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chapter eight
THE GOOD OL DAYS
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CERES FEELS LIKE her eardrums are going to burst when she opens the door to her apartment, removing the final barrier between her and Steve and the rock music that had been audible from down the hall. It becomes a trillion times louder once they're inside and she can close the door behind them. She winces, not in pain, but in embarrassment at Steve's widened eyes as he processes the deafening music.
Ilyas smokes and blares music. And he wonders why their neighbors hate him.
"ILYAS!" Ceres shouts over AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long". Classic rock has been one of Ilyas's favorite genres since it became popular; his vinyl records, 8-tracks, and CDs have been well-worn and loved over the decades.
Her roommate presses pause on the stereo using a remote, causing her ears to ring from the abrupt silence. He's wearing a denim jacket over a Def Leppard t-shirt and — thank God — matching denim jeans, one leg crossed over his opposite knee while he tunes one of his electric guitars on their sofa. His hair is tousled as usual after a morning shift at the tattoo parlor. Ceres is pleased to note that there isn't an open bottle of alcohol near him. Could he be... actually trying?
Ilyas glances at them and does a double-take once he notices Steve. His eyebrows shoot up his forehead. "Holy shit. He's actually here."
Ceres does not know how to interpret this, but she feels a little stung. "Did you think I was joking?"
"I thought it might've been a joke," he admits as he stands, setting his gleaming red and white guitar against the sofa. Her jaw almost drops when he meets them at the door and holds out a hand for Steve to shake. "Thanks for stopping a bunch of concrete from falling onto my friend— I would've missed making her shout at me like that."
Steve, still a bit taken aback by the music, politely shakes his hand.
"You can stop acting like I was going to die," Ceres says with a roll of her eyes. "He knows. I told him about the curse and the fact that you're ancient."
"Ah." Ilyas shoves a hand into the pocket of his jacket. "Yeah, you're not the oldest young-looking guy in New York, sorry."
"I'm a bit relieved, honestly," Steve replies. "Uh, if you don't mind me asking... how old are you?"
He shrugs. "Lost count after a hundred. It stops mattering then."
Ilyas is not short compared to most guys — he's half an inch shy of being six feet tall — but he looks dwarfed by Steve. The super soldier's buff physique sharply contrasts the mutant's, who is much slimmer and muscular in a lean way. This perspective is strange since Ceres is used to him being one of the tallest X-Men.
What he lacks in height he makes up with in personality, though, because Steve still seems a bit shy.
Ilyas is not worth being intimidated by. To rectify this, Ceres gestures to him and says to Steve, "Like I said before: this is my roommate, Ilyas Ravel. He's an asshole but he's the only person who understands what it's like to be like us."
Maybe that last part isn't true since Logan Howlett is also an old man trapped in a younger person's body, but she'll be damned if she can contact him, and he isn't one for talking or being helpful, anyway. She's already got a lot on her plate by introducing Steve to one immortal dickbag.
A meow causes all of them to look for the source: Ilyas's cat, who pads around the kitchen counter and into the entryway to see what the commotion is about. She rubs against Ilyas's calves before doing the same to Ceres, mewling in greeting.
"That's Chris," Ilyas says.
Steve's brows furrow. "You named your cat Chris?"
"No, I named my cat Anti-Christ, but we call her that for short."
Steve shrugs as if to say, Fair enough, bends into a crouch, making himself smaller, and holds his hand out for Chris to sniff. She does, thoroughly investigating his knuckles, and then gives him a stamp of approval by ramming her forehead into his fingers. He gives her a gentle scritching behind her ear while she stretches her hind legs.
Ilyas glances at Ceres and points to the positive interaction with wiggled eyebrows and a thumbs-up, mouthing, "Chris likes him."
Ceres shakes her head and mouths back, "Shut up."
He makes a heart with his hands.
She allows light to burn under her skin, turning her fist orange, a silent warning.
Steve stands up and the two of them quickly face him as if nothing had transpired while he was introducing himself to Anti-Christ. He seems more comfortable in their chaotic living space, looking beyond the two mutants to see the details of the apartment: Ceres's potted plants placed on almost every spare surface, a record player on a shelf with hundreds of albums stacked below it, hints of decor from every decade from their seventies-print lamp to the yellow eighties wallpaper in the kitchen, posters of Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, and Blondie that decorate the wall behind their rust-colored sofa.
Finally, his gaze slides back to Ilyas. "So, Ceres told me that you guys were part of some sort of team back in the day?"
"Oh, she already started the whole X-Men spiel?" he asks, wandering back to the sofa to continue tuning his guitar. "Yeah. I'm one of the founding members, but there are only four others left— they're called Charles, Erik, Hank, and Alex. We gave ourselves that name because it's an unknown X-Factor gene that causes our mutations."
As he explains, Ceres quickly slips into her bedroom to dig through her boxes of journals and find an empty one for Steve. She eventually locates a pocket-sized notebook with a rustic cover. It seems to fit Steve's vibe, so she pulls it free from where it was crammed into the bin and retreats into the main living area.
Now, Steve is sitting in their armchair, listening to Ilyas with rapt attention. It's a sharp contrast to the careless way Ilyas recalls his memories with the team and gives a summary of what the early days before Ceres were like. He recounts the details as if being a part of the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't a big deal.
Oh shit, does Steve know about the Cuban Missile Crisis? She opens the journal and writes its first entry with her pen: Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
"Here," she says, passing the notebook to him. "I wrote something already— hope that's alright."
"Thank you." Steve accepts the gift and opens it to read her writing. He nods. "I'm indeed not very familiar with that."
"Are you writing down things you missed out on?" Ilyas asks, moving on to polishing the guitar instead of tuning it. "If so, jot down the band Queen."
Ceres grabs a pen from the coffee table and hands it to Steve so he can make the addition. She chooses to sit on the sofa next to Ilyas so she's between the boys. It's not that she thinks something will go awry between them on their first meeting, but she knows that Ilyas is stupid and hot-headed and she's used to being the mediator between him and whoever he's arguing with. Whether it's their neighbor ("Yes, Mrs. García, I'll tell Ilyas to turn down his stereo,") or a random person on the street who'd bumped into him ("I'm sorry, he doesn't actually mean he has laser eyes"), getting him out of sticky situations may as well be a super power of hers by now.
"Anyways, where was I? Oh — this is where Ceres comes in." Ilyas leans back, practically sprawled in his seat. Anti-Christ jumps onto the cushion between him and Ceres and begins meticulously kneading the area. "The X-Men had disbanded and Ceres heard about mutants because we were all over the news, so she found us. Asked for our help. But then Charles had a mental breakdown and kicked us all out."
That's the simplest way of wording the events of the late sixties into the seventies. Ceres had been freshly-cursed when she finally learned about the X-Men and their work with the CIA, then did enough digging to find the start of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. At first, Charles had welcomed her, but the deaths of so many mutants and the loss of his legs overcame him. He'd lost his way and stopped believing. Though Ceres had finally learned some semblance of control over her powers, he'd driven her away, and she'd cursed him out before leaving the mansion behind.
"Did you two get along?" Steve asks. He sits with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped near his chin as he listens with his complete attention. "At the beginning, I mean."
"God, no," Ceres answers with a laugh. "Working with him was almost impossible. I don't think we ever would've become actual friends if Charles hadn't suggested we become roommates after we moved out of the mansion. And I still want to throttle him most days."
"It's true," Ilyas confirms. "She does. Or she threatens to blind me. Or burn me."
"It's hard to sound serious when he can just heal immediately."
"Really?" Steve questions. "How fast?"
Ceres's heart stops. "No, wait—"
Without blinking, Ilyas takes a knife out of nowhere and stabs the blade straight through his hand. Steve flinches back in surprise. Blood gushes from the wound, dripping onto the wooden floors and blossoming around the knife until he yanks it out. He holds his palm up so Steve can see the brown skin already stitching itself back up and the crimson liquid retreating back into the wound. In a matter of seconds, the only sign that it had happened is the small puddle of blood on the floor.
Steve's lips stay parted in shock before he finally says, "Jesus."
"I wish you wouldn't have asked," Ceres says. "I hate when he does that. Do you know how stressful it is to live with a roommate who has no concern for his physical wellbeing?"
"You're just as bad," Ilyas tells her.
"Clean up that mess you made before Chris walks in it and trails bloody paw prints all over the place."
"Fine." Ilyas sets his guitar aside and puts the knife wherever he'd kept it before, then rises to find a clean cloth and some bleach.
When he's gone, Ceres turns to Steve with an uneasy grin. "Sorry if this all seems a little... much. It's a lot to process. He's a lot to process."
Instead of agreeing with her and making some polite excuse so he can high-tail it out of the apartment, Steve gives her one of his signature half-smiles to reassure her. "It's okay. We have a type like that— on the Avengers, I mean."
Ceres is certain he's talking about the billionaire-turned-superhero, Tony Stark. The one Ilyas had said Erik could crush inside his metal suit in an instant.
"Maybe they'll finally make our hair grow grey," Ceres jokes.
"Probably. I think it's their life's mission."
They trade even wider smiles, and Ceres opens her mind on the off-chance that Charles might hear her just to say, Thank you. If she hadn't set aside her fears and taken the leap to truly get to know Steve, it might have been too late. The Avengers haven't joined together to face a new threat again in months, but that doesn't mean they were a one-and-done ordeal. She has no idea if something will sweep him away. Disaster could strike at any moment, and he'd travel to wherever that is to save the world again.
She has to make the most of this fleeting connection in case time runs out for them. As they look at each other, all of their walls down, she begs the universe to allow this connection to become a permanent fixture in her life. She doesn't think she'll ever be ready to let Steve Rogers go, not even when she's discovered all of the parts that make him whole.
______
a/n:
this chapter is short but i haven't had the mental capacity to write lately. there was a shooting at a university near me recently so everything has been on edge. i wrote this chapter last month and was going to add a second half to it, but since i haven't been feeling up for writing lately, i decided to just publish it for you guys.
i recently watched some of the prequel x-men movies and was picturing ceres and ilyas in them the WHOLE time. ceres would have rocked the 70s vibes in days of future past. most of the events in this chapter are references to first class and days of future past with maybe like one thing from apocalypse. also you can see that i undid a death in apocalypse because no :) i just pretend that it didn't happen :)
thank you all for reading, i appreciate you guys so much <33
— kristyn
( word count: 2.2k )