Erik
Erik woke up in the room he had claimed for himself the first day at the mansion, feeling like his brain had been pulverized and was at least halfway through leaking out of his ears. Before he even had time to remember what had happened, nausea hit him so hard and fast that he barely managed to lurch upright and would have thrown up all over himself if not for the trashcan that magically appeared just in time. When he’d finished heaving, he dizzily followed the blue fingers holding the trashcan up the blue arm to the blue shoulder to an incredibly unimpressed blue face.
“Thanks, Mystique.”
“You fucking idiot, he could have killed you,” Raven said.
Erik sank back against the pillows with a groan. As much as he wanted to go to the bathroom and brush his teeth to get the sour taste out of his mouth, the thought of moving any more than necessary to curl into the fetal position was painful, and even that would have to wait until his head stopped spinning. Something cold and wet landed on his chest, more thrown than tossed: a damp washcloth, he felt, draping it over his forehead. Without really processing Raven’s statement, he muttered, “Couldn’t have hurt worse than this.”
“It really could have,” she snapped. “What year is it and who’s the president?”
“1972, and an imbecile. You know, your bedside manner leaves something to be desired.”
“I’m not here to play nursemaid,” Raven said, even as she picked up the glass of water on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed, gently supporting Erik’s head as he drank. Then she folded the washcloth in half and dabbed his forehead with it, continued absently, “I’m here to make sure my brother didn’t telepathically lobotomize you. What were you two doing in there? Hank stuck his head in to check on you and found you both passed out.”
“Both passed out? Is he alright?” Erik’s eyes had drifted closed but now they snapped open, wide and worried. He could bear almost any pain himself, but if hurting him had hurt Charles—if he had managed to accidentally injure Charles, again—well, all he knew for certain was that the idea of walking away from that particular mistake for a third time was intolerable. Charles would have to force him to go.
Raven nodded. “Hank says he’ll be fine. No signs that it’s anything more than pushing himself too hard too fast. He needs the rest anyway.”
“I need to see him, I need to make sure,” Erik said, struggling to sit up again. Raven started to say something and then sighed heavily instead, watching as he maneuvered to the edge of the bed with painful slowness. He gritted his teeth against another wave of nausea and blinked several times, trying to clear his blurred vision. Even sitting down he was swaying, constantly off-balance with no concept of himself in relation to the floor, and it only got worse when he stood up. His vision was skipping like a bad television broadcast and with his depth perception shot each step came down too hard. Right when he thought he was going to fall over or throw up or both at once, Raven slipped an arm around his waist. She guided him as he tripped back to bed and collapsed like a dead weight, too dizzy to even lie down properly.
“Okay, slugger, that’s enough. He can’t give you points for heroic behavior he’s not awake to see.”
“Not that,” Erik groaned into the blanket. He hadn’t managed to collapse anywhere near a pillow. “Make sure he’s not hurt.”
“I told you, he’s fine. Telepathic overexertion always did a number on him. It just didn’t take much, this time around. But since you’re still alive and basically coherent, maybe he’s not as bad off as we thought he was.”
Raven had pushed the hardest to put some kind of barrier between Charles’s mind and their own but now seemed equally eager to believe that the damage wouldn’t be permanent. So far, it was impossible to say for certain. Even with the files from the facility they knew only some of what Charles had endured, the shocks his system had been put through; he had slept the entire drive back to Westchester and had only been awake for a few short minutes altogether since the rescue. To Hank’s poorly-concealed displeasure, Erik was, part by accident and part by his own design, the person who had spent the most time with Charles and the only one to really have spoken to him. Now he was the only one to have seen—and suffered—his telepathy in action as well. And, thinking back on those last few minutes of his conversation with Charles, Erik wasn’t sure he agreed with Raven at all.
“He didn’t mean to,” he said, pushing through the pain because this mattered.
“Didn’t mean to what?”
“Use his powers. Lash out at me. Last thing I remember…he was so scared.”
“Of you?” Raven’s voice was suddenly ice. “Erik, what did you do?”
“Of himself,” Erik said. He didn’t even bother to protest his own innocence; couldn’t, in good conscience. He’d only meant to help, but good intentions meant nothing when he’d pressured Charles into using his powers as surely as if he’d threatened him. And he’d touched Charles without warning, both physically and telepathically, knowing exactly what that meant to someone who had been so completely robbed of control over their own body. Sick with self-loathing, he continued, “He thought he was dreaming, that he was still back there—I thought that he could check my mind, confirm through someone else’s senses if he couldn’t believe his own. I told him that using my powers helped me remember who I was, when I got out of prison.”
“Oh, my God,” Raven said disbelievingly. “That’s such a bad idea that it borders on suicidal. And you really think the two of you went through the same thing?”
It was difficult to summon anger when his entire body felt heavy enough to sink through the mattress, but Erik at least managed to snarl from his prone position. “We were both captured for being mutants, robbed of our freedom and our powers by cowardly humans who didn’t understand that cutting off a mutation is like losing a sense, it’s torture—”
“Okay, okay,” Raven interrupted, pressing down on his chest firmly enough to make him aware that his breathing had quickened with anxiety. “But listen, you can’t think like that, or this will happen again and this telepathic hangover you’ve got will feel like a pleasant dream in comparison. You couldn’t access your powers for years, and I can’t imagine how painful that was. But he couldn’t get away from his, and he could only use them exactly the way they wanted him to. He was a weapon, aimed at targets that he could feel. And the only alternative was to focus on people who felt dead. No minds at all.”
For a moment the nausea was back. Erik had never considered how the helmet felt to Charles, had imagined it simply as what it was: an impenetrable metal wall between them. For someone who loved metal, the image was reassuring; from the other side…
“The helmets?” he managed.
“He told me when I dropped by about a month ago,” Raven said almost apologetically. “Said talking to you was like talking to a statue with your face. Sometimes he couldn’t even understand what you were saying.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Would it have made a difference if you had?” Raven asked, and thankfully moved on before Erik could even think about the answer. “You know, the one thing he always feared more than anything when we were kids was losing control. Every time he said I couldn’t drink, or I had to wear that stupid blond disguise out in public, or he wouldn’t argue with me until we got inside because he was worried my powers might slip…I don’t think it was about me at all.”
“So he was always afraid of his power,” Erik said. He hoped it sounded as contemptuous as usual, with no hint of the recently-developed anxiety that Charles might have been right that churned alongside the nausea in his still-unsteady stomach. “Why are you telling me this? Not that I mind the walk down memory lane, but you’re rarely so sentimental.”
“The point is, using his powers might not be as comforting for Charles as it was for you. Not if they’ve been used against his will, as part of his torture. Not if they’ve made his worst fear come true. And I’m telling you this because I am trying my hardest to stack the deck in your favor here so you don’t make a mistake this boneheaded again the second I’m gone.”
Erik had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d been two steps behind this entire conversation, and rather than admit it was now three he exerted a monumental effort and some unattractive grimacing to prop himself up against the headboard, a vantage point from which he could glare more effectively. If his eyes were narrowed primarily as an attempt to stop Raven’s face from spinning like a pinwheel, she didn’t have to know that.
Unfortunately, she seemed more irritated than intimidated by his reaction.
“You’re the genius who went on national television and called for mutants everywhere to take up arms or step into the light or whatever florid metaphor popped into your head at the time. You disappeared right after so you may have missed the memo, but they did, and they didn’t stop when Charles went missing.” Raven sighed, deflated a little. The new Brotherhood existed in Erik’s mind as an abstract entity, but for the first time he realized that they had names to her, faces, their own traumas to escape. “I’ve been gone for three weeks and…something’s come up. I have to go back.”
He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel more unsteady, but Erik abruptly realized that the thought of doing this, staying in the mansion, without Raven wasn’t one he’d even considered, or liked now that he was forced to. For all his bluster in the motel room that first morning that he didn’t need friends, that the fewer people he had to deal with the better, that he couldn’t trust anyone—Raven was and always had been an exception. The only one who broke more of his rules than her was her brother.
“I should go with you,” he heard himself say, distantly.
Clearly that wasn’t the reaction she’d been expecting. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I’ll go with you,” Erik repeated, wondering when his mouth had gone so dry. “It’s past time I returned to the Brotherhood. I’ve been—remiss in my duties.”
Nothing about the past few days had made it any easier to see Raven look at him like she saw a person and not a figurehead, but this time he felt too sick to lash out in return. Instead he tried to imagine becoming Magneto again, what it would mean to put on that armor—the helmet, the cape, the cold demeanor and unforgiving rhetoric. To value his powers and his strength and that nebulous idea of a people over any one life, even his own. To be part of an army again, even if he did stand at its head, all living either on the run or on top of one another in a crowded base carved out of a mountain or underground, skittering around each other like ants. People looking to him for answers, voices shouting over each other in meetings, arguments about strategy, brushing shoulders with strangers in the hall who would later brag that they’d touched the great Magneto. He was so lost in the thought of it that he didn’t notice that his body and all the metal in the room were trembling at the same frequency until Raven put a hand on his leg, making him realize that he had pulled his knees up to his chest like a child.
“You don’t want that,” she said.
“It’s never mattered what I want,” Erik said. It wasn’t bitterness; just a fact. “Nor you. That’s not how this works.”
“What makes you think you’re ready now, when you weren’t three days ago?” Raven said, switching tacks.
Erik scoffed, more at his own stupidity than the question itself. “I have to be. This mission has proved that. They kidnapped their greatest ally in broad daylight and tortured him for weeks with no hesitation—with nerve like that, there’s nothing they won’t do. Nothing they aren’t doing at this very moment. Any doubts I had after Washington as to the continued importance of our cause are gone. We saved the human race once ten years ago and I saw what happened. I don’t know why I thought it would be different the second time.”
He was almost talking to himself by the end, trailing off vaguely and wondering how the hell some lukewarm editorials had convinced him that the fight for mutant rights had been won and the danger was over. He’d wanted it to be true so badly, that was the trouble. Wanting something didn’t make it so, a lesson he’d taught himself before he was ten and every year of his life since and yet all it took to make him forget it, apparently, was Charles Xavier reappearing with that same tired refrain about acceptance and cooperation, still burdened with a fatal misapprehension that Erik was a better man than he actually was. And once again, Charles was the one who had paid for Erik’s mistakes. Raven had held him in check so far; he just had to hope she could keep doing it when they went back to the Brotherhood.
After a moment of that same penetrating stare, Raven nodded. “That’s better. Faster progress than I thought, too. Answer’s still no, though.”
Erik grit his teeth, torn between fury at her presumption, his usual determination to throw the entirety of his mind and soul into a decision once he made it, and a quiet, unhappy hum of denial in the back of his mind at the thought of leaving the mansion. “Mystique—”
“Think about it, Erik! You really want to leave Charles and Hank here alone when we still don’t have the faintest idea how much of Charles is still Charles?”
Erik tried to sound coolly dismissive and not as howlingly possessive as his instinctive Of course not would have implied. “Hank will take care of him.”
“And how’d it go the last time we made that assumption?” Before the sudden tension in Erik’s body could manifest in violence—they’d endured their own guilt separately throughout the years, only talking about it once or twice in short, clipped conversations after too much whiskey, and both knew how quickly it could escalate—Raven backed down, taking refuge in strategy. “We need Charles on our side this time, Erik. We can’t win this war without him. At best it’ll be a stalemate, at worst it’ll be Logan’s future all over again. So make sure he’s sane, and then make sure Hank isn’t filling his head with all kinds of bullshit about forgiveness and innocent bystanders and mutant-human cooperation, okay?”
Perhaps it was just the telepathic hangover, but those were hard lines to read between. Slowly Erik asked, “You want me to brainwash him?”
“I want you to look out for him better than he would look out for himself,” Raven said, with gentleness all the more devastating for being so abrupt. “Which is all you’ve ever tried to do.”
There was no response to that that didn’t involve a high likelihood of Erik embarrassing himself by breaking down in one way or another, so he cleared his throat and changed the subject. “He won’t be happy that you’ve left and I’ve stayed. Neither of them will.”
“They will not. Which is why I’m saying goodbye to you and not to them.”
She smiled at him, conspiratorial and cheerful, and it was almost enough to make Erik smile back despite the lingering nausea. “You really are abandoning me, then.”
“Oh, stop whining. You’re a grown man, you can handle two nerds.”
Sometimes it was so easy to forget that those two nerds were a scientific prodigy with super strength and the most powerful telepath known to man, who both also happened to be terrifyingly intelligent and pioneers in a subset of genetics that science hadn’t even recognized yet. Especially here, in this room, with his old clothes hanging in the closet, it was natural to flash back to the days when he and Mystique could make fun of Hank’s glasses and Charles’s sweater vests. But then Erik remembered Hank’s expression as he carried Charles out of the burning facility, the way Charles had leaned into his touch like an abused animal desperate for the slightest bit of affection before the inevitable kick came, and laughter seemed obscene after all.
Raven seemed to follow the same line of thought; she sobered quickly, and stood up. “Take care of them, Erik.”
“You too, Mystique.”
She left silently. Erik meant to get up too, brush his teeth and hair, possibly even shower for the first time in days, and then track Hank down for what would in all likelihood be a truly uncomfortable conversation, but he fell asleep before his head stopped spinning.