Erik (3)
The children weren’t crying anymore, which meant someone must have seen to them. Taken them aside, said the right comforting things—the grownups are talking, it’ll be alright, kids, just sit tight in this corner and we’ll explain everything soon. It was probably Alex, who the children thought was cool because he was Scott’s big brother and were in awe of because his mutation was flashy and destructive. They didn’t understand how real power worked, how it was hardly ever flashy. Flash was a distraction, a ploy to gain time at best, and it was far too late for that now. They were out of time—had been for days, really, without knowing it. They needed real power.
Erik wasn’t seeing the room. His eyes were open but in front of them was that haze that came when he went deep inside himself. In the white room it had been a blessing that he could only calm his mind at the expense of his place in the real world. He had passed entire days that way, floating on subconscious waves of memory and fantasy, making his thoughts deep and still, allowing new realizations and epiphanies to bubble to the top of his awareness. Clarity came then that he could never have experienced while distracted by his body—a useless thing that felt hunger, claustrophobia, the adrenaline rushes that made him dizzy and breathless, and always, always reached out for a sense that wasn’t there and ached in its absence.
Embodiment had been one of the hardest parts of his identity to recapture, after his rescue. Certainly the strangest.
Now he set it aside again. The plan that had begun to form during his argument with Charles before the children arrived was rising slowly into conscious thought, unfurling like the petals of a flower in swamp water. Nature gave way before necessity in allowing it to thrive.
The pieces came disjointed as his thoughts at first.
The humans had expected him to be here, they were ready for him with an arsenal that far exceeded plastic guns and ceramic bullets. No armed forces could function entirely without metal—even if it was only miniscule components of helicopters, transport vehicles, communications devices—but his fine control still wasn’t what it had been. Could he grasp a handful of wires miles away and use them to destroy an entire army?
Jean had sensed their minds before he sensed their equipment. Did that mean a surfeit of minds or a deficit of metal?
If she could feel them they weren’t wearing helmets. That seemed suicidal but then again they couldn’t have expected Emma or Jean and last they’d heard of Charles he was powerless and close to catatonic. That left Magneto the greatest threat. And with Emma burned out, Jean an untrained child, and Charles unstable, perhaps the humans had come to right conclusion even with the wrong information.
More pieces fell into place. The Blackbird needed two to fly it. It would have to be Hank and Raven. They were short-range fighters and if they waited until the enemy was that close to engage they might as well stand still and present their throats for slitting. Alex’s force and blast radius had both increased exponentially since Erik had last seen him; there might be a weapon of substance under that flashiness after all. And even if Erik couldn’t use the enemy’s own weapons against them he had every piece of metal in the mansion at his disposal, and he was reasonably sure Charles would rather lose his collection of antique cars than his life.
If the worst happened, if they couldn’t hold the mansion, the children wouldn’t be safe in the bunkers. Emma was right—they needed to run now and hope the humans didn’t comb the wreckage of the mansion for bodies. Erik would pull the place down on his own head if it gave Charles more time to escape; he wouldn’t survive captivity a second time.
The grounds were level and trimmed but the wheelchair would become a problem when they hit the woods at the property’s edge where Charles would be trapped at worst, a terrible hindrance at best. At full strength in her diamond form Emma could have carried him effortlessly but she was exhausted herself, possibly not even capable of shifting forms at all. Her physical strength was at a low ebb and her telepathic strength good for a few messages passed mind to mind and not much else.
“I never knew it could be so easy,” Charles had said in the library two nights ago, still half-trapped in the memory of taking over another man’s body. “Stepping into someone’s skin is like…putting on a new pair of trousers. Nothing simpler. I hadn’t known.”
Erik was beginning to see the outline of the whole now. Emma and Charles each had what the other needed: Charles had full energy and power, Emma had a secondary mutation that gave her immense fortitude and strength. And they were both telepaths, the only two of all of them who had direct access to each other’s minds and by extension bodies.
“Use her, Charles,” he said, interrupting someone else if the glares sent his way were anything to go by.
“Pardon me?” Charles said, in that tone that Erik knew meant he needed to rephrase quickly or the conversation was over before it began.
“Work with Emma. One unit in two bodies, like you said. She’ll give you mobility if you give her the strength and guide her movements. It’s the only way the two of you and the children will make it out of here alive.”
“You’re mad,” Charles said flatly.
Erik shook his head with impatience, not denial. “We can talk about that later. Right now you need to go.”
“I can’t decide which of your assumptions is more absurd, that you think I’ll leave you here to fight an army on your own or that you think I’ll use my powers in that way ever again.”
“Use your powers in what way?” Emma said warily.
Before Erik or Charles could deliver what would undoubtedly have been a slightly biased version of events, Raven tapped her temple and said, “Catch, Em.”
From the way Emma winced and then hissed a little, Raven had bundled up her relevant memories and thrown them into Emma’s mind, straining her already-exhausted telepathy. It was faster, simpler, and Raven always had had less trouble with telepathy when it served a strategic purpose. Emma processed the memories for a few seconds before she stopped wincing and turned an appraising eye on Charles.
“Now that is impressive. You do hold yourself back, don’t you?” she said. “Not a bad idea, either.”
“I’m listening if anyone has a better one,” Erik said, looking at the rest of them. His odds were better than he had expected. It would pain Alex and Hank to agree with him but his plan had the virtue of prioritizing Charles’s safety and putting him in control of Emma, who they didn’t trust not to save her own skin at the first possible moment. Raven was still so consumed with guilt over her failure to rescue Emma that she would do anything to ensure her continued freedom. And Emma would get exactly what she wanted: energy reserves where she lacked them, access to her powers that she didn’t currently have. Charles looked like he had so many objections he didn’t know where to start but even he would have to listen if every other person present overruled him.
But because Charles had a history of picking the worst moments to stand his moral ground, he said stubbornly, “It’s too dangerous. You can’t ask me to do this, Erik. You remember what happened the last time, and you remember what happened the last time I remembered what happened the last time. We’re safer if I don’t use my powers at all.”
“This is nothing like the last time,” Raven said, trying to be gentle in circumstances that didn’t really allow for it. “You’re in complete control, you’re healthy, no one’s trying to hurt you, Emma’s fully aware and consenting—don’t think of it as taking her over, think of it as…pooling your resources.”
Charles scoffed, but the bitterness wasn’t enough to hide the real reason for his hesitation. Fear. It always came down to fear, to Charles not trusting himself, to him putting the safety of inferior beings above his own health and happiness. To him never understanding how special he was. So caught up in trying to be the good man he needed to be that he didn’t see that he was already the best of them all. Erik grit his teeth to keep from screaming at the unfairness, the stupidity of it all—trust took time, time, they had no time, and wasn’t it Charles himself who had said he would trust Erik as much as Erik trusted him? What else had Erik been doing these past few weeks, remaining at Charles’s side even when he knew his free will could be taken from at any moment, when he could see the effects of telepathic manipulation in behavioral changes and shifting moods like the afterimage of the sun burnt on the backs of his eyelids? Couldn’t Charles return the goddamn favor?
Emma was saying something about just trying, making her lift her arm or touch her nose; she would meet him halfway telepathically and steady his powers, all her shields were down, she was ready.
“I know how much you’ll blame yourself if you so much as stub my big toe so honey, I’m really not worried,” she said.
Charles had set his jaw stubbornly and made his expression stern and forbidding in that way that meant he considered a subject closed, but there was panic in his eyes that made Erik want to smash something.
“Charles, you won’t hurt her,” he said. He meant to sound calm, to treat it like the simple fact it was, but his composure had the tensile strength of the last few strands of a very frayed rope.
“And how could you possibly know that?”
Tension had changed the pitch of Charles’s voice. It was high and shrill and grated on Erik’s nerves. “If you could just trust me, Charles—”
“Not until you tell me how can you be so—”
The rope snapped; something was falling; the crash was imminent. Erik thought he might be shouting.
“Because you never hurt the rest of us! Look around you, you use your powers every day and you’ve never harmed anyone. You’ve had the chance to make us do anything you wanted, you could have convinced me or your students that you were right about everything so completely that we’d never question you again and instead the only thing you did do was make certain your household ran smoothly! What makes you think your telepathy will be any more dangerous when you use it consciously?”
“Oh, fuck,” Raven said.
Erik realized he was breathing heavily. Charles looked like he might not be breathing at all.
“What—what did you just say?” Hank stammered, at the same that Alex said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Oh, fuck,” Raven said again.
There was something eerie about the way Charles turned his head to look at her.
“One of these things is not like the others,” he said. “You don’t sound surprised, Raven. Not pleased, but not surprised. Has Erik given away a secret the two of you were keeping from me?”
To her credit, Raven didn’t lie, didn’t even hesitate before telling the truth. Her gold eyes were molten, though Erik wasn’t sure whether they were tears of regret, sadness, or fear. Her instinct for self-preservation had always exceeded his own, a primal roar in the face of danger when his was a whisper at best, but even he could feel the change in the room like the sudden soaring of barometric pressure before a storm, something the body registered before the mind.
“We didn’t know how to tell you,” she said. “You were so terrified of your powers already, we didn’t know what you might do if you found out.”
“Will someone—anyone—tell me what’s going on?” Hank demanded.
“His powers have been healing. Reasserting themselves subconsciously,” Erik said, not looking away from Charles. He was suddenly reminded of that time in Venezuela when he’d encountered a mountain lion near a mark’s summer chalet; the way its eyes had bored into him bright and inquisitive while it held its body perfectly still, and he’d known the wrong response would set into motion a sequence of events he might not survive. He took a steadying breath, went on. “You question everything, Beast, and you never questioned the state of his telepathy after his rescue, never mentioned rehabilitating his powers with the regimen you used after Washington. You treated his physical injuries and went back to renovating the Danger Room. When was the last time you worked on Cerebro? When was the last time you talked about his telepathy at all?”
“That’s not proof of anything,” Alex said stubbornly. “That’s so entirely subjective it’s a—a conspiracy theory!”
“Tell me the subject of our last argument, then. Tell me the last time any of the children needed real discipline. Tell me the last time you or Beast told me that you’d turn me over to the government yourselves if I hurt your professor again.”
“It doesn’t matter, Charles. You didn’t hurt anyone—you helped, even. We would have said something otherwise. You were just…healing in your own way,” Raven said, catching the minute changes in his expression with a shapeshifter’s talent for observation. Devastation and unnatural calm, back and forth—an emotional ricochet that meant nothing to her because she’d never seen it before, but Erik had, two nights ago. Only these changes were coming faster, as if they’d been compressed to fit in the little time they had left before the humans came.
“Are you certain that was your logic?” Charles had turned from Raven back to Erik with that same serpentine way of moving, and Erik knew the question wasn’t for her. “Are you entirely certain it had nothing to do with fear for your own safety? Or was it simply a child’s wish for summer holidays to go on forever?”
“Yes,” Erik said. “To all of them. Now think of what you tried to do to yourself last night and tell me we were wrong to give you more time.”
“Wait, what did you try to do to yourself last night?” Hank said. His frustration was beginning to show—ignorance didn’t sit well with him, not in the space where he felt most confident and not when it came to Charles after ten years of knowing more about him than anyone else. Erik would have admired his tenacity if it hadn’t been so poorly timed.
Ignoring Hank entirely, Charles laughed. “‘Give me more time’? That’s what you’ve been telling yourself you did? That’s euphemistic even for you. You lied to me, Erik. You deceived me. You knew what I was capable of, you knew how I would feel about it, and you deliberately kept the truth from me because…what, you wanted to play chess a while longer?”
He had slipped into a mocking sing-song by the end, the kind of tonal shift that evoked an instinctive shudder. There was a wrongness to it, like nails scraping a blackboard or a baby wailing. Erik tried not to flinch, tried not to let even the slightest hint of hesitation or regret color his thoughts in case Charles was listening in, because he had made a choice that night they had played chess for the first time and he’d wondered why it was the first time; and yes, Raven had encouraged him to keep the realization a secret, but Erik was the one who had looking down at Charles sleeping in their bed and decided to let it go on because it gave him what he wanted. Safety and more time—the only things he ever wanted, it seemed. And it felt somehow a betrayal of the memories he’d hoarded since, to regret the decision itself. An apology would be disingenuous, too close to another lie. So he met Charles’s scorn with all the stoicism he could muster, felt the rage beneath the laughter, and was strangely calm when the rest of the room went hazy around them and Charles stood up from his chair. Like he’d been expecting it all to lead here.
“Are you going to do it now?” Erik said. “Erase me, like you were going to last time? You said it would make me happy. I can’t imagine that’s at the top of your priority list, based on recent events.”
“Which recent events are those?” the projection of Charles said. “Are you referring to the human army on its way to destroy us or your total betrayal of my trust? And you think I was manipulating you. Good Lord, what a morning.”
“You seem rather more upset about the second than the first. They’re going to kill you and your children unless you go now, Charles, that hasn’t changed.”
“‘They’re going to kill you and your children,’” Charles repeated, again in that mocking sing-song. He sounded bored, young, and spoiled, an exaggerated version of all the qualities Erik disliked most about him, but knowing it was an act didn’t make it any less annoying. “Has anyone ever told you you’re quite the broken record? You really ought to ask Raven for help with a new shtick.”
Erik bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper in his mouth but it wasn’t enough to quell his own rage, which was rallying after shock had momentarily taken precedence. He remembered that Charles had been corporeal enough to kiss the last time this happened, so he took the chance: two long steps to close the distance and a shove with all his strength behind it. He felt the impact from palms to shoulders but the result was less than impressive—instead of going flying, as he’d hoped, Charles’s body flickered and stabilized an extra few feet away. He gave himself an exaggerated up-and-down appraisal, then smirked, shook his head condescendingly.
Erik barely restrained himself from trying again anyway. “You’re acting like a fucking child, we haven’t—”
“If you’re about to say something about time or lack thereof, look around. Nanoseconds are passing in the real world, Erik, we’re only out of time because I’ve pulled us out of it.”
Erik stared. The thickness of the air seemed to indicate distance more psychological than literal; with immense focus the haze dissipated enough to see the eerily still bodies of everyone else in the room. It felt like entire minutes passed before Raven’s chest rose with a single inhale. In the corner, a tear fell down Jean’s cheek with impossible slowness. Cold shock doused his anger for a second time, a feeling no more pleasant than it been the first.
“See?” Charles said. “Only this time I mean to use my powers.”
“You’re also not yourself,” Erik pointed out, ignoring the not-terribly-subtle dig. “We’ve been here before, Charles.”
“Not quite here. Incoming armed forces aside, the last time we were anything like here I was struggling to accept an unbearable truth about myself. Now I’m struggling to accept an unbearable truth about you.” Charles paused, tapping the first two fingers of his right hand against his temple so hard it was more of a stabbing motion. There was anger behind it but something unconscious and automatic too, like a glitch. Erik was torn between the desires to take the moment of quiet as an opportunity to defend himself, to ask what was so unbelievable about him doing something reprehensible for Charles’s protection after all the other reprehensible things he’d done in his life that had hurt Charles instead, and the need to hold those hands in his own until they’d stopped shaking. He hesitated too long; before he could say anything Charles burst out, “What happened to ‘I’ve never lied to you, I don’t intend to start now’? And if you tell me that technically you never lied to me I will knock you across this room, Erik, don’t think I won’t.”
“We were going to tell you. When you were ready, when you hadn’t just regained a traumatic memory and then tried to suppress your own powers!”
“Ah, so you thought you had everything under control. What a terrible inconvenience this incoming death squad must be for you, then, interrupting another one of your brilliant plans. And now here we are. How do you see this playing out?”
Erik took a step back, retreating on instinct. He’d known intellectually that Charles was capable of this kind of viciousness—for all that he was good and almost too forgiving, he wasn’t weak—but he’d never expected to have it manifest so suddenly or be directed so specifically at him. He wondered if Charles was in his head, rifling through his guilt and doubts with careless mental fingers and choosing the exact words that would hurt him most. Would he even listen, if Erik told him to get out, or would he laugh in that same condescending way and say it wasn’t pleasant, was it, when someone manipulated you like that? And he thought again of Cuba and Washington, all the times he had hurt Charles and never paid for it, walking away like there would never be consequences, like there would never be a day when he pushed too far and Charles declared him an enemy simply for the sake of self-preservation.
“How this plays out depends entirely on you,” he said, so rattled that the only thing he could think of was the truth.
“Yes, it does,” Charles agreed easily. “And your fantasy of holding them off while the children and I escape just won’t suffice, however romantic and heroic it might be.”
“Your students need—”
“Be very careful speaking of my students,” Charles interrupted. “You’ve put them in danger since you brought me home just as surely as the humans are now, so don’t presume to tell me how to protect them.”
When he stepped forward Erik took another step back, remembering the threat to knock him across the room, but Charles moved too quickly: he had Erik’s face clasped between his hands within a fraction of a second, his grip too tight to pull free. At the distance of only a few inches Erik’s gaze couldn’t help but go to his mouth; he thought that would probably always be true. Charles noticed and his lips twisted, merciless.
“There’s something you need to understand,” he said. “I am myself. Right now, like this. Don’t underestimate how far I’ll go for my students. Don’t underestimate how far I’ll go for my sister, my friends, or you. Now go.”
He released his grip and stepped away. Alarm bells that sounded like low wails began to go off in Erik’s head and he tried to reach out, to stay stop or wait or Charles, somehow fully convinced that if he could just get one finger hooked into Charles’s cardigan he could stop whatever was about to happen. He couldn’t move, not that single finger, not his vocal cords, not his eyelids. The haze was intensifying again and no amount of desperate focus dissipated it this time. He tried to at least keep the blue of Charles’s eyes in his diminishing field of vision but either they were closed or Charles—the projection of Charles—was gone.
The last thing he heard came in a musing tone, without a hint of mockery.
“Perhaps you were right about the humans after all, Erik.”
When he next became aware of his surroundings it was in pieces, like the incomplete merging of reality and an especially vivid dream. The air was cool; he was standing in shade. Everything was green and brown and smelled like sap and living things. There was pressure on both his hands—Ororo on one side and Scott on the other, both looking as bewildered as he must have, and ahead of him were Raven and Emma and Jean. Even as he struggled to accept it, he knew they were deep in the forest off the edge of the Xavier property.
He also knew that there no point in looking around for Charles. He had taken them over and sent them away.