Erik
Two months after Washington, Raven found Erik in a skeevy motel off the Florida interstate. He’d been renting the room by the week for the past seven weeks. Spent most of his time on the tiny balcony, basking in the hot sun and reading as many newspapers as he could get his hands on during the day, sleeping there at night under sheets stripped from the bed. Instinctively he gravitated away from enclosed spaces and complete silence, seeking out the warm night air and ambient noises—crickets, occasional voices from other rooms or the parking lot, the steady hum of highway traffic—that fell just on the safe side of sensory overload.
The television was on constantly. He drank a lot of whiskey. He grew a beard and got a tan and put out food for the cats that skulked around the motel and spoke only to the news agent, the man at the liquor store, and the old woman in #12 whose sink he fixed one day.
Clippings of articles about Washington, about humanity’s shapeshifting savior and the ongoing hunt for the nefarious Magneto, editorials about the “rise of the mutant,” started covering the mirror above the dresser, then spilled across the hideous wallpaper. Not unlike the murder collage he’d created during the hunt for Schmidt—though these articles formed a narrative that spoke less of sadistic cruelty and more of political and ideological ambivalence. Mutants existed incontrovertibly, and the American public didn’t seem to know quite how it felt about that.
Tentatively positive, it seemed, for the most part. Occasional far-right screeds aside, the general tone was one of guarded appreciation for mutantkind, or at least for its actions. Doubtless periodic reassurances, in public and in the press, from one Dr. Charles Xavier, geneticist, had something to do with that. He had Nixon’s ear, the rumors went, and the President was known for leaning heavily on his advisors.
If things were going to hell—and Erik was entirely certain that they were—it was happening quietly, and behind the scenes.
Erik would intervene, he promised himself. He had ten years of absence to make up for, and no idea how the cause had fared, if the Brotherhood still existed in any recognizable form, or if they had all gone their own way like Mystique. But even if only a few of his followers remained loyal, they would be searching for him now. He had only to reach out to any one of his old contacts.
And he would, just as soon as the thought of speaking to more than one person and planning beyond the next minute didn’t trigger a panic response that ended with him hyperventilating in the bathroom while sympathetic metallic groaning noises were wrung from the pipes in the walls. He just needed a few more days.
Then again, Raven had only ever been interested in what he needed when it coincided exactly with what she needed, and this was not one of those times. Opening his eyes to her in her natural form doing the splits above him to avoid breaking his nose after her graceful leap onto the balcony was abruptly derailed by…well, him, was not the most unpleasant way Erik had ever woken up, but it didn’t exactly bode well for the day, either.
“What the hell, Mystique!”
“What the fuck, Erik!” she shouted back, glaring down at him. “You lunatic, what are you doing out here?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Trying to break into your room, obviously. I thought you’d be, you know, in it.”
“Why? Come to finish what you started in Washington?”
Sneering contemptuously always did go better when he wasn’t half-asleep and wrapped in bedsheets like a naked human burrito. Raven at least didn’t seem particularly intimidated: Erik could feel her rolling her eyes, even with her back to him, as she waltzed into his motel room and made a beeline for the coffee maker.
“I’m not going to apologize for that,” she called, briskly scooping grounds into the filter as Erik dragged himself upright and tried to process events strategically, instead of with a vague sense of tired bemusement. He’d slept more in the past two months than he had in the first six months of leading the Brotherhood, but no matter how many times he told himself that he should be bursting with energy after ten years of forced inaction, twelve hours of sleep felt like four and there were days when he woke up still exhausted.
“I wouldn’t expect you to apologize for doing whatever it took to achieve your objective. You don’t seem worried that I’ll finish what I started in Paris,” he said, trailing after her. There was a pair of sweatpants on the bathroom floor and he put them on because it seemed polite, not because he had any special pretensions of modesty around Raven.
“Oh, please,” Raven said. “If you still wanted me dead we would not be having this conversation. And if I’d really wanted you dead, your funeral would have been eight weeks ago.”
“Sparsely attended, I’d imagine.”
She gave him a cup of coffee and a raised eyebrow as he came out of the bathroom, which said ya think? more clearly than words, even with her enviable command of sarcasm this morning. Or maybe it was exactly her usual command of sarcasm and only seemed enviable due to the whole predawn, surprise nature of the situation.
“Would you have come?” he said inanely, sitting on the bed while she perched cross-legged on the dresser, ignoring the dozens of pictures of herself tacked to the wall. It occurred to him that this was already the longest conversation he’d had in two months.
“To your imaginary funeral? Is this your very uncomfortable way of asking if we’re still friends?”
“Friends,” Erik repeated blankly. He’d thought of Raven as a partner, colleague, subordinate, lover, and fellow soldier, and he hadn’t been lying about missing her, but he’d had one friend his entire adult life, and it wasn’t her.
“Yeah, friends. You don’t have many, so don’t throw away the ones you’ve got, okay?”
“I don’t need friends. I need—”
Raven held up a hand and made a twirling gesture that encompassed the trashcan full of empty bottles and fast food wrappers, the one change of clothes folded over a chair, the armor he’d stacked in the corner and forgotten about, and his own disheveled appearance. “If you’re about to say followers, hold up and take a look around. Magneto needs followers but Magneto’s not here, is he? No one’s seen him since Washington.”
“I don’t like what you’re implying, Mystique,” Erik growled. He meant to stare her down but there was a flash of something warm and sympathetic in her golden stare, and he looked away first, disconcerted. To cover the moment of weakness he lashed out, snapping “Or is it Mystique? This…softness reeks of your brother. Am I speaking to Raven after all?”
The warmth faded from her eyes. “Don’t make the same mistake you did in Paris, Erik. The one where you assume Mystique is yours and Raven is Charles’s? It didn’t end well for you, the last time you thought you could manipulate me like that, did it? Call me whatever you want, but don’t think it means you have any say in what I do or who I am.”
Erik forced himself not to look away again, nodded once in understanding.
“Well, as long as we’re clear on that,” Raven said, and looked pointedly at the scar on his neck. Erik wanted to cover it so badly his fingers twitched, but he used both hands to lift his mug and took another sip of coffee instead, expression carefully blank.
The bullet wound had healed slowly. He’d dressed it himself, not wanting to risk a human hospital, stocking up on hydrogen peroxide and gauze at convenience stores scattered across Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia. For a week the skin had felt unbearably tender and hot to the touch while it oozed the kind of bloody pus that made him fear infection. It was still noticeably pink and the scar tissue would ensure that skin would always be uneven, but Erik had never been ashamed of any of his scars, and he didn’t mean to start with this one. Besides, it was Raven’s, after all, not Shaw’s. Somehow that made a difference.
However long he’d been lost in thought and unresponsive was too long; Raven was looking at him with concern again. He said the first thing that came to mind. “Not that I object to…coffee with a friend, but why did you track me down?”
“I need your help.”
He raised an eyebrow. “My help, or Magneto’s help?”
“Definitely yours, maybe both. Then again, Magneto never was that great when it came to the small-scale operation. Always went for the grand gesture.”
Erik opened his mouth to point out that sometimes the grand gesture was the only thing oblivious humans would respect, but then the rest of her words registered. A shiver went up his spine, some intuition he couldn’t quantify but which grated on his nerves like impure metal.
“What small-scale operation are you talking about?”
“Search and rescue,” Raven said carefully. “In conjunction with the X-Men, or what’s left of them. It’s time-sensitive.”
“I don’t understand.”
It wasn’t a lie. Erik recognized the words of the mission parameters but when he reached out to grasp their meaning, there was nothing. Blankness where a conclusion should have been, even with all the facts laid out, and that nameless dread filling his chest cavity like wet cement. He didn’t notice that his hands were shaking so badly that his coffee threatened to spill over the sides of the mug until Raven took it from him, set it aside, and sat on the bed a safe distance away.
“They have Charles, Erik,” she said.
The bedframe shrieked. In the bathroom, the showerhead snapped in half and clattered into the tub.
“No,” he said, denial instinctive. He hadn’t heard from Charles, materially or telepathically, since the clear dismissal in Washington. He hadn’t expected to, and for his own part had desired contact no more and no less than he had since the day he had vanished off a Cuban beach. For eleven years, the longing for Charles had burned, outlasting every fleeting burst of resentment and anger at the telepath’s actions and inactions, his naiveté, his stubbornness. It was a wound that never healed, and that he would have gladly ripped open again if it had. Those precious seconds in Washington of Charles fully present, his gentle telepathic touch pain-roughened around the edges, had been half-lost in Erik’s haze of shock and confusion. Everything had spun out of control so quickly—a week later, he was still struggling to believe that the world around him was real and not a dream, and the feeling of Charles in his mind always slipped away no matter how greedily he reached for it.
But even if those few treasured seconds were all Charles would give him, they were proof that he would reach out, if he had no other choice. Pitiful, compared to the complete trust Charles had so foolishly bestowed on him once, but Erik would gratefully be a last resort if the alternative was nothing at all.
Surely Charles would have called for him, if something had happened.
“I’ve been to the mansion,” Raven said. “It was Hank’s idea to come find you.”
That seemed about as likely as the world’s most powerful telepath being made to do anything against his will, but if Raven was telling the truth…
He flinched when her fingers tentatively wrapped around his, her face set in determination. “You know I wouldn’t lie about this. The Brotherhood is waiting for you, we have work to do, but I wouldn’t have come now if it wasn’t urgent."
Erik nodded; that, at least, he believed. Raven’s youth, natural impatience, and his own teachings had ensured that she could be callous, but she wasn’t heartless.
“Two weeks ago, Charles and Alex went to Washington,” she said. “Standard meeting with some political bigwig, nothing out of the ordinary. They were supposed to take the train back from Union Station that night. Alex went to check their bags, two minutes tops, and when he got back Charles was gone. Just…vanished. No one had seen a thing. Hank thinks they were either wearing telepathic blockers or Charles was shielding heavily because of the crowds and didn’t sense danger until it was too late.”
The balcony railing ripped free of the concrete and soared across the parking lot forcefully enough to send up a shower of sparks when it hit the ground. Two weeks. Two weeks Erik had been watching cartoons and soap operas, practicing small talk about the weather and spending entire afternoons focused on the interstate, his metal-sense caressing thousands of cars as they drove by. And all that time Charles had been missing. Two weeks paled in comparison to his own imprisonment, but Erik knew intimately that there was no necessary correlation between damage done and time spent in the hands of the enemy. He had inflicted more pain in one hour than the government had inflicted on him in ten years. And Erik knew torture, how to dispense it and how to resist it; Charles didn’t. He could be dead or beyond help already.
“He was helping them and they turned on him,” he said distantly.
“They’ll regret it,” Raven promised. “We’ll make them regret it. But first we have to get him back.”
Erik forced himself to nod in agreement even as every base instinct howled for blood. Anyone who had touched Charles from the moment he was taken until now, caused him even the slightest bit of pain—Erik would sink his powers into every fragment of iron in their blood and superheat it. He would trigger fatal seizures by inducing electromagnetic storms in their brains. He would inflict the damage himself, by hand, and never mind an eye for an eye: he would take a life for an eye, if that eye was Charles’s. It took every ounce of restraint and the melting of the coat hangers in the closet for him to choke back that intoxicating rage and focus instead on the facts. Revenge could wait; it always had, for him.
“Who are they?”
“Hank is following up on some leads. We don’t have a lot. They’re not CIA or FBI. Nothing political. My hunch is that we need to take a closer look at Boliver Trask’s old cronies. Could be a friend or protégé out there trying to carry on his work.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Speaking to Trask is a little more complicated than stopping by and ringing the doorbell. Since they decommissioned the Sentinel project he’s been in Allenwood, maximum security.”
“Is that a problem for you?” Erik said wryly.
Raven cracked her first smile since arriving. “Good point. You think that’s where we should start?”
This was happening too quickly. He had thought he had more time. Erik summoned some loose change from the bedside table and began weaving it through his fingers casually, hoping to distract Raven—or perhaps himself—from sensing the tiny tendrils of panic creeping through him, growing stronger with every heartbeat. Deep breaths, smooth thoughts, and no giving in to the dizziness that overtook him at the idea of a rescue mission now, when he still shook off flashbacks a dozen times a day. The house-of-cards fragility he sensed in his own thoughts was worrisome, but Raven and the others would be looking to him for leadership, and Charles could even now be in worse shape, with none of Erik’s coping mechanisms.
And that was to say nothing of the danger they could all be in, if his captors found a way to manipulate Charles’s telepathy.
“Allenwood is on the way to the mansion,” Erik heard himself say, and then quickly, helplessly, “Mystique, I’m not—”
He broke off, unsure of the right word. Well? Myself? Entirely confident in my own sanity?
“I know,” she said. “If you were I’d be worried. But it can’t matter now. This is Charles.”
It should have irked him that after all this time, that was still all it took. Instead Erik reached for his coffee mug with steady hands and took a tepid sip calmly. He had no belongings to pack but would need to procure some new clothes, a weapon, some useful odds and ends. And a car. A flight would be quicker but there was no time to fake the necessary documents, and he could steal a car without even touching it. As long as he kept his mind occupied with the miniscule details, focused on the next step and nothing more, he could remain in control of himself and the mission. He could bear anything if it meant Charles would be safe. In any case, Raven would be there to haul him back, if he went over the edge.
“Well,” he said. “I suppose I should find a shirt, then.”
“And a razor,” Raven said helpfully. “You look like a hobo.”
Erik almost smiled.