black stockings, he can imagine her moving across the stage in the same smooth manner.
She sets the papers down on his table. While she won't disturb his metals, she has no problem moving the papers around his desk in what she calls order. "You know I'll never dance again."
"That's not true." He sets down his screwdriver. Dressed in black, it must be hot for her, but he hasn't seen her wear any other colors.
"I will never dance as a professional again. What would you do with one of your birds -- Having flown across oceans, could it ever be content with a horizon made of four walls? Would it forget the ocean wind?"
He bites off his retort, When did you become a poet? He knows Angel's heart beats soft. Instead, he says, "You're no less a dancer, an artist, or beautiful for performing on a smaller stage."
She snorts. "Easy for you to say. You're still fixing broken up things for broken boys who'll never return."
The one and only time Emma gets him drunk, he lets the entire embarrassing story out. There was a boy -- that was no surprise to Emma, very little phased her except for cheapness -- Erik wanted to find him again, and he was trying to do so with the birds.
"And what, pray tell, is the logic behind making birds and sending them out in the world to other buyers?" Even through the fog of alcohol he could hear her disdain.
"Because who else would make a clockwork bird that sings that song?"
Emma tops off his glass and slides it to him across her marble counter. From his seat on the other side he barely catches it, before it blazes a watery path to her pricey floor. "For all you know he's forgotten you and that song he sang to you entirely."
"I have to believe in something."
"You're no fun drunk, you know."
Thank goodness they were drinking in her flat. He barely makes it to her couch where he wakes the next morning to aspirin and a wide glass of water.
"Those who can't, teach," Angel sneers.
"Take it," Erik growls. He tries to put the heavy music box in her arms.
"I'm not taking one of your fancy music boxes you asshole." She slaps his hands away, and then crosses her arms beneath her breasts.
"It's not one I'd sell anyway, no one wants a record player anymore anyway." His arms are starting to grow tired, and he regrets that his talent does not extend to wooden boxes heavy enough to sink a ship. He also regrets his workroom is too cluttered to put the damned thing back down.
"Oh great, give me the unwanted music box. How fitting Lehnsherr. No need to rub it in that I'll never dance again."
"Angel, just take the damn thing." He can feel himself breaking into a sweat.
He shoves it at her. "Take it or I'll drop it right here, I swear." Angel seems both angered and flustered. When his grip loosens, she makes a grab for the box.
She hefts it in her arms, the blood rushing across the tops of her cheekbones. As she leaves, holding the box with little effort, she says, "It's rather sweet you know, that you whistle as you program the birds with the same song."
Erik grunts. He knows an apology when he hears one. Later, as she plays a Nina Simone record, he pretends not to notice the way she slowly dances as the ballerina on the player turns to a waltz.
"Why would you set certain birds to certain songs?"
"People always want privacy. Deliver love notes, I don't care."
Angel looks at him. "Maybe. But you're very focused about this one thing. Whose letter are you waiting for?" She leans on his table, not minding the grease there or the eyeful she's giving him. "What will you do once you get a reply? Be afraid of gifts that are too easy to come by, Erik."
Erik curses his memory and for losing the song book. He wouldn't call this particular endeavor easy. Unable to remember the actual song, he'd been forced to do his best at imitating the song, setting it to a bird, and hoping for the best.
She digs through his pile of pending orders, rearranging his desk until she finds what she wants. She mutters about his workroom not having enough space, but Erik likes this room with a window that overlooks the old gardening shed. With both hands, she hands him a box.
He doesn't take it, just eyes it. "What is this?"
"The very persistent order from the Xaviers you've been avoiding. She was extremely insistent you see this as soon as possible. She offered a bonus big enough that if you don't want to fix it, I will."
"You don't know the first thing about mechanics."
"Nope, but they'll never know that."
"Give me that." He takes the box from her hands and sets it back into the pile of orders.
"You're fucking stubborn, Lehnsherr. Just find the boy and fuck him out of your system," Emma says the next time she visits.
"Emma." He thinks about slipping rat poison into her coffee. She raises in eyebrow in response.
"What's a five year age gap now that you're older."
"You're disgusting."
"Just the truth," she replies and admires her manicure. "What do you fantasize about then?"
Although Erik will never admit it to anyone, his mind often wanders to a particular fantasy. He and Charles meet again, and Charles is just as kind and giving as ever. He's not sure how the bird will fit in. But Erik has thought and thought about all the improvements he could make to that first flying bird. How he could make her flight smoother, the bird more lifelike, her song sweeter.
Of course, that would require so many updates she'd no longer be the same bird. But the desire to give Charles the bird he promised he would -- One day Charles will have that bird.
Until then, he still creates other animals of course, plodding bears, yammering dogs, but he pursues the birds with such intensity those are what sell best.
Erik does his very best not to project this at Emma.
Angel's contract is for a limited period, and with it about to expire, Erik would like her to stay. He finds her in the orchid room she's taken to working on. She has a mister in one hand, and the other rests on her hip as she admires the room full of buds.
He stays near the entrance and admires the silhouette she cuts against the wide windows. "You're welcome to stay here as long as you would like," he states.
She sets the mister next to a purple orchid that's been blooming for two months. Pivoting in her boots, she spits back, "I don't need your charity."
"It's not charity if I," he squeezes out the word, "need you here."
"I'm replaceable. Any university drop-out can do this job."
"You said it yourself," he says softly, slowly, and just a little fondly, but only someone who knew him well would know that. "Who else will put up with my mood swings?"
Angel gives a small smile despite herself. "I said your PMS, that's what I said."
"Just know that."
"I'll stay," she declares, "but I want a salary increase. And a signing bonus."
He raises an eyebrow. "And where would I find that paperwork?"
"I already have it drafted up. I just need you to sign it to make it official."
He barks out a laugh. "Certain I would still want you?"
"Who doesn't?" They share a sharp smile together.
He still draws inspiration from the animals around the estate. The bluebirds who steal eggs, the quails marching along in their small families, the geese that nip at his heels as he flees and swears at them. Erik is rather fond of those geese. Now that the estate's grown more wild, the animals are slowly coming back, and Erik enjoys their return.
Animals are honest about their dislike, their needs and wants. People hide too much, contain too much in them waiting to come out at the worst time. With animals, at least, Erik knows where he stands.
Erik looks up from the owl he's working on at Angel. For once, she's not all in black, a magenta orchid pinned over her heart.
She just stares at something beyond his shoulder. He looks back, at the owl he's keeping floating.
"What?"
"That takes some talent."
He grunts.
She looks away and at him. She drops a stack of folders on his desk. "These are the current orders, sorted by date. Can't avoid the Xaviers any longer."
He sees Emma in his living room, and is about to yell at Angel for letting her in again. Emma rolls her eyes, having heard his line of thought, and starts singing. Her voice, trained carefully to perfection, is much better suited to it than his.
Erik sits, stunned. His mouth might be open as well.
She looks down her nose to him. "No wonder the boy hasn't found you; you've been using the wrong song."
Erik gathers his words, opens his mouth, but Emma ploughs on. She uncrosses her legs, and lets her satin heels tap against the floor.
"Common enough mistake I suppose. Schumann's arrangement is more popular. But Fanny's is prettier. As if a man would know what it feels like."
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"You didn't ask for help. And," she adds, "I was tired of hearing you tinker with the same song over and over and ruining it."
"Why do you sound different?"
"It's a duet for two women. Schumann's is for a man alone." After a pause, she adds, "You really ought to thank Angel; she's the one who recognized it."
Erik looks at her. Emma exhales, in what could be a sigh, and looks out the window, her arm folded over her crossed legs. I once took her to opera.
In general, Erik does not like speaking to Emma this way, but sometimes he will let it pass without a sharp and biting rebuke. Her talent is good at layering words with other concepts, thoughts, and feelings -- and as she says, he never did like talking about those. He lets her stay for dinner.
Carrying an orange orchid into his workroom she asks, "Have you started on the Xavier order yet?"
"No."
"It's your current order," she reminds him in an oddly gentle voice. She sets the plant down near the window, fusses with its leaves a little.
Erik takes a glance and sees the order hasn't skipped ahead of anyone, he's just worked his way to it at last.
"Thanks," he says, and hopes Angel knows what he means by it. When she doesn't say anything, just looks at him with her dark eyes he can't read, he continues, "for --"
"No need. Don't like all this heart-to-heart. We already had enough of that." She walks through the door, but pauses. "But you're welcome anyways." Her orange lacquered nails, painted the same shade as the flower, pass through the door with one last swipe.
He looks around his desk, even though he knows where he puts all his orders. He picks up the fine but worn box and opens it up. Familiar glass eyes look up at him, the feet still broken. He whistles to her using the tune Emma taught him, thinking this could not possibly be the bird he gave to Charles, but she begins flapping against the box, ready to fly again.
"Hello old friend," he says in wonder. In the dip of his palm, he winds her up, and as she begins to fly in eager circles, he watches in amazement.