Chapter Text
“I will not fight your war, my friend.”
Erik slid his right arm carefully under Charles’s limp body, down at the knees, moved his left to span Charles’s shoulders instead of just propping his head. He kept his eyes on his hands and not on Charles’s face.
Charles tried anyway—Charles always tried. “There is nothing to be gained in—“
Words broken off by a high-pitched gasp, the slightest gurgle to it in the throat, as Erik stood and lifted him in one clean movement. Charles hung doll-like in the crooks of Erik’s elbows, head against Erik’s shoulder, white cheeks flushed red, hands moving erratically, stiffly above laboured breath, eyes rolled back disturbingly and then returning, pupils huge.
Erik settled the mostly-dead weight of his only and utterly unwilling friend safely against his chest and nodded once more to Azazel.
Raven placed a hand where Erik’s hand rested against Charles’ ribs, and Azazel joined hands simply with Riptide, who connected in turn to Angel, who wrapped her hand probably as tightly as she could manage around Erik’s upper arm, and as Moira stumbled forward, apparently recovering some of her fight at sign of action, a slightly unhinged “He needs a doctor,” and then, eyes wild, “Charles I didn’t know, I—I’ll say nothing, your house—the secret’s safe with—"
***
It was a dark room, empty prior to their materialisation and thus with lights unlit.
Riptide moved away from them, rectifying that part of the situation. It was somewhere Shaw had spent some time, then, Erik noted, enough that his men knew where the lights were.
“We’ll be safe here.” Charles’s voice was weak, terribly weak, his face still contorted and flushed and looking worse for being streaked with sweat and sand and tears. The hand closest to Erik’s chest was clenched tight in the front of his suit. Besides the way that pulled the collar of the outfit uncomfortably at the back of Erik’s neck, Charles was disturbingly easy to carry—too light and too fragile and too recognisably injured. Erik had pulled the bullet out himself; he knew where it had been, and he knew what that meant for the way Charles’s lower body was deadweight in his arms.
Erik reminded himself that Charles’s mutation was perhaps the most powerful he’d seen and made himself focus on the now. Charles was many things, but not fragile, not in the way that meant vulnerable to death. He nodded once. “The children won’t be if they stay at Westchester, and nor will anyone the humans get to before we do.”
“We are human, my friend.”
Erik looked caught between disgust and fury for no more than half a second. He scanned the room and walked directly to the nearest soft surface, a long and luxurious chair with gilt at its edges and short-pile velvet upholstery. He released Charles to the cushions carefully but wordlessly, eyes on his task and not on the way Charles’s eyes squeezed shut and his teeth bit into his lips as Erik positioned him on his side and the bullet wound pulled.
He left Charles there digging his short nails into the velvet and returned to the others. Charles could not be his top priority. “We need to dispose of those intimate with the CIA project and with this event as quickly as possible. If possible we need also to get back their information on Charles, and any information they have on Shaw’s network. We can only use as much as they don’t know to locate, and I don’t want to have to find somewhere to put those who won’t work with us. If we can take the information from them before they start checking the properties to Charles’s name then we can leave the three boys and any other liabilities we locate at Westchester and avoid giving them any further knowledge of us. Ideally we should also wipe records of other mutants…particularly Sean Cassidy, I don’t need the CIA using family members to blackmail the boys into contacting us. I don’t want our own turned against us. And Raven. Yes, it will be convenient for us if knowledge of her gifts is eliminated to the point that it isn’t taken seriously.”
“And Cerebro,” Raven added. “We let them turn on us once. We shouldn’t let them find others.”
Erik nodded distractedly. “They don’t have a telepath for now but yes, that too.” He turned to Riptide and Azazel, both clearly waiting for instruction—Angel had slunk away to curl in the corner of another couch, palm pressed to the ragged edge of her wing. “Who knows that Shaw was posthuman?”
“It’s not only humans…” Charles croaked from the couch, as though Erik might somehow have overlooked that the man he’d hunted most of his life had turned out to be—one of them. It didn’t matter. He ignored Charles.
“No one living,” Riptide smirked.
“The White Queen,” Azazel added. “Those in this room. The three I took to New York.”
Raven shook her head. “No, the CIA knows—when you attacked us in Virginia, you can’t have killed everyone who saw. And there were cameras everywhere. Besides, Moira knew and I don’t think she’d think that was something she shouldn’t tell them.”
“Then they’ll assume we have access to his properties and his network.” It was inconvenient, but probably inevitable. “Is this—“
“A safehouse,” Azazel confirmed. “Few of his bases are listed.”
Erik considered this carefully before replying. No degree of caution could be too much, not now, on the first unsteady steps of his future. “We should remain based here until we can discover what parts of his network are known to intelligence agencies. They can’t surprise us when we’re already here but they almost certainly know that we have a teleporter. They may lay traps in locations they suspect we may use.”
Raven nodded slowly, her thumbnails pressed into her palms. Her skin looked like armour, and it almost distracted from the way she was just slightly shaking. “I could do it, I think. If we can figure out who’d have access to the information, and if I can see them for a bit…”
“That should be stage two,” Erik confirmed. It was falling into place, slowly, the pieces coming together in his mind. They had few allies for now and thus few gifts but Azazel’s was powerful, and so was Raven’s. Charles’s was invaluable but that would be a careful manoeuvre—Charles had not come with him willingly and he knew with frustrating certainty that if he was not careful with what he asked, his only friend would refuse to aid him at all. For now, action was urgent.
“We need to eliminate as quickly as possible anyone with a strong interest in hunting us down—anyone who might consider disclosing our existence to the population. Six of us will have difficulty preventing a genocide once mobs start rounding up and lynching anyone they suspect. Azazel should bring immediate liabilities here where they can be interrogated and shown to Raven before they die.”
“Erik…” It was almost unbelievable that Charles could layer that level of distress into his voice separate to his wound and his weakness. Erik was fairly certain, however, that he could believe anything of Charles.
Raven glanced over at the couch with clear discomfort. “They want to kill us. Erik’s right. We have to—it’s self-defence.”
If Charles had any reply, he was too slow to speak it.
“Who?” Azazel’s question was perfectly simple, utterly unquestioning of the clear logic, the implicit need for certain men to die and the rightness of it.
It tightened Erik’s chest in the most glorious way, a level of satisfaction that floated on top of his revenge and muted the unavoidable fact of the man lying paralysed—Charles, paralysed—six feet away. He wasn’t sure yet who needed to die but as soon as he was, he had followers willing—waiting—to do it for him.
Gifted followers, mutant, like him.
He turned to Raven with a smile he couldn’t quite quash. “I think Raven will be able to find out for us?”
Raven nodded slowly, carefully, eyes locked on Erik’s with the transparent need to forget what Charles would say. “If Azazel takes me where they were commanding the ships from, I can shift one person to another ‘til I—well I guess they’ll be planning too, won’t they? I just need to find that meeting and then…” she hesitated only a moment, eyes still on Erik’s, golden-bright. “Then Azazel can bring them here.”
“Raven…” Charles again, choked and rasping, clearly too weak to argue but too stubborn to shut up.
Erik held Raven’s gaze. Raven turned once to the couch—Charles was invisible from here anyway, hidden by the back of the seat—and then to the group standing, waiting, Erik and Raven and Riptide and Azazel.
She was still shaking, a little, but her voice was steady.
“My name is Mystique now.” She looked back to Erik with the smallest edge of a smile. “And I work for Magneto.”