Erik
“You got all the way up here with no collateral damage or unnecessary human fatalities? I’m so proud,” Hank said, like an asshole.
“Don’t tempt me, Beast. We’re not there yet,” Erik growled from the back seat. When they had ditched the convertible for a less conspicuous old VW Bug, he had let Raven take the wheel while he stretched out full-length in the back, which in a car this size meant that he was slouched with his neck and shoulders against one door while his legs dangled out the open window of the other. It was easier to pretend he was asleep than to participate in Hank and Raven’s friendly—if slightly awkward—chatter.
“I wouldn’t say no collateral damage. You really did a number on that bathroom,” Raven said, also like an asshole. She was high-spirited and chipper, in her natural form in broad daylight and driving with a reckless confidence that Erik admired even as her swerving inspired the occasional bout of nausea. This wasn’t the quiet, serious pre-mission Mystique Erik remembered; this was the woman he’d seen glimpses of in Paris, self-assured and not only ready for a fight but eager for it. The anxiety for Charles, the vulnerability she’d shown in motel rooms with bad TV reception and cheap scratchy blankets—all so completely absent that Erik wondered if he’d imagined them. Seen what he wanted to see, signs that there was something still there of the Mystique he’d known. As if that would prove the continued existence of the old Magneto, too.
The old Mystique certainly wouldn’t have greeted Hank with a long embrace and reassuring smile before jerking her head back at Erik and smirking “You boys wanna hug it out before we hit the road?”, then dissolved into giggles at their expressions of mutual horror.
“Let’s…not do that,” Hank had said, with admirable restraint. Raven’s peals of laughter had followed Erik his entire impatient stomp to their new vehicle.
When Raven and Hank slipped into conversation about who had been left in charge at the mansion (Alex) and the new student that had just arrived (Ororo) and what had happened to Logan (he had taken off in the middle of the night, no note), Erik tuned them out and tried to enter the meditative state that had passed so many of the hours in prison. No surprise, that it was more difficult with so much sensory input, but this was the last moment of anything like peace or privacy that he would get for the foreseeable future. Drifting down into deep, smooth thoughts, he sought out that place between the serenity that protected his sanity and the rage that made him strong. He needed to center himself, rein in his emotions, tighten his grasp on his powers, and above all not think about what might have happened to Charles in the past thirty-six hours. If he allowed any one of the worst-case scenarios he could so easily imagine in bright Technicolor and surround sound to take root in his mind, he would wake up in the rubble of Allenwood with Trask impaled on a rebar in front of him and Raven very, very pissed off.
The drive from Philadelphia to the United States Penitentiary, Allenwood seemed to take no time at all, to Erik’s slightly confused senses. He opened his eyes as Raven pulled off the highway and drove half a mile down a disused maintenance road, just in time to see Hank’s skin turn blue and furry in an instant.
“Great timing,” Raven said. “I was starting to worry.”
“I timed my last serum dose exactly,” Hank said. “The idea of spending the whole trip hiding in the trunk was not appealing.”
Erik looked at Hank’s hands and nails, which could now more accurately be described as paws and claws, and then at the briefcase full of delicate equipment which Hank had told them would allow him to hack into the facility’s security feed, cause strategic power outages, and trigger or silence alarms as needed.
“Can you operate those with…those?” he said doubtfully.
Hank smiled with all his teeth. “No. But you can.”
That took a moment to sink in, and then Erik grinned back, just as feral and unamused. “That’s not how this is going to play out. I’m not going to sit in the bushes with you and twiddle my thumbs while Mystique walks into danger alone.”
“You won’t be twiddling your thumbs. You’ll be using them, which is more than I can do right now. First I’ll show you how to revert the live security feed to old footage. Then you’ll track Raven using the metal in these wireless headsets I built and override the power to open the doors she needs as she needs them. I’ve got the facility’s blueprints right here.”
“I don’t need fancy gadgets to open metal doors, Beast,” Erik pointed out through gritted teeth.
“You do if this is going to look like a series of routine glitches and not suspicious enough to alert the whole complex. How’s your fine control these days?”
Any hint of condescension or pity in his tone and Erik would have demonstrated first-hand with the metal in Hank’s seatbelt. But this was Hank, whose naiveté outweighed even Charles’s and whose empathy trumped his sense of self-preservation, and his sincerity was palpable even with his expression suddenly obscured by tufts of blue fur. He wasn’t insinuating anything or looking for an admission of weakness; he was simply a scientist confirming variables in a hypothesis. Erik forced himself to consider the plan with the same objectivity.
“Better than it was. I could do it without raising any alarms,” he said. His mind replayed the image of the balcony railing soaring across the motel parking lot, the hour he had spent coaxing the broken sink back into working order. Then, grudgingly, “But it would take time. More time than we have.”
The truth, grating as it was reassuring, was that Hank had always loved Charles more than he disliked Erik, and any plan Hank came up with would be designed with Charles’s rescue above all other priorities. If he had thought Erik’s powers would expedite the mission, he would have used them. The decision not to was strategic, not personal.
Erik never had had much luck separating those, himself.
“Shifts are changing in an hour,” Raven said, saving him the embarrassment of admitting Hank was right. “New personnel should start arriving soon—we need to get back to the main road so I can play damsel in distress.”
It hadn’t really registered before now how much silent waiting was involved in this plan. First they spent a good twenty minutes crouched below the embankment near the highway while Raven, wearing her blondest curls and only slightly more clothing than she did in her natural form, assessed every car that came around the bend in the road half a mile away. Four cars passed before she said “that’s the one” and scrambled up the hill just in time to flag down a dark van with tinted windows. Feigning a sprained ankle, she hobbled up to the driver’s side window and knocked him out with one punch.
They put the body in the trunk, Erik and Hank in the back seat, and Raven in the driver’s seat wearing the face of the man whose ID badge had labeled him a midlevel guard.
“I was hoping for a warden,” Raven groused. “Someone people would be too afraid to question.”
“You look pretty mean,” Hank offered.
“That’s so sweet, Hank,” she said, and smiled with the tobacco-stained teeth of a man with a thirty-year chew habit. Hank shuddered and didn’t say anything else, although Erik caught him muttering something about checking for cancer under his breath.
For the final approach, Erik and Hank hunched on the floor out of sight, hardly daring to breathe, while Raven flashed her security badge and spent a small eternity exchanging pleasantries with the guard at the penitentiary gate. Even when they were finally waved into the facility, the tense silence dragged on, broken only by Hank’s whispered instructions as he directed Erik to hand out and activate the wireless earbuds that would allow them to communicate with Raven while she was inside. There was no time to be second-guess, no time to say goodbye; Raven simply parked the car near the maximum security building, winked at them over her shoulder—which came off less reassuring and more alarmingly lecherous, with the face she was wearing—and walked into Allenwood. Erik didn’t even see the door swing closed behind her—Hank was already walking him through the process to switch the security cameras from live to recorded feed, still speaking in a hushed whisper despite it no longer being strictly necessary.
Then another lull. They sat with the blueprint spread out on the seat between them, tracking Raven’s progress and waiting for her hissed commands to open this door, short that circuitry, confirm that it was a left turn at this corridor. There were long stretches of silence. Erik reached out with his metal-sense, searching for the familiar signature of Raven’s earbud, but it was a miniscule, moving speck of metal surrounded by tons of iron and steel; without the blueprints to narrow the search, he would have lost her.
“It’s getting a little hot in here, Erik,” Hank whispered.
Erik blinked, winced at the sudden sting as a drop of sweat fell into his eye. “What?”
“Unless you chill out, literally, you’re going to melt the car.”
The smell of heated leather filled the van, and Erik suddenly registered the unnatural warmth emanating from the steering wheel, door handles, seatbelts. He must have sunk his powers into the car’s metal components to ground himself while he flung out the rest of his focus to track Raven. Alarmed, he peered out the window; at least the exterior didn’t have structural damage.
“Pull back,” Hank said. “Raven knows what she’s doing.”
“None of us know what we’re doing,” Erik snapped, even as he closed his eyes and took deep breaths. “We have no idea what we’re walking into.”
“Would it make a difference if we did?”
Erik sighed, leaning back against the cooling leather as the temperature in the car fell several degrees. With forced inaction came the renewed awareness of enclosed space, of Hank not only sitting close but watching him closely. And somewhere Charles was—Charles was—
“It would make no difference at all,” he said, and that admission cost him nothing.
Raven’s voice came over their earbuds, flatter and steelier than before: “One more, Erik.” He pushed the right buttons unthinkingly, distracted by a rush of unease at her tone. Since entering the prison she had taken down three guards and locked their bodies in empty rooms, with no indication that she’d even broken a sweat; had she been injured after all? Had she been bleeding this whole time?
“Wait!” Hank said, too late.
Raven’s savage grin was audible, and abruptly Erik realized the significance of “one more” door. She had reached Trask; was probably looking at him even as she drawled, “Hang tight, you two. I’ll be right back.”
The next thing they heard was an electronic screech as her earbud hit the ground.
And then nothing.
Normally such consternation on Hank’s exaggerated facial features would be comical, but Erik was sure his own practiced poker face had deserted him just as completely. Raven was gone. Anything could be happening to her while he just sat here, useless, dumbfounded. His heartbeat skyrocketed and he was half a second from launching himself out of the car and storming the facility himself when Hank hissed something and grabbed his arm to hold him back, squeezing tight enough to bruise, and suddenly the fingers wrapped around his wrist weren’t blue and furry but a fluctuating color palette of every skin tone belonging to every guard that had ever held him back or down or still so they could hurt him. Lashing out only made it worse but he couldn’t not fight, it was all he knew how to do—fight and destroy—and then someone had shoved his head between his knees and was telling him to breathe, rubbing his back gently. It didn’t hurt but the touch was intolerable, and Erik gave a distinctly feline full-body flinch, pressed his back against the door.
“Get off me,” he snapped, looking anywhere but at Hank, still breathing hard. “Don’t touch me.”
Hank raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I won’t—just stay put and don’t freak out, okay?”
“We lost contact with Raven and you want me to stay put?”
“Raven cut off contact with us because she didn’t want us listening in on Trask’s interrogation. If she was in trouble she would have said so. She’s stubborn, not stupid.”
“And what if she’s in trouble now, when she can’t say so?”
“Then I’d be worried about them, not her! Just give her a little time. Five minutes, that’s all.”
Hank sounded more confident than he looked, but he held his ground. For a long moment they simply glared at each other, and Erik felt a vicious rush of satisfaction when Hank broke eye contact first. It was easier to regain control of himself after that, with the comforting knowledge that no matter how much else had changed, at least he could still intimidate Hank.
Though perhaps not as effectively as he’d thought, considering that Hank dropped that argument only to segue to a worse one:
“Thank you for helping us, Erik,” he ventured quietly. “I wasn’t sure you would. I mean, I was pretty sure…but not entirely sure, you know.”
Like masks to cover how desperately he didn’t want to have this conversation, Erik put on his best contemptuous smirk, half-lidded eyes and lips pressed thin, and pitched his voice at subzero temperatures. “Well, I had such fun on our last adventure, how could I say no?”
“Really easily, actually,” Hank said dryly. “You and Charles have a history of parting on not the best of terms.”
Just leave it, Beast, Erik wanted to beg, at the same time that he wanted to sink his powers into the tons of metal that pulsed comfortingly around him and superheat it with all the strength of his grief and anger. He could probably melt the entire facility to the ground. But either response would reveal his weakness to Hank and he wouldn’t allow that to happen; Hank who had already seen Charles’s weakness, who knew what a broken man looked like and would see right through Erik’s charade, given half the chance. Erik refused him that right, as he resented that Charles had allowed it, had allowed anyone but Erik to see him at his most vulnerable. It hardly mattered that Erik had forfeited the privilege of his own free will, leaving the telepath with no one else to turn to. Charles was the only one Erik would allow to see him at his best and worst; it seemed ludicrous that the reverse wouldn’t also be true.
It had to be ludicrous, or it would be unbearable.
“I…regret that history,” Erik made himself say calmly. “I don’t regret doing what I believed was necessary to defend our people, but I regret that I didn’t protect him. In Cuba, in Washington, and now that he—”
He broke off, unable to phrase the present in words that wouldn’t break him.
“It doesn’t change a thing, but I’m here now,” he said instead. “And I will do anything to see him safe again. You should know that.”
There must have been something not quite sane in his expression, because Hank suddenly shifted uncomfortably, seemed about to disagree, and then mumbled, “That’s not a very good apology.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Hank raised a bushy eyebrow. “A threat?”
“An explanation,” Erik said. “For anything that might happen later.”
Hank was halfway from suspicious to truly alarmed when a beefy fist began pounding on the driver’s side door. The man who peered in the tinted windows wore a guard’s uniform and an air of poorly-concealed anticipation, and Erik bared his teeth and reached out to garrote him with the metal from his ID badge before he could call for backup. Then the stranger’s brown eyes glowed gold, and Hank scrambled to unlock the car door before Erik could redirect his powers to do it himself.
“Did you miss me?” Raven said, breathless, grinning, and blood-spattered. Without waiting for an answer, she started the van and peeled out of the lot, tires shrieking. “Buckle up, we’ve got a long drive. Trask spilled everything.”