Erik
Erik knew when he was about to die. Throughout his life there had been several moments, confluences of events, that should have ended him. He recognized that instant when adrenaline became acceptance, when inevitability stronger than himself took over, when he knew that even though it wasn’t in his nature to stop fighting there was no point now. It was the closest thing he could imagine to peace in this life, felt only briefly at its very end. He remembered every time he had closed his eyes never expecting to open them again and chance or luck had intervened, and the flicker of confusion when he realized he got to keep living. Had to keep living. It was a difficult emotion to pinpoint, sometimes.
When Charles choked on air and hunched over himself, nails digging into his temples, Erik closed his eyes again. He had seen flashbacks but never one like this, one that looked like it was actually ripping Charles’s mind apart. If Raven’s hunch had been right and Charles was a bomb just waiting to be triggered, the moments before the end for all of them would probably look like this. And if it hurt them as much as it looked like it was hurting him, they’d all be in agony.
But once again Erik opened his eyes and continued to live.
The sound of Charles vomiting painfully snapped him back to the moment; whatever had happened was over, but he’d not come out of it unscathed. Erik was by his side in seconds and watched, helpless, for a full two minutes as the retching continued before Charles recovered enough to speak. His whole face was wet. Sweat beaded on his forehead, eyes leaking tears, nose running, saliva dripping from his chin—Erik itched to reach out and wipe it all away, to hide some of that evidence of vulnerability from the world because what good was he if he couldn’t protect Charles. Through sheer force of will he held back, unsure how safe it was to touch at all.
Charles was muttering to himself, low and garbled and despairing, still trembling but cognizant enough that Erik hoped he could hear him.
“Charles? Tell me what’s happening, tell me what to do.”
He meant it as a command; it came out like a plea, fragmented and frantic.
On the edge of a sob, Charles gasped, “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—easy, it was so, so easy—”
Erik barely heard a word, after Shaw. Ten years on and that name still had power—to render him silent, ten years old again, paralyzed with fear and anger even though he’d seen the light leave the bastard’s eyes himself as he bored a hole between them. But Charles knew minds and a mind like Shaw’s was out there in the world and his stomach turned thinking of it—
And then the rest of it registered.
Charles had killed a man.
“You didn’t have a choice. They didn’t give you a choice,” Erik said immediately. He had killed lots of men and was inured to it but he remembered his first deliberate kill and he knew the look of nauseated self-hatred on Charles’s face. And that was the normal guilt of taking a man’s life, without the added shock of being in his head while it happened. In the horror of revelation Charles hadn’t been very clear—had he been trapped before or after the death? Because of it or despite it? Did it matter? Erik suspected it didn’t, for the very immediate future. There was a hysteria building behind Charles’s eyes that didn’t bode well for any of them and for the first time Erik wished he had as much of a talent for calming Charles down as he did for aggravating him.
“I need you to take deep breaths, Charles.”
Fuck caution, Erik decided, they were dealing with bigger problems. He put one hand against Charles’s face and ran the fingers of the other through his hair, hoping to ground him with physical contact. It had worked in the past, when he had come out of Cerebro overwhelmed by his powers and barely connected to his body, but this…this was without precedent. He could only hope.
Charles didn’t push him away. He didn’t seem to notice the contact at all. He was shaking his head now. “It was so easy. I never knew it could be so easy.”
“It wasn’t you. You’d been tortured for weeks, you weren’t yourself. The Charles I know would never think killing is easy.”
“Killing?” Charles looked puzzled, like Erik was the one not making sense. His eyes flickered around the study, pupils pinpricks in a sea of blue, and his breathing came harshly and at odd intervals that Erik didn’t like. “I meant controlling someone like that. Making their body my own. Stepping into someone’s skin is like…putting on a new pair of trousers. Nothing simpler. I hadn’t known.”
Erik was trying to remember to breathe himself, to keep his body language relaxed and soothing and not betray how terrified he was. Charles could very well be the most powerful mutant in the world and that was difficult enough to accept when he kept himself leashed by that preposterous moral code. So many times Erik had wished he would bend it, just a little, just enough to help their people, but he had been so foolish. A Charles with no boundaries wasn’t an asset. He was a devil. A Charles who fully embraced his power the way Erik urged all other mutants to could slip from body to body like a wraith and if he saw nothing wrong with it then none of them were safe.
“Listen to me, Charles,” he said firmly. “In all the time I’ve known you you’ve never treated your mutation with anything but care and concern for the people around you. You’ve never seen people as objects. You respect their wishes even when what they ask of you is unfair or impossible.”
“I was—”
“Right,” Erik interrupted. He wasn’t sure he could bear it if Charles agreed with him under these circumstances. If he got everything he’d wanted on that Cuban beach like this, he’d lose Charles just as surely. “You were right. To be careful. Just because something is easy doesn’t make it right.”
“And yet you keep killing.” Charles was eerily calm for a moment. Then the tears spilled over again like they’d never stopped. “Oh, God, Erik, what did I do—”
“Nothing you would have chosen,” Erik repeated, because it was all he could do.
It wasn’t enough. Charles had gone from devastated to rapt and back to devastated and looked ready to ricochet between the two again, with no indication that he was actually processing the trauma of the new memory at all. Much as he hated the idea, Erik knew when he needed reinforcements.
“I’m sorry for this, my friend,” he said, and with a gesture levitated Charles’s chair to hover beside him as he made for the lab downstairs. He didn’t allow himself to run, in case he passed any of the children in the halls, but his strides were long and fast. Charles was in no state to protest; he had swung back to something like catatonia, staring fixedly at nothing while his lips moved soundlessly. By the time Erik was taking the stairs down to the lab two at a time with the wheelchair bobbing after him, Charles was smiling instead, manic with a touch of bewilderment.
Hank saw that smile and burst into action without a single glance at Erik.
“This way,” he said. He led them to a small room behind the infirmary, probably once an office or large storage closet and now outfitted as a small but homey bedroom. The bedframe was a dark wood, the sheets striped white and blue. On the walls were generic posters of Einstein, the Parisian skyline, Hollywood blockbusters from the 1950s. There was also an assortment of medical equipment clustered around the bed, which Hank lifted Charles into like he weighed nothing, positioning his dead legs on the mattress and piling pillows behind his back.
“We’ve found it helpful to have a place to give medical aid that doesn’t look like a hospital or a lab,” Hank explained absently, seeing Erik’s confusion. “Since that’s been the source of the damage, a lot of the time. Helps to have comforting surroundings. What happened?”
“He remembered killing someone,” Erik said bluntly. He gritted his teeth, hoped Charles wouldn’t hear him, but they didn’t have time to tiptoe around the issue. “It must have been the missing page, the last experiment. He took control of someone’s mind and they died. He couldn’t give me the details. He’s not himself.”
Hank nodded, took it all in without looking away from Charles. He took a penlight from the tray on the dresser and spoke clearly, carefully. “Charles? I’m going to take a look at your eyes now. How are you feeling?”
Charles shuddered and winced away from the light; his pupils remained contracted, the blue irises luminescent, almost otherworldly. “Hank? What are you doing here?”
“Where do you think you are, Charles?”
“I’m—I was—” Charles blinked several times, like he was trying to dispel shadows or phantoms that existed only in his field of vision. “I was back there. I was with the General, I was standing up—”
“Was there anyone else there?” Hank asked. Erik hated him for a moment; that he had been the one there when Charles’s telepathy had malfunctioned before, knew the right questions to ask and how to phrase them to get through to Charles even at his most incoherent. He wanted to shove the kid aside and take the seat on the mattress by Charles’s side at least as much as he wanted to get out of the room, the mansion, the country, as if any distance would be great enough to hide him from Charles if he was determined to find him.
“Yes, there was another person,” Charles breathed, like he was remembering it for the first time. Then he went still again, cold and serpentine, smiled like jagged ice. “Well, I say person. Perhaps that’s overly generous. Used to perform unnecessary surgeries on children for the Third Reich, drown kittens as a boy, you know the type. Our old friends the CIA kept him busy after the war doing some very interesting biochemical weapons research. What was his name—something anglicized beyond all recognition. Oh, yes! They called him Vince but he still thought of himself as Wenzeslaus. Can you imagine? Sadly he thought to begin a third career with the Soviets and, well, you know how forgiving the CIA can be, don’t you, Erik?”
Erik had backed up a few steps without meaning to, as if Charles’s words had been a physical force pushing against him, forcing him away. He felt sickened, swallowed heavily, couldn’t find the words to convey any of the emotions tangled and writhing in his stomach.
“They put you in a Nazi’s head?” Hank said, horrified and beginning to comprehend.
“I put myself there,” Charles corrected. “Not on purpose, of course, but the alternative was hardly better. Total telepathic suppression was beginning to…wear on me, you could say.”
“Oh, my God,” Hank said. He sounded shattered.
Charles laughed, an oily slick of darkness underneath the surface delight. “Yes, that’s what I said. Erik doesn’t seem to agree. You don’t believe, do you, Erik?”
“How could I. You know what I’ve seen,” Erik said through numb lips. He wanted to tell Charles to stop. He wanted to cry or run or wrap that IV pole around Charles’s neck and squeeze. Instead he felt frozen, watching this creature with the cold eyes and unnatural composure use that familiar mouth to speak viciously callous words, drops of acid into the part of his mind that still throbbed like an infected wound whenever he remembered his mother’s body hitting the floor, his people taken away and never seen again.
Suddenly he remembered other words, from before when they were in the study. I was in it and I couldn’t get out and I killed him, I was him, Charles had said. Erik wondered if he was speaking to Charles at all, if there hadn’t been some fragment of that other man trapped in his head all this time, like a glass splinter stuck under the skin that throbbed only when direct pressure was applied to it. If it was even possible, it would explain so much—and then he could reassure himself that the vindictive streak that was directed solely at him wasn’t how Charles really felt, deep down.
“Charles, how does your head feel right now?” Hank was asking.
“It—I—oh, like I’m standing at the top of a very, very high building,” Charles said. He was warm and human again and sounded more himself, shaky and unsure but struggling for control despite his own uncertainties. Because if anyone was going to be a fucking martyr, Erik thought, it was Charles Xavier.
“Do you feel any change in your perception of your telepathy? Do you think there may be a chance that it could manifest?”
Now was the time to speak. Erik knew it as certainly as he’d known he ought to run the night he’d spoken with Raven. He needed to pull Hank aside and tell him that it already had, that Charles had been influencing them all this time like a benevolent god but this cold sneering thing was an Old Testament nightmare and he couldn’t be allowed to continue what the real Charles had so innocently begun. This version of Charles hated, and his hate could burn their brains to cinders.
But Charles stared up at Hank like the question was unthinkable and shook his head wildly.
“No, it can’t manifest, it’s too dangerous, I’m too dangerous. I used him and discarded him like he was nothing, Hank, and just because I didn’t shoot him doesn’t mean I didn’t kill him.”
“You didn’t shoot him? But how—?”
“I thought he could help free me—they kill them anyway, the General said, even if I protected them throughout the entire test it wouldn’t matter in the end—and the PCP made me so, so angry. So I took him over as an—escape vehicle, I suppose. He carried me. We didn’t even make it to the door. He was shot and I got out of his head right before he died. I felt it but I didn’t, you see?”
“I see,” Hank echoed automatically, clearly struggling and failing to find his feet in a world where Charles equated a man with a getaway car. “You were experiencing psychosis at the time, though, as a result of exposure to an incredibly unstable narcotic, and your system is clean now. I really don’t think you need to worry about that type of reaction again, professor.”
“Don’t you?” Charles said shakily. Then his eyes went to Erik and his tone changed. Silky, now, as he said it again: “Don’t you?”
Then Charles’s body shimmered and splintered into two bodies, one remaining reclined on the pillows while the other stood up like that wasn’t an impossibility.
“Hello, darling, dearest, liebling,” the second version of Charles purred. The first seemed frozen and so, when Erik allowed his gaze to shift from this new threat for a split second, did Hank. The Charles who could stand swayed forward like he was drunk and unsteady on his feet, though the same motion might have read as seductive if the idea of seduction hadn’t seemed so alien to this moment. Erik kept his expression carefully blank but Charles tilted his head and Erik got the sense that he’d seen past that weak façade and soul-deep with no effort at all. He knew with the same intuitive understanding that he’d been judged, and found wanting.
“Oh, you’re not well, are you, my love,” Charles said.
“Neither are you,” Erik said.
“On the contrary, I’ve never felt more myself. I’ve limited myself so unnecessarily all these years. Remaining trapped in that broken shell when I had access to every other body on the planet—or I could simply bypass the need for one altogether, like this. You couldn’t understand, with your perfectly functional—and frankly very pleasing, aesthetically speaking—physical form. Your mind, though…it’s all cracked, isn’t it. You’re a broken teacup, darling.”
“That’s my concern, not yours.”
Whatever else he was, this Charles at least had the insufferable verbosity of the original, and it calmed Erik enough to stop his own emotional whiplash, unearth a steady thread of irritation from the depths of his fear and confusion.
“Of course it’s my concern. I just want you to be happy. You’ve had so little happiness in your life.”
“Stop it,” Erik hissed.
Charles came forward again, almost within arm’s reach now. “Stop caring for you? Never. I’ll fight you our whole lives and never stop caring for you.”
“Stop saying these things.”
Charles ignored him entirely. “What would it take, darling? To make you happy. To let you rest.”
White walls surrounded him again. He reached out with his metal-sense and there was nothing, just that throbbing pain like a bruise deeper than skin or the itch of a phantom limb. For the first several years he had panicked like every time was the first time, struggling against the total deprivation for even the slightest brush of steel or iron, not caring if his captors saw. The futility had worn on him, the pain becoming so constant he barely noticed it, and he had become obsessed with perfect impassivity, refusing to show a hint of distress or discomfort to the eyes that watched him so relentlessly. He screamed himself hoarse but only in his head. Even his dreams were filled with screams and even as he heard them again Erik couldn’t tell if Charles’s words or Charles himself had triggered this memory.
“Get out of my head,” he said automatically, just in case. “You know what it would take. You’ve always known. Safety for all mutants, not just the lucky few you’re hiding in this school. The respect, the—compliance, of the humans.” And then, because Charles looked like he was listening for once, Erik added the one condition he’d rarely admitted even to himself. “And you, by my side. I still want that. Even though I know it will never happen.”
“Who says it will never happen? Who says anything needs to happen that we don’t want to? Who made that decision?”
Charles looked so confused, so heartbroken, that Erik clenched his fists to keep from punching the expression off his face. He forced back the tears that threatened to form too but allowed a bark of bitter laughter to escape. “You did, Charles. On the beach when you sent me away, when you wouldn’t even ask for my help after I crippled you for life, you made that decision. And I gave up hope long ago that you would ever change your mind.”
“What if I did?” Charles pleaded. “What if I could give you that hope again?”
“I can only hope you’d never be so cruel,” Erik said. “You’d turn your back on me again the moment I took necessary action that conflicted with your pro-human agenda and I don’t know that I could bear losing you a second time.”
“Like I could bear losing you,” Charles said sadly, so close now that even at a whisper his words were perfectly clear. He had always been a few inches shorter than Erik but he seemed almost tall now, after Erik had become used to his height in the wheelchair. He barely had to look down at all to meet those blue eyes, found them warm and welcoming in a way that sent shivers down his spine. It was too like the real Charles. He couldn’t look so like himself and say things like, “All this pro-human nonsense…I’m simply saying genocide would give me an awful headache, darling. Telepath, you remember? The death throes of millions would lay me up for days if it didn’t make me go stark raving mad. Besides, surely we can use some of them. Build our brave new world out of whatever mutants and humans we please.”
Erik’s head thunked lightly against the wall as he ran out of space to back away from Charles’s slow, steady advance. The tremor in his voice would have been undetectable to anyone but the telepath mere inches away.
“You don’t mean that.”
“You’ve never been terribly good at parsing what I mean, love.” Charles smiled, a conspirator’s grin. “How many times did I have to invite you for a drink in my hotel room before you realized that what I really wanted was to tear that stupid turtleneck off you?”
“Too many,” Erik admitted, not quite able to suppress his own small smile in return at the memory of those long evenings spent talking, drawing out the second and third glasses of minibar whiskey until the conversation and alcohol both ran out and there was only an anticipatory, humming silence. Once he had figured it out, it had been its own kind of gratification, savoring that kinetic energy and knowing that what lay on the other side of that potential would be even better. He had said goodnight each time knowing that Charles wanted him to stay, wanting to stay himself, testing both their resolves with the most pleasurable kind of denial he’d known in a life full of it.
Again, he wasn’t sure if that surge of memory came from himself or from Charles. The past merged with the present; Erik opened his eyes to find Charles’s hands at his hips, their bodies slotted together like perfectly-matched puzzle pieces, and with Charles’s face turned into his neck he could feel his lips move with every perfect, poisonous word.
“Let me help you, darling. You don’t know which way is up, do you? You’ve been alone for so long.”
Erik closed his eyes again. It was easier to ignore the brimming tears that way; easier to pretend the strange frozen tableau across the room didn’t exist and Charles’s promises, his unbroken body, and this easy intimacy were the only reality that mattered.
“I can feel how it’s changed you,” Charles murmured. “You’re so close to the edge. One solid push and you’d go flying. You could be a new man, Erik. You could be happy, you could rest.”
Neither man moved, but every muscle in Charles’s embrace went rigid at once. Erik’s breathing, so deliberately calm and steady, hitched. Fear this total didn’t feel like fear at all; it felt like ice, like numbness, like resignation. There was no point in pushing Charles away physically or mentally—a few feet, a few miles, they’d make no difference, and Charles was already so deeply enshrined in his every thought, swimming in his dura matter, stroking telepathic fingers along every nerve ending, that Erik doubted he’d ever truly be out of his head again. He tried to pretend his shudder at that thought was disgust. His face was still pressed into Charles’s hair and he was vaguely aware of the strands shifting with his breaths as he spoke.
“No, Charles. I don’t want that. Are you listening to me? It has to be my choice. You would want it to be my choice.”
“But you make such bad choices, darling,” Charles pouted. A fond smile curled against Erik’s neck, like Charles found this to be an adorable personality quirk, like he wasn’t casually contemplating rewriting an entire human being.
“They’re still my choices,” Erik said. “Don’t take them away, Charles. Please.”
“You’d thank me.”
“I wouldn’t.” Erik willed it to be true. He cast about for a distraction, hoping to derail this dangerous train of thought, even if he had to return to one that was far more painful. “A minute ago you were going to fight with me for the betterment of our people, we were going to build the future, change the world. Let our victory make us new men, together.”
Charles sighed heavily, leaned back just enough to stare at Erik with that same exasperated fondness he remembered from their countless teasing arguments. Not the vicious fights—the simple squabbles with no real stakes. It was a look that implied Erik was an idiot but Charles loved him anyway. “Why must you make everything so difficult? Why can’t we just forget the world and the fight and the future—it’s all so tiresome. You’re the only one I care about, the rest of them are just…noise. Why listen to them at all?”
It sounded so simple, so perfect, when he said it. Suddenly very tired—of their arguments, of being confused, of being so engaged in this mad, toxic world at all—Erik tipped his head forward so that their foreheads rested together and without thinking breathed, “Just because something is easy doesn’t make it right.”
Time, which had been narrowed to the present like nothing had ever mattered but this moment, expanded again at those words—words that sounded familiar because he had said them before, and remembering them he remembered the thought that had accompanied them, about the danger of a Charles with no boundaries.
This, here, was exactly that danger.
“You’re not real,” he said, against all the evidence of his senses. He looked across the room to the form in the bed and Hank standing like a wax statue of himself, not blinking, his breathing barely noticeable. “You’re over there. You have a body, you have people who depend on you, you have a school to run. You can’t walk away from that.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find, darling, that I can do pretty much anything I like,” the image of Charles disagreed. His smile wasn’t friendly now; Erik wondered if phantom fingertips could press hard enough to leave bruises, or if he was only being made to think that nails were digging into his skin. He took a moment to savor the slight pain, to inhale the smell of shampoo and soap that rose off the illusion’s skin, to look deep into eyes that he would never see from this position again. He had to end this before they spiraled even further out of control, though he wasn’t entirely certain if he was acting to stop Charles or to stop himself when he leaned forward and murmured, “So can I,” as he used his powers to grab a syringe filled with sedative and drove it unerringly into the arm of the real Charles on the bed.
The illusion’s face barely had time to twist into a snarl before it vanished into thin air.