Charles
“Oh look, kids, Mr. Magneto’s here to make you breakfast,” Raven sang out cheerfully as they came into the kitchen. Three little heads swiveled in such perfect synchronicity that Charles briefly flashed back to those terrible horror movies Sean had loved, which seemed to over-rely on a preponderance of creepy children. The metal in his wheelchair flinched in sympathy as Erik came to an abrupt stop, uncomfortable at suddenly being the center of attention. Fortunately for him the attention spans in question were perilously short.
“Professor, Mystique burned so much toast,” Scott said with a giggle, like she had been doing it for their amusement and not out of genuine culinary incompetence.
“Yes, she did,” Raven agreed shamelessly as she tipped a full plate of blackened slices into the trash. “Almost had it at the end there, but there’s still some bread left. You want French toast, kids? Or pancakes? Omelets?”
The consensus seemed to be the second option, with Ororo pushing for the addition of chocolate chips. Jean confirmed very seriously that they had maple syrup before agreeing and Scott, who would eat anything, seemed mainly concerned with how long each would take to arrive on the table.
“You heard ‘em. Make the little monsters pancakes,” Raven said to Erik, after she’d given him a hearty clap on the shoulder and Charles a kiss on the cheek in greeting.
Her smile had teeth and a teasing quality that edged toward mockery, not enough to tip off the children that there was tension between the grownups but certainly enough for Erik to get the message. Their new normal was still in flux. Barring catastrophes like the kind that had brought them together, she seemed to tolerate him on a trial basis that left very little room for error. It wasn’t punishment for Paris, or at least not all of it was; more her way of reminding him that the balance of power had shifted. The give and take between them of ten years ago had been reversed and Raven had no desire to go back to following orders. She had come to the mansion when he’d asked her to but by immediately throwing him under the bus in front of the kids made clear that compliance didn’t mean deference. Charles would have called this new vindictive streak of hers passive-aggression if it hadn’t been entirely unapologetic and, in his opinion, completely justified.
Erik was no more annoyed by it than he was by anything these days. He gave her a similar pat on the shoulder and began assembling ingredients by the stove with silent efficiency. While Raven hopped up on the counter to drink her coffee, Charles wheeled over to the kettle, found it still hot, and made himself a cup of tea. No one mentioned why she had come back and she didn’t look at him like he scared her, which Charles appreciated so much he barely restrained himself from breaking the illusion of normalcy by hugging her. The silence could have been awkward if it had settled but instead the air was filled with the babble of the students as they all tried to be the first to tell their professor how Mystique had shown up in the middle of their Saturday morning cartoons.
There was a moment when the three of them in the kitchen with children at the table felt overwhelmingly surreal. It could have been 1962. Erik had done most of the cooking then too, and Raven had preferred to sit on that countertop since she could reach it. But in 1962 she would have been blonde and fake and Erik would have been wound tight with a ferocity he was missing now and Charles would have been standing next to them, instead of sitting in a wheelchair. He sighed and the déjà vu passed. They were all older, even Raven who looked younger, and the children at the tables weren’t their first class. Nothing was the same.
Raven seemed to sense his thoughts better than he sensed hers, these days. Quietly, while the children continued to babble at Erik, she leaned over and whispered, “It feels strange, doesn’t it? Just like the good old days.”
The words were cheerful but there was something sardonic, even hurt, underneath them. Charles had said the wrong thing often enough to know the right thing now.
“For me, perhaps. I had everything I ever wanted and in light of what came after there has been a certain tendency to look on that period with…rose-colored glasses, shall we say.” In her natural form Raven’s body language was impossible to hide, and he could see her discomfort and the beginnings of disdain. “But you were hiding your true self, Hank was consumed with self-hatred, Erik was essentially preparing to commit suicide, I was of no help to any of you—it was hardly the best of times. At least, I should hope we can do better.”
Raven relaxed, smiled a little sadly. “Oh, Charles. You can be such an ass, but sometimes you’re really pretty sweet. You mean well, don’t you?”
“Always.” Though it didn’t absolve him of anything and both knew it.
“I hope we can do better too,” Raven said. The striations of meaning there were too complex to pick up this early in the morning and without his telepathy so Charles simply nodded and dared to squeeze her hand. For a few precious seconds, she let him.
The moment fractured when heavy footsteps thundered down the staircase, a prelude to Alex slouching into the kitchen in pajama bottoms and nothing else with his hair sticking up at every possible angle.
“Cool, pancakes,” he said in the middle of a yawn that distorted the words completely. “Hey, Mystique, you’re back.”
Raven laughed and gestured at his disheveled appearance. Alex had let his hair grow after leaving the military; it was far past regulation and edging into hippie territory now, and his pajamas had belonged to a former student who was twice his size. “You kidding? Eye candy like this waiting for me, how could I stay away?”
Because he was the only one looking, Charles was the only one who saw Erik’s shoulders twitch with poorly-concealed amusement; the eye-roll he had to imagine since Erik’s back was to him, but Charles was certain it occurred. Alex ruffled Scott’s hair on his way to the coffee pot, eyes still only half-open, moving slow enough that Raven had a cup waiting for him by the time he crossed the kitchen. They were at ease with each other in a way Charles hadn’t envisioned. The first time Raven had visited after Alex’s discharge he had expected fireworks, but they seemed to have come to a truce without any help. Alex had greeted her in the foyer with a real smile and brief hug; their whispered conversation, which Charles had eavesdropped on unabashedly, had contained names Charles recognized as members of Alex’s old platoon. They didn’t talk much, weren’t precisely friends, but there was respect and understanding between them. They drank together in the evenings, watched the same late-night variety shows, helped each other train in the gym and Danger Room.
“Your sister did me and my unit a solid in Vietnam,” was all Alex would say about it.
Raven wasn’t much more forthcoming. One night she said, “Alex gets it. He’s a soldier like me. He fought the wrong war at the wrong time once, he won’t do it again.”
All the resentment Alex wasn’t directing at Raven now went to Erik instead, which hadn’t exactly made the past few weeks any easier and certainly negated any hope of all of them eating breakfast together now. The only times Erik stayed for meals when Alex and Hank were present were when he was in a particularly good or particularly awful mood, both of which manifested in the desire to be more of an asshole than usual. Today Erik was thoughtful, withdrawn. He hadn’t said a word about their lucid dream or Charles’s attempt to cut off his telepathy completely, but Charles had opened his eyes that morning to find himself being watched unblinkingly and Erik had reached for his hand and pressed a kiss against his knuckles before leaving for his morning run. Something in his shoulders had relaxed when he’d seen Raven in the kitchen even though he’d yet to say a word to her.
In fact he barely said a word to anyone beyond enlisting the children to help put drinks and toppings and utensils on the table again. While Alex and Raven traded small talk about the kids, the house, Hank’s continued habit of falling asleep in the lab, Erik mixed the batter and flipped the pancakes before dividing them evenly onto six plates and levitating four to the table. The other two he held out to Charles and Raven.
“Let’s eat outside,” he said, pouring coffee for himself. Charles’s mug bobbed away from his lips just as he was about to take a sip of tea and he regretted—not for the first time—allowing Erik to wrap paper clips around all the cutlery. Similar hostage situations had occurred before.
“Sir yes sir,” Raven muttered under her breath as they followed him out to the veranda. The sun was only just above the treeline and the air was already warm. It would be a hot day. The children would spend the morning shrieking and running about the grounds and the afternoon flopped on couches in front of the television. Ororo might take it into her head to create a breeze, though her control was improving and she hadn’t used her powers subconsciously in at least a week. Erik put Charles’s tea down on the table and they sat in their usual way.
“You don’t look surprised to see me, brother dearest,” Raven said. “Did he tell you?”
Charles blushed and took a fortifying bite of breakfast while Erik, predictably, left him to twist in the wind. “Erm, not exactly. I happened to be nearby and…overheard part of the call. Accidentally.”
“Tell her what else you got up to last night, after that,” Erik said helpfully.
“Do I want to know?” Raven asked, at the same time that Charles blurted, “I really don’t think that’s relevant.”
“He tried to cut off his telepathy entirely,” Erik said, entirely unfazed by Charles’s most forbidding glare.
“Fuck you too, my friend,” Charles said. “Bring your foot a little closer, I’d like to run over it.”
“Just making sure we’re all on the same page,” Erik said mildly, though his tone was undercut by the grin that showed every one of his teeth and made it clear that for all his apparent tranquility that morning he still had—well, opinions would be putting it mildly—about the past few nights.
“He’s being overly dramatic,” Charles told Raven.
“I’m really not.”
“Jesus, what are you two, twelve?” Raven snapped. “I leave you alone for a week, I’m surprised you haven’t burned the place down yet.”
Hers was that anger that masked fear. It burned bright and quick because there was no real heat to it. Even without telepathy, Charles still had empathy; he could imagine her confusion, the alarm when Erik had demanded that she come back at once, when every report she’d heard until then had emphasized how well he was doing. To come back unsure of what kind of catastrophe she was walking into and find everything as it was—normal for their given definition of it—of course she was uncertain, and her uncertainty manifested as frustration. He felt chastened. He looked at Erik and saw that blankness on his face that indicated a similar thought process.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “It’s been a busy few days, we’re all—overexcited.”
Raven nodded. “So tell me what’s going on.”
There were no words for some of it, but Charles tried. Raven didn’t know about the flashback so he began there, two nights ago when they’d played chess in the library. It was the first time that he spoke of the killing as something he had done and not simply something he remembered. Memory put a shield between him and his actions, made them distant and dreamlike. He couldn’t succumb to the temptation to think of that Charles as anyone but himself, he had to deal in reality, come at it like a scientist. Quantifying the trauma helped in a strange way—the PCP had triggered chemical, physiological side effects that manifested as rage and euphoria exactly as the General had said they would. He described them: the break that had occurred when that other mind subsumed him, how his shields had failed. He said nothing about canaries or how taking that man’s body for his own had felt more natural than breathing at that point, with the damage to his ribs. Deliberately avoiding moral implications, he said nothing about how right it had felt, only that it had been easy. Raven’s eyes went to Erik then.
“And then?” she said.
Charles looked to Erik too. He was on shakier ground now. “There are gaps after that. Shock of some kind. Erik got me to Hank but at some point I lost control of my telepathy and created a projection of myself that threatened him.”
“So far as threats go I’ve had worse than the threat of eternal happiness,” Erik said. Seeing Raven’s confusion, he explained, “Charles—the projection of Charles—seemed to think that imprisonment had affected my mental state. He offered to finish what the humans started. Wipe the slate clean, as it were.”
“Total annihilation,” Raven translated. She turned to Charles, in awe. “Could you have done it? Wiped not just his memory but his whole personality? Could you have changed him like that, permanently?”
Charles didn’t like the question and he liked the answer even less. Raven and Erik were the two people in the world most likely to catch him in a lie and the two he felt guiltiest for lying to, and that left no recourse but the uncomfortable truth. “Obviously I’ve never tested it but…yes. Well, sort of. If I was projecting myself as well, I could but not without causing great damage. He would be a true blank slate. Nothing left. If I wasn’t expending focus on a projection, with my full power, I could do a great deal more. So long as it was there to begin with—an emotion, a thought, an inclination—I could suppress or enhance it however much I wanted to.”
“Would he know?”
Charles shook his head silently.
“Would you?” Erik asked. There was something strange and speculative about him now, a thought process unwinding beneath his carefully blank expression.
Charles kept his silence out of that old pagan conviction that speaking something made it real. If he didn’t admit the truth it didn’t exist; the logic was simple. Erik had his answer in that silence.
“You wouldn’t. If it happened again, a break or loss of control like that, you could take away everything I am and neither of us would ever know.”
Charles couldn’t bear to look at either of them. That Erik sounded somewhere between rueful and impressed was no comfort—he had always appreciated mutations at their most dangerous and his fascination with telepathy in particular was both morbid and masochistic in ways Charles felt unprepared to think about too closely just now. Raven’s silence was ominous too. Charles wondered if he had frightened her, if her silence hid churning thoughts of escape. He tried to defend himself. “Which is exactly why I raised my shields last night, and why I still think I should try again.”
“Don’t try to make it sound reasonable,” Erik snapped. “You tried to cut off your mutation. You could have done yourself irreparable damage.”
“Name my other choices, please,” Charles said with forced calm.
“You already did,” Erik said. “Do you remember? Before you gave serious thought to a non-consensual telepathic lobotomy, you made another offer.”
That need to devour, a hunger to be sated at any price—he felt it again in flashes, not a memory he would have trusted without Erik’s confirmation. Some were like that, memories indistinguishable from dreams. Last night, the night before, his weeks of captivity; they were clearer but clearer wasn’t clarity. He tried to go back, before that image of Erik pressed against the wall. He saw Erik standing tall and proud but wavering, his jaw clenched in that way that meant he was holding back tears. To hear the precise words he’d dreamed of in all his wildest fantasies…for Charles to ask the questions Erik had asked himself a thousand times over…even if the projection had given him a chance to respond, Erik wouldn’t have known what to say.
I’m simply saying genocide would give me an awful headache, darling.
There was ice in Charles’s veins, frozen fingers squeezing his heart. An entire day Erik had spent thinking about this and Charles knew how his mind worked, he knew how obsessively Erik could fixate on a single idea.
“Erik, no,” Charles said.
Erik knelt beside the wheelchair, open and earnest, unstoppable. “You said you could give me hope, that we could achieve safety for all mutants, the compliance of the humans, and that we could do it together. You said your pro-human agenda was nonsense and nothing needed to happen that we didn’t want to. You changed your mind.”
“I didn’t,” Charles protested weakly.
“You did,” Raven said. It was half a question, half a rebuke. She didn’t know what they were talking about, but she knew when he was lying. He looked to her for help and found none; her surprise was overpowering, her eyes flicking between him and Erik as if unsure who to believe.
“I wasn’t myself,” he tried instead. “The projection said things I never would—I’d never change your mind without your consent, Erik, you know that, and I’d never turn my back on—”
“That’s not the point,” Erik interrupted. He was still on his knees, still gripping Charles’s hand between both of his own like he could tether them together in this moment for as long as it took to make Charles understand. “I already told you, it doesn’t matter what you could have done. You didn’t. But don’t you see, Charles? It goes both ways. You couldn’t manipulate a thought or feeling that wasn’t already present in me on some level and your projection, whatever its origin, wouldn’t have made an offer it didn’t have the power and desire to see through. That means that there is a part of you that thinks I’m right. You agree that we would be better off without the humans.”
Erik at his most evangelical was equal parts mesmerizing and unbearable. Charles wasn’t sure which he hated more, the overbearing certainty in Erik or the whisper of uncertainty in himself, the slightest sigh of suspicion that Erik was right. After Cuba, after Washington, after what they’d done to Erik in prison and to him in the lab, what rational person would believe peaceful co-existence was possible? He could end the war before it began, make the world safe for his students. Didn’t he owe them that? No deaths, no bloodshed, just the slightest increase or decrease in beliefs that already existed in the hearts of world leaders and people in positions of power. Persecution of mutants and Erik’s crusade, both halted at once. He remembered again how easily he’d taken over the Nazi’s mind and body, wondered how changing a few dozen minds would compare. He imagined pressing down the keys on a well-loved piano, how the lightest touch in the right places at the right times produced a beautiful symphony.
“Charles,” Erik said gently. Charles felt tears on his face and tremors in his fingers and Erik was looking at him like he was the most fragile, perfect thing in the world, and Charles hated him more in that moment than he had in years.
“You’re wrong,” he hissed, pulling away. “You’re wrong about this and you’re wrong that we’d be better off without the humans. Just drop it, leave it, please—”
Erik became conciliatory quickly, sensing that he’d cornered something reckless and dangerous. “I’m not asking you to join the Brotherhood, Charles. I’m not asking you to do anything. Just think about what it is you really want, even if it’s more comfortable to pretend you don’t. Be honest about how far you’re willing to go for our people. Nothing that projection said was a lie, was it?”
Charles ignored the question. He wasn’t sure he could stomach the answer. “If you’ll recall, the last time people wanted me to help them using my telepathy it went rather catastrophically so appealing to my status as a mutant whose powers can be weaponized is not the smartest or safest route.”
“Charles, that’s not fair,” Raven said, voice soft with rebuke.
At the same time Erik jerked back like Charles’s nearness suddenly caused him pain. “That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I simply asked you to consider that we might not have to wait fifty years to work together if you would only admit that there is a part of you that believes as I do. Is that really so difficult?”
Once Erik would have flown into a rage by now; instead he sounded bewildered. Charles wondered if that was what he was hoping for, if he was deliberately goading Erik into anger because it was more familiar and more bearable than this gentle attempt at persuasion with its undertones of hope and longing. It was such a simple thing Erik was asking for, on the surface. Such a small concession to make. The trouble was that Erik had never been satisfied with one small concession. He dealt in totalities and if Charles gave ground here he would keep giving it and Erik would keep pushing, asking more and more of him, until he asked for something unforgiveable. He wanted Charles at his side or entirely out of the way, no half-measures, no toothless alliances. Charles knew suddenly that he was on the verge of a moment of weakness with irrevocable results and if he stayed here much longer Erik’s pleas would win him over. He would make that first concession willingly. A frisson of fear ran through him at the thought.
“I need to talk to Hank,” Charles said, after clearing his throat to make sure his voice was steady. “If you’ll excuse me—”
Erik clenched his fists where they rested on his thighs and his eyes flashed but he said nothing. It was Raven who stopped him.
“We’re not done here. All this unfinished business aside,” she said, gesturing between the two of them, “there is still the matter of regaining a measure of control over your telepathy. At the very least enough control so that you can practice using it without worrying about knocking out everyone in a five-mile radius. I think I know someone who can help.”
“Another mutant?” Erik guessed.
“No one you haven’t met before,” Raven said. Her smile was genuine, her happiness jarring against the tension that still hung over them. “The Brotherhood got new intel recently, tangentially related to the reason I had to run the other week, about a black ops site in Nevada running experiments on mutants. Including a telepath with a secondary mutation that turns her body into diamond. Sound like anyone we know?”
“Emma fucking Frost,” Erik said.