Erik and Charles
As the sun set, Erik, Raven, and Hank stood on a hill somewhere near the Canadian border in the northeast corner of New York State. Anyone looking out a south-facing window from the facility below would have spotted them, but when Hank had pointed out their exposed position Erik had growled, “The time for subtlety is over—let them see” which had made Raven smile approvingly and Hank heave an aggrieved sigh. Neither disagreed, though.
For the first time in several long minutes Erik opened his eyes and let the hand that been stretched towards the facility fall to his side. With the other he massaged his forehead, blinking several times as his metal-sense withdrew to his immediate surroundings and traditional vision reasserted dominance over his perception.
“It’s all concrete above-ground,” he said, disgusted. “Minimal metal in the struts and beams, wood any place they could use it. They’ve converted and expanded a nuclear fallout shelter underneath. The floors belowground are steel and go down at least ten levels, but I can’t touch them without causing structural damage to the first floor.”
“So we can’t just lift the roof off the place, is what you’re saying,” Raven translated.
Erik shook his head grimly. “I’m afraid not.”
“All right, we’ll go in the old-fashioned way.” Raven, busy running possible scenarios in her head, didn’t look nearly as put out as Erik felt, but then she was nothing if not adaptable. “If he’s on the first floor you’ve got less ammunition but we’ll find him fast, and if he’s on one of the lower levels the whole place is your playground.”
Erik raised an eyebrow and Hank looked up, both a little surprised by how casual she sounded. Hank squatted on the ground making last-minute adjustments to several slapdash devices he had cobbled from parts of the ones he’d designed for Allenwood, which he’d explained would allow him to crash the whole facility’s independent electrical grid and its backup generator. With the place thrown into chaos, hopefully Raven and Erik could slip in and find Charles with no one the wiser, or at least get a good head start on any pursuers. After another dose of the serum, he could manipulate the delicate wires and circuits himself; much as he hated being left out, he’d kept his protests half-hearted, knowing that nothing in the world would convince Erik to stay on the sidelines this time.
“You make it sound like a game of whack-a-mole, Raven,” he said, trying and failing not to sound reproachful.
Raven cocked her head with the deliberate nonchalance of a predator toying with prey that had no chance of escape. Hank swallowed loudly, sensing he had waded into dangerous water, but forged ahead anyway. “I just mean, not everyone in there even knows about Charles, probably, this is highly classified stuff, and he wouldn’t want—”
Raven moved so fast her limbs blurred, and when she went still again it was crouched on her toes in front of Hank with her fingers gripping his chin so hard his already-pale skin whitened even further. “I don’t give a damn what he would want. He doesn’t get a vote because he’s been in there with those bastards for weeks and you don’t get to deputize yourself as his proxy. Just because I’m not sitting here wringing my hands helplessly doesn’t mean I’m not taking this seriously. And if you think I’ll show mercy to anyone who’s had a hand in this—well, you might not want to listen in too closely.”
Erik was on the brink of telling her that was enough when she picked up two of the wireless earbuds and stood up, handing one to him and keeping the other for herself. Left behind as she stalked away, he helped Hank to his feet and then squeezed his shoulder. Something in either action must have been enough to convey encouragement and trust, because Hank looked less like a kicked puppy, visibly straightened up, and even attempted a smile.
“Go on then,” he said. “I’ll give you ten minutes to get in position and then cut the power. Be ready to move, fast.”
Erik nodded. “We’ll see you soon. All three of us.”
He caught up with Raven halfway down the hill, waited for her to speak first. After a hundred more feet she flashed him a sharp grin and something that resembled a shrug. “You think teamwork is like riding a bicycle? Because I am way out of practice.”
“Not in the slightest,” Erik said.
“You were supposed to be the short fuse, not me.”
“Don’t kid yourself, I still am,” Erik said, and Raven laughed. When she bumped his shoulder companionably he didn’t flinch at all, but only because the sensation didn’t register: he’d reached out with his metal-sense again, honing in on trace amounts of iron and steel in the building’s skeleton that he had missed at a distance. And something else, not solid metal but lots of ferrous components in an extremely concentrated area, possibly a single room—the bank of elevators to the lower levels had overshadowed it on his first sweep, but from this new angle it was unmistakable. Whatever else was underground, there was a laboratory on the first floor.
“This way,” Erik said, redirecting their approach. “There’s a lab in the southwest quadrant. If he’s not there he’s probably close by.”
They had only just rounded the perimeter to the closest entrance when a strange noise—a combination of a buzz and a hiss, like a can of soda being opened but amplified—echoed from inside the building, and every light in the handful of visible windows went dark. There was no mistaking Hank’s work. Raven looked at him for orders and Erik was struck by the absurd thought that he ought to say something inspiring, a dramatic monologue that involved buzzwords like “brotherhood,” “oppressors,” “justice,” and “freedom.” He always had made his best speeches on the spur of the moment. Yet somehow he knew that he would choke on the words this time, that justice was a farce and freedom was a joke and the benefit of mutantkind had nothing to do with why he was here. Words were futile, more futile than he had ever realized; action was the only speech that mattered. So, silent, he lifted a perfectly steady hand and the chain-link fence around the facility tore itself open, the nearest door flying off its hinges as they approached.
The halls were empty and drenched in shadows. Erik preferred it that way: these places were all alike, sanitized and blindingly white and interchangeable, too familiar after ten years of the same. He barricaded the panic-inducing thought of going deep underground again in a corner of his mind to deal with later and led the way unerringly, drawn toward the lab like he’d magnetized himself to it, his blood to the scalpels that had touched Charles’s.
Because he could, because there was a sour taste in his mouth and the heaviness that had weighed him down for days had been replaced by a sensation half in his head and half somewhere near his diaphragm that felt like falling, Erik opened the lab doors by blasting them halfway across the room. He could tell from fifty feet away that there was no one inside—though there were pounding feet and raised voices several hallways over—but Hank would need to know what had been done to Charles, in case he wasn’t capable of telling them himself.
And Erik had his own reasons, too.
“Find him,” he told Raven. “I’ll be right behind you.”
As her footsteps faded away, he walked further into the lab. All his senses were hyper-attuned, straining against the limitations of his body. He could feel machines in an adjoining room, silent now but still warm. There were two chairs in the main room, modified to include specialized restraints and surrounded by medical equipment, and the smell of bleach that hung heavy in the air was strongest around them, so strong his eyes watered with it. Whatever had happened here had required extensive cleanup after the fact. Even so, they’d missed a few spots; he could sense the iron in several drops of dried blood on the floor.
There was a desk and filing cabinets on the far side of the lab. Erik rifled through the drawers and picked the files that on cursory inspection mentioned mutations, telepathy, or Xavier, Charles. Anything that would help Hank piece together what had happened—
There was a sudden gasp from the doorway, and when Erik wheeled around there was a boy in a white lab coat staring at him.
When he took in whatever expression was on Erik’s face the kid tried to bolt, but not fast enough to escape the thin noose that had formerly been the clip of his ID badge. As the boy clawed at the metal around his neck, feet kicking in midair, the crude leash dragged him back and across the room to where Erik waited, ominously serene.
“I’ve come for Charles Xavier,” he said, tightening the metal until the technician stopped babbling nonsense and went still, dangling six inches above the ground. “Do you know what that means?”
The kid shook his head frantically. He was young, younger than Charles had been when they first met, and Erik waited for that knowledge to inspire some flash of compassion, some spark of mercy. Instead there was only a clinical dispassion.
“It means you’re the first, but you won’t be the last. Whatever you did to him, however you tried to break him, Charles Xavier will outlive you all.”
Erik grabbed the files and went back to the doorway, leaving the boy dangling in the middle of the room by the collar around his neck. He forced his breathing to steady. Everything was happening so quickly. Even as part of him knew exactly what to do, from some ingrained muscle memory he would have lost over ten years if he hadn’t spent the twenty before that honing it, there was a part of him that felt small and overwhelmed, that wanted nothing more than to take Charles and run until the two of them were unreachable by the rest of the world. But to do that now would be to leave this lab and the facility that housed it and the people that ran it whole, safe, and unpunished. That he couldn’t allow. Even if justice was a farce, he could give Charles vengeance.
Starting here. Erik let his metal-sense settle into every piece of steel and iron and copper in the lab as he calmed his mind. He imagined the surface of his thoughts placid and smooth, and then he allowed some of the worst moments of his life to float to the surface as poisonous bubbles and burst. Noxious memories of the lab Schmidt had used, dark and dank and filled with rusted knives and saws, not nearly as bright and cheerful as this one. The lab somewhere under the Pentagon where he used to wake up sometimes, confused, not knowing if they’d put the sedative in his food, water, or air this time. And the words he’d read only a moment ago in a file labeled Xavier, Charles: Experiments 1-17 that referred to the best man he’d ever known as “the subject” and included exact dosages and extensive notes on side effects in a precise, clinical hand. “10 mg IV heroin @ 1200 and 1400 hrs.” “Subject febrile, severe lethargy, heightened emotional response.” Every inhumane thing they had done to him, written down proudly, for posterity.
It was easy as breathing, with those memories held foremost in his mind, to tear the lab apart. He reduced every complex machine to individual nuts and bolts, smashed the tables and chairs to pieces against the walls, sent a hail of razor-sharp blades through the rest of the files, set a hurricane of metallic shards spinning around the terrified technician. Then he went in search of Raven.
Halfway down the hall, he clenched his fist tightly. In the lab the metal collar tightened too, and all the objects in the air hit the floor at once.
Even with the chaos of the ongoing power outage, the racket he’d made had drawn attention. He didn’t make it a hundred feet before another white coat attempted to stop and question him, and they came fast after that. He didn’t even bother to pause, or get a good look at any of their faces. Slowing down enough to take them out by hand would have wasted time and the anger that had triggered his metallokinesis had been nowhere near slaked by the lab’s destruction; it was so easy now to turn their own glasses, clipboards, and pens against them, and he’d already forgotten each crumpled body by the time it hit the floor.
“Erik! In here, now!”
He registered Raven’s scream only enough to change course; it took the sight of Charles to cut through the static in his head. For a long moment he stood frozen in the doorway, gasping, staring. There was a series of crashes behind him as his anger drained away in an instant—trying to get it back was like trying to grab spilled water, and what did it matter anyway, when Charles looked so frightened of him?
The last time Charles had looked at him like this had been Cuba, only this was infinitely worse because there had been sharp judgment too, in Cuba, and Erik had deserved it, and now those blue eyes were so—empty. Charles was tearful, afraid, but Erik was willing to bet Charles himself didn’t know why, or why he was pulling at the restraints around his wrists, trying to reach out and shrink away at the same time. He had seen this kind of emptiness in the eyes of traumatized men before, had read enough of Xavier, Charles: Experiments 1-17 to know that there were some chemical cocktails that simply couldn’t be resisted. The damage was clear, and the part of Erik’s mind that had learned how to clinically assess a mark for weaknesses psychological and physical whispered that they might have come too late.
Just as well that made no difference, really, in the end. Even if Charles was a ticking time bomb there was nothing that could stop Erik from shattering the restraints and taking the unsteady hand held out to him. Charles summoned him, he went. It was practically an elemental truth.
“Oh,” Charles said softly, wonderingly, as Erik wiped his tears, caressed skin still red with poorly-healed burns and scars, tucked his tangled hair away from his face. Surely human contact should have triggered him the way it did Erik but he was leaning into it instead, eyes closed, his frightened whimpers fading into steady breaths again. Not wanting to test the limits of that acceptance, Erik kept his touches light and gentle, resisting the possessive urge to wrap his entire body around Charles’s emaciated frame and prove to him that every inch of his body was real.
“I don’t think he remembers us, Erik,” Raven said shakily.
Charles looked at her, affectionate but uncomprehending, and then back at Erik.
“Do you know who I am, Charles?” Erik asked. He kept his voice low, unthreatening.
“I’m not sure,” Charles whispered.
His agitation rattled the room for a few seconds before Erik brought himself under control. The last thing Charles needed was to associate either of them with violence, especially if it was difficult for him to understand that they were here to rescue him and not make things worse. It was already a miracle he’d remained so calm for so long. “I’m Erik, and this is Raven. We’re friends. We’ve come to take you home.”
“You’re not wearing helmets.”
“No, Charles. We trust you,” Erik said, nearly certain that wasn’t a lie. He hoped his guilt didn’t show on his face; he had worn one, for so long before his arrest, and when he hadn’t he had wanted it back more than anything because he’d been so certain that his human jailers could only hold him so long, and they could only do so much damage to his body, but Charles could hold his mind permanently and he would never know it or, worse, know it and love it. And then the treasured memory of that moment in Washington when Charles had taken control of his body and powers had made it impossible to deny that that worst case scenario was one he’d craved at least as often as he’d dreaded it, and he’d worn the helmet to prevent himself from reaching out for Charles at least as much as to prevent the reverse.
But now they sat inches apart, their minds bare to each other and Erik’s fingers literally pressed against Charles’s temple, and he couldn’t feel the slightest hint of Charles in his mind. Instead, the telepath’s brow merely furrowed with innocent concern.
“I’m not sure you should. Everyone wears them.”
“When was the last time you saw someone who didn’t?” Erik asked.
Raven looked at him, less adept at hiding her alarm. Being cut off from a physical mutation had been disconcerting enough, but Charles’s was so deeply engrained in his psyche that cutting it off seemed unimaginable.
Charles’s frown deepened like he didn’t understand the question. He opened his mouth, hesitated, and then reached out for Erik’s face instead, tracing it like a blind man learning what someone looked like for the first time. His stare was fixed and unblinking, his pupils dilated from something in one of the several IVs in his wrists and arms, and when Erik reluctantly pulled away it seemed to turn inward. There was a long moment of silence that reminded Erik of his time under the Pentagon—the kind of howling silence that fell when thoughts and memories were too painful to be spoken aloud but impossible to escape—and then Charles began to shake and whimper again, muttering something about water under his breath. It was awful to watch, and even more awful to see Charles in such pain and feel no telepathic bleedover, when Charles had always leaked his headaches, his happiness, his hunger.
“Hank says we don’t have a lot of time,” Raven said suddenly.
Erik nodded in acknowledgement and continued to murmur soothing nonsense words as he pulled all the metal free of Charles’s body and melted it into pools of nothing on the floor. “Time to go, then. Ready, Charles?”
“No,” Charles said, but he seemed steadier now, more present, and the shadow of a smile he gave Erik was more beautiful than anything in a place this ugly should have been.
Time, which seemed to have slowed, sped up quickly after that. He lifted Charles in his arms, felt the telepath struggle to wrap his arms around his neck and then relax so completely that only the occasional flutter of his eyelashes betrayed the fact that he was still conscious at all, and followed Raven back down the dark hallways. It wasn’t dark enough to hide the evidence of the chaos he had wrought his first pass through the facility and Raven gave him a look over her shoulder that clearly said Really, Erik? as she sidestepped two bodies and a pool of blood. Still, Erik appreciated that she said nothing aloud that would have alerted Hank to the destruction and earned them both a lecture. Charles didn’t say anything either but he did wrinkle his nose at the smell and turn the top half of his body more fully into Erik’s chest, inhaling his scent instead.
“I had to. They took you, Charles. They had to know I couldn’t allow that,” Erik told him. He was so accustomed to justifying his actions to Charles, even knowing he would never truly understand, that it didn’t occur to him until he was done that Charles hadn’t asked, hadn’t voiced any disapproval at all. The messiness of it seemed to displease him more than the violence, and instead of disagreeing with Erik he simply made a vague questioning noise.
“You know why,” Erik reassured him, since Charles was in no state to comprehend the real answer. “You just don’t remember right now.”
“Okay,” Charles agreed, and laid his head back down on Erik’s shoulder again.
Raven must have told Hank to be ready, because the getaway van was waiting outside the same door Erik had blown off its hinges at the beginning of the mission. Hank clutched the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands and stared at Charles with such naked worry on his face that Erik tightened his grip resolutely and scowled, his distrust belied only by the files he tossed into Raven’s lap once he had Charles settled in the back seat. Hank and Raven had brought him into this and he’d played along nicely so far, but they were gravely mistaken if they thought he would leave Charles in their hands and what—go back to Florida? Back to the Brotherhood? While Charles was in this state? Not a chance in hell, he thought, resting one hand over Charles’s hip and stroking his hair with the other. They wouldn’t be rid of him so easily, now that they had accomplished their mission.
But that was a conversation for later. Now, anchored by the telepath’s too-quick heartbeat and the iron in his blood, Erik reached his metal-sense back to the facility, already rapidly fading into the distance. He felt out the most crucial support struts in the lower levels, wrapped his powers around steel beams and iron joints, and yanked it all up, up, until it broke the surface and exploded out the concrete roof the facility like a volcano erupting solid metal.
“I do hope you’re not a dream. Please be real,” Charles mumbled.
Erik watched him until he fell asleep, wracked with guilt but unable to kill the hope that he would get to keep this, a Charles who didn’t hate him, just a little longer.