Charles and Erik
The body in the bed bore little resemblance to the photo that sat on a bedside table in Westchester of a flushed, grinning, pleasantly drunk Charles Xavier with his arm wrapped around his beaming sister at his graduation party. The floppy brown hair, then fashionably overlong, was now congealed with oil and blood, missing clumps where EEG electrodes had been glued to his scalp and yanked off again. There were ECT burns at his temples and track marks up and down his arms and every blue vein pulsed visibly too close to the surface of paper-thin, paper-white skin. Freckled skin, English-pale, was colored with livid purple and green bruises. Red lips that had curved up flirtatiously were pinched a pale pink from dehydration, and the laugh lines at the corner of his mouth and eyes were etched deep with pain. The comfortable extra weight of a professional academic had vanished, revealing pronounced collarbones, delicate wrists, cheekbones that could cut glass, deep bags beneath closed eyes.
Sometimes, when those eyes fluttered, there was a flash of bright blue that harkened back to the boy in the photo. Other times a few mumbled words slipped out in that same cultured accent. The medical file hanging at the foot of the hospital bed said Xavier, Charles; the doctors called him that too when they came in at all hours of the day and night, interrupting a drifting state that was neither asleep nor awake. Perhaps he was Xavier, Charles. It seemed as good a name to answer to as any other.
Besides, there was something about these doctors that he didn’t like. They were professional, if not quite friendly, but he didn’t think everything they injected him with was medicine and their odd hats grated on his nerves and sometimes they spoke words he knew were English but still couldn’t understand. Or they would say odd things like, “The brass is hopping mad at the General for breaking their new toy” or “The footage from the incident is changing minds all the way up the ladder” or “Betcha the doc’s back from Allenwood within the month.”
Intuition told him that the less of his weakness and disorientation he revealed to them the better, so he held back all his slurred questions about where he was and what had happened, did his best to be minimally cooperative. Bad things happened when he didn’t cooperate at all, even if he couldn’t quite remember what they were.
Couldn’t quite remember much of anything, really. Scattered sensations, sometimes, like black and white polaroids of memory. His cheek on a cold floor. Voices shouting, excited, worried. Cold air as someone ripped his shirt open; an electric humming, like a machine charging up; a bomb detonating inside his chest. An eternity or a minute later he was sitting fully-clothed in a shower stall while warm water soaked him to the bone and swirled pink down the drain. The humming and the bomb came back, before that or after it or maybe both.
Then he’d woken up in this room. Barely any details registered at first: it took several awakenings before he could stay conscious for more than a few seconds. Even when he could, there wasn’t much to see. It was a sterile white hospital room, impossible to place or differentiate from any other hospital room in the country. He was wearing soft cottons pajamas, hooked up to four different monitors and three IVs. His hands were cuffed to the safety railings that had been lifted and he couldn’t feel his legs at all—but none of that felt unfamiliar, which meant he must be safe or at least safe enough, and it was so very easy to drift away again instead.
“When will they resume the tests?”
The voice floated in from the hallway, young and friendly, probably a nurse.
For some reason Charles flinched, and one of the monitors let out an unhappy series of beeps. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe through his nose, to keep listening.
“As soon as he can communicate like someone who hasn’t had their brain put through a Cuisinart and use his telepathy without flatlining,” another voice answered.
“You think that’s gonna be any time soon?” the first said, lower, like this was some kind of secret. Charles strained to hear better, wondering why this felt so important.
“I don’t know.” The second voice sounded grim. “These freaks are basically human, and humans have limits. They may have pushed this one too far with all those drugs. Then again, he held up for a good long time. Maybe he’ll bounce back.”
“And what about his…” The voice drifted off, implying a question.
“I’ll just say this. I wouldn’t want to be around that son of a bitch without a helmet right now. Wouldn’t be safe for me or for him.”
They moved down the hallway, voices fading with distance, and Charles realized that at some point all his muscles had seized up with no command from his brain, like a mouse froze when it sensed a hawk nearby. It hurt: there was still unexplained damage to his ribs, soreness in his abdominals like he had spent hours vomiting, a kind of post-flu lethargy that had seeped into his muscles, bones, and deeper still, somewhere beyond the physical. Muscle group by muscle group he forced himself to relax. Absently he twisted his wrists in their padded handcuffs; the repetitive motion was soothing.
A tiny, curious corner of his mind turned those overheard words over, examining them for meaning that had escaped him in the moment. Tests, telepathy, drugs, limits—there was something there, something he needed to know or had known. He wondered if it had anything to do with the strange force he could feel coiled his head, motionless but humming with kinetic energy. It felt somehow unnatural to have it confined to his skull—like it was some kind of living creature, meant to be out in the world—but the idea of wakening it was so terrible that his mind shied away from it. Whatever it was, he couldn’t control it; better to leave it slumbering, so it couldn’t hurt him or anyone else.
He was building high mental walls around it when there were fast steps in the hallway, and before he even had time to tense up again one of his nurses had rushed into the room. Charles let out an involuntary squeak of distress at the sudden movement, then another when it hit him—she wasn’t wearing a helmet.
And she was staring at him like he was real, like he was important, like she cared. She hadn’t ever looked at him like that. None of them had. Charles shrank back, uncertain.
“Charles?” she said. She sounded different, wrong…sad?
“Yes.” He tried to sound more sure of the fact that he was. “Yes, I’m Charles.”
“Shit, Charles, what did these bastards do to you?”
Charles giggled—he’d never heard any of the doctors or nurses curse, or get upset, or be anything but polite and brusque. The nurse didn’t seem to get the joke; in fact, she looked even more worried.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re going to be okay, Charles, I promise. You hear me? We’re here now.”
She seemed genuinely upset so he nodded to placate her, but instead of leaving him alone she moved quickly to his bedside. As she crossed the room, her eyes flickered from green to gold, her hair grew shorter and redder, and her skin rippled from smooth bronze to blue scales with a rushing sound like an entire flock of birds taking flight. She reached for one of his cuffed hands with that same sad smile and it took him an extra few seconds to flinch away, enraptured by the inexplicable sight of the most familiar stranger he’d ever seen.
“Oh,” he said, breathless and suddenly close to tears for no reason he could name.
“I know,” the blue girl agreed, her gold eyes shining. “I know, Charles. I missed you too. We’ll deal with the rest of it later. Now it’s time to go.”
As if on cue, a series of crashes and bangs echoed down the hall, broken glass and screeching metal reverberating off the walls in a cacophonous wave of sound that swept over and burst their bubble of calm. Charles whimpered and twisted his wrists helplessly, trying to get away with nowhere to go, and the blue girl stroked his hair and shushed him like he was a fussy child. Then noise from the hall cut off abruptly, and instead agonized screams ripped through the air for a moment before they were choked off with ominous suddenness.
“It’s okay,” the blue girl said reassuringly. “He’s here to help. No one’s going to stop us taking you away from here.”
“Make it stop, please make it stop,” Charles begged.
“It’s over, it’s over,” she promised. Then, in an angry shout: “Erik! In here, now!”
And an avenging angel appeared in the doorway.
He was beautiful in the graceful, untamed way predators were beautiful and in the refined, noble way Greek gods were beautiful. He radiated power and menace and protective rage and all of it, somehow, was directed straight at Charles. The stranger’s chest heaved as if he’d just climbed a mountain, his ginger hair shining under the fluorescent lights and his pale gray eyes fixed on Charles like nothing else in the world existed. Charles stared up at him through tears—of fear, confusion, exhaustion, he didn’t know—and didn’t understand how someone could simultaneously inspire a shock of fear and a warmth that spread through him like a warm blanket draped around his shoulders. It felt like safety. The handcuffs rattled against the railing as he pulled at them, wanting desperately to reach out and draw the man closer. Why didn’t matter; he only knew that he needed to do it like he needed to breathe.
The man gestured once and the cuffs fell away. Charles jumped, shocked, and then did just as he’d meant to: he reached out and waited.
The man crossed the room in three massive, ground-eating strides and took Charles’s hand, using the other to carefully trace the burns on his temples, the bruise-purple bags under his eyes, brushing away his tears with a gentle thumb. A grimace crossed his face, like his heart was causing him physical pain, but it vanished so quickly Charles wondered if he hadn’t imagined it.
“Oh,” he gasped again.
“I don’t think he remembers us, Erik,” the blue girl said, voice quavering despite an obvious attempt to sound calm and collected.
The man blinked, which Charles somehow knew telegraphed a level of surprise that would have most men leaping out of their seats. “Do you know who I am, Charles?”
“I’m not sure,” Charles said truthfully. He had lied to doctors and nurses without a second thought, but the idea of lying now seemed absurd.
All the metal in the room shivered for a moment, but the reassuring expression on the other man’s face never wavered. “I’m Erik, and this is Raven. We’re friends. We’ve come to take you home.”
“You’re not wearing helmets.” That seemed important, especially if they were leaving the hospital. They might not have helmets, in the outside world.
“No, Charles,” Erik said. “We trust you.”
“I’m not sure you should,” Charles said doubtfully. “Everyone wears them.”
Erik and Raven exchanged alarmed glances heavy with a significance Charles didn’t understand.
“When was the last time you saw someone who didn’t?” Erik asked.
Charles frowned, though even now, with an inexplicable rush of cold anxiety down his spine, he couldn’t bring himself to look away from Erik’s face. His eyes weren’t really gray at all—they were green, maybe, or blue when he tilted his head a certain way. There was a scar above his lip that Charles wanted to trace with his index finger, so he did, but he was hardly surprised when Erik pulled his hand away gently, silently telling him to focus. Charles chewed his lower lip and tried, but his mind skittered away every time he reached further back than the white of this room. The water that had turned pink after touching his clothes, that meant something. Had something else washed away too, something invisible? He remembered a foreign stickiness, something dark and greasy and unpleasant that had clung to his skin or maybe his thoughts, but he hadn’t seen anyone. He wasn’t entirely sure he could trust his eyesight anyway—he saw things that weren’t there, visual echoes of memories that weren’t his, but if Erik was asking it must be important—
“Come back, Charles. We’ll talk about it later. I need you to calm down and hold still now.” Erik was holding his face firmly in both hands, forcing eye contact that shouldn’t have been as soothing as it was, and as Charles’s involuntary shivers subsided the needles in his IVs slid free more smoothly than they’d gone in; he barely felt it.
“Hank says we don’t have a lot of time,” Raven said quietly.
Erik nodded. “Time to go, then. Ready, Charles?”
“No,” Charles said, but he managed a small smile to let Erik know he was joking. Erik smiled back, though his was sadder, and lifted Charles out of the hospital bed like he weighed nothing. Charles couldn’t feel the arm under his knees but the long fingers splayed against his back felt comforting. It never occurred to him to protest the fact that he was being kidnapped.
Raven leading the way, they moved through the facility quickly. Charles wanted to look around, curious at the unfamiliar surroundings, but even more than that he wanted not to see evidence of the destructive swath Erik had cut through the place in what looked like single-minded determination to do as much damage as possible. Doors had been yanked off their hinges and crumpled like tin foil; the overhead fluorescent lights swung from a handful of broken wires; shards of glass crunched underfoot; pieces of desks and chairs and lab equipment and tables and file cabinets were strewn across every hallway. Worse than that, though, were the bodies with their white coats stained red and limbs twisted grotesquely, slumped like discarded marionettes. And so much blood—more blood than the human body could hold, surely, still spreading in lakes across the linoleum. The stench of it filled the air. Charles gagged and pressed his face into Erik’s neck instead, breathing in the smell of sweat and soap and leather. It was too hard to reconcile the man who had wreaked such havoc with the man who held him so gently, so he simply didn’t try. Charles was used to things not making sense.
“I had to,” Erik said softly. “They took you, Charles. They had to know I couldn’t allow that.”
Charles shook his head, though in his current position it was more like a nuzzle. “Why?”
“You know why. You just don’t remember right now.”
“Okay,” Charles sighed, unconcerned.
Then they were stepping into the sunlight and there was a screech of rubber on pavement and a third voice harsh with anxiety. Raven answered, but it was so much nicer to focus on the soft surface Erik laid him down on than the unhappy voices talking over each other above him. Doors slammed and they lurched into motion again.
Charles pulled his unfeeling legs towards his chest and curled his upper body in on itself, his head resting on Erik’s thigh and one hand twisted in the material of his pant leg. His vision blurred slightly so he closed his eyes, trying to ignore the intermittent shivers that still shook him at unpredictable intervals. That thing in his mind quivered too, pulsing against the barriers he’d erected around it. So much excitement. Perhaps if he drifted just a little…someone would wake him, if anything important happened. Erik hadn’t relaxed at all: the muscles under Charles’s head were rigid with tension, even if the fingers that carded through his tangled hair were impossibly gentle and Erik’s occasional, softly-accented whispers too soft for anyone but Charles to hear.
“Rest, we’re taking you somewhere safe…it would be you, you were always the best of us…it’s over now, none of them will ever touch you again…you’re in there somewhere, schatz, I know you are…”
“I hope you're real. Please don't be a dream,” Charles slurred, hovering on the edge of consciousness. If Erik said anything in response, he didn’t hear it.