Charles
Something was wrong with Erik.
He was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth like he’d forgotten about it while Ororo held up her latest homework assignment with both hands, her eyes flitting between the page and his face to gauge his reaction. “Paint how your mutation makes you feel,” Alex had said, and Ororo had drawn the mansion under a giant storm-cloud of sparkly purple crayon with silver lines between the cloud and the house. There were two small stick figures to the side.
“—and the professor says our mutations are cousins because of electromagnets and my mutation makes me feel big like I can stop bad things from happening, so the cloud is me, and the metal spikes are you, and everyone else is inside the house and we’re making them safe!”
“Cousins because of electromagnets,” Erik echoed. “Charles told you that?”
“Uh-huh! Do you like it?”
Erik crouched down to her eye level and gave the drawing the same cool, assessing stare he gave metal objects before he used his powers on them, a look that indicated absolute focus and usually inspired intimidation if not outright fear in lesser grownups. Ororo bore up under it bravely.
“Yes,” he pronounced finally. He looked from the drawing to her worry-scrunched face and added very seriously, “I wouldn’t dare fight anyone who could make those clouds. Who are we protecting the school from?”
“The bad people who took the professor,” Ororo said, in a tone that implied she hadn’t really thought about it. “And anyone else who thinks we shouldn’t practice our powers and go to school and play without being scared.”
From his hiding place around the corner Charles saw the wheels turn in Erik’s head, the words gather at the tip of his tongue, and it didn’t take a telepath to know that the next word out of his mouth would be “humans,” because even when playing art critic for a ten-year-old Erik had his mind on the war he was so sure he saw coming. His cognitive dissonance was complete and unhesitating: he could tell himself that he was fighting to preserve Ororo’s innocence and groom her to fight alongside him at the same time. It would have been infuriating if it wasn’t also so terribly sad. Erik had the veneration for childhood of someone who had never had one and the militant mindset of someone who thought of his life as a mission.
He could also be snide about “the professor and his school” as much as he wanted, but when he saw an opportunity to convert he could be more pedantic than any Oxford don.
But just as Charles was about to intervene, Erik visibly reconsidered, then closed his mouth and smiled instead.
“You’re very right,” he said, standing up to his full height again. “Your powers are beautiful and you should use them however you like. Though maybe a little less flooding in the back yard, yes? It’s hard to play in a swamp.”
“Sorry,” Ororo said sheepishly. “I’ll try to do better.”
She scampered away, leaving Erik in the kitchen making a face at the first sip of his now-cold coffee. Charles attempted to retreat surreptitiously as well, though wheelchairs weren’t designed with covert getaways in mind. Still, he was more proficient than he had been, was building up calluses on his palms and knocking into doorways less often, and he managed to make it down the hall and into the study in near-silence. Impressive, considering how preoccupied his mind was with replaying the conversation in the kitchen. Erik talking to his students should have been his worst nightmare and instead it was simply…odd.
The children had been as fascinated by Erik as he had been determined to avoid them for weeks now. They had more questions about “Mr. Magneto” than Charles’s impaired memory had answers to—where had he come from, what was he doing here, was he a new teacher, why wasn’t he all dressed up like on TV. Charles had hedged and half-answered until one day Scott had asked him if Mr. Magneto would help them make repairs on the treehouse, and without input from his brain his mouth had answered, “Well, you’ll just have to ask him, won’t you?”
The glare Erik had given him when they met in the library later that evening had said that Scott had done just that, and not only survived to tell Ororo and Jean about it but inspired them to do the same.
“Every time I think they’ve run out of questions they prove me wrong,” Erik had sighed. “They’re certainly yours, Charles.”
“So long as one of us is sure about that,” Charles had said.
That day—and plenty of others since—he had been plagued by self-doubt. The children were so young, so untrained, and even though they had only been at the mansion for two months and objectively he couldn’t have forgotten that much about them, they still felt like inquisitive, demanding strangers. He wasn’t sure what they wanted from him; he wasn’t sure what he had to give them. There did seem to be a school developing against all odds around him, with classes and homework and fixed mealtimes and training periods, but Charles couldn’t pinpoint his part in all of it. The idea of teaching a class himself was overwhelming; doing nothing at all was intolerable. And calling himself the headmaster of a school for mutants when he had no functioning mutation of his own was simply absurd.
Some days were easier. The children were sweet and sensitive and it wasn’t much of a hardship, being asked to read to them or watch them practice their powers. Scott was earnest and still young enough to worship his older brother, Ororo’s fearless energy was often contagious, and Jean was sensitive to his moods in a way that felt considerate, not suffocating. He had a feeling she had been his favorite even if he couldn’t quite remember why.
Still, he could understand Erik’s consternation at being their new favorite plaything.
Erik tried to mitigate the attention, still taking his meals in his room and avoiding the common areas when he could and spending long stretches of time on the edge of the grounds, but it had still become a not entirely-infrequent sight to find him making a sandwich for Scott or watching variety shows with Jean. He answered questions succinctly, asked them politely, never pandered to the children or treated them like anything but miniature adults.
He also wasn’t as subtle as he thought he was.
“Why are you using distancing mechanisms on children?” Charles had asked one day after Ororo had asked Erik for help with her math homework and he had refused, sending her in search of Hank instead, crestfallen. “You like them, I know you do. It’s not a crime.”
Erik, who didn’t seem to understand how deep Charles’s fear of his telepathy ran, had said suspiciously, “How do you know I like them?”
“For God’s sake, I can see it! Especially when you’re trying to pretend you don’t. You get this—look.”
“I get a look,” Erik had repeated flatly. When Charles had ignored the clumsy attempt at deflection and simply kept glaring at him, offended on Ororo’s behalf, Erik had grown somber quickly. “Charles, I think we both know it’s for the best if your students don’t grow too attached to me.”
“Oh,” Charles had said weakly. “You couldn’t have beat around the bush on that one just a little?”
Erik had shaken his head and smiled a little, less an answer to the question and more in gentle judgment of Charles himself, and put him in check for the third time that chess game.
They hadn’t talked about it anymore after that. The past was difficult enough and neither was ready to let go of the present; let the future wait, Charles thought, and Erik seemed to agree in his own way. Every so often he would make a comment about the children or the vegetable garden or future modifications to the house that implied impermanence, like he wouldn’t be there to see it, but the comment never became a conversation. Charles understood intuitively that this was deliberate. Erik was trying to acclimatize him—or both of them, perhaps—to the idea that his departure was inevitable before it became imminent. Each too-casually dropped hint would have prefaced a screaming argument years ago, with Erik accusing him of trying to trap him in a fantasy world and Charles shouting back that warmongering wasn’t the answer either, but recently Erik went out of his way to avoid antagonizing Charles at all.
Perhaps it was just the houseful of children, but he reminded Charles of a little boy ringing a stranger’s doorbell and running away before he had to face consequences. There was something very charming about the idea of a young, mischievous Erik.
“What’s so funny?”
Erik leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, radiating a combination of skepticism and fondness. Charles hadn’t realized he was smiling to himself; now he directed the smile at Erik instead.
“I was imagining you playing ding dong dash,” he said.
Erik looked even more skeptical. “I don’t know what that is, but it sounds…unnecessary.”
“Well, it is, I suppose, but that’s not the point.”
“I’d be very much surprised if there was a point at all,” Erik said absently, his mind clearly on something else. He wandered further into the room, flipped through one of the science journals on a side table with deliberate nonchalance. “You know, if you’re going to spy on me, you might not want to do it while sitting in a chair I can feel from half a mile away.”
Caught, Charles blushed, but made an effort to defend himself anyway. “I wasn’t spying! I overheard the two of you and didn’t want to interrupt. Ororo wanted to talk to you, not me.”
“Yet somehow she ended up talking to both of us, she just doesn’t know it.”
“Are you upset about that, or about the picture?” Charles said, well aware that the question was an underhanded, distinctly immature, and not-very-subtle attempt to deflect the conversation from his own shortcomings to Erik’s. Erik knew it too, from his well-practiced raised eyebrow.
“I’m not exactly…thrilled, about the picture,” he admitted. “It’s flattering, of course, and she’ll make you a fine X-Man one day, but there are…misapprehensions I feel I should correct. Things she doesn’t understand. Oh, you needn’t worry, I won’t interfere—educating students is your job, professor.
“But I do find it…unpleasant, to be monitored. To know that there are eyes on me, tracking my every move. It’s like being back in that plastic box. Do me the favor of trusting me a little, Charles? I think I’ve earned it.”
Erik spoke so carefully these days, with a strange kind of circuitousness like he occasionally got lost in his own sentences, that it took Charles a moment to process the second half of his response and understand the trauma that it revealed. Of course Erik would be sensitive to the fact that he was being watched; his behavior had been constantly, critically scrutinized for ten years, and he had been punished whenever it didn’t meet standards he had never known but which were in all probability entirely arbitrary. There was a reason he spent so much time alone, away from prying eyes, in the open air. His request for a basic modicum of trust was entirely understandable—and impossible to grant.
After all, Charles had trusted Erik twice before, and both times he had been left bleeding in the middle of carnage Erik had created in a barely-thwarted attempt to start a war he couldn’t win. And that had been an Erik whose motivations he understood, no matter how much he disagreed with them; this Erik was unpredictable, prone to more moments of gentleness and vulnerability than Charles had thought him capable of but also given to panic attacks and instability, claustrophobia and new nightmares. And Charles’s captivity had left its own scars—he was more guarded now, less patient, subject to his own mood swings. He couldn’t imagine trusting Erik when he didn’t even trust himself.
So he obfuscated, because the truth was cruel. “I trust you as much as you trust me, my friend.”
Erik’s eyes widened; he could count on one hand the number of times Charles had called him that since his rescue.
“Fancy a game?” he said, instead of pointing out that Charles’s answer wasn’t an answer at all. Shying away from a fight again.
And, again, Charles let it happen.
“Yes, of course,” he said, pushing his chair over to the table while Erik reset the board with a casual wave of his hand.
They played several times a day now, mostly in the evenings after the children had gone to bed but sometimes when there was a lull in the morning or afternoon schedules. Charles enjoyed it more than he had expected to the night Erik had first found the game, dusty and untouched for longer than he could remember. If there was any one object that symbolized the most painful time in his life, aside from his wheelchair, it was that chess set. The sight of it in the study during those hellish years had been a constant, unbearable reminder of everything he had lost, and an echo of that bitterness had made his chest ache distractingly during that first game. Because of it Erik had beaten him badly but Charles had improved after that, to the point that they were evenly matched again.
He was winning this time when, halfway through the game, with no exterior trigger at all, the flashback hit.
There was no time to brace himself. One second his right hand was outstretched to move a bishop; the next it was clenched into a fist, nails biting into his palm, as he thrashed against restraints that were loosened just enough to taunt him with the idea of freedom.
This was familiar. This was real. So uncertain about so many of his memories, he knew that this had happened, was happening, would always be happening. His body hurt. His mind hurt. His entire world was pain in so many different colors and textures he lost count and there were whispers—one outside his head, one inside it, one a memory, a thousand more, and he was reasonably sure a few of those voices were real.
Thinks the only good mutant is a vivisected one.
As if he could ever love anyone more than he hates me.
Inferior American scientists—take off an arm, those useless legs, and see how long his sanity lasts.
Charles screamed until his voice cracked and he choked on his own saliva, a wail that was drowned in the redness behind his eyes. He had been seizing for more than a minute now, he could stop breathing at any second and he would have considered it a blessing, but then another wave crashed over him. Rage, this time, toxic and liberating at once. It wasn’t his—he’d never allowed himself to feel rage like this, clinging white-knuckled to peace because his anger could destroy the world—but he made it his, the way he could make every feeling and every thought in the world his, if he wanted to. He could fit the entirety of humanity into his skull and snuff out lives by town, occupation, religion—in any order or amount he pleased. Perhaps he’d begin with the American and Russian crews who’d fired on the beach during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Surely the world would thank him for ridding the gene pool of such idiocy.
But first he’d start with the shriveling Nazi worm to his left, because he was very tired of this place. The helmets worn by everyone else around him were an inconvenience and for the first time in days he thought of Erik; if only he were here Charles would borrow his power and boil their blood in their veins, pull it out through their pores, explode their hearts, something that would send a suitable message that it was best to treat mutants nicely, in the future. Sadly he had to make do with the one unshielded mind available to him. Charles’s command that the man free himself wasn’t easily obeyed but he was very persuasive, and wrists broke rather easily after all.
Their minds were entangled like vines deep in the jungle now, heavy and wet and improbably strong for all their individual weakness. They were one man in two bodies, and nothing had ever felt more natural than exerting total control over another human being. Charles made a few quick adjustments—silenced vocal chords, cut off his pain receptors before he went into shock and rendered himself useless—and they were in business.
For about thirty seconds. Four, five technicians. Charles wasn’t keeping track but there was quite a lot of blood on both his faces, and at least some of it was his own. He was free now, or free for the second time, and the door was closer now than it had been—and then a flash of new-old pain that he recognized as a gunshot wound and suddenly half his body was a separate body again and there was a dead man lying on the ground next to him.
And Charles was in his study throwing up onto his mother’s Persian rug.
He was also shaking so badly that it was almost like another seizure, or a continuation of that same one, and only Erik’s sudden presence at his side kept him from shaking right out of his wheelchair and on to the ground.
When he blinked the vomit-induced tears out of his eyes and sat up on his own, he heard himself gasping the same words over and over again: “Oh God, oh God, oh God—”
“Charles,” Erik snapped, sharp with fear. “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me what to do.”
“Oh God,” Charles repeated, mindless, teeth chattering, and somewhere sane in the very back of his mind he reflected that he hadn’t seen Erik this scared since the beach. Then, with a gasp like there was a finite amount of oxygen in the world and he wanted all of it, he managed, “There was a man—felt like Shaw, his mind, Erik, and I was in it and I couldn’t get out and I killed him, I was him and I killed him and it was so—”
Another pair of gasping breaths, until the right word came to him.
“—easy. It was so, so easy.”