Erik
“We have a problem, Mystique.”
Erik spoke quietly, cupping his palm around the telephone receiver. The whole floor was asleep—Ororo was the closest, clutching her teddy bear with metal button eyes three doors down, and Charles the farthest, his watch warming his wrist on the other side of the wing. Still Erik had locked the library door with his powers, pitched his voice at nearly a whisper, and knew even that might not be enough precautions.
“Don’t tell me you and Charles are at each other’s throats already,” Raven sighed heavily, though she didn’t sound particularly surprised.
“We’re not.” That, at least, would be familiar; that, he could deal with. “He’s regained his powers.”
A sharp inhale, a breath of silence, and Raven still couldn’t hide the relief in her voice. “Oh, my God. Oh, fuck, I’m glad. I thought they’d really broken him—”
“He doesn’t know it.”
“That makes no—What are you talking about?”
“He doesn’t know his telepathy is back, he doesn’t know he’s using it—I didn’t know he was using it until tonight and I still don’t know how long it’s been going on. Since the beginning, for all I know. The children, the school, me…Everything is the way Charles wants it to be because he wants it to be that way. His conscious mind is still terrified of his powers, unwilling to even think about them, but his subconscious mind has been guiding us, manipulating us, this whole time.”
Erik’s hissing whisper edged toward hyperventilation and he broke off to gather himself. He glanced at the door—closed, locked, no one approaching—and still couldn’t shake the paranoid conviction that he wasn’t alone in the library. Of course he was, he’d checked every nook and cranny before placing the call to the number Raven had given him, but he had spent the entire evening with Charles desperately pretending everything was normal and now that he was finally allowing himself to feel it, his anxiety was as sharp and painful as bolts of lightning arcing through his veins. At least he knew that was real; there was no mistaking the texture of his own fear after two months spent fighting it every time he entered an enclosed space or someone touched him without warning.
“Erik? Erik, are you still there?”
Erik wrenched himself back to the present moment, guided by Raven’s worried voice over the line. “Yes. Yes.”
“Are you sure about this?” she said. He could hear her doubt and, beneath it, the beginnings of uneasiness. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you but…I mean, how could you possibly know?”
“You haven’t been here, Mystique. The children don’t just stop fighting when he enters the room, they go silent. I’ve walked away from arguments with Havoc because I’ve forgotten what we were arguing about. Beast has spent half an hour asking Charles about the range of motion in his pinky finger and never once mentioned his powers. We wouldn’t have played chess tonight at all if I hadn’t found the board accidentally, without him knowing. When he doesn’t want something to happen, it doesn’t happen. I should have seen it long ago.”
But he hadn’t, because he hadn’t wanted to. Erik could see that now. He had been content, and he wasn’t entirely certain all or even most of that had been the result of telepathic manipulation, no matter how insidious and undetectable. Some of his happiest memories of the past few weeks had been so unremarkable: reading on the balcony while Charles napped beside him, long runs around the grounds, recreating his mother’s recipes half from memory and half by intuition at night once everyone else had gone to sleep. Things he had dreamed of for a decade—nothing outlandish, nothing impossible, just the simple, uncomplicated pleasures of home. Surely those feelings had been real, even if Charles had influenced some of the events that led to them, keeping away interruptions or sharpening Erik’s memories without either of them realizing it.
And the moments when something felt wrong had been so rare and unobtrusive that it had been easy to attribute them to his own lingering instability. He’d certainly had enough mood shifts and moments of forgetfulness before coming to the mansion; why should now be any different? How easy he had been to convince. He’d practically done Charles’s work for him.
Raven cursed again. Even if she didn’t entirely trust him, she had always trusted his instincts. “He’s got you all playing house in a little mutant utopia and he has no idea? Erik, this is bad.”
“As I said. I can’t stay here. Tell me where to find you.”
“Not happening,” Raven said immediately. “He still needs you, especially if he’s this far out of control. Now that you know what’s happening you can be careful, resist his influence.”
“I’m not going to be your spy, Mystique, not when he could make me forget all this tomorrow by accident,” Erik hissed, hoping he sounded angry instead of panicked.
“And what do you think is going to happen if you leave, Erik?” Raven said sharply. “What do you think is going to happen if you tell him?”
He felt liked he’d been punched in the solar plexus, a blow so real he pressed his hand over the skin and half-expected bruises. He swallowed heavily. “What?”
“Don’t bullshit me, or yourself. We both saw his face when you walked into the room at that base. He barely knew his own name but he knew you. You ground him more than Hank, more than the school, and if you run away from him now he’ll be devastated and alone in that house with a bunch of kids. If anything would force his telepathy from subconscious to conscious, that would do it. You’re the only one who knows first-hand what happens then.”
“You think he’d—”
“I don’t think we want an unstable telepath climbing into Cerebro in search of you, let’s start there,” Raven said. “And I think he won’t let you go as easily as he did in Cuba. And who told him to fight harder for the things he loves?”
“You can’t think he would hurt them,” Erik said flatly, forcing his mind away from the things he loves.
It was unimaginable. Watching Charles interact with the children over the past few days—while lurking around the corner, usually, because he didn’t want to draw their attention, for fear of becoming their new plaything—he had been struck by Charles’s gentleness, his patience. The same Charles who still said “I don’t remember that” multiple times a day with all the fearful wonder of someone who was a stranger to his own life, who looked at Erik every morning like he’d expected him to slip away in the night and his continued presence was a gift, the same Charles who was vulnerable and hurt and prone to nightmares pulled a veil of serenity and confidence over himself the instant any one of the children shouted his name. Whether it was a skinned knee that needed bandaging or an art project they wanted to show him, he was there. Part of it was pride, of course, not wanting to appear weak in front of them, but most of his unlikely well of strength and enthusiasm came from real affection. Charles loved his students, cherished their mutations, and would sooner use his powers against himself than them.
Which, if he lost control entirely, might well happen. When he’d accidentally attacked Erik, the backlash had knocked him out too.
“Honestly I’m more worried about what it would do to him,” Raven was saying, echoing his own thoughts. “But if there was a—a ripple effect, or something, he wouldn’t mean to, and he’d hate himself for it. Sometimes we lose control and our mutations hurt people, even if it’s the last thing we want.”
“Subtle, Mystique,” Erik said scathingly.
He could practically hear her rolling her eyes over the phone. “You promised me you would take care of him, Erik. You’ve never lied to me before, don’t start now. If you tell Hank he’ll just put Charles back on the serum. He’s still the best of us. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“You’re the one who said this was bad,” Erik reminded her.
“So help me make sure it doesn’t turn catastrophic.”
“By lying to him. By lying to everyone. By letting him rummage around in our heads rearranging the furniture according to whims he doesn’t even know he has.”
“Please, Erik. Just for a little longer. Then I’ll be back and we’ll figure it out together, the three of us. Just don’t…scare him.”
Erik rubbed his hand over his face with a little too much force, half-hoping this was a bad dream and he would wake up next to a Charles who didn’t justify every reservation Erik had ever had about the potential danger of his powers. He had worn the helmet for fear of exactly this scenario: Charles innocently, casually violating his mind and him not only not fighting it but embracing it. Every instinct was screaming for him to tell Raven no. It was the conversation in that Florida motel room all over again—his world had just been upended, and her response was to ask too much of him, and only the thought that perhaps she viewed it as asking Magneto for something entirely within reason kept him from refusing at once. She had gained so much strength over the past decade; she didn’t need to know how much he had lost.
“You’ll owe me,” he said after a long silence.
“I’m good for it,” Raven promised, so relieved that Erik couldn’t make himself say any of the cruel words crowded on the tip of his tongue, barbs about how it was easy to be brave when she wasn’t the one in danger, how even his jailers hadn’t managed to steal what she was asking him to sacrifice, how hypocritical this was of her when she’d thrown Charles out of her head long before he had put on the helmet.
Instead he hung up abruptly and paced the length of the library for a few minutes, alternating between tugging at his hair and gesturing at the various metal knick-knacks around the room until he was orbited by a cloud of silver and brass and gold trinkets. The easy use of his powers helped him back down from the edge of hysteria; the two fingers of expensive whiskey he swallowed in a few gulps helped more. He poured another two fingers and took that glass more slowly, thinking about how far away he could be by morning, how the possibility of danger to a handful of people who either didn’t like him or didn’t know him was hardly sufficient motivation to put his entire selfhood in jeopardy.
Then he tried to put himself back in those moments that hindsight had shown him had been telepathically manipulated, searching for some common thread among them. A shiver down his spine, a sense of wrongness, a sense of rightness that he could pinpoint as false, the pulsing warmth that used to accompany Charles’s telepathic touch—anything out of the ordinary.
Surely Charles wasn’t so powerful now that he could pass entirely unnoticed through all of their minds simultaneously. His presence had been palpable before, ineffable but unforgettable. Erik remembered the feel of it, not a caress so much as the platonic essence of one, warmth and light and softness and yet none of them at the same time. Anticipation and dread had had him on edge these past weeks, constantly combing through his own thoughts in search of that presence, craving it at least as much as he feared it. If Charles had passed beyond that—if he could be in any of their heads at any time—
That was a shiver down his spine, and it didn’t come from Charles. Suddenly Erik needed to see him. He threw back the rest of the whiskey, flipped the library lights off absentmindedly with his powers as he strode back down the long hallway.
Charles was exactly where he had left him: lying on his back in his absurd silk pajamas, one arm thrown over his head, face turned toward Erik’s side of the bed as if looking for him even in his sleep. Even though he now shaved every day they had somehow never gotten around to cutting his hair, and he looked even younger than he had the night they had met in the water. Awake the new lines around his eyes and mouth were always sunk deep; asleep they smoothed out and no one would know to look at him that he could turn them into a houseful of blank slates. Erik sat down on the edge of the mattress, not quite daring to touch him.
He was the most terrifying, arousing thing Erik had ever seen.
Charles turned his head on the pillow, and as he blinked open blue eyes cloudy with sleep something crystalized in Erik’s mind. He knew exactly what he should do, could see the events laid out in front of him like they had already happened. He should write two notes, an apology to Charles and a warning to Hank, and slip away now, quietly, as fast and as far as he could. Somewhere rural, where there would be no collateral damage if Charles’s telepathy came hurtling across the country in search of him.
“What are you doing up?” Charles mumbled sleepily, brows knitting with innocent confusion.
And Erik knew exactly what he would do.
He framed Charles’s face with his hands, knew the impression of feverish heat against his palms was in his own mind, pressed a gentle kiss against his slightly-parted lips.
“Getting a glass of water, schatz. Go back to sleep.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Just the one. Everything’s fine now.”
He would ensure that the return of Charles’s powers was less traumatizing than his own had been. He would sleep next to him at night and bring him cups of tea during the day and gently pressure him into chess games until he stopped physically and telepathically shying away from the emotional intimacy of it. He would protect Charles from Hank the way he had failed to ten years ago and Charles would have his school and he would regain control of his powers—the how on that was a little hazy, but Erik had never let unknown variables concern him overmuch when he was strategizing—and no one but him and Raven would ever know how close Charles had come to destroying them. And he would do it all because of the smile Charles gave him at the end of the day, small and sad like he was saying goodbye every night, and the light in his eyes when he saw Erik the next morning. He had power over Charles as surely as Charles had power over him, and the best place to utilize it was right here. If they could destroy each other, perhaps they could protect each other just long enough to thwart total disaster.
And if the worst case scenario came to pass, as in Erik’s experience it usually did, and Charles went off like a nuclear bomb as his captors had intended—well, he’d always hoped Charles would be there when he died.
He hadn’t felt this calm in years.