Erik (2)
They went down to the lab together. Emma set the pace with every bit of her old imperiousness, sure in her steps though they came not with the click of high heels but the thunk of heavy-duty work boots stolen somewhere between Nevada and New York. But that pace was slow and Erik didn’t miss that she had one hand clenched on the back of Charles’s wheelchair. She had refused to answer any questions until the others were present, saying she was too tired to tell the same story three times over and they hadn’t the time for such redundancy in any case.
“Including laser boy babysitting out back,” she added. “Your students are safer inside anyway. For now, at least. Go get him and meet us downstairs.”
“Can’t you just ask him—” Erik began, gesturing at his temple the way he had picked up from Charles to imply the use of telepathy. He had forgotten that Emma’s glares justified her surname as much as her secondary mutation. Even weakened as she was now, when her blue eyes narrowed and glinted like shards of ice he figured the sentence best left unfinished.
“Telepathically I’m a little burned out at present,” she said. “It took the ‘help’ of a few dozen security guards, soldiers, truck drivers, flight attendants, and random strangers to get me across the country and I’m not about to spend the ashes I’ve got left on a message you could probably send yourself if you shouted loud enough.” When he remained stubbornly rooted in place she sighed, softened a little. “It’s safe to leave your boyfriend alone with me for five seconds—I couldn’t hurt him if I wanted to.”
“Go, darling,” Charles said gently, squeezing his hand and looking up at him with that entirely trusting expression that made Erik want to wrap him in blankets and hide the both of them away behind metal walls in some far corner of the world. Now that it was too late that wanting filled him more than ever. Erik had never allowed himself much hope for the future; when he had pictured it on his most optimistic days since Charles’s rescue, his best-case scenario was a seamless continuation of the present. He knew their equilibrium was unsustainable. He knew there was something monstrous about wishing for Charles’s recovery to take even longer, to postpone the moment when he wasn’t needed anymore. He knew Charles was bewitching them all in this strange liminal place set aside from the horrors of the real world sure as any creature out of teutonic legend—and not only knew it but accepted it, even embraced it as had once been his worst fear. On mornings when he woke with Charles in his arms it sometimes took him entire minutes to remember why he had been afraid, why this was wrong, why it could never last.
Emma’s arrival upset the equilibrium. She was reality intruding upon them, with her powers crippled from overuse and the signs of her captivity clear in the new lines on her face, her weight loss, her blonde hair lank and heavy with grease. He’d never seen her nails unmanicured before.
“Don’t worry, sugar, I’m sure we’ll find something to talk about while you’re gone,” she said with a shadow of her old sneer.
“Fine. Wait for us here,” he said. Exerting some small amount of control over the situation was like dangling over a cliff by a single finger, but it was better than nothing.
He left them in the hallway and walked as quickly as he could without running through the mansion and then out the back entrance onto the grounds. Ororo had rejoined Jean and Scott and the three of them barreled around the yard in an increasingly-violent game of tag. She’d apparently said nothing of their new visitor to Alex, who would surely have curtailed playtime already instead of remaining sprawled in the shade with one eye on the kids and the other on a comic book from the collection he’d inherited from Sean. He looked up as Erik came closer, then threw the comic book aside and crossed his arms over his chest.
“What d’you want, Magneto?”
“Get them inside and come with me,” Erik said, careful not to be overheard. When Alex’s jaw began to set stubbornly, he neatly sidestepped an argument about authority: “Professor’s orders.”
The boy Erik had helped train in 1962 would have argued anyway; since then Alex had learned to assess a threat before he attacked it. He analyzed tone and body language instinctively, sized up every stranger as a possible enemy, had the heightened caution of a soldier accustomed to surprise attacks. When he sulked there was something performative about it now. His distrust for Erik was as open and honest as his devotion to the school was total. Hearing that the command came from Charles and seeing the cracks in Erik’s usual stoicism was enough for him to get the measure of the situation and then he moved quickly, calling to the children in a voice that was calm but brooked no argument. His easy amble as they followed the kids back to the house didn’t match the sharpness in the gaze he turned on Erik. It fell on him like a floodlight, impossible to escape or ignore.
“We’ve received an unexpected visit from an unexpectedly alive Emma Frost,” Erik said in answer to the unasked question. “She escaped a facility in Nevada. Apparently we’re to expect visitors of a distinctly more threatening kind as well.”
Alex processed that with rather more aplomb than Erik had expected. Then, suspiciously: “Is she here to warn us about them or lead them to us?”
“Settle your students quickly and ask her yourself. She and Charles are waiting for us.”
“Why the hell would you leave her alone with Charles?” Alex hissed. His calm exterior slipped for a moment, revealing someone younger and more anxious—a ghost of the boy who had languished, angry and forgotten by the world, in a prison cell until Charles Xavier had appeared from nowhere and given all the things society had denied him—a second chance, forgiveness, happiness, a family—like they weren’t rare and precious gifts. Alex had nothing to give back except his loyalty and protection and they had been Charles’s from the beginning. Threats to Charles could now be met by a grown man with the skill-set of a professional soldier and a perfectly-controlled mutation, but they registered first with the frightened boy he had been.
Too anxious to wait for an answer, Alex herded the children into the sitting room and switched on the TV to NBC, promised them ice cream later if they watched The Hollywood Squares and Jeopardy in perfect silence for the next hour. Erik tired of waiting after five seconds and went back to the hallway where he’d left Emma and Charles.
It wasn’t really a surprise to find them gone. Charles never stayed put; the moment Erik left him to his own devices for ten seconds he decided he desperately needed a cup of tea or an obscure scientific journal or to check on the children. Erik had lost track of him enough times in recent weeks that the instinctive panic response had devolved to fond frustration but the presence of Emma Frost changed everything. He flung out his powers and found the wheelchair downstairs, the metal still body-warm and unchanged in any way.
“Come on,” he threw over his shoulder to Alex, who had finally caught up. “They’re in the lab. Probably making stupid decisions as we speak.”
For once he was glad to be wrong. No strategy session was yet in progress. Charles and Hank were on one side of the room and Raven and Emma were on the other. Their red and blonde heads were tipped close together and Raven had her blue hands fisted in the lapels of the white denim jacket like she expected Emma to be physically torn away from her again. There was something close to an actual emotion on Emma’s face—the hint of a smile and a brightness in her eyes that was all too human to be diamond.
“I’m sorry, Em,” he overheard Raven saying in a hoarse whisper. “I should have come for you sooner, I shouldn’t have believed the reports—”
Erik hadn’t been aware it was possible to sympathetically roll one’s eyes, but Emma managed it. “It’s not your fault, honey. This outfit was so deep underground only a handful of people in Washington even knew it existed. If it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine, for making it nearly impossible to find me.”
“What does that mean, it’s your fault?”
Alex’s voice cut across the room, echoing too loudly off the metal walls and sharp with hostility. With Erik distracted by the sight of his old second-in-command embracing a former ally he’d long thought dead, Alex had beaten him to Charles’s side this time and anchored himself there, glaring protectively. Alex on one side, Hank on the other—Charles flanked by his own lieutenants. Emma and Raven stood together, no doubts there. How easily the lines had been drawn once reality intruded on them once again…
Only Erik seemed unsure of his place. Halfway between the two he backed away from both instead, leaning against the wall and feigning nonchalance, stone-faced, with his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking.
“Don’t be an asshole, Alex,” Raven snapped.
“It’s okay. I promised them some answers,” Emma said in a soothing undertone. Her eyes swept the room; she became brisk, businesslike, speaking to all of them now. “I found a…loophole, you could call it, in their defenses against me. They kept me in a cell lined with some material that my telepathy couldn’t penetrate, but it was only partly effective when the door opened. My powers weakened over time so I couldn’t convince them to let me go but I could make them forget what they were doing there. A kind of invisibility. Guards brought meals and walked away not knowing how they got to that part of the facility. Again and again, every day. Didn’t get much sleep—couldn’t miss a visitor, see—but it worked. I became a completely unnoticed cog in their machine.”
“And the unit was so secretive and self-contained that no higher-ups ever came looking for results or information about you,” Raven said, understanding how such facilities worked better than any of them.
“No rescue teams, either,” Emma said. “And that was that, until a few days ago.”
Erik felt there should have been a pause then. Some moment of silent commiseration for Emma’s ordeal. Loyalties aside, surely they could at least agree that no mutant should be forced to choose between years of invisibility or years of torture. Erik had been imprisoned for longer, experimented upon, treated like he was less than human instead of more than, but at least he’d had some interaction with his captors. Sometimes it was only juxtaposed against them that he retained any sense of self at all: he hadn’t always known who he was but he’d never forgotten who he wasn’t. The only thing he could think of that was worse than being watched all the time was never being seen at all. Emma hadn’t been cut off from her mutation and he envied her that, but she’d been unable to fight back, forced into a kind of non-being that was its own kind of torture. It would have been inhumane if it wasn’t so predictably human.
He and Charles met each other’s eyes across the room, and Erik could see the same thought process unfold in him as well. There was a flash of sympathy across his face and then that biting of the lower lip that meant Charles had come to a conclusion he didn’t like but couldn’t refute. Erik knew what it was because he’d done the same—whatever sympathy Emma deserved, they hadn’t time to give it to her. They had press on and if they got lucky—very lucky, Erik intuited—there would be a moment of quiet to give her the credit she was due.
But it couldn’t be now.
“What upset the status quo?” Charles asked.
“I’m guessing you did, sugar,” Emma said. “They weren’t very chatty, the people who took me. Maybe it was the same group that snatched you up, maybe all telepath-kidnapping black ops units have a newsletter or a crisis hotline. All I know for sure is that last week the guards stopped coming. No visitors at all for a day or two. Then, right before I died of boredom, this new outfit bursts in, at least a dozen of them. It was more than I could handle at once. I couldn’t make them forget and even if I could have it was obvious someone higher up now had a vested interested in me.” She paused, the kind of silence that felt like another person in the room, and her eyes went to Charles. “Military, I think. They mentioned a general.”
No one missed Charles’s slight flinch or reacted to it. His voice was perfectly steady when he said, “Was he there?”
Emma shrugged. “If he was I didn’t see him. But I didn’t exactly stick around to ask.”
“How’d you make it out, if you couldn’t make them forget?” Raven asked.
“Calculated risk. Poorly calculated, I’ll admit,” Emma said. “I’m bullet-proof when I want to be and even though I couldn’t make them forget I existed I could make myself invisible long enough to get out the door. I hoped that for once bureaucratic ineptitude would be good for something and I was right. No one seemed to know who was in charge, security protocols were shot, there were too many guns and not enough helmets. By the time they initiated lockdown and organized search parties to find me I was on my way off-base in the back of an empty convoy vehicle.”
Proving there was a first time for everything, Alex did exactly as Erik had told him to. “How do you know you weren’t followed, or that they let you escape on purpose so you could lead them right to us?”
“Telepath,” Emma said, pointedly enough that none of her facetious endearments were necessary. “I checked, and I wasn’t exactly gentle. The ones who only had splitting migraines were lucky. But it doesn’t matter—they were going to come for you whether or not I cooperated. Someone wants you back badly, Charles.”
“They can’t have him,” Hank said firmly. Perhaps it was the location—he’d always been more confident in the lab—or the implication that the school he’d helped rebuild was in danger of failing again or the direct threat to Charles, but he seemed entirely at ease in his Beast form and barely fazed by Emma’s message. Erik had seen him like this on the nights he had come down to find Charles and discovered the two of them in the middle of untangling some problem with the technical specifications of Cerebro or the new Blackbird. Hank accumulated data and developed a strategy from there, which was one step further than Erik usually took himself. He also had a tendency to tap his pencil against the table while he was thinking; now he did it with a blue claw. “I’m assuming we don’t have a lot of time.”
“Enough to take your students and run, if you go now. I came as fast I could but they won’t have to hitchhike or hope the next flight to Dallas is on schedule.”
“We have no intention of running. We’re perfectly capable of defending ourselves against whatever weapons they mistakenly believe can stop us,” Erik said, because Charles’s couldn’t seem to find words and the look on his face was one of utter devastation.
It seemed natural to speak for them all. He’d seen the care Alex took to keep the children both safe and entertained during training, he knew how much time and effort Hank had put into his research and prototypes; Ororo’s happiness at using her powers freely had only just overcome her homesickness, and Scott and Jean felt more comfortable here than they ever had with parents and foster families who feared them. The school and the mansion were inextricable from each other and inextricable from both was the future of these young mutants—and all young mutants, if Charles could only regain his powers and reach them. He’d have no chance of either if they ran. Cerebro would be destroyed, Hank would lose all his work.
In the end it was very simple. The mansion was a sanctuary and sanctuaries had to be protected.
“Alex and I will handle as much as we can when they’re in range, Raven and Hank will take the Blackbird. You and Charles and the students will be safe in the bunkers,” he added.
Emma was glaring at him like he’d missed the point entirely. “They have numbers and they have speed and they’re ready for you, Magneto. Plastic and ceramic, glass, nylon, wherever they can use it. You didn’t exactly leave much to the imagination about what you can and can’t do when you wrecked the facility you found him in. They’ve gotten creative because of you.”
“And I’ll thank you not to relegate me to my own bunker, please,” Charles put in shortly.
Erik gave in to the urge to pace a tight circuit back and forth between the two groups; the movement helped expend some of the nervous energy that might otherwise have leaked out into the surrounding metal and damaged delicate instruments. He could hear little hitches in his breathing and there was a strange twisted sensation near his solar plexus, like he’d been punched there. After a moment he recognized it as surprise. He’d allowed himself to relax under the guise of recovery for so long that he was taken aback by an entirely predictable turn of events. Of course the humans would come for them; of course the kind of monsters who’d tortured Charles so methodically wouldn’t let him go so easily. Tearing a single facility to the ground was like chopping the tail off a lizard—given time there would be another, different in detail but serving the same function—and he had drilled that lesson into Raven’s head too many times to have forgotten it so quickly himself. Perhaps he’d not been so immune to Charles’s subconscious manipulation after all or perhaps the weakness was entirely his own—it made no difference when he’d wasted an unconscionable amount of time playing house instead of preparing to meet the enemy. Charles made him shortsighted, willing to exist in the moment instead of widening his gaze toward the future. He’d forgotten that too.
Erik always had lashed out when he felt cornered. He turned to Charles. The nastiness of the words tasted sour in his throat, like sickness.
“You agree with Emma, is that it? After all they did to you? You’re given the chance to strike back, to return to them one small part of the pain they inflicted on you, and you’d rather flee than take it.”
“Jesus, Erik—”
“Charles can answer for himself, Mystique,” Erik interrupted without looking at her.
Actually there seemed to be a chance that Charles couldn’t. Erik wondered what expression was on his face that made Charles stare at him like that, with such a mixture of shock and sadness and disappointment that made something inside Erik tremble and quake like a building built on a faultline. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who had allowed himself to be surprised by the obvious.
Everyone and everything else had faded and become unimportant; it was only the two of them now, the way it was only ever the two of them in moments like this.
“Nothing has changed, Charles,” he said quietly. “It never will.”
“You certainly haven’t,” Charles said.
The self-loathing that filled him burst forth as bitter laughter. Erik crossed the room in slow, predatory strides, the way the projection had an eternal two days ago, until Charles was forced to tilt his head back or break eye contact. He wanted to say hope hurts, doesn’t it? but sensed it would be counterproductive to the plan forming in the back of his mind, still so amorphous that he didn’t dare dwell on it for fear of it dissipating into nothing. Instead he said, “Save your lectures, professor. How much time you think we have? Minutes, hours, an entire day? How far could you and your children run before they arrive, burn this place to the ground, and begin the hunt again?”
“Do you have anything to contribute besides rhetorical questions?” Charles snapped.
Erik recognized the irritation as a weak deflection of fear and went for the low blow without hesitation. “If you want the Xavier Institute to exist past tomorrow, if you want Jean and Scott and Ororo to have a home past tomorrow, you must be willing to defend it and them. The way you couldn’t—or wouldn’t—the first time you opened your school. What you do here is crucial for the future of mutantkind, Charles. Young mutants the world over need to know there is a place they can escape oppression, grow up in an atmosphere of acceptance where their powers are celebrated. They need hope. That’s what this place is, a symbol of hope, and it must stand strong.”
“I thought we were cowards hiding away from the world, refusing to help our own people,” Charles said snidely, but his derision was undermined by the quiver in his voice as the words hit home. Erik pressed his advantage.
“I was wrong about that. When they’re older let them choose for themselves, but the front lines are no place for a ten-year-old. The humans are the ones who’ve brought the fight to your children, not me. Send them away with Emma if you’d rather but the rest of us will remain here and show them that we’re not vermin to be eradicated.”
For the second time that morning Charles was prevented from responding by the sudden arrival of students—all three of them this time, with Jean clutching Scott’s hand on one side and Ororo’s on the other and looking more shaken than they’d ever seen her.
“There are bad people coming.” Jean sounded closer to tears with every word and her face was wet by the time she finished. “I can feel them, they’re thinking about us and how they want to hurt us. There are so many of them and they’re coming so fast. They’ll be here by lunchtime, what are we supposed to do?”