Charles
“We can’t give him the serum. We can’t give him anything. His system is like toxic chemical soup right now, there could be side effects—”
“Hank, you read those files. You know what they were trying to do. What if he wakes up here, doesn’t remember it or us, and does exactly what they wanted him to?”
“He wouldn’t. You said he was confused but rational. Responsive. That means he’s still him, and he wouldn’t, ever.”
“Not on purpose! It wouldn’t be his fault. But it would be idiotic not to think about the worst case scenario.”
“If we give him the serum while his telepathy is unstable, who’s to say it won’t cripple it permanently?”
“Hank’s right. There’s been too much strain put on his powers already. They need to heal too.”
“Then there is the—”
“No. That’s not an option.”
“You’re such a hypocrite, Erik. It used to be nonnegotiable.”
The familiar voices had begun to rise in volume and pitch, sharpening as a whispered discussion became a hissed argument. Charles blinked once, twice, but must have fallen asleep again between the two because when he opened his eyes again the room was silent and empty. His head felt weighed down, like someone had shoveled wet concrete into it while he slept, and it took phenomenal effort to turn his head from one side of the pillow to the other.
Yet something about that simple gesture was a blissful relief.
For some equally mysterious reason his next impulse was to raise his hands. Nothing happened. There was pressure bearing down on them, soft but heavy. He tried again, but his atrophied muscles had the strength of rubber bands and there was already sweat breaking out on his forehead from the effort—or from the jolt like electricity that hit him as his mind came to the only logical conclusion: restraints. Again. Always. The doctors had said something about new tests…But he had thought—he remembered—
“Charles? Charles, calm down, you’ll hurt yourself.” Familiar hands tugged at the thick blankets draped over him, stripped away the heavy duvet, loosened the sheets that had somehow become twisted around him. Then the same fingers lifted his, making sure not to touch his wrists or restrain him in any way, merely showing him that with the covers pulled down to his waist he had complete freedom of movement. “It was just blankets, see? Too many blankets. That’s all.”
“Erik,” Charles said, hating that he sounded so breathless, so weak still, or perhaps again. He knew that Erik would never let himself be seen like this, and it felt important to be as strong as Erik, even if he had no idea why that was.
“Hello,” Erik said, smiling with some of his mouth and all of his eyes. Trying not to make it sound like a question, he still couldn’t strip all the uncertainty from his voice when he said, “You recognize me.”
“You’re in my dreams,” Charles told him, like that made the answer obvious.
Erik frowned, not understanding. He looked very tired, Charles thought. Unsure of his basis for comparison, he was nevertheless certain that Erik usually had some kind of barely-leashed intensity that seemed to be missing. From the state of his hair and stubble he hadn’t showered in a few days; maybe he hadn’t been sleeping either. Moving slowly, as if unsure of his welcome, he sat down on the edge of the bed and rested a hand that Charles couldn’t feel somewhere near his knee. “What dreams?”
“Sometimes during tests I go away for a while, and you’ll be there, you and Raven. You come and you stop them. You kill them all and take me away.”
“We did, Charles. It wasn’t just a dream. It happened. They’re dead and you’re home, in Westchester.”
Westchester sounded like a real place, a familiar place. Again, Charles turned his head from one side of the pillow to the other, this time taking in his surroundings. He was in a bedroom that might have been designed as the diametric opposite of the white room—hunter-green wallpaper, scattered paintings of bucolic landscapes, all mahogany furniture, solid and expensive. Through a door by the antique desk he glimpsed a large marble-accented bathroom with a shower and tub. There were balcony doors flung open on the other side of the room, leading out to a sunlit terrace where a cup of tea and a book rested near an armchair that looked like it had been dragged out from the bedroom. Erik must have come inside when he heard Charles struggling, but that didn’t explain why he was here in the first place. Erik didn’t like Westchester, did he? The sight of him here, flushed from the sun with his shirt rolled up to his elbows, felt wrong and right simultaneously, a feeling Charles couldn’t parse at all.
“I’m not sure I believe you,” Charles said doubtfully. “This feels just like one of my dreams and I heard them say there were be more tests. Once I…‘can use my telepathy without flatlining,’ they said.”
Charles could see Erik’s knuckles go white even if he couldn’t feel the grip on his leg tighten and for a moment he was worried Erik would yell at him. That wasn’t supposed to happen—Erik was always so gentle in his dreams, reserving that teutonic rage for the others, the ones Charles couldn’t remember much about except that they all wore lab coats and called the tests “experiments,” and Erik hated experiments on other mutants. In fact, all his memories of the tests were fuzzy, like they had happened a long time ago, or to someone else.
Instead all Erik’s anger drained out of him the moment he noticed Charles’s nervousness, and he nearly flung himself off the bed in his haste to put distance between them. He sounded disgusted with himself. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t you, it was them, I shouldn’t have killed them so quickly. They should have suffered far more, far longer—”
Charles sighed and leaned back against the pillows again, determined to enjoy every moment of this respite from reality even if Erik couldn’t. He could feel the summer breeze drifting in through the open doors, the smell of fresh-cut grass so different from the chemical disinfectant in the white room and…before. His ribs and wrists were bandaged, his skin free of grime and sweat, silk striped pajamas felt heavenly on his bruises; even the headache that had plagued him as far back as he could remember had softened to a bearable twinge, and the pulsing force in his head was quiet. He heard the frenetic pacing cease, a moment of hesitation.
“Hank should know you’re awake.”
He sighed again, more theatrically this time. “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, will you just stop being so dramatic and come back?”
Erik approached the bed again cautiously, as if he expected Charles to change his mind with every step. “You want me to stay?”
“Of course,” Charles said. When he patted the empty mattress to his right—the bed was so enormous, there was no need to for anyone to perch penitently on the edge—Erik climbed up and settled with his back against the headboard a few inches further away than arm’s length, long legs and bare feet stretched out in front of him. He looked almost comically bewildered.
“Why?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“You think you’re dreaming. You believe that you’ll wake up and they’ll be torturing you again and in these few moments, these precious moments, you don’t want to see your sister, or Hank, or go outside, or eat a real meal. You want me to stay. I don’t understand how that can be.”
“Yes, well, you’ve always been rather thick,” Charles said.
Erik was so taken aback that a bark of laughter escaped him before he could stop it. Charles managed to keep a straight face at that, but even his best poker face couldn’t last against Erik’s expression of total consternation immediately afterwards, which seemed largely composed of abject horror that he’d dared to feel a positive emotion while Charles was in such a state. Only when he saw that Charles had been joking—albeit somewhat clumsily—did he drop the self-flagellation.
“Only you would forget everything else and remember to insult me, Charles,” he said ruefully.
Charles turned over on his side, rearranging his lower half manually, and reshuffled the pillows so that he could look up at Erik without straining his neck. He was exhausted in a way that transcended physical tiredness. It hadn’t even occurred to him to ask for Raven or Hank, and feeling the sunlight on his skin or eating food that didn’t come in an IV sounded nice in the abstract way that walking sounded nice—the stuff of fantasies, impossible dreams that hurt all the more for dwelling on them. But this, lying in a comfortable bed while Erik not only didn’t hurt him but actually treated him gently instead, in just enough residual pain to be confident his mind hadn’t snapped entirely, was as close to perfect as he had ever expected to experience again. For however long he got to keep this, he would hoard it jealously.
“I thought you were a dream at first too,” Erik said. “At the Pentagon with that boy and the man from the future. For ten years I imagined what it would be like when you came for me, every little detail. And then you did, and you were walking, you were so angry with me, and I knew it couldn’t be true because those were the things I’d wanted most of all.”
“You wanted me to be angry?” Charles asked, not mentioning how nice Erik’s fingers felt carding through his now-washed hair in case that made him stop.
“What’s the point of yelling at someone if they won’t yell back? I had a decade of resentments that I kept hidden from every stupid human who tried to make me lose my temper. I was saving them for you.”
Only Erik would think of his hatred as a kind of gift, Charles reflected, but there was no bitterness to the thought. It was difficult to summon bitterness about anything; even the conviction that this was nothing more than a fantastical mirage and he could wake to a living nightmare any second inspired determination to exist only in this moment. He had no wish to claw his way back to reality so soon, the way Erik would—or the way he thought Erik would. This softer, quieter shadow of Erik didn’t look ready to claw his way anywhere. He seemed content to just…talk.
“Tell me about them,” Charles said. “Your resentments, the ones you saved for me.”
Erik sighed heavily, pretending to be far more put out than he was. “The food was terrible, for one. No flavor at all, terrible oatmeal. The jumpsuits always itched. Abysmal selection of reading material…I must have read Dr. Spock and the same dime store romance novels a hundred times. Why it took the barmaid two hundred pages to uncover the cowboy’s secret identity every time is beyond me.”
“You could have written better,” Charles said, daring to tease a little.
“I did, in my head. Too dangerous to be trusted with a pencil, apparently. That was years ago, somewhere else, before they moved me to the Pentagon. It was always cold there. The shower was a spigot over a drain in the corner of the bathroom, impossible to use without flooding the place. The towels were like sandpaper. And the lights were so bright…I got snow blindness once, in Russia, it wasn’t so different. They didn’t turn off the lights for days at first. I punched a wall so I could look at my hands and see blood and bruises, to remember what colors looked like.”
He held up his left hand, smiled a little. “You’d never know.”
Charles frowned, not eager to remember his own white room or the restraints that had kept him from lashing out in the same way. He asked the first question that came to mind. “What convinced you it wasn’t a dream?”
“Time,” Erik said. “Some days I wake up and I’m still not sure. But time helps. Time and using my powers. When that’s the thing they want, the thing they take away from you…reclaiming it is the best way to reclaim your reality.”
“You’re very smart,” Charles said. “Show me.”
Erik looked down at him, surprised, and then reached out to the ornate lamp, gilded in gold and no doubt terribly expensive, on the desk across the room. As Charles watched, the lamp began to spin in place and the gold peeled off the frame, long strips hovering in midair and then, one by one, drifting across the room as if blown by the softest breeze. For a moment Erik paused, considering, and then the metal suddenly seemed to turn liquid, reshaping itself into the form of a tiny golden cat with its tail curled around its legs and its ears pricked forward. The detail was exquisite, Charles saw as it floated down into his hand. He smiled up at Erik, who looked almost embarrassed now that his fierce concentration had dissipated.
“Thank you,” Charles said. “That’s very impressive.”
Erik shrugged. “I couldn’t have done it two months ago. Then again, I always was stronger around you.” He fell quiet for a moment, then continued with a seriousness that felt very different from the easy comradery of before, like he’d come to a decision about something. “You helped me understand my powers once, Charles. It’s time for me to return the favor. Come into my mind and tell me if I’m lying when I say that this isn’t a dream.”
“You’d never say that. You hate me being in your head,” Charles said quickly, hoping that his nervous laughter hid the sudden hitch in his breathing. He knew that much even if he didn’t quite know what Erik was talking about. Something ominous was trailing cold fingers up his spine; something about this subject was dangerous.
“That’s oversimplifying and you know it. I mean it, Charles. Come in and see the world through my eyes. You can do it.”
“I can’t,” Charles insisted. “I won’t. Erik, stop this.”
“You are stronger than what they did to you, Charles, I know you are,” Erik said fiercely.
To escape the intense look on his face—some unbearable combination of faith and stubbornness and apprehension— Charles began the laborious process of shifting positions so he could turn his back but a hand on his shoulder stopped him easily. Of course it did; anyone could manhandle him these days, like they had every time they’d peeled his sweat-soaked skin off the chair and dragged him to the wet room, every time they’d dropped him on the floor of a shower stall and walked away knowing there was nothing he could do but lie there until they came back for him, every time they used the restraints or didn’t because his odds of escape were the same either way—
The rush of memory hurt, a tidal wave that subsumed and nearly drowned him before he fought his way back to the surface, and he hated Erik for making him remember in the only place it was safe to forget, a hatred mixed with confusion because he was no longer certain what was happening.
And even as he physically shook off the rest, that last thought of escape continued to scratch at the forefront of his mind. There was something there, something he was forgetting. Whatever it was made the dormant creature in his head stir restlessly, expanding and contracting like it breathed, or was trying to get out. He knew with absolute certainty that couldn’t be allowed to happen—which made it a very bad moment for Erik to touch his temple and send the invitation telepathically. He meant to do so gently, perhaps would have succeeded under other circumstances, but he was out of practice and Charles had no shields, no forewarning, and no control, and Erik’s message careened into his mind like a telepathic shriek.
COME IN CHARLES
“Get back!”
His voice resembled a child’s wail as Charles shoved Erik away with all the strength in his wasted body. At the same time, the force in his mind twitched and lashed out too, a single tendril like a bullwhip snapped straight from his mind into Erik’s. Charles could only watch, horrified, as Erik’s expression went blank with shock the microsecond before his eyes rolled back and he collapsed on the bed like a discarded plaything.
And he couldn’t do anything at all as the same tendril of power snapped back to its source. An atomic bomb exploded whitely behind his eyes, and everything after that was black.