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The first thing that Erik notices is the way that the light catches the dust as it hangs in the air, thick and swirling and restrictive, coating all of the surfaces that he can see.
The second thing that he notices is the smell. It makes his nose wrinkle and the corners of his mouth turn down. Scotch? Bourbon? Something strong, at least, mixed in with the distinctive stale smell of a house that’s been too empty for too long.
The third thing that he notices is the tunnels beneath the school, the long stretches of metal under his feet. The last time he was here, they were just cellars and bunkers built by a paranoid step-parent but now there’s a whole underground complex running beneath the main building – tunnels and cupboard and expansive rooms and right there, in the very heart of the system… Hank and Charles’ machine. Cerebro, he remembers after a moment. Cerebro, the machine that put them on their first step to gathering in their kind and helping them, teaching them, protecting them.
Not that either of them truly succeeded in any of those aspects; not when so many of the people that they know are dead or lost or both.
The hallways are silent as he climbs the stairs – a quiet that rings in his ears and amplifies every creak of the hardwood floor and every groan of the window panes as the wind whips around the mansion. He takes a moment at the top of the stairs to orientate himself, then turns left and heads down the landing to the east, where he knows that Charles’ room is even though he’s moved rooms in the last decade. Charles has always like to wake up to the rising sun.
If Erik thought that the mansion in general was disheartening, he had no idea what was awaiting in Charles’ bedroom. It’s dirty in a way that Charles has never been (messy, yes, chaotic, always but never dirty). The pervasive smell from downstairs is even worse in here, sunk into the furniture and trapped by windows that haven’t been opened in years. He tries to turn on the light but nothing happens – he squints up at the ceiling, and sees that there’s no lamp in the socket, just bare wires dangling into musty air.
And there, on his bedside table, are the needles. Just two syringes – both empty – but a quick scan of the room reveals more in the bin, along with two empty bottles. He crosses over to the bed and picks one of the syringes up, holding it up to the fading late summer sun that’s coming through the window and inspecting it. There’s still a drop of yellowish liquid beaded inside the chamber and for a moment, Erik wonders what it would feel like.
To not be able to sense the metal in everything, to not feel the pulse of the electromagnetic field of every particle around him. To not be aware, constantly, of the potential of his surroundings and not have his fingers twitch with every sliver of metal that passes between them.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Erik nearly drops the syringe in surprise, and curses himself; he’d been listening out for footsteps, not the smooth gliding wheels of Charles’ chair, and hadn’t even noticed him roll into the room let alone come upstairs. He opens his mouth and closes it again, takes a deep breath, and turns around with the syringe twisting in his hand.
“Just admiring your collection of paraphernalia. It’s quite impressive,” he replies, and Charles scowls at him from his chair, moving quickly across the floor to snatch the syringe from him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he snaps. “I didn’t let you go just for you to come and aggravate me, and if they come looking for you here…”
“They’ve got no reason to come here. They were too busy watching Mystique shoot me in the bloody neck to notice the cripple on the floor.”
He regrets it the moment that he says it – Charles’ face closes off even more and his eyes harden, and he rolls backwards away from him.
“Speaking of which, I see that you’ve had your neck seen to. Where did you go? Surely the nearby hospitals would have recognised you from the news.”
“The benefits of spending a year recruiting mutants before I was imprisoned,” Erik says with a wry smile, gently touching the gauze that’s taped to his skin beneath his ear. “My underground mutants haven’t forgotten me.”
“What a shame. The rest of the world was starting to.”
Erik can only stare in shock at the coldness in Charles’ tone as he watches him head out of the room, leaving him standing in the cold, dank memories of when he wasn’t such a hated person.
**
“Tell me about the serum.”
Hank lifts his eyes from the microscope to glare at him, then returns to his study of the formula on the slide. Clearly he hasn’t quite forgiven Erik for their altercation in Paris – though considering Erik was the one who nearly drowned he finds it somewhat melodramatic – but has viewed Charles’ apparent acceptance of Erik’s presence as a sign that he’s not to be harmed.
But whilst Charles hasn’t actively made an attempt to force him to leave, he hasn’t left his room in three days – the only proof of continued life being the swearing and banging that Erik can hear a few doors down. He’d originally sought out his old room only to find it filled with the belongings of a teenage boy. Probably one of the ones who died in the Tet Offensive. There’s a thick enough layer of dust on the alarm clock and stack of books by the bed.
“What do you want to know about it?”
“What it did to him.”
Hank pauses, then moves away from the microscope and leans against the desk, folding his arms across his chest and staring Erik down.
“His powers are still growing, did you know that? Slowly, yeah, but they’re getting stronger every day. You think he’s powerful now, just think about what he’ll be capable of in a few decades – with Cerebro’s help, he’ll be able to connect with every living mind on the planet, all from this mansion. Right now his range is only about two hundred miles, but that’s more than enough. After Cuba, he spiralled, and it just kept on getting worse, so he just kept on drinking more. The more he drank, the more he heard and the more he heard, the more he drank until he couldn’t stop the cycle.”
“So you just… gave him the serum? Cut off that whole part of him?”
“He needed it,” Hank corrects him, shifting nervously, and Erik can hear the defensiveness in his tone. “He was so… broken, and I’d been trying everything to help him and I normally wouldn’t have even considered it, but – he was desperate.”
“And the walking?”
“An unexpected side-effects, but not unwelcome,” he concedes. “It helped convince him that this was the right choice to make. He said that he was glad not to have to use the chair. It meant that he wasn’t faced with your betrayal every moment of the day.”
“I didn’t betray him.”
“That’s not how he sees it. And you can shake the desks all you want but that’s not going to change anything.”
Erik hadn’t even realised that the instruments are levitating a few inches in the air. He looks down at his hands, clenched into tight fists at his sides, his knuckles bright white, and takes a deep shaky breath. One, two, three, release. The room settles.
“Looks like your powers are pretty rocky too,” Hank remarks flatly, and Erik pulls a face.
“I was locked in a plastic prison for nearly a decade, of course I’m rusty.”
There comes a thumping noise from upstairs and across the mansion, and a few seconds later, a raw scream. Hank meets Erik’s eyes for a brief second and then looks away, embarrassed. The moment of levity is gone.
“Some days are better than others,” Hank admits, and busies himself again with his research. “Hopefully now, we’ll have more good ones.”
**
He passes time as autumn draws in by training. Whilst there’s no denying his absolute strength – his relocation of the stadium in Washington is evidence enough of that – his time in the Pentagon cell has weakened his refinement and control. It’s all good and well being able to lift structures as big as the Eiffel Tower but he’s useless if he nearly crashes airplanes when he’s upset.
So he puts his powers to use in managing the gardens and grounds of the estate. It’s not an easy job – the groundskeeper that Charles had been employing a decade ago has clearly been relieved of his duties, and nobody has taken them on. At first Erik unearths an old pair of gardening shears from the shed, before accepting after half an hour that he’s underprepared for the task and going back to find a machete.
It’s slow work – and it’s days before he even notices a notices a difference – but when the sun breaks through the orchard for the first time in years, he feels a huge sense of satisfaction, and twirls the machete around in the air until his mental grasp on it slips and it embeds itself into a tree nine feet off the ground.
**
It’s the crying that’s the worst, in the dark early hours of the morning. Erik wakes to the sound of sobs echoing down the panelled corridor and every time he’s halfway across the room and reaching for the door handle before he remembers that Charles hates him.
**
Erik bumps into Hank as he wanders into the kitchen from the greenhouse, his arms littered with small cuts and mud splattered across his face after a small incident in the potting shed. Hank glances up from where he has his head in the fridge and does a double take, his eyebrows shooting up into his hairline with amusement.
“Should I be worried about the state of the garden?” he asks with a laugh, and Erik scowls at him.
“You’ll be next if you’re not careful. How’s your research going?”
“No research today, just tinkering with Cerebro,” Hank says as he returns to the fridge, and upon closer inspection Erik can see the little smudges of grease on his forearms. “Charles kind of overloaded her by looking for Raven and she was due for an upgrade anyway.”
“Overloaded how?”
Hank finally emerges holding an entire wheel of cheese, and proceeds to unwrap it as he sits at the table.
“When he reached out for her, he connected with too many minds at once. It was too much for him and he blew some of the circuits; luckily he didn’t hurt himself and he managed to find her eventually, but there was still some minor damage.”
Erik nods, and watches as Hank chews thoughtfully on the kilo of cheese.
“Have you seen him today?”
“Mid-morning. He came down for a cup of tea.” He swallows the mouthful of cheese and looks away from Erik. “He only comes down when you’re not here.”
Erik sighs, and gets to his feet.
“I’d guessed as much. Tell him when you next see him that the house is next, won’t you? Whilst the two of you might be willing to live in this rats’ nest I mostly certainly am not.”
“He won’t like it.”
“I don’t expect him to.”
**
Mowing the lawns is a monumental task. He decides that he’s going to make perfect lines in the grass, which turns out take considerable consideration even when he’s controlling the mower with his mind – every wandering thought is a blip in the pattern, and after a while of focusing too hard and giving himself a headache, he gives in and sends the mower whizzing off towards the house, whipping around and creating scrawls and curves all across the place. He grins to himself as he does it, moving his arms in unnecessarily grand gestures to control the mower, spinning on the spot and creating a spiral in the north-western corner.
Enjoying yourself?
He stops so abruptly that the mower stalls and falls over, dropping his arms to his sides and looking wildly around himself. There’s nobody else in the gardens so he looks up, and he thinks that he sees somebody standing in the window of the library, but he’s too far away to see properly and by the time he jogs closer, there’s nobody there at all.
**
Whilst the bullet wound in his neck is healing as expected, it’s still sore and still throbs when any pressure is put on it, and the dressing that’s taped to his skin is annoying to say the least, but he’s not expecting miracles. He’d hoped when he’d reached out to his contacts that somebody would be able to point him in the direction of a healer, but there’d been nothing of the sort – just a cursory clean and stitch and dressing of the wound, and then he’d been sent on his way. Even they didn’t want him sticking around too long. Bad publicity.
He winces as he pulls the gauze away from his skin, neck tilted to one side under the sharp light of the bathroom as he peers into the mirror. The entrance wound is oozing; he must have jostled it too sharply in his sleep to cause it to reopen, and it glistens in the lamplight. He sighs and dabs at the area with a warm washcloth, each touch bringing a hiss or a grunt, until the water runs colourless.
“You should get proper medical attention for that.”
This time, he doesn’t drop what he’s holding, but it still takes him by surprise and he tenses up when he sees Charles behind him in the mirror.
“I threatened to kill the President of the United States live on national television. I think that public outings are somewhat out of the question now, don’t you?”
“You risk infection.”
“I’ll take it over certain imprisonment, if not immediate execution.”
They glare at each other over Erik’s shoulder until Charles clears his throat and looks away.
“Hank told me that you intend to clear out the house.”
“It needs doing,” Erik points out as he tapes a fresh dressing to his skin, pressing it down gently at the edges. “Once the house is clean, you can reopen the Institute, find these mutants that Logan told you about, begin to –”
“No,” Charles says sharply, and the glare is back full force. “I’m not going through that again.”
“You have to,” Erik snaps and whirls around to face him properly. “There are mutants out there who need guiding, teaching, and protecting. It’s either you or me, Charles – or are you that willing to sacrifice all those children to my cause?”
He strides past Charles into his bedroom and yanks open the top drawer of his dresser. He can feel Charles watching him as he finds a t-shirt and pulls it on over his head, careful to avoid his neck, and continues to ignore him as he walks across to the windows and throws open the curtains to let in the late autumn sun. The frosts will be coming soon, he thinks, and congratulates himself mentally on completing his work in the garden.
“What are you doing here, Erik?” Charles asks quietly, and Erik doesn’t turn around – instead he just stares out of the window at the satellite dish in the distance. This room was Raven’s, once; it was one of the few in the house that didn’t have some teenager’s abandoned belongings in it, and the only room in the mansion that had been cleaned recently, and kept tidy and warm. It was kept ready for someone to return – Charles must be so disappointed that it was the wrong person.
“Curing you of your hoarding habits, apparently.”
“Don’t joke about this, Erik,” Charles says sharply, and wheels himself closer. “You’ve made it quite clear that we don’t see eye to eye on many subjects nowadays – so why are you helping me to continue taking on students when in reality, you’d rather be training them and moulding your very own Brotherhood in some secret lair hidden underground in a forest somewhere?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, we have our meetings in abandoned warehouses in the sleazier parts of town.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“Only because you’re not happy with the answer that I gave.”
“Because I don’t believe that you’d be so self-sacrificing to come and assist me when it goes against everything that you believe in and I refuse to believe that you’ve come on some sort of nostalgia trip!”
“I’m here for you, Charles!” he shouts suddenly, and the room trembles. “I’m here because every day in that blasted cell beneath the Pentagon I thought of you, and dreamt of the things that you’d be achieving out here in the real world, thinking of all the mutants that you’d be sheltering and thinking to myself that so long as you were around, my being imprisoned wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. And then when I finally get out, it’s to find that you’re the one who’s needed to be guided and protected and I wasn’t able to help you. Because you believe that everything that’s happened is entirely my fault, and I intend to prove otherwise to you.”
This outburst brings Charles up short, but he’s not looking at Erik. He’s looking warily at the objects levitating throughout the room, including himself. Erik takes a deep breath – one, two, three – and thinks of cheerfully slicing down a particularly recalcitrant ivy plant, and the room settles again, Charles’ chair lowering gently to the wooden floor.
“Sorry,” Erik mutters, and the first time in so many years, Charles smiles at him.
“You’ll get there, my friend,” he says softly, and turns towards the door. “I’ll meet you after breakfast to start on the downstairs rooms – there are some things that great sentimental value to me and I won’t have you throwing them out. I’m sure Hank won’t mind assisting us if he’s not too busy with his research.”
“You’ll help me?” Erik asks as he leaves, and Charles nods with a twisted smile.
“You’re right. The house needs cleaning and we might as well start with the library.”
“You could start with cutting your hair!” Erik yells at his retreating back and he is rewarded by the faintest of laughter, and it floods through him like a warm flush.
**
Erik stares at the piles and mounds of junk that fill the office, and immediately regrets his decision to clean the house.
“Do you even have any idea that half of this stuff is here?” he asks incredulous as he lifts up a sheet and discovers yet another box of records. He glances at Charles, who is looking around the room as though he hasn’t stepped foot in it in years. He probably hasn’t.
He has quite clearly showered this morning though – the ends of his hair are still damp where they curl against his collar – and he’s wearing not just clean, but presentable clothing. His beard whilst not shaved has been trimmed, and there’s a slight brightness to his eyes that wasn’t there in Paris. Almost as though he might be believing in his own mission again.
“I haven’t even seen half of this stuff before,” he admits. “When the first of the students were drafted for Vietnam, their belongings were packed and stored in the rooms that we didn’t use as much. But as time went on, it became easier to just… leave things where they were. They didn’t come back, either way.”
“Did their parents not want their belongings?”
“Most of the parents don’t want anything to do with their mutant children.”
Erik replaces the sheet and wipes his hands; the dust spirals thickly in the air.
“I know it’s hard, but you can’t just keep everything here. You’re not keeping their memories alive by hoarding their possessions in boxes in your spare rooms.”
“What would you know about it?” Charles scowls, and Erik rounds on his with wide eyes.
“You think I don’t know about loss? Do you think that you’re the only one whose stomach drops when they read in the newspaper that one of their charges has been killed, or somebody mentions offhand about that alleged torture that your friend is being put through? At least you had Hank as a sympathetic ear; my guards took great pleasure in taunting me when they ripped Angel’s wings off. They laughed for days about the experiments that Emma endured whilst they tested her telepathic abilities. So don’t think that you have the monopoly on grief, Charles. Only on self-pity.”
“If you’re just going to insult me –”
“I’m just being honest,” Erik snaps, and strides across to the windows to push fully open the curtains. “That’s all I’ve ever been with you and I’m not going to stop just so as not to offend your delicate sensibilities.”
Charles looks for a moment like he’s having a very heated argument with himself, so Erik just lets him get on with it and focuses instead on removing all of the dust sheets from the piles and throwing open the windows. The blast of fresh air is a welcome one, and it clears through the stale smell and tension with a gentle breeze.
You’re such a bloody twat sometimes.
“Yes, well, you seem to like me anyway.”
I abhor you.
“That’s fine, so long as you tell me if this fifteen-year-old’s box of notes on… the Declaration of Independence… really need to be kept.”
**
It takes them the whole day to clear out the office – Erik constructs a giant container from all of the scrap metal that he’s accumulated over the last few weeks, and what can’t be burnt is stored in that whilst all of the combustibles are piled up in an enormous pile in the forecourt. It turns out that beneath all of the mess there was still the trappings of an actual office, and so with Charles’ direction Erik rearranged the furniture into some semblance of a functioning room.
“Perhaps it can be your study?” Erik suggests as they stand in the doorway, the smell of Hank’s cooking snaking down the corridor towards them. “We can move all of those books from your bedroom into here. It could be quite cosy.”
Charles’ doesn’t respond, and for a moment Erik wonders if he’s insulted him again – but when he glances down, Charles is just staring at him oddly.
“What?”
“I can’t say that I ever thought I’d hear you say the word ‘cosy’, that’s all,” he remarked flatly, and backs out of the room. “But it’s a good idea.”
“Of course at this rate, it’s going to be months before we actually get to your bedroom. The first floor is going to be a nightmare.” He follows Charles down the corridor and towards the kitchen, and dinner.
“Don’t be so pessimistic.”
“I’m the one that’s having to do the heavy lifting whilst you just order me around!”
Charles side-eyes him as they round the corner.
“Oh come on, nearly everything has metal in it, you’re not doing any heavy lifting at all.”
“Fine, so it’s a mental strain rather than a physical one.”
“Putting up with you is a constant mental strain but you don’t see me whinging about it.”
**
He dreams of a prison.
Not the prison beneath the Pentagon, but one similar. A plastic room, suspended within a vast empty chamber of darkness a hundred feet deep, and a bridge that dissolves behind him with every step that he takes towards the room. There’s only the basic furniture in there, he discovers. A bed, a table. Chairs. A desk with a notepad, pens and a stack of books. They’re all plastic or glass, and the strip lighting in harshly bright.
There’s also a chess set on the table. Somebody has been playing.
**
By Friday, they’ve finished the ground floor. On Wednesday Charles has a particularly bad day and refuses to leave his bedroom – Erik runs out of patience somewhere around ten in the morning, and after lifting Charles’ bed an inch then dropping it out of sheer frustration, stomps back downstairs and leaving Hank to deal with Charles’ screaming and cursing. He spends the morning cleaning up the hallway, entrances and porte-cochere before retreating to the gardens in the afternoon.
He turns the satellite dish, just to see if he can. Hank runs out five minutes later demanding that he turn it back because he just lost signal on all three TV channels.
But by Friday, the whole of the ground floor is clean and, for the most part, tidy. Erik makes a point of opening all of the curtains and cracking the windows to let in some air, and when he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine that it’s still autumn of 1962 and Charles is out for a run with Hank, that the kids are practicing or playing whilst Moira compiles her research, and as he breathes out, he can hear Havok’s sarcastic tone, and Banshee’s retort, and Mystique’s pure laugh.
Then he opens his eyes, and they all fade – lost or dead but gone either way.
**
Charles struggles with the first floor bedrooms.
There are thirteen in total – at some point, Moira’s room, the master suite, nursery, and both sitting rooms have been split and converted into smaller bedrooms, suitable for teenagers at boarding school. Only two aren’t full of belongings.
The first one that they come to belonged to a boy named Julian – a telekinetic. Charles tells him all about the student as they work, about the subjects his was best at and those that he struggled with, about his dreams for the future. About when he was drafted.
Erik doesn’t really listen to Charles’ story, but he doesn’t stop him either. If it helps for him to talk about it, then he can shout about his students all day. It’s better than pretending that it never happened.
The next room belonged to a girl named Danielle, a girl able to produce illusions of people’s wishes and fears; when her father was drafted, she returned to her family to help them whilst he was gone. Charles doesn’t know if she was captured and killed, or just imprisoned, or in hiding, or absolutely fine and has just decided to stay with her family instead of returning to the Institute. All he knows is that she never came back.
Then there’s James, and Victor, and Ruth, and Jonothon, and Sooraya and Jonas and Calvin and David and Santo and Noriko.
“I can remember everything about them,” Charles says as he wipes the dust off one of Calvin’s photo frames. Erik watches him carefully, ready for him to break down, but he doesn’t. Not this time.
They work through the methodically and firmly, and whilst Erik has to put his foot down on several occasions, Charles is mostly accepting of the process. Hank helps them in between experiments, and his presence both helps and hinders; whilst Erik can’t deny that his physical ability to move things is a godsend, Charles is more restricted with him around. It’s as though he doesn’t want his former student to see him so emotionally vulnerable again, not having had to spend a decade with him slowly spiralling into depression.
It’s slow, but it’s progress.
**
Erik still wakes to Charles crying and screaming, and he still rolls out of bed before remembering that he’s not wanted.
**
“Have you considered using Cerebro to look for your lost students? The ones that you don’t know for certain have died? Some of them might be quite interested in returning if they knew that they still had a school to come to.”
Charles doesn’t answer. He just stares at the chessboard, contemplating his next move as the wintery light filters in through the wide observatory windows. He’d been slightly reluctant to allow Erik to levitate him up the final flight of stairs – the elevators only covered the first three floors of the house – but eventually he’d given in, and seemed to be enjoying sitting at the highest point of the mansion. He was certainly being very complimentary about the view and Erik’s gardening skills.
“I think it’d be better, not knowing,” he says finally, not lifting his eyes from the board. “Looking for somebody who’s dead… it’s not pleasant. There’s a very specific lack of consciousness at the other end. It’s like opening your eyes, and it’s so pitch black that you still can’t see anything, and even though you know that your eyes are open, it feels weird. If I were to search for any of them, those that I might hope were alive, and be faced with that black nothingness… I’d rather not know, and just hope.”
**
Two months after Erik arrives at the mansion, Hank throws a spectacular tantrum about having to do all of the grocery shopping, since Erik is now an internationally-wanted super-criminal and Charles can’t navigate stairs any more.
Erik and Charles watch him stomp back to his lab in a state of mixed horror and amusement. As soon as the door slams behind him, Erik cracks up with laughter and Charles soon after, and they laugh until they’re crying and Erik’s sat on the floor wheezing.
It’s at that point that the door flies off his hinges as Hank storms back out of his laboratory with his wallet, and bellows at them that he’s going to get milk and bread and toilet paper, and he’ll be back in ten minutes.
**
He dreams of the prison again.
Even in his dream, he knows that there’s no metal in the vicinity. He can’t sense anything at all, not wiring or piping or buttons or zips. It’s the same feeling that he’d had at the Pentagon – he’d been dazed for a full two weeks after they got him there, after he’d destroyed his last three holding cells. He’d just bumped into the walls, disorientated and reeling from the loss of his powers.
No, not the loss of his powers – the impotency of them. His mind continued to stretch out for metal that wasn’t there for days after his incarceration, but never found it; instead he strained constantly, hour after hour, and after a while it wasn’t so that he could fashion a method of escape but purely as means of comforting himself, of reviving his dulled senses.
He feels that all again, now. Whilst this prison is infinitely better than his previous one – the distractions of the books and notepad for one – it’s still empty and sterile.
The pieces on the chess set have moved since he was last here. Somebody is still playing.
He smiles, and looks up and around himself; then he catching sight of his own reflection in the glass walls, and screams.
**
There’s a warm hand wrapped around his forearm when he wakes. It takes him a moment to adjust to the darkness of the early morning, and the sensation of somebody else holding his arm, and when he cracks open his eyes it’s to see Charles slumped forward in his chair beside the bed, snoring gently where his head is pressed to the mattress beside Erik’s shoulder.
Erik desperately doesn’t want to wake him. He knows why Charles is here – he remembers his dream, and imagines that he must have caused quite a ruckus for Charles to come in here and ease his mind, calming his consciousness and easing him back into dreamless sleep. Charles has made a point of avoiding any physical contact since their reunion, apart from the particularly memorable and truly impressive punch that he’d bestowed upon him at the Pentagon, and it seems as though he’s actually sleeping peacefully despite the uncomfortable position.
He turns to look at the clock, and is rewarded with a sharp pain in his neck – he raises his hand to the bullet wound and sure enough, he’s torn it open again. He can only assume that his shouting from the dream was accompanied by violent thrashing. He heaves a sigh and gently pries Charles’ fingers from his arm and rolls away, feeling his neck gingerly. There’s a small amount of thick, clotted blood there and it’s sore to the touch, but once he looks at it in the mirror, it’s not as bad as he feared.
It only takes him a few minutes to clean and dry it, but when he’s finished, he can’t stop staring at himself in the mirror. Charles’ immediate reaction upon seeing him for the first time in a decade was to punch him – but did he really only see a monster when the door opened? It’s as though Charles has made such a distinction between Erik and Magneto that he doesn’t realise that they’re the same person; he can’t reconcile the framed murderer with the man that he used to love.
But then, perhaps that’s the problem – it’s not the alleged murder that made Charles punch him.
He rubs his hands over his face and turns off the light, heading back into the bedroom. Charles hasn’t moved in those few minutes and doesn’t look like he’s about to, so Erik crawls back into bed without waking him. He flips the pillow over – he can deal with the small blood stain when it’s actually light outside and rolls over to look at Charles.
Erik might not think that he’s changed in a decade, but Charles definitely has. It’s not just in his untamed hair, his rough attempt at facial hair and terrible clothing choices, but in the deeper lines on his face and the black bruises beneath his eyes, and the tiredness of his voice. Erik may call Charles out on his self-pity, but he can’t say that it’s not at least partly warranted. Between them, they’ve lost everyone that they cared about, including each other.
He takes Charles’ hand in his own and closes his eyes, concentrating on matching their breaths, and waits to fall back into dreamless sleep.
**
Charles is gone when he wakes again to birdsong and sunlight.
**
Cleaning Charles’ bedroom is just depressing.
It’s as though he’s made an effort to tidy up in anticipation of Erik’s disapproval, but he’s forgotten where things are supposed to go. There are clothes stacked up in a neat pile in a dark corner, and rows of books inside the drawers of his dresser; there’s a perfect row of half-full water glasses on the desk and the chairs are turned around to face the door – in fact, everything is perpendicular. If Erik didn’t know better, he’d say that Charles was high when he tidied.
“I hope you’re ready for this,” he says mildly, and Charles nods slowly.
“The first floor was the most difficult, with all of the kids’ things. My bedroom is the last room that we have to do and I’ll be damned if I stop now.”
“The last one? What about Hank’s end of the floor?”
“Trust me, we’re better off leaving him as he is. I wouldn’t even know where to start, that’s his responsibility.”
Erik shrugs, and goes straight to the pile of clothes in the corner.
“Clean or dirty?”
“I’m not sure. Assume dirty. I have quite a few… lost days, from before we came for you. I think the combination of the drug and the alcohol wasn’t perhaps the best idea. I can assure you that the stranger positioning of some of my belongings were organising when I wasn’t in my right mind.”
So he was high when he ‘tidied’.
“And you didn’t think to remove the books from your drawers in the two and a half months since you’ve been back from Washington?”
“It didn’t seem like a priority,” Charles mutters, glaring out of the window, so Erik lets it slide and piles the clothes into a laundry basket.
They work through it methodically, foot by foot, as they have all of the other rooms. Charles was right – he’s much more ruthless about disposing of his own belongings once somebody gives him the impetus. He probably doesn’t want the reminder of his addiction days – rather, a fresh start. They work through it amiably, with pleasant conversation and gentle jibes, but Charles doesn’t mention coming to rescue Erik’s mind from itself the night before and so Erik doesn’t either.
The bathroom brings him up short, when he comes to it. It’s been converted to a wetroom, the shower separated from the toilet and sink just by a large plate of glass, and there’s a bench on the wall of the large shower. Long bars litter the walls and the sink and mirror themselves are much lower than in the other bathrooms.
There’s a faint click-click as Charles’ chair rolls over the transition strip from carpet to tile, and he comes to a stop beside Erik’s left side.
“It’s not so bad. It only took me a few months to get used to it,” he says quietly, and Erik’s throat closes.
“I did this to you,” he chokes out, and the taps begin to rattle. “This is my fault, it wasn’t Moira, it was me. It was me.”
“Erik, you need to calm down…”
“Everything is my fault, Charles!”
Calm down!
He reaches out blindly for Charles and his hand makes contact with the back of his neck, and he holds on tightly, fingers digging into his skin as he draws gasping breaths.
It’s okay, Charles says gently, and Erik snatches his hand back.
“The bathroom is fine. We’re finished,” he snaps, and turns on his heel and out of the door. He thinks that he hears Charles shout his name once, but he ignores it, and slams his bedroom door behind himself. His hands are shaking as he sits down on the edge of his bed, and he can feel every metallic atom in the room.
After a while, his breathing slows and his hands still, and the awareness of the metal dims to a low, residual hum in the back of his skull. He feels both better and worse for the admission that’s been a decade in the making – a weight off his soul for finally accepting that even though they might both be at fault for their catastrophic split on the beach, he alone is responsible for Charles’ paralysis.
It’s almost funny, he thinks as he lays back on his bed. One attempt at deflecting bullets renders Charles paralysed from the waist down; the next attempt results in the death of the most powerful human in the world and his own subsequent incarceration.
He should just let the bullets hit their intended targets from now on.
**
“So when are you going to search for new mutants?”
Erik freezes in position as his foot gently lands on the top step of the stairs. The door at the bottom that leads into the kitchen is wide open, and Hank’s voice carries very clearly up the stairs to where Erik is lurking.
“I’ve already told you, Hank. I’m not fit to teach any more students. I don’t know what made me think that I was in the first place.”
“What about Erik? I’m pretty sure he thinks that you’re going to take on students again. You know, the whole ‘lead, guide, protect’ thing.”
“I haven’t told Erik that I’m not reopening the school, but at the same time I haven’t said that I am going to, I’ve been pretty vague.”
“So what is all this cleaning about then?”
“It seemed to be helping him.”
“And it’s just about helping him, not about helping yourself?”
There’s a pause and Erik nearly releases the breath that he’s holding, and he knows exactly what expression is on Charles’ face right now.
“I don’t need helping.”
“Bullshit,” Hank says flatly, and doesn’t wait for a response. “I don’t care if you don’t want to admit it but the cleaning is helping you as much as him. And don’t give me that look, it’s true. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do whilst you pretend to be above mental recuperation.”
Erik panics for a second as he hears Hank pushing his chair back, the wood scraping loudly on the tiled floor, and in his desperation reshapes a nearby empty vase into a large plate, leaping onto it and whizzing silently back down the corridor and into one of the empty rooms, out of sight, as Hank reaches the top of the stairs.
“I can hear you breathing, you idiot,” Hank says flatly as he passes the bedroom that Erik is hiding in.
**
Erik is used to waking to Charles’ screaming. He’s not used to waking to Charles screaming inside his head.
He doesn’t stop when he’s halfway to the door this time, and he doesn’t pause as he stumbles down the corridor. The mansion is silent apart from his thudding footsteps in sharp contrast to the howling cries echoing in his head, and the lack of noise and movement from Hank’s room at the other end of the corridor would suggest that Erik is the sole receiver of Charles’ trauma.
It’s not a pretty sight when he bursts through the door. Charles’ back is impossibly arched as he twist and turns in the bedsheets, hands fisted in the duvet and eyes squeezed tightly shut. There’s a sheen of sweat over his skin and there’s blood trickling from his mouth where he’s bitten his tongue.
“Charles!” he shouts, and grabs at his hands as they swing wildly through the air to hold them carefully. “Wake up, it’s just a dream!”
Charles wakes very suddenly, grabbing at Erik with his eyes wide and unseeing. It takes him a moment to realise where he is and who he’s with, and when he does, his whole body slumps as his grip tightens on Erik’s shoulders and he breathes heavily into his chest.
“It’s okay,” Erik says quietly, and Charles just made a sort of choked-off sob. Erik thinks for a moment that Charles is going to pull away – and for a second it seems like he might – but he just lets go of one shoulder so that he can push himself into a sitting position, his right hand on Erik acting as an anchor, and wipes the blood away from his mouth.
“I had this dream, a terrible dream, and I couldn’t stop it,” he mutters, rubbing his face with his free hand. “I couldn’t stop myself from killing every human, I couldn’t disconnect from Cerebro or shut off my power… it was too much. I couldn’t stop, and everyone was screaming.”
“I dreamt of another plastic prison. I was an old man, cut off from society and completely alone.”
Charles sighs, and pulls gently at Erik’s shoulder. It takes him a long moment to realise what Charles is asking for and when he does, it’s with shock but relief, and he climbs over Charles to settle on the bed.
“I think it’s the broken future,” Charles says tiredly, and doesn’t even blink as he takes Erik’s hand in his own, fingers intertwining. Erik can hardly breathe. “The future that Logan came from, the one that changed when Raven didn’t kill Trask. In theory it shouldn’t exist anymore, but what we’re experiencing must be residual potential from Logan. I just hope that Hank isn’t having similar dreams.”
“I’m pretty sure that we would have heard him if he was,” Erik reasons, and Charles nods, shuffling his body back down the bed and pulling Erik with him. He almost doesn’t dare to touch him, just in case Charles changes his mind, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue – instead Charles twists his body and with a strange and awkward manoeuvre, rolls himself over and straight into Erik’s side.
“I’ll ask him in the morning anyway,” he murmurs, his face pressed into Erik’s chest and his hand burning hot on Erik’s ribs, and breathes deeply, his stubble scratching at Erik’s bare skin.
Erik lets out the breath that he’s been holding, and closes his eyes.
**
Did you dream?
Erik is so surprised by Charles’ mild tone that he starts in shock, and the stream of urine that he’d been sleepily concentrating on aiming directly into the pan jerks in a wild arc, spraying the back of the toilet seat and the floor.
“Shit,” he hisses, fumbling his cock back into his sweatpants then grabbing a handful of toilet paper and wiping up the mess.
You okay in there?
“Fine!” he shouts back, flushing away the evidence and washing his hands. There’s a huffing noise from the bedroom, and when he opens the door, Charles is watching him carefully.
Are you sure that you didn’t dream?
“If I did, I don’t remember it, and it clearly didn’t wake you. It’s almost a shame, I think I was winning the chess game.”
Charles looks at him oddly as he climbs back into bed, but seems to think better of asking for an explanation. He’s pulled himself into a sitting position with pillows behind his back, and has picked up a book from his bedside table. Erik looks up at him from the mattress and the way that the sun shines on his face, and wonders if every morning for the last ten years could have been like this, if Cuba had never happened.
I didn’t dream of the future either, thank you for asking, Charles says sardonically after a few moments, and Erik rolls onto his belly.
“What’s with the mental conversation today? Decided to take a vow of silence?”
No, though I’m sure that would amuse you. You spend your downtime trimming the lawns, I spend it flexing my metaphorical muscles. I think it’s safe to say that spending years with my powers locked away has weakened my connection to them.
“But that’s all behind you now.”
It’s all behind me, he agrees. And before you ask, my drinking has also been at a minimum. And no, I haven’t used any recreational drugs, though I’m sure you’d have noticed if I had.
“Well that’s a reassuring statement at… nine o’clock in the morning.”
Speaking of which, Hank’s leaving for a trip after lunch today and he’s said that he’ll make one more run to the supermarket before he goes, so you’ll need to let him know before he goes if you think of anything that we’re missing.
“I finished off the spaghetti when I made bolognaise the other night, and I’m pretty sure we’re nearly out of eggs.”
I’ll let him know. Oh, and you should move your things out of Raven’s room.
Erik jerks his head up and stares at Charles, but he’s focused entirely on his book – Erik tilts his head to read the title, and ‘The Once and Future King’ must be a very interesting read to warrant such attention. He continues to stare at him until he sees Charles’ eyes flick briefly over to his shocked expression, and he frowns.
What?
“Are you kicking me out?” Erik asks incredulously and Charles coughs, shaking his head.
Certainly not. But where’s she going to stay if she decides to come back? It is her room, after all.
“And where the hell am I supposed to go?” he shouts, pushing himself into a sitting position, the sheets pooling around his bare waist. “Relegated to the first floor amongst the empty bedrooms of hormonal teenagers? Or should I perhaps section off part of the laundry room in the basement?”
Charles does drop his book down onto his lap then with a raised eyebrow at Erik’s slightly laboured breathing and furious expression, and then his face splits with a smile and he lifts one hand to Erik’s jaw. Erik freezes at the touch, and his own hand makes an aborted move to grasp Charles’ forearm.
My dear Erik. When you’re with me, I don’t dream. I can filter out the voices. I can sleep. Why would I want you anywhere other than by my side?
Erik doesn’t have a response for that. So he just curls back into Charles’ side and waits for his heart to stop thundering in his chest.
**
Pietro turns up at the Institute on the second of December as frost begins to form on the grass, and following him with her head bent low is a young girl with dark brown hair. She’s been crying.
“Your sister?” Charles asks as he and Erik usher them into the parlor, and Pietro nods.
“Twin. We thought that maybe the x-gene hadn’t been passed onto her – I mean, I manifested years ago but there’s been no sign of activity on Wanda’s end – but then… there was an incident yesterday.”
“Wanda? Can you tell me what happened?” Charles asks gently, and the girl just shakes her head with a sob, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. Pietro reaches out for her but she moves away, pulling her knees up to her chest.
“We’re still not sure what it was. Mom was nagging us to get off our asses and do our chores, and she told Wanda that the lounge was a shit-tip and she wanted it tidy before she got back from her shift, and Wanda just shouted that she should do it herself if she was that bothered and gestured at the lounge and it just… everything caught fire. I mean, everything. The couch, the chairs, the table, the TV…”
“Were any of you hurt?”
“No,” Wanda chokes out, and every set of eyes turns to her. “Pietro ran the oxygen out of the room before it could really blaze. There’s not much damage, but there’s enough.”
“That’s remarkably quick thinking Pietro, well done,” Charles says, clearly impressed, and Erik feels a strange swell of pride. “So do you think that you might be pyrokinetic?”
“I thought that pyrokinetic could only manipulate fire, not create it?” Erik asks. Charles shrugs with a frown and Wanda shakes her head.
“I don’t think so. I mean, Pietro put it out pretty fast, but I did try to put it out – I felt nothing though, no power over it at all.”
“And this is the first time that you’ve been aware of your powers?”
Wanda nods, and sighs miserably, and this time lets Pietro put an arm around her shoulders and squeeze her. Erik glances down at Charles, who is looking at them intently.
“Wanda, would you mind if had a look inside your mind?” he asks, gesturing to her temple. “I might be able to see something in there that you’re not aware of, some clue as to your power. I promise that it won’t hurt at all. You’ll barely even know that I’m there.”
Wanda looks to both Pietro and Erik for reassurance. She looks so young, Erik thinks – and yet quite old for manifestation. This is something that she’ll remember for the rest of her life. He knows all about Charles’ manifestation, and he could never forget his own even if he had the memories removed from his mind. The despair is too overwhelming. But perhaps, if they can help her, she can push the experience to the back of her mind for a while at least.
She flinches as Charles’ mind touches hers, but doesn’t pull away. Charles’ eyebrows draw down though as he explores her memories and his shoulder tense, and he bites his lip in concentration. Erik is about to reach out for him when he pulls back with a gasp, leaning back in his chair and breathing heavily.
Are you okay? Erik asks privately, and Charles nods almost imperceptibly.
“My apologies, Wanda, I’m slightly out of practice. I did find the corner of your mind where your powers and controlled and I have to say, your potential is absolutely remarkable. You have the ability to manipulate probabilities – to put it more simply, if there is even the most remote possibility of an event occurring, you can either ensure that it does, or prevent it entirely. It doesn’t matter how improbable, you can do it. Your powers are almost limitless – you just need to learn to control them.”
“And you can help her to do that?” Pietro urges with a remarkably earnest expression. “You can teach her how to control it? God knows I can’t.”
Charles, for a moment, looks completely blind-sided.
“I’m not sure…”
“We’d love to help,” Erik cuts across smoothly. “Our resident scientist is away on a trip at the moment but I’m sure he’ll be willing to assist upon his return. You can both either stay here in the meantime or return home, whichever you prefer.”
Erik…
“It’ll be nice to have some youngsters around the house again,” he says lightly, ignoring Charles completely. “Pietro, I’m assuming that your power gives you a high metabolism – the kitchen is this way.”
**
“That was a dick move.”
“You can help that girl, Charles, we both can. If you don’t want to go out actively searching for students that’s fine, but I’ll be damned if we turn away someone who comes to us for help. I wish I’d had somebody like you to train me but all I had was Shaw, and he made me into a monster that even now I can’t escape. I’ll be damned if I send any more mutants to the same fate,” Erik snarls, and turns on his heel on the driveway. Pietro and Wanda will probably be back in their own home by now – it’s been at least thirty seconds since they left in a cloud of dust, with the promise of returning once Hank is back in residence.
“You’re not a monster, Erik,” Charles says tiredly, following him back into the house. “What he did to you doesn’t define you, it never has. I’ve told you before and I’ll keep on telling you until you actually listen to me – there is good in you, and even though I’ve seen you do terrible things, I’ve seen you do wonderful things too. A monster wouldn’t spend an hour carefully pruning the cyclamens when he’s sulking.”
“It wasn’t an hour, it was more like forty-five minutes,” he says irritably, and slumps onto the couch that Wanda and Pietro had previously vacated, tipping his head back and closing his eyes. “And that’s not the point. Wanda needs our help.”
“And we’ll give it to her, I promise, but I still don’t want us to populate the whole mansion with teenager. And regardless, it was a still a dick move.”
“I’ll show you a ‘dick move’,” Erik says flatly and cracks one eye open to see Charles’ grin, before reaching out and pulling Charles towards him.
**
Erik tilts Charles’ head carefully with two fingers beneath his chin, slightly up and to the left, and squints his eyes as gestures minutely; Charles winces as another clump of hair falls to the floor to join the rest of the straggly sections that Erik’s already removed.
“I do hope that I’m not going to regret this,” he mutters sullenly, and Erik raises an eyebrow.
“You’re the one that asked me to do it.”
“Yes, but I’d rather imagined having some say in the process.”
“You spent the last few years cultivating something that resembled a sparrow’s nest on your head, you don’t get an opinion in this.”
Erik could swear that Charles’ bottom lip is stuck out as he scowls. Whilst he professes to have utter faith in Erik’s abilities, he’s still keeping his head perfectly still as his hair is cut for him by levitating scissors.
“Just imagine the surprise that Hank will get on Sunday when he sees me,” he says defeatedly, playing with a lock of hair that has landed on his arm. “He’s going to be so confused.”
“It’s just a haircut, hardly anything monumental. Now if we’d built a swimming pool on the grounds… that’d be something work talking about.”
“Erik, it’s December and there’s snow on the ground. A swimming pool is not a priority at the moment.”
“The house is clean and tidy, and soon, you will be too. You’re going to need a project of some sort.”
“I am a grown man, Erik. I don’t need you to organise a hobby for me.”
“But I have you signed up for so many activities,” Erik says with a grin, running his hands through Charles’ hair with careful hands to even it out, massaging his scalp for a few seconds longer than strictly necessary. “Now are you ready to see what you look like when you’re not pretending to be a hippy?”
“You’re finished?” he asks, surprised, and Erik lowers the scissors with a gesture.
“Yes. I’ve been told that mullets are becoming quite fashionable.”
“What?!” Charles shouts, horrified, and violently rolls himself towards the mirror. “Erik if you’ve made me look like some sort of… of…”
He trails off as he reaches the mirror and sees that Erik has not, in fact, turned him into a shag wool rug. Instead he looks like he might have done nearly a decade ago, had he not fallen on a beach in Cuba and lost everything. It’s shorter than it’s been in a very long time but still a respectable length, and Erik watches with a smirk as Charles runs his hands through his own hair.
“Oh wow, you can really see the ginger bits coming through in places, can’t you?” Charles murmurs as he leans in towards the glass. “That’s quite unfortunate.”
“Your beard is ginger, it’s hardly surprising.”
“Oh my god we’re a matching pair, this is getting embarrassing.”
Erik crosses to the mirror and stands behind him – and he can’t help but raise his hand to Charles’ head and run his fingers through his hair again, searching out the ginger patches and pressing his thumb behind his ear. Charles for his part leans into Erik’s touch, his eyes drifting closed, and he makes a small contented sound when Charles leans down to kiss the top of his head.
“Now both you and the house look respectable.”
**
They take a road trip to a tiny little cabin in the woods over Christmas whilst Hank visits his estranged parents in upstate Illinois. The cabin is well-stocked and cosy, and they their days curled around each other in front of the fire or exploring the surrounding area where the paths are clear enough for Charles’ chair.
Christmas passes quietly. Charles nearly reaches out for Raven on Christmas morning, but Erik pauses where he’s checking on the turkey and lays a hand on Charles’ shoulder. It’s still too soon. She’ll come to him herself, if she’s ever ready.
**
“You aren’t staying, are you?”
Erik turns to look at the profile of Charles’ face where it’s lit by the moonlight that’s streaming in through the open curtains.
“I promised those mutants that I would help them. That I would protect them. I can’t go back on that promise now – I sent out a message telling them that they had lived in the darkness for too long, spent too much of their lives hiding. I can’t hide myself and be seen as a hypocrite.”
“You wouldn’t be hiding,” Charles protests. Erik sighs and rolls over, holding Charles’ bicep in a gentle grip.
“Regardless, they need guidance and protection. Some of them won’t be in a position to escape the hell that they’re living in and find a better place – they’ll need me to come and rescue them.”
“Bit of a saviour complex growing there, Lehnsherr?”
“One day my ego might be as colossal as yours, but it is not this day,” he smiles, and after a moment, Charles returns it. “If you need me, find me – if I’m too far away, use Cerebro, and I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ll always hear you; I left the helmet behind.”
“Yes, I noticed.”
Erik watches him carefully and Charles lets him, not pushing him for anything more of an explanation and not begging him to stay. He’s doing to Erik exactly what he did with Raven – he’s giving him the choice.
“You understand, don’t you?”
“I’m not going to pretend that I like it, but yes,” Charles says, and turns to kiss Erik’s bare shoulder. “I understand.”
**
I will always come home to you, Erik thinks desperately as he pushes into Charles, their bodies sweat-slicked and tense and perfect and the air hot between them, and Charles’ nails dig into the backs of his hands as Erik presses his mouth to the back of his neck with a shuddering breath.
And I will always be your home, Charles replies, and that’s all that they need.
**
Erik leaves on a Tuesday morning.
Charles half-wakes to the sound of him moving around their bedroom – hears the stream of water from the shower, the rustling of clothing, and winces as he throws open the curtains.
“Where will you go first?” he growls, his voice still sleep-rough, and Erik half-shrugs as he packs most of his belongings into a bag.
“I’ve got a lead on a whole family of mutants in Kentucky – I thought I’d start there.”
“At least it’s not too far away.”
“Worried you’ll get separation anxiety?”
“More like worried that you’ll get withdrawal from your gardening,” Charles retorts, and Erik laughs. It’s a sound that Charles hasn’t heard properly in a long time and his chest aches at the thought that he might not hear it again for a while.
He watches as Erik purposefully leaves some clothes in the wardrobe, some books on the desk, a bottle of aftershave in the bathroom. Charles means to ensure that he comes back for them, whether it’s a few days or a few months down the line.
“Remember – I will be able to hear you anywhere, any time, if you want me,” Erik says earnestly as he pulls on his shoes. “Always.”
“I know.”
Erik watches him for a moment and then strides across the room and bends down to steal a kiss from him – a breathless, urgent, forceful kiss, and Charles reaches up to grip Erik’s hair tightly and pull him down. But Erik pulls away; a little reluctantly, perhaps, but he pulls away nonetheless.
“I’ll be home by Easter,” he promises as he presses his forehead to Charles’, and with another brief kiss, stands up. Something warm swells in Charles’ heart at the word home, and it’s with a smile that he watches Erik swings his bag over his shoulder and leave, closing the bedroom door behind himself with a quiet click.
**
Hank finds him mid-morning out on the front gravel section, wrapped tightly in a warm coat and with a scarf wound around his neck several times. He stands beside him for a while, saying nothing and just looking at the satellite dish with him. Charles looks up at him after ten minutes or so, his face set and determined.
“Start up Cerebro, Hank,” he says firmly, and takes a deep breath. “It’s time to find my students.”
**
end.