Erik
“I’ve got him, Hank. Yes. Yes. Look, neither of you are happy about it, I know, but you’ve got twenty-four hours to get over it. Meet us at that motel outside Philadelphia, this time tomorrow. We’re going after Trask.”
An exasperated sigh.
“I know, Hank, but we’ve been driving for fourteen hours straight and unless you want him to go into this sleep-deprived—right. See you tomorrow.”
Raven stepped out of the phone booth, wearing the blonde, blue-eyed disguise that she defaulted to in public. (When Erik had asked her in a distinctly accusatory tone why she was hiding her true form again she had only laughed, morphed into a perfect Elizabeth Taylor, and said, “I’m famous, darling, hadn’t you heard? Everyone adores Mystique. I simply don’t have time to be signing autographs.”) With her fashionably oversized sunglasses on it was difficult to read her expression when she saw Erik already waiting by the car, gas tank refilled and a plastic bag full of sandwiches and sodas on the hood next to him. In Atlanta he’d picked up a black turtleneck and atrociously-patterned bellbottoms; as long as she kept her eyes above his waist, he looked almost like the Erik she’d known ten years ago. The déjà vu was pleasant and awkward, by turns.
“How much of that did you hear?” she said.
“Enough to know you’ll be trying to tuck me into bed early tonight,” he said dryly.
“Impressive. Your hearing’s gotten better. That could come in handy.”
“I had the same sights and smells for years but if I listened hard enough sometimes I could hear the guards changing shifts, or the generators humming. It wasn’t much, but it helped.”
Suddenly flushed with embarrassment, Erik put his own sunglasses on and slid into the driver’s seat. For a man who’d struggled to speak twenty words a day for months he’d become practically garrulous overnight. Raven asked more questions than she answered—he couldn’t decide whether she was trying to help by drawing him out or waiting for him to betray new weaknesses—and more often than not his brusque responses went off the rails into tangents that followed no logical train of thought. Half the time he couldn’t even remember what he’d said. The sensory input even along the rural highways up the East Coast was nearly overwhelming, a heady combination of farm smells and bright midsummer colors and periodic towns or dairy farms that brushed reassuringly against his metallokinesis. He was distracted easily and often, and only saved from panic attacks by the comforting anchor of the black convertible they’d stolen in Florida and the near-total absence of any human contact besides Raven. It was an uneasy equilibrium, but it had gotten them this far.
This far was a sleepy college town somewhere in Virginia. It was evening going on night, the highway that would allow them to avoid Washington, DC was narrow and winding, and trading off turns at the wheel meant that they hadn’t stopped for anything but gas and food since leaving Florida. Erik was exhausted and Raven had nodded off in the passenger seat several times that afternoon.
“I saw a motel on the edge of town,” he said as he pulled out of the parking lot. “If we press on now we’ll have to keep going until Baltimore. It’s too risky to stop anywhere closer to Washington.”
“Motel,” Raven agreed, taking a long sip of the most heavily caffeinated soda the gas station had offered. “Even you can’t stop a car wreck if you’re asleep at the wheel. Hurry up, Gunsmoke starts in a few minutes.”
They were checked in by the opening credits as newlyweds Frank and Ava Johnson, sliding back into old patterns from the days when the Brotherhood’s victory had seemed not only attainable but even something close to fun. Raven liked naming their aliases after famous Hollywood couples, never using the same one twice, while Erik insisted on forgettable surnames and tried not to roll his eyes while she did a flawless impression of a ditzy bride, chatting up a storm with the poor sod behind the desk. Like always, Erik took the side of the bed nearest the door, Raven checked the bathroom for alternate exits, and they unpacked the bare minimum necessary for the night, toothbrushes and pajamas, weapons to keep under their pillows. Erik tried not to remember how Charles used to unpack his suitcase entirely, folding his innumerable ugly sweaters into cheap motel dressers like they were staying forever instead of a single night. Erik had told him that it was strategically idiotic, but Charles never had learned how to listen.
“Come eat your turkey club before I do,” Raven said, lounging on the bed in her natural form, eyes glued to the TV like it had her full attention.
“Later. I’m going to take a shower,” Erik said.
He didn’t miss the way Raven’s golden eyes cut to him as he crossed the room, surprise and suspicion in them before she set her face in a placid mask. She was good but Erik was better, and he knew that she had at least half her attention on him at all times, waiting for him to—what? Snap? Attack? Run? He had had enough of people watching him, analyzing his movements; it felt like an itch under his skin, a fly buzzing by his ear, slowly driving him insane.
“Don’t be too long—I want hot water too,” Raven said.
Erik turned around, fighting down a spike of anger. “At some point you’re going to have to let me out of your sight, Mystique. You may as well learn that now, or your paranoia will make you useless tomorrow.”
Raven visibly vacillated between denial that she was any such thing and amusement that he of all people was cautioning against paranoia before she simply sighed. “I’m just trying to help, Erik.”
“Don’t try so hard,” Erik said shortly, before he closed the bathroom door firmly and fused the lock shut with his powers.
He could have sworn he only closed his eyes for a second, but when he opened them again he was in the shower, and had been for long enough that his chest and stomach were bright red from the scalding water. There was shampoo on his hands and in his hair and an oddly-syncopated gasping sound echoing off the cheap tiled walls that he eventually recognized as his own breathing. Everything was white, the shower, the peeling wallpaper, the cabinetry and sink and toilet, and there were no windows, and for a horrible, eternal second he was back there and everything since his breakout was a prolonged hallucination, a desperate attempt by his splintering psyche to save itself. The Brotherhood, Mystique, Charles—they had all left him and he was going to die here, alone, separated from his people, the way it should have been so long ago, he was never supposed to live past Mama, past Schmidt, past Charles—
His knees hit the floor and the sink imploded at the same time. There was a loud thumping noise in his ears, something pounding like a drum: his heart, Raven at the bathroom door, both. An ominous combination of groans and pops came from the pipes as Erik scrambled for control, head bowed, rocking back and forth to a rhythm that came from nowhere.
As always, it was pain that finally grounded him—this time the sharp sting of shampoo as the soapy water ran into his eyes. As pain went it was piercing and yet utterly mundane, almost calming. He lifted his head into the cooling water and let it wash away, imagining his panic and hallucinations washing away too, and then he forced himself to stand up, step around the puddle from the now-overflowing sink, and open the bathroom door.
Raven stood there, wild-eyed and furious, utterly unimpressed by his nakedness.
“I used all the hot water,” he said. “Sorry.”
“You fucking asshole,” she shouted, taking in the ruined bathroom. Then, a beat later: “Oh my God, have you been crying?”
Erik rolled his eyes, wincing only a little at the lingering pain; his eyeballs felt tender. “Shampoo, Mystique. Try not to overreact.”
“You’re telling me not to overreact?” Her eyebrows shot towards her hairline, he thought. It was sometimes difficult to tell, with the blue skin.
“I’ll fix it,” he said. “May I get dressed first?”
“Please do. Are you planning on joining a nudist colony or something? Because otherwise this, for the second time—” She gestured vaguely in his direction “is a little weird. Unless it’s a hint which is particularly unsubtle, even for you—”
“It’s not a hint,” Erik interrupted hurriedly, and hoped his movement toward his suitcase and pajamas came off as a dignified stroll and not a desperate scurry. His physical intimacy with Raven was so far in the past and his current emotional intimacy with her so complicated that the handful of times they’d fallen into bed together in the year before his arrest seemed almost ridiculous. He still appreciated her aesthetically, in that vague way he appreciated great works of art or anyone beautiful and dangerous, but they both knew that their short-lived relationship had been more about Charles than either one of them. Missing him desperately—though not in the same fashion—and horribly lonely, they’d slept together because each reminded the other of him, because their mutual grief transmuted into rage and the line between violence and sex was thin, because they could fuck each other or fuck over the whole world. It had been rough and unhappy and when Raven had “left him” for Azazel Erik had almost felt glad.
“Good,” Raven said, so clearly relieved that Erik contemplated being offended. “I’d hate to have to turn you down a second time. So what is it?”
“It’s complicated,” Erik said slowly, pulling on a t-shirt and sweatpants. “For ten years I wore a prison uniform. They only took it off to experiment on me. There were…invasive tests, drugs that numbed my legs or felt like fire, new scars so I could never forget. Sometimes for no other reason than to humiliate me. My body hasn’t felt like my own in a long time. Seeing it now, feeling it, knowing it’s under my control…it makes me stronger. Real.”
Raven nodded, her expression softening as she understood. “But you don’t like being touched, do you?”
Erik shook his head. He’d admitted too much already, given away a crucial weakness, and couldn’t decide if the nausea that churned in his gut was due to that or the memories of those experiments that drifted up, hazy with drugs and pain and despair.
“For the same reason,” Raven said, not a question. “You want to be in control of it. It wasn’t your choice before, but it is now.”
“This conversation is over, Mystique.”
“This mission isn’t, Erik.”
Ten years ago the command would have worked; Raven would have rolled her eyes or flounced away, something that reminded him that while she had strength and potential, she was also young and spoiled, thanks to Charles’s influence. But she would have listened. She had questioned him but never disobeyed him, respected the hierarchy of the Brotherhood, understood the importance of a united front before people who would gleefully capitalize on any sign of weakness—the humans, the X-Men, Emma Frost, it made no difference. That diffident girl had vanished, replaced by an impatient vigilante who had learned how to trust herself and forgotten how to trust anyone else. Erik understood; so had he. But Raven’s ten years of freedom had made her stronger, and Erik’s ten years of captivity had made him…unrecognizable, he thought at his lowest moments.
“Look,” Raven said more gently. “I understand that you’re experiencing…side-effects. But we have to have each other’s backs for this. Truce, limited time offer, okay? I don’t care if you trust me completely, I don’t care if you like me at all, I just need to know that you won’t get in my way tomorrow. Cause a diversion, sure. But let me handle Trask, let me find out where Charles is, and let’s get out of Allenwood quietly before we tip off the bastards that have him.”
“And what about them?”
“Them, you can have. I’ll even stop Hank from stopping you. But Trask is mine.” She took a step closer, almost within arm’s reach, careful and calculated. “Erik, we don’t have the time to circle each other warily while we learn how to work together again. I’m rescuing my brother, and you’re with me or against me. It’s that simple.”
Erik’s head spun. Still reeling from his panic attack in the shower, flayed open emotionally by the intimacy of the conversation, overwhelmed by the world-shattering (perhaps literally, if they failed) significance of the mission to save Charles, he wanted nothing more than to shrink away, disappear into darkness and safety. But under that, rising like a warm ocean current into the most frigid parts of his soul, there was his oldest friend, rage, and Raven’s promise: Them, you can have. The possibilities churned in his mind: all his fantasies of revenge, condoned, aided by his old second-in-command. His powers (almost) entirely under his control again. And a cause he could believe in—Charles must be safe—that would prepare him for the jarring but necessary return to the cause—all of us must be safe. Like the past ten years had never happened. He would show restraint tomorrow, to unleash twice the destruction on the day after.
“I’m with you,” he said.
“Good,” Raven said. Then, with a grin that banished the stifling solemnity in the air, “But you’re still fixing the bathroom like, now. And don’t try to bullshit me about cold water, I know you can heat the pipes any time you want to.”
“Yes, Mrs. Johnson.”
Erik grabbed a stack of towels from the closet to wipe up the small lake that had formed courtesy of the broken sink. Before he got to work, he rested his hand on Raven’s shoulder; lightly, and only for an instant, but it was a start.