X-Men First Class fic: Dismantle the Sun (3/4)
Title: Dismantle the Sun
Pairing: Erik/Charles (M/M)
Rating: R
Warnings: Hospitals. Drinking. Death.
Author's Notes: Fix-it. Sequel to Inevitable Things. This fanfic is a belated New Year's present for delirium1995, who pointed out that Charles' recovery in X-Men: First Class was far too quick and painless both physically and emotionally, and as James McAvoy said about Xavier, "he's just had a huge part of his physical life taken away from him, by someone he cares about more than anyone else." So he's going to a dark place in this one.
The story is currently being beta-read. Please feel free to comment with critiques or point out spelling/grammar issues. Please especially point out passages that are clunky, where it is too difficult to follow the action, or where characters do things that strike you as out of character.
NB: about the possessive apostrophe and proper nouns that end in s: according to Eats Shoots and Leaves, it is now correct to write Charles's; but I grew up with Charles', and it still just looks completely wrong to me to write it the other way. The Bedford Handbook (5th ed.) claims this is an acceptable exception; The 2011 edition of The Elements of Style is quite clear that it is not.
Previous installments: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
Dismantle the Sun: Part Three
Stop All the Clocks
"Beast, what happened to you?" Alex asked, pausing for a moment with a towering forkful of pancakes mid-shovel to his mouth.
Hank's eyes narrowed, following Alex's gaze to the bright white bandage tied around his shaved forearm. "Duchess bit me."
"Well, what did you do?" When there was no answer, Alex peered at him harder. "Hank, what did you do with Duchess?" he asked in a low voice.
"Nothing! She bit me and ran off--" he cut off abruptly when he realized Charles was in the doorway, aligning his wheelchair to slip through the narrow gap.
"Ah, Hank. I wanted to talk with you about the progress you've made indexing the Cerebro results." Charles said brightly. "There's a boy by the name of John Turner, maybe 11 or 12 years old, somewhere in the Midwest… what happened to your arm?"
An exasperated growl rumbled through Hank's chest, and he ran his hands over his face and the top of his head, tugging at the fur there. "Duchess bit me! Last night, she was so upset, I took her out for a walk and she bit me and ran off, Jesus!" Hank's yellow eyes turned into wide round saucers. He squeaked out a quick "Sorry, Professor!" and collapsed in his chair -- the sturdiest one at the kitchen table, brought in just for him.
Charles wheeled himself to his spot at the table, and reached out to pat the back of Hank's hand. "You've been doing well by her, Hank, I'm sure she'll come back."
"If she doesn't get run over by a truck," Alex said, and shrugged to Charles' peeved glare. "They drive like maniacs on that road, because they only thing they expect to hit are deer, and everyone knows the deer are strangely avoiding this part of the county." He turned back to Hank for that last bit, and Hank favored him with a smile full of fangs.
Charles hid a relieved grin, happy at the inside joke they were enjoying; he was peculiarly happy today, especially odd considering last night had been one of the unhappiest of the past few months. He ran his fingers lightly over his slacks, feeling the bandage taped securely in place and hidden by the cloth. He picked up the plate at his place and reached forward to the stack of pancakes, thoughtfully placed on his side of the table.
"Alex, your cooking is marvelous," he said after the first bite, and the young man shrugged in response, as if it would hide the fact that he was beaming under the praise. "And Hank," he said after the next. "This boy in the Midwest, or thereabouts -- he's a telepath of sorts that I've had some communication with, a sort of dream-mediated astral projection, but I'm not quite sure of the details."
"Do you recognize his signature from before?" While Hank asked, Alex reached nonchalantly across the table to take the bottle of maple syrup out of his paw; he'd forgotten about it and poured a quarter of the contents onto his plate while Charles was speaking.
"No, I don't, and that's strange. Actually the whole thing is strange."
"Know what's strange? They're experimenting with hallucinogens to promote extrasensory perception down at Area 51. Do you think that would work?" Sean sauntered in, still in his rumpled t-shirt and yesterday's sweatpants, red hair sticking out every which way.
"What's strange," said Hank, "is that you still believe the nonsense you read in comic books, and yet you sort of look like a grown man."
"And scream like a girl," Alex added with a snicker.
Sean raised his chin so he could look down on Alex. "Girls only wish they could scream like I do." Then he turned to Charles. "ESP-enhancing drugs, just think what we could do!"
"You know what I'm thinking?" Alex looked at Charles, gauging his level of tolerance for the day, then at Hank. "Supersonic dishwasher. Last one to breakfast does the cleanup."
"Excellent idea, my dear fellow," Hank concurred, pushing his pancakes around with his fork in an attempt to sop up all the syrup.
"And Sean, no." Charles said, putting his fork down and clasping his hands together beneath his chin, in the style of Professor Armstrong, a particularly severe and unflappable educator of genetics. The old man specialized in the sexual characteristics of amphibians, was never once observed to crack a smile on the school grounds, and certainly never lowered himself to acknowledge his students' jokes at his field's expense; Charles had loved trying to get that man's mountainous ego to shift or give, and never did succeed. Now he tried to evoke the old Professor as much as he could for Sean's sake, and said with as much gravity as he could muster, "Drugs and mutant abilities do not mix."
"Is that the voice of experience?" Alex inquired.
"Smart people learn from other people's mistakes," Charles said drily, enjoying himself far too much. He might be acting like an old man, now, but he certainly didn't feel it. "Hank, I'll come down to the lab after Rebecca and Tim are done with me this afternoon, we'll discuss it then."
"Wasn't she supposed to come in the morning, and Tim and Hannalore were this afternoon?"
Charles shook his head. "No, we decided yesterday that weekend visits can be reduced to one afternoon session each day. We'll still have morning sessions on weekdays, but Hannalore and Rebecca can alternate days, and afternoon sessions with Tim will be Tuesdays and Thursdays."
It was a roundabout way of saying that, yes, for the first time since October 28th, he'd gotten out of bed, emptied his bladder, bathed and dressed without assistance from anyone else -- and he had come down to breakfast looking much better kempt than Sean, which had to count for something. Things were looking up.
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Rebecca's perfectly calm and clinical expression remained frozen in place when she looked down at Charles' bare legs, even while her thoughts were racing with abject fear. For all that he'd read her mind plenty of times before, he hadn't expected that response.
"I'll have to report this," she said mechanically.
He looked at the two lines stretching neatly down his right leg, one faint, one still red and puckered, the scab just beginning to form. Tim would have no reason to see it when he arrived half an hour later; but Rebecca would need to know so she could avoid reopening the wound during the session. Charles had already decided to wipe her memory afterwards, and would do so after every session until it had sufficiently healed. "It was just an accident," he explained. "I was helping one of the boys with a model airplane yesterday, and discovered that I'm clumsy and Exacto knives are sharp." He smiled his best laugh-with-me,-I'm-so-charming-and-self-effacing smile at her.
"I still have to report it." Rebecca was sweating now. He took a quick peek inside her mind, and was astonished by what he saw.
There were grainy black and white photos spread out on her coffee table, a few of her dressed -- if barely -- in black lingerie, with people Charles didn't recognize, and two photos of people he did know. One of those photos was of Erik in Cuba, standing between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, his pensiveness and unease at odds with the good humor of the other two men. The other was a snapshot taken in a bar, red ink circling Erik and Charles in the background, beers in their hands, Erik telling a story and Charles laughing. The manila envelope they came in bore only her name and home address.
"If you feel you must," Charles said, and quietly stuffed the memory back in its manila envelope and tucked it in the back of her mind. Forget this for now. He would retrieve it for her at the end, so she could do whatever it was she needed to, after he removed the memory of the evidence of the previous night's madness. "But it was just an accident. I'm sure you understand."
Inexplicably relieved, she smiled and looked down again at Charles' legs, openly admiring the cuts. "I'll just get a temporary bandage on that, and then I can set you up with a clean one after Tim's done." I knew it, she thought to herself, pleased. I can always tell.
He found it remarkably difficult to swallow after that, given her other thoughts. Thankfully she turned them off as soon as Tim arrived, like changing channels on a television, and Charles could focus on learning how to do the leg exercises himself without having to actively block out the completely inappropriate images of what Rebecca would be only too happy to do to him.
When it was over, after Tim had left with a promise and a threat to do a longer session on Sunday, and Rebecca had applied the new bandage and helped him back into his dress slacks, Charles reached in and erased the majority of their session together. Then he fetched the envelope with the photos and returned it to the coffee table, quietly sitting back and watching as she remembered them. This time she hadn't been prepared; this time her face betrayed her fear as she looked at him and saw the photo with the red circle in her mind's eye. "I can't lose my job," she thought, and "they only want to talk to him, they only want to find that Communist," and then her decision was made.
Charles smiled brightly and thanked her.
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Hank spent a full fifteen minutes telling Charles about the ideas of Vannevar Bush and the need for an integrated curricula focused on information classification, dissemination and retrieval, then launched into a discussion of the computers designed for managing US census data, with a brief tirade on the involvement of the International Business Machines Corporation with Germany's Third Reich, all delivered over his shoulder while pulling down various notebooks and folders stuffed full of mimeographs and copies of microfiches from the shelves in the lab.
"So how many John Turners are there, Hank?"
The broad shoulders sagged underneath the lab coat. "Several hundred, and that's just the Midwest. John Smith and Bob Johnson are more common, so it could have been worse, but it's still bad enough."
"He's young, not yet in high school. Green eyes, some freckles. Light-colored hair, blonde or light brown. Does that help?"
Hank scratched at the blue ruff at his neck, lost in thought. "I'll call around for school photos. Do you know if he's involved in any sports? I might be able to find something in local newspapers, although… there are a lot of local newspapers. At the CIA we had entire buildings full of people to do nothing but catalog all day long, and even so most things get glossed over."
Charles sighed. "I do wish we'd been able to figure out how to keep Cerebro, instead of just dismantling it. As it is, you've got me, Sean and Alex. Maybe we can impose upon the Tydahls as well."
Hank dropped the folder in his hands onto the lab table without bothering to look at it. "I've been working on designs for a new Cerebro." He shook his head at Charles' hopeful expression. "No, it's not going as well as I'd like. I had been pursuing an approach that made use of Mr. Lehnsherr's ability to modulate the data flow, and came up with a pretty good way of providing feedback to the user, but…"
"But Erik's not with us," Charles finished for him. "And it's hard to start again on a problem when you've already thought of a better solution." Charles nodded in sympathy. "Let's save that for another day."
They were interrupted by the sound of pounding on the door to the lab, and Alex shouting for Hank to come out into the hall. Hank leapt across the table and swung the door open -- the movement fully graceful, filling Charles with good-natured envy -- and Duchess leapt through the open door and scurried behind Hank, her claws ticking on the linoleum as she slid in her haste. Behind Alex, Sean came running up, laughing, and Hank surprised them all with a deep roar. Himself, most of all.
"Easy Beast!" Alex said, hands up, palms out.
Sean pointed at Duchess peeking out from behind Hank's knees. "I'm a dog whistle!" he chortled, nonplussed.
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Duchess ran away for good the next day.
Mrs. Tydahl had found him on his way to breakfast to tell him about Rebecca's phone call at 7am sharp. Duchess had been padding quietly alongside the wheels of his chair, as though nothing were amiss. He'd gone to the foyer and the nearest phone to return her call, not wanting to trouble the boys with what he expected would be a preliminary attempt at blackmail or threats, but instead he got one of the receptionists who told him that, given his recent progress and the surprise on-site visit of a specialist familiar with similar cases, it would be best if Charles came to the clinic at the hospital in New Salem today for a consult. Rebecca had offered to drive him, just this once, since they were all trying to work around the specialist's schedule but didn't want to inconvenience Charles any more than they had to. He repeated the change in plans aloud for Mrs. Tydahl's benefit -- Mr. Tydahl typically drove him to the hospital when he had to leave the estate -- and when she opened the door to retrieve the Sunday paper, the dog bolted through it.
Sean shouted himself nearly hoarse, but she didn't return. Hank tried to track her, but lost her scent almost immediately. Charles promised Hank he would make Rebecca drive slowly and carefully down the road, controlling her every move if he had to, and if they happened to see Duchess, he would make her turn around immediately and bring the dog home, the appointment with the specialist -- or the blackmailer -- be damned. But even as he said the words, even as he reached out and took control of Rebecca, lifting her foot gently off the gas pedal to slow her car to a very sedate pace, even then he knew that finding out who was going after Erik and how much information they already had far outweighed the well-being of a pet dog, no matter how beloved.
An hour later, Rebecca led the way down the hall of rooms set aside for patient-doctor consults, her smart pink dress suit matching her pink nails. He wheeled behind her, listening for tension in the thoughts around him and finding it everywhere. He tried sifting through minds looking for a flavor of duplicitous, and only found an intern thinking about cheating on his wife, not the unscrupulous information gatherers he had expected -- perhaps they didn’t consider their work duplicitous.
Certainly not the man who was waiting in the office for them, who dismissed Rebecca with a terse invitation to wait outside. Charles held still while the man introduced himself as John Smith, an employee of the Agency tasked with researching a suspected terrorist with ties to communist Cuba, carefully arranging his features to look surprised when the man tossed copies of the two photos of Erik on the desk for him to see. He rubbed his fingers against his temple, as if attempting to soothe away a headache.
Rebecca was outside the door, listening with all her might. Go check your lipstick, Charles ordered her, and she immediately rose and walked down the hall to the restroom.
“Well,” Charles said, “as you can see, I'm surprised to find out this gentleman is so familiar with the Cubans, and I'm alarmed that you have a damning photograph of me having a drink in a bar with him.” He congratulated himself on being clever. “Why don't you mollify me by telling me everything you know?”
“Certainly," Mr. Smith acquiesced immediately. "His codename is Magneto, and he delivered a manifesto to the Agency raving about so-called 'Mutant Rights' five days ago. He has been implicated in the disappearance of several members of a covert operations group over a month ago, and most recently with the kidnapping of a U.S. Senator and his family. Would you like a drink?” Mr. Smith asked smoothly, reaching into his bag and pulling out a stainless steel flask. There were two double old-fashioned glasses on the shelf behind him; the doctor whose office they were borrowing had a preference for Waterford crystal.
“Thank you,” Charles said, rifling through the man's memories, catching the image of him filling the flask the previous night with Lagavulin 16-year-old scotch and sealing it. Mr. Smith poured two-fingers’ worth each, placed the glass for Charles near the photo of him in the bar (Charles must remember to keep a copy, as it was a good shot of Erik in profile), and downed half of his own drink in a single gulp. Charles raised his glass in a convivial salute, and took a less hearty, but no less appreciative sip. “I do appreciate the peatier flavor of Islay,” he said, thinking of the night he introduced Erik to the full array of his highland scotch collection. And what a long night it had been...
He took another drink as Mr. Smith continued. “We have reason to believe that he may have been involved in the escape of one Miss Frost -- an alias, obviously -- although all records as to why Miss Frost was in our custody or under whose authority we were keeping her, or even the identity of whoever apprehended her, are lost, presumably stolen.”
Distantly, he was aware of Rebecca's thoughts spiking in sudden surprise and recognition. He placed his nearly-empty glass down on the desk, and brought his fingers to his temple again in an attempt to concentrate, to break through the fog wrapping her mind so he could see whatever it was that alarmed her. Mr. Smith was speaking again, the words slurring together--
Charles watched, amused, as Mr. Smith faceplanted on the desk, his glasses making an unpleasant crunching sound as he did. Two men walked in with Rebecca in tow, and Charles greeted them happily--“Ah, Agent Levine, so nice to see you again! And Mr. Moore, I don't believe we've had the pleasure--”
Mr. Moore backhanded Charles, hard, sending him crashing through stars into a temporary darkness. He scrabbled his way back to wakefulness in time to hear Mr. Moore's words echo through Rebecca's memory-- “Fucking telepaths. Makes me hate my job, some days.” He tugged desperately at the edges of their minds, but nothing gave; and at last he sagged in place, relinquishing any control he might have had.
Charles did not feel particularly clever any longer. Instead, he felt like he was wrapped soundly in a ball of cotton, through which only occasional snippets of conversation could be heard. Agent Levine's voice, in a low, condescending tone "…the liberty of clearing your calendar…" and sometime later, Mr. Moore said, "Boss, looks like we got another JT. And get a load of this -- he's crippled already," and from far, far away, in the background of somebody else's conversation, Emma said "Really? I'm surprised." Some time after that -- minutes, or perhaps hours -- Mr. Moore pushed his wheelchair out into the hall with Rebecca at his heels, and Agent Levine closed the door behind them, leaving poor Mr. Smith to sleep off whatever it was they'd been drugged with.
There was a jolt and a rattling, and his head rolled painfully to the side. A pool of saliva on Charles' lip gave way, drool sliding down the side of his chin. That was a curb, he thought belatedly. A breeze, and sunlight warm on his skin -- outside, the parking lot. Mr. Moore's voice behind him, saying something urgent but indiscernible to Levine, and Charles' mind pulled up the memory of the last thing he'd heard him say: Another JT.
The initials wandered through the haze and landed in a fog bank on a hill. Once the connection was made, the realization shined in Charles' head with a sharp clarity, focusing in on a train of thoughts: This isn't about rescuing Erik, Charles told himself, the words beginning to push the drug-induced haze away, It's about rescuing John. The adrenalin rush hit him like touching a live wire, reverberating through his sedative-addled body. “Stop!” he ordered, reaching blindly out and catching only Agent Moore in his net. Behind the curtain of his eyelashes, through the corner of his half-lidded eye, he saw Agent Levine grab Rebecca's elbow and tug her forward, the radio in his other hand raised to his lips. The chair jerked suddenly, and the world tilted around it. “Sleep,” he commanded Moore, unable to form anything more than the simplest words, his mind struggling to catch up with what was going on around him.
The ground was rising up and he was falling down to meet it, his body nonsensically expecting to hit sand, not the pavement that tore the sleeves of his shirt and scraped the skin raw. His head bounced against it with a sharp lancing pain, and his mind announced in a sing-song, whiplash! and mild concussion! and told him that his feet were somewhere out of view, possibly tangled up in the chair, and added isn't this a pickle you've gotten yourself into?
"Bag it," Agent Levine shouted. The walkie-talkie squawked something back, and Charles felt the decision being made, heard tires squeal in response, betraying the impatience of the driver. From his vantage point on the ground he watched the wheels of a wide black car with government plates turn sharply, overcorrecting, then relaxing as the friction caught the back wheels and the entire vehicle lurched forward. Rebecca and Agent Levine were four feet to his right, and moving further away; Agent Moore was lying stretched out on his back with his head propped up against the curb six feet away, gone from Charles' mind, his feet almost close enough for Charles to touch, pointing towards him and the knocked-over wheelchair. There was nothing at all between Charles and the oncoming car except a dwindling amount of pavement and a shrinking volume of air.
He saw the entire thing again from the driver's perspective, noted the two candy-stripers - high school girls hoping to be nurses some day - already stepping towards Agent Moore to lend a hand, and he knew there was no good choice. Charles slammed the driver's foot against the brake, but struggled to hold the man's hands steady on the wheel. His head was still throbbing from whatever it was they'd administered to him, and his attention was stretched too thin to do so simple a thing as control a human less than twenty feet away. The man behind the wheel had managed to get the car to drift towards him at an angle with all four wheels clearly visible to Charles, and he knew he was trapped. There wasn't enough distance or time to stop it from happening.
Then the car jumped sideways, improbably, and Charles exhaled and blinked slowly, listening to the soft percussion of steel against flesh and bone, flesh and bone against glass, the impossible clarity of an empty high-heeled shoe hitting the pavement, followed immediately by a ton of steel crumpling itself against a cement pillar. He opened his eyes to see the bodies of Agent Levine and Rebecca fall to the ground twelve feet away, having flipped over the car entirely; he inhaled brake dust and smelled the burning rubber left in the car's wake; he heard the squeal of the now-bald tires, different in pitch than before, as the car finished twisting around the pillar and continued to slide past, hopping over the curb backwards and breaking through the decorative bushes, finally coming to rest with a loud crunch against the wall of the clinic's front entrance.
"It's not you, Erik," Charles said in the shocked silence. His tongue felt thick and his lips were disinclined to move, and he had to focus all of his effort on enunciating the words so he could be understood. He didn't know if Erik could hear him or not; for all he knew, he was 300 yards away, crouched on the hospital's roof like a gargoyle. But he was here, somewhere, wearing that helmet. He wondered briefly if he could read lips, or what he thought of seeing Charles like this, sprawled and helpless on the pavement, the wheelchair collapsed behind him. But then he remembered the realization that had woken him from his stupor, and he forced the words out. "They have John Turner, and he's crippled," he said, letting the words fall into place. "They crippled him."
The world turned warm and soft as the sedative won out against the adrenalin, now that he had done what he needed to do. Voices rose up suddenly, all around him, and footsteps were hurrying back and forth, and someone was shaking him and saying something, and he would have sent the thought "I can hear you" to them, but he couldn't, so he didn't.
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Charles opened his eyes, and stared himself in the face.
"This is disconcerting," he said.
"You are so thoughtless," the version of him that wasn't lying in bed answered, "do you have any idea what would happen if you got yourself killed?"
"Where's Emma, Raven?" He scowled at himself, and he scowled back.
"Miss Frost is playing hostage, which is a role she's perfect for. You know why?" Raven-in-Charles'-shape leaned towards him, close enough for him to grab her by the neck if he was so inclined. "Because Erik doesn't care about her," she spat out. "And I don't care about her. And we care about you, you…" Raven-in-Charles'-shape screwed up his face, and leaned his head down as tears started streaming down his cheeks. "You stupid idiot who almost got himself run over right in front of me!"
Charles reached up and held his sister in a tight hug, smoothing her hair with his right hand and shushing her as she bawled into his shoulder. "Be yourself, Raven, please," he pleaded after the worst of the sobs had subsided, reaching out to see whether anyone had been alerted by the noise and finding Sean standing watch outside the door. "This is too strange for me."
He let her go, and she flickered into the shape he was used to seeing her in, the blonde girl he'd originally recommended as being the form his mother was most likely to approve of, albeit in a candy-striper outfit. He shook his head, thinking of Erik, and how Erik had been right in regards to Raven where he himself had been wrong -- Moira's memories had shown him that -- but she smiled, the tear tracks missing on this new face but her eyes shimmering. "It's okay, Charles. I'm on a covert mission right now, and this is my disguise."
"And what, may I ask, is your mission?"
"Make the world safe for mutants," she said proudly. Her features clouded over, and she added, "only right now, it's make sure one mutant in particular is safe, because another mutant is going to go over the edge if anything else bad were to happen to you, and then the world wouldn't be safe for anyone."
He couldn't feel her hip against his, but he felt the twist in his upper back from the depression she made on the mattress where she sat; he wished he could feel her, so he crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her instead. "Please tell me Erik isn't walking straight into the trap they -- whoever the hell they are -- have laid for him."
She gave him a level glare back. "I don't know anyone who would do anything that stupid." Then she rolled her eyes and added, "Except you, of course. Oh, and him."
"Heads up, Professor, head nurse at 12 o'clock," Sean thought, and Raven leapt up to hit the nurse call button before Charles had opened his mouth.
When the head nurse walked in a minute later, she was blushing furiously, and Sean poked his head in the doorway and gave Raven and Charles the "okay" hand-sign. Charles greeted her, made some nice pleasantries about the kindness of candy-stripers and being grateful for the care he'd received from the hospital's excellent staff, and how he'd just woken up, and impressed upon her the urgency with which he needed to return home. In the jumble of thoughts set into disarray by Sean's shameless flirting, he found the story that had been constructed so far of yesterday afternoon's tragic events -- yesterday afternoon, a whole day lost. Rebecca had been taking him back to her car after a short session, having received help from two nice gentlemen, and it was just bad luck that the wheelchair had caught on something and the gentleman pushing it didn't know how to manage it properly, and they fell in the way of a car, and the driver swerved to miss them and -- tragically -- struck Rebecca and the other fellow. Three dead, one presently in a coma, and the last miraculously walking away with only a severe concussion, although "walking away" was merely a figure of speech.
"Yes," Charles assured her, "That's exactly how it happened."
And although everyone knew about the drunk man who slept it off in Doctor Williams' office and disappeared sometime in the middle of the night, everyone believed that was properly kept a secret from everyone else, so no one talked about it.
Tucked safely away in his coma, Agent Levine was barely responsive to Charles' probing, even when he was sitting right next to him, with one hand placed on top of his ("They say that sometimes people in a coma can feel human touch," the nurse said, unconsciously stroking the gold crucifix pendant at her throat) and the other at his temple. The most he could get were flashes of the car's final approach, as though the last memory was still waiting to be thought. Everything else was locked deep away, beyond his reach.
The only non-physical clue he had was Mr. Moore's thinking of Levine as "the new guy," and the fact that Mr. Smith -- a legitimate representative of the CIA -- had no idea that Moore and Levine were involved. Glassy-eyed, the nurse handed Levine's wallet to Charles, and stood stock-still while he flipped through its contents. A tab for a dry-cleaner in New Salem -- so close to home -- several dollar bills of various denominations, carefully smoothed and facing the same direction, a business card for dance instruction with Rebecca's number written on the back in her tidy script, and three cards with the seal of the National Center for Intelligence Gathering and "Samuel Levine, Field Operations, Extranormal Research Division" printed in dark blue underneath. A 1-800 number with a three-digit extension finished the card.
Charles kept the business cards -- including the one with Rebecca's number -- and handed the wallet back to the nurse. He released her after he'd tucked the cards safely away, and picked up a conversation thread in the middle about how very sorry he was that so much trouble had been caused on his and Rebecca's behalf. He let the nurse think she had lost track of his words, entranced by his smart British accent; it wasn't far from the truth.
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“I think I found your John Turner, Professor, but... Well, you can tell me.” Hank placed a copy of a newspaper clipping on the desk, courtesy of the new Xerox 914 downstairs in the lab. In it were headshots of two freckled boys, evidently school portraits, beneath a photograph of a tractor on its side and the headline “Tragedy Strikes Local Farmers.” Charles tapped the boy on the right with his finger, said “That's him. That's exactly how he looks.”
“Look at the date, Professor.”
Charles did. “1942? Ah.” He peered up at Hank, wondering when the boy had developed a tendency for the dramatic. “What's the rest of the story?”
Hank rubbed the fur at the top of his head, debating. “Hank...” Charles said in a low voice, warning.
“Promise you won't do anything rash?” Hank pleaded.
The corner of Charles' lips twisted upward. It hadn't escaped his notice that an awful lot of people had been asking that of him, lately. “How about if I promise to let you know if the situation warrants quick action and a… less cautious approach?"
“How about you promise to include us this time?” Alex sounded far too reasonable. “I think we can agree that this affects all of us.” Sean and Hank nodded.
"Fine," Charles agreed. What could he do but acquiesce in the face of so much astounding sensibility? He looked at Hank expectantly.
"1942, Northern Illinois. Two brothers were working on their father's cornfields, late summer; the tractor got stuck climbing a hill to the main road and tipped over. The elder brother fell from the cab and was crushed under the wheel, sustaining serious injuries and dying shortly thereafter. He was known for having a "knack" with farm animals; there are several mentions of him being called in to help neighbors with animals that had gotten themselves stuck, cats in trees, that sort of thing. The younger brother was thrown further from the tractor, hit his head on a rock, and was in a coma for a decade."
Hank opened the folder and pulled out another newspaper article, this one with a photo of an older man with his head bowed, being pushed into the back of a police cruiser. "A preacher from his hometown was with him when he woke up. The court records state that he 'went to John's bedside because God told him to; upon seeing John, now twenty-one years old, wake up, he asked him whether he was doing God's work or not. Then the preacher beat him to a bloody pulp with a lead pipe before the nursing staff could pull him off, and John was in a coma for at least another five years. The damage was so bad, they had to amputate his legs."
"Dammit," Charles muttered, putting his head in his hands. He took a deep breath and looked up to meet Hank's amber eyes again. "Why do you say 'at least'?"
"Because men claiming to be with the Federal Bureau of Investigation took him into custody for his protection in 1957, and he hasn't been heard from since."
Sean gave a low whistle. Alex just nodded, leaning against a bookshelf; evidently he'd already heard this.
"Right. So, we have two things to do. First, rescue John Turner from wherever they're keeping him. Second, keep Erik from killing innocents in the process." He sighed. And that's my fault, because I assumed they were responsible for crippling him.
"Great, let's go!" Sean said, leaping forward, then stopping suddenly, pitching forward on the balls of his feet precariously. "Wait. How do we know where to go?"
Charles pulled one of Levine's cards from his jacket pocket and placed it on the desk, next to the photos of the brothers. "We call them and ask for directions."
Hank's ears twitched. He looked at the window the Charles had left cracked open to let in the spring air. “There's a motorcycle coming up the drive, Professor.”
They all looked at Charles expectantly; for a moment he stared at the window and the trees beyond in what felt like slack-jawed amazement, before he recollected himself and verified that he hadn't actually been sitting with his mouth wide open. “It appears we have a guest,” he said, “and I gather he means to stay for a while. We'd better go down and greet him properly.”
The low-slung Harley-Davidson was big and its engine rumbled loudly; its rider was bigger and, if possible, spoke in an even louder rumble, deep in his broad chest. “Here I am,” he announced, knocking the kickstand into place and swinging his leg up over the back of the bike in an easy, thoughtless dismount. “These your kids?”
“Hello, Logan,” Charles greeted him, settling the rising hackles behind him with a gentle petting of their minds. He wouldn't do it every time, but for the moment he needed to keep things from spiraling out of control. They could have their wrestling matches later. “This is my first class -- Dr. Hank McCoy, Alex Summers, and Sean Cassidy.”
“Beast,” Hank said, indicating himself. He nodded towards Alex, who was radiating smugness at Hank's acknowledgement of the name, “Havok, and Banshee.”
“Wolverine,” Logan growled. “Now that we're all warm and fuzzy, when do we eat?”
Pairing: Erik/Charles (M/M)
Rating: R
Warnings: Hospitals. Drinking. Death.
Author's Notes: Fix-it. Sequel to Inevitable Things. This fanfic is a belated New Year's present for delirium1995, who pointed out that Charles' recovery in X-Men: First Class was far too quick and painless both physically and emotionally, and as James McAvoy said about Xavier, "he's just had a huge part of his physical life taken away from him, by someone he cares about more than anyone else." So he's going to a dark place in this one.
The story is currently being beta-read. Please feel free to comment with critiques or point out spelling/grammar issues. Please especially point out passages that are clunky, where it is too difficult to follow the action, or where characters do things that strike you as out of character.
NB: about the possessive apostrophe and proper nouns that end in s: according to Eats Shoots and Leaves, it is now correct to write Charles's; but I grew up with Charles', and it still just looks completely wrong to me to write it the other way. The Bedford Handbook (5th ed.) claims this is an acceptable exception; The 2011 edition of The Elements of Style is quite clear that it is not.
Previous installments: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
Dismantle the Sun: Part Three
Stop All the Clocks
"Beast, what happened to you?" Alex asked, pausing for a moment with a towering forkful of pancakes mid-shovel to his mouth.
Hank's eyes narrowed, following Alex's gaze to the bright white bandage tied around his shaved forearm. "Duchess bit me."
"Well, what did you do?" When there was no answer, Alex peered at him harder. "Hank, what did you do with Duchess?" he asked in a low voice.
"Nothing! She bit me and ran off--" he cut off abruptly when he realized Charles was in the doorway, aligning his wheelchair to slip through the narrow gap.
"Ah, Hank. I wanted to talk with you about the progress you've made indexing the Cerebro results." Charles said brightly. "There's a boy by the name of John Turner, maybe 11 or 12 years old, somewhere in the Midwest… what happened to your arm?"
An exasperated growl rumbled through Hank's chest, and he ran his hands over his face and the top of his head, tugging at the fur there. "Duchess bit me! Last night, she was so upset, I took her out for a walk and she bit me and ran off, Jesus!" Hank's yellow eyes turned into wide round saucers. He squeaked out a quick "Sorry, Professor!" and collapsed in his chair -- the sturdiest one at the kitchen table, brought in just for him.
Charles wheeled himself to his spot at the table, and reached out to pat the back of Hank's hand. "You've been doing well by her, Hank, I'm sure she'll come back."
"If she doesn't get run over by a truck," Alex said, and shrugged to Charles' peeved glare. "They drive like maniacs on that road, because they only thing they expect to hit are deer, and everyone knows the deer are strangely avoiding this part of the county." He turned back to Hank for that last bit, and Hank favored him with a smile full of fangs.
Charles hid a relieved grin, happy at the inside joke they were enjoying; he was peculiarly happy today, especially odd considering last night had been one of the unhappiest of the past few months. He ran his fingers lightly over his slacks, feeling the bandage taped securely in place and hidden by the cloth. He picked up the plate at his place and reached forward to the stack of pancakes, thoughtfully placed on his side of the table.
"Alex, your cooking is marvelous," he said after the first bite, and the young man shrugged in response, as if it would hide the fact that he was beaming under the praise. "And Hank," he said after the next. "This boy in the Midwest, or thereabouts -- he's a telepath of sorts that I've had some communication with, a sort of dream-mediated astral projection, but I'm not quite sure of the details."
"Do you recognize his signature from before?" While Hank asked, Alex reached nonchalantly across the table to take the bottle of maple syrup out of his paw; he'd forgotten about it and poured a quarter of the contents onto his plate while Charles was speaking.
"No, I don't, and that's strange. Actually the whole thing is strange."
"Know what's strange? They're experimenting with hallucinogens to promote extrasensory perception down at Area 51. Do you think that would work?" Sean sauntered in, still in his rumpled t-shirt and yesterday's sweatpants, red hair sticking out every which way.
"What's strange," said Hank, "is that you still believe the nonsense you read in comic books, and yet you sort of look like a grown man."
"And scream like a girl," Alex added with a snicker.
Sean raised his chin so he could look down on Alex. "Girls only wish they could scream like I do." Then he turned to Charles. "ESP-enhancing drugs, just think what we could do!"
"You know what I'm thinking?" Alex looked at Charles, gauging his level of tolerance for the day, then at Hank. "Supersonic dishwasher. Last one to breakfast does the cleanup."
"Excellent idea, my dear fellow," Hank concurred, pushing his pancakes around with his fork in an attempt to sop up all the syrup.
"And Sean, no." Charles said, putting his fork down and clasping his hands together beneath his chin, in the style of Professor Armstrong, a particularly severe and unflappable educator of genetics. The old man specialized in the sexual characteristics of amphibians, was never once observed to crack a smile on the school grounds, and certainly never lowered himself to acknowledge his students' jokes at his field's expense; Charles had loved trying to get that man's mountainous ego to shift or give, and never did succeed. Now he tried to evoke the old Professor as much as he could for Sean's sake, and said with as much gravity as he could muster, "Drugs and mutant abilities do not mix."
"Is that the voice of experience?" Alex inquired.
"Smart people learn from other people's mistakes," Charles said drily, enjoying himself far too much. He might be acting like an old man, now, but he certainly didn't feel it. "Hank, I'll come down to the lab after Rebecca and Tim are done with me this afternoon, we'll discuss it then."
"Wasn't she supposed to come in the morning, and Tim and Hannalore were this afternoon?"
Charles shook his head. "No, we decided yesterday that weekend visits can be reduced to one afternoon session each day. We'll still have morning sessions on weekdays, but Hannalore and Rebecca can alternate days, and afternoon sessions with Tim will be Tuesdays and Thursdays."
It was a roundabout way of saying that, yes, for the first time since October 28th, he'd gotten out of bed, emptied his bladder, bathed and dressed without assistance from anyone else -- and he had come down to breakfast looking much better kempt than Sean, which had to count for something. Things were looking up.
------------------
Rebecca's perfectly calm and clinical expression remained frozen in place when she looked down at Charles' bare legs, even while her thoughts were racing with abject fear. For all that he'd read her mind plenty of times before, he hadn't expected that response.
"I'll have to report this," she said mechanically.
He looked at the two lines stretching neatly down his right leg, one faint, one still red and puckered, the scab just beginning to form. Tim would have no reason to see it when he arrived half an hour later; but Rebecca would need to know so she could avoid reopening the wound during the session. Charles had already decided to wipe her memory afterwards, and would do so after every session until it had sufficiently healed. "It was just an accident," he explained. "I was helping one of the boys with a model airplane yesterday, and discovered that I'm clumsy and Exacto knives are sharp." He smiled his best laugh-with-me,-I'm-so-charming-and-self-effacing smile at her.
"I still have to report it." Rebecca was sweating now. He took a quick peek inside her mind, and was astonished by what he saw.
There were grainy black and white photos spread out on her coffee table, a few of her dressed -- if barely -- in black lingerie, with people Charles didn't recognize, and two photos of people he did know. One of those photos was of Erik in Cuba, standing between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, his pensiveness and unease at odds with the good humor of the other two men. The other was a snapshot taken in a bar, red ink circling Erik and Charles in the background, beers in their hands, Erik telling a story and Charles laughing. The manila envelope they came in bore only her name and home address.
"If you feel you must," Charles said, and quietly stuffed the memory back in its manila envelope and tucked it in the back of her mind. Forget this for now. He would retrieve it for her at the end, so she could do whatever it was she needed to, after he removed the memory of the evidence of the previous night's madness. "But it was just an accident. I'm sure you understand."
Inexplicably relieved, she smiled and looked down again at Charles' legs, openly admiring the cuts. "I'll just get a temporary bandage on that, and then I can set you up with a clean one after Tim's done." I knew it, she thought to herself, pleased. I can always tell.
He found it remarkably difficult to swallow after that, given her other thoughts. Thankfully she turned them off as soon as Tim arrived, like changing channels on a television, and Charles could focus on learning how to do the leg exercises himself without having to actively block out the completely inappropriate images of what Rebecca would be only too happy to do to him.
When it was over, after Tim had left with a promise and a threat to do a longer session on Sunday, and Rebecca had applied the new bandage and helped him back into his dress slacks, Charles reached in and erased the majority of their session together. Then he fetched the envelope with the photos and returned it to the coffee table, quietly sitting back and watching as she remembered them. This time she hadn't been prepared; this time her face betrayed her fear as she looked at him and saw the photo with the red circle in her mind's eye. "I can't lose my job," she thought, and "they only want to talk to him, they only want to find that Communist," and then her decision was made.
Charles smiled brightly and thanked her.
------------------
Hank spent a full fifteen minutes telling Charles about the ideas of Vannevar Bush and the need for an integrated curricula focused on information classification, dissemination and retrieval, then launched into a discussion of the computers designed for managing US census data, with a brief tirade on the involvement of the International Business Machines Corporation with Germany's Third Reich, all delivered over his shoulder while pulling down various notebooks and folders stuffed full of mimeographs and copies of microfiches from the shelves in the lab.
"So how many John Turners are there, Hank?"
The broad shoulders sagged underneath the lab coat. "Several hundred, and that's just the Midwest. John Smith and Bob Johnson are more common, so it could have been worse, but it's still bad enough."
"He's young, not yet in high school. Green eyes, some freckles. Light-colored hair, blonde or light brown. Does that help?"
Hank scratched at the blue ruff at his neck, lost in thought. "I'll call around for school photos. Do you know if he's involved in any sports? I might be able to find something in local newspapers, although… there are a lot of local newspapers. At the CIA we had entire buildings full of people to do nothing but catalog all day long, and even so most things get glossed over."
Charles sighed. "I do wish we'd been able to figure out how to keep Cerebro, instead of just dismantling it. As it is, you've got me, Sean and Alex. Maybe we can impose upon the Tydahls as well."
Hank dropped the folder in his hands onto the lab table without bothering to look at it. "I've been working on designs for a new Cerebro." He shook his head at Charles' hopeful expression. "No, it's not going as well as I'd like. I had been pursuing an approach that made use of Mr. Lehnsherr's ability to modulate the data flow, and came up with a pretty good way of providing feedback to the user, but…"
"But Erik's not with us," Charles finished for him. "And it's hard to start again on a problem when you've already thought of a better solution." Charles nodded in sympathy. "Let's save that for another day."
They were interrupted by the sound of pounding on the door to the lab, and Alex shouting for Hank to come out into the hall. Hank leapt across the table and swung the door open -- the movement fully graceful, filling Charles with good-natured envy -- and Duchess leapt through the open door and scurried behind Hank, her claws ticking on the linoleum as she slid in her haste. Behind Alex, Sean came running up, laughing, and Hank surprised them all with a deep roar. Himself, most of all.
"Easy Beast!" Alex said, hands up, palms out.
Sean pointed at Duchess peeking out from behind Hank's knees. "I'm a dog whistle!" he chortled, nonplussed.
------------------
Duchess ran away for good the next day.
Mrs. Tydahl had found him on his way to breakfast to tell him about Rebecca's phone call at 7am sharp. Duchess had been padding quietly alongside the wheels of his chair, as though nothing were amiss. He'd gone to the foyer and the nearest phone to return her call, not wanting to trouble the boys with what he expected would be a preliminary attempt at blackmail or threats, but instead he got one of the receptionists who told him that, given his recent progress and the surprise on-site visit of a specialist familiar with similar cases, it would be best if Charles came to the clinic at the hospital in New Salem today for a consult. Rebecca had offered to drive him, just this once, since they were all trying to work around the specialist's schedule but didn't want to inconvenience Charles any more than they had to. He repeated the change in plans aloud for Mrs. Tydahl's benefit -- Mr. Tydahl typically drove him to the hospital when he had to leave the estate -- and when she opened the door to retrieve the Sunday paper, the dog bolted through it.
Sean shouted himself nearly hoarse, but she didn't return. Hank tried to track her, but lost her scent almost immediately. Charles promised Hank he would make Rebecca drive slowly and carefully down the road, controlling her every move if he had to, and if they happened to see Duchess, he would make her turn around immediately and bring the dog home, the appointment with the specialist -- or the blackmailer -- be damned. But even as he said the words, even as he reached out and took control of Rebecca, lifting her foot gently off the gas pedal to slow her car to a very sedate pace, even then he knew that finding out who was going after Erik and how much information they already had far outweighed the well-being of a pet dog, no matter how beloved.
An hour later, Rebecca led the way down the hall of rooms set aside for patient-doctor consults, her smart pink dress suit matching her pink nails. He wheeled behind her, listening for tension in the thoughts around him and finding it everywhere. He tried sifting through minds looking for a flavor of duplicitous, and only found an intern thinking about cheating on his wife, not the unscrupulous information gatherers he had expected -- perhaps they didn’t consider their work duplicitous.
Certainly not the man who was waiting in the office for them, who dismissed Rebecca with a terse invitation to wait outside. Charles held still while the man introduced himself as John Smith, an employee of the Agency tasked with researching a suspected terrorist with ties to communist Cuba, carefully arranging his features to look surprised when the man tossed copies of the two photos of Erik on the desk for him to see. He rubbed his fingers against his temple, as if attempting to soothe away a headache.
Rebecca was outside the door, listening with all her might. Go check your lipstick, Charles ordered her, and she immediately rose and walked down the hall to the restroom.
“Well,” Charles said, “as you can see, I'm surprised to find out this gentleman is so familiar with the Cubans, and I'm alarmed that you have a damning photograph of me having a drink in a bar with him.” He congratulated himself on being clever. “Why don't you mollify me by telling me everything you know?”
“Certainly," Mr. Smith acquiesced immediately. "His codename is Magneto, and he delivered a manifesto to the Agency raving about so-called 'Mutant Rights' five days ago. He has been implicated in the disappearance of several members of a covert operations group over a month ago, and most recently with the kidnapping of a U.S. Senator and his family. Would you like a drink?” Mr. Smith asked smoothly, reaching into his bag and pulling out a stainless steel flask. There were two double old-fashioned glasses on the shelf behind him; the doctor whose office they were borrowing had a preference for Waterford crystal.
“Thank you,” Charles said, rifling through the man's memories, catching the image of him filling the flask the previous night with Lagavulin 16-year-old scotch and sealing it. Mr. Smith poured two-fingers’ worth each, placed the glass for Charles near the photo of him in the bar (Charles must remember to keep a copy, as it was a good shot of Erik in profile), and downed half of his own drink in a single gulp. Charles raised his glass in a convivial salute, and took a less hearty, but no less appreciative sip. “I do appreciate the peatier flavor of Islay,” he said, thinking of the night he introduced Erik to the full array of his highland scotch collection. And what a long night it had been...
He took another drink as Mr. Smith continued. “We have reason to believe that he may have been involved in the escape of one Miss Frost -- an alias, obviously -- although all records as to why Miss Frost was in our custody or under whose authority we were keeping her, or even the identity of whoever apprehended her, are lost, presumably stolen.”
Distantly, he was aware of Rebecca's thoughts spiking in sudden surprise and recognition. He placed his nearly-empty glass down on the desk, and brought his fingers to his temple again in an attempt to concentrate, to break through the fog wrapping her mind so he could see whatever it was that alarmed her. Mr. Smith was speaking again, the words slurring together--
Charles watched, amused, as Mr. Smith faceplanted on the desk, his glasses making an unpleasant crunching sound as he did. Two men walked in with Rebecca in tow, and Charles greeted them happily--“Ah, Agent Levine, so nice to see you again! And Mr. Moore, I don't believe we've had the pleasure--”
Mr. Moore backhanded Charles, hard, sending him crashing through stars into a temporary darkness. He scrabbled his way back to wakefulness in time to hear Mr. Moore's words echo through Rebecca's memory-- “Fucking telepaths. Makes me hate my job, some days.” He tugged desperately at the edges of their minds, but nothing gave; and at last he sagged in place, relinquishing any control he might have had.
Charles did not feel particularly clever any longer. Instead, he felt like he was wrapped soundly in a ball of cotton, through which only occasional snippets of conversation could be heard. Agent Levine's voice, in a low, condescending tone "…the liberty of clearing your calendar…" and sometime later, Mr. Moore said, "Boss, looks like we got another JT. And get a load of this -- he's crippled already," and from far, far away, in the background of somebody else's conversation, Emma said "Really? I'm surprised." Some time after that -- minutes, or perhaps hours -- Mr. Moore pushed his wheelchair out into the hall with Rebecca at his heels, and Agent Levine closed the door behind them, leaving poor Mr. Smith to sleep off whatever it was they'd been drugged with.
There was a jolt and a rattling, and his head rolled painfully to the side. A pool of saliva on Charles' lip gave way, drool sliding down the side of his chin. That was a curb, he thought belatedly. A breeze, and sunlight warm on his skin -- outside, the parking lot. Mr. Moore's voice behind him, saying something urgent but indiscernible to Levine, and Charles' mind pulled up the memory of the last thing he'd heard him say: Another JT.
The initials wandered through the haze and landed in a fog bank on a hill. Once the connection was made, the realization shined in Charles' head with a sharp clarity, focusing in on a train of thoughts: This isn't about rescuing Erik, Charles told himself, the words beginning to push the drug-induced haze away, It's about rescuing John. The adrenalin rush hit him like touching a live wire, reverberating through his sedative-addled body. “Stop!” he ordered, reaching blindly out and catching only Agent Moore in his net. Behind the curtain of his eyelashes, through the corner of his half-lidded eye, he saw Agent Levine grab Rebecca's elbow and tug her forward, the radio in his other hand raised to his lips. The chair jerked suddenly, and the world tilted around it. “Sleep,” he commanded Moore, unable to form anything more than the simplest words, his mind struggling to catch up with what was going on around him.
The ground was rising up and he was falling down to meet it, his body nonsensically expecting to hit sand, not the pavement that tore the sleeves of his shirt and scraped the skin raw. His head bounced against it with a sharp lancing pain, and his mind announced in a sing-song, whiplash! and mild concussion! and told him that his feet were somewhere out of view, possibly tangled up in the chair, and added isn't this a pickle you've gotten yourself into?
"Bag it," Agent Levine shouted. The walkie-talkie squawked something back, and Charles felt the decision being made, heard tires squeal in response, betraying the impatience of the driver. From his vantage point on the ground he watched the wheels of a wide black car with government plates turn sharply, overcorrecting, then relaxing as the friction caught the back wheels and the entire vehicle lurched forward. Rebecca and Agent Levine were four feet to his right, and moving further away; Agent Moore was lying stretched out on his back with his head propped up against the curb six feet away, gone from Charles' mind, his feet almost close enough for Charles to touch, pointing towards him and the knocked-over wheelchair. There was nothing at all between Charles and the oncoming car except a dwindling amount of pavement and a shrinking volume of air.
He saw the entire thing again from the driver's perspective, noted the two candy-stripers - high school girls hoping to be nurses some day - already stepping towards Agent Moore to lend a hand, and he knew there was no good choice. Charles slammed the driver's foot against the brake, but struggled to hold the man's hands steady on the wheel. His head was still throbbing from whatever it was they'd administered to him, and his attention was stretched too thin to do so simple a thing as control a human less than twenty feet away. The man behind the wheel had managed to get the car to drift towards him at an angle with all four wheels clearly visible to Charles, and he knew he was trapped. There wasn't enough distance or time to stop it from happening.
Then the car jumped sideways, improbably, and Charles exhaled and blinked slowly, listening to the soft percussion of steel against flesh and bone, flesh and bone against glass, the impossible clarity of an empty high-heeled shoe hitting the pavement, followed immediately by a ton of steel crumpling itself against a cement pillar. He opened his eyes to see the bodies of Agent Levine and Rebecca fall to the ground twelve feet away, having flipped over the car entirely; he inhaled brake dust and smelled the burning rubber left in the car's wake; he heard the squeal of the now-bald tires, different in pitch than before, as the car finished twisting around the pillar and continued to slide past, hopping over the curb backwards and breaking through the decorative bushes, finally coming to rest with a loud crunch against the wall of the clinic's front entrance.
"It's not you, Erik," Charles said in the shocked silence. His tongue felt thick and his lips were disinclined to move, and he had to focus all of his effort on enunciating the words so he could be understood. He didn't know if Erik could hear him or not; for all he knew, he was 300 yards away, crouched on the hospital's roof like a gargoyle. But he was here, somewhere, wearing that helmet. He wondered briefly if he could read lips, or what he thought of seeing Charles like this, sprawled and helpless on the pavement, the wheelchair collapsed behind him. But then he remembered the realization that had woken him from his stupor, and he forced the words out. "They have John Turner, and he's crippled," he said, letting the words fall into place. "They crippled him."
The world turned warm and soft as the sedative won out against the adrenalin, now that he had done what he needed to do. Voices rose up suddenly, all around him, and footsteps were hurrying back and forth, and someone was shaking him and saying something, and he would have sent the thought "I can hear you" to them, but he couldn't, so he didn't.
------------------
Charles opened his eyes, and stared himself in the face.
"This is disconcerting," he said.
"You are so thoughtless," the version of him that wasn't lying in bed answered, "do you have any idea what would happen if you got yourself killed?"
"Where's Emma, Raven?" He scowled at himself, and he scowled back.
"Miss Frost is playing hostage, which is a role she's perfect for. You know why?" Raven-in-Charles'-shape leaned towards him, close enough for him to grab her by the neck if he was so inclined. "Because Erik doesn't care about her," she spat out. "And I don't care about her. And we care about you, you…" Raven-in-Charles'-shape screwed up his face, and leaned his head down as tears started streaming down his cheeks. "You stupid idiot who almost got himself run over right in front of me!"
Charles reached up and held his sister in a tight hug, smoothing her hair with his right hand and shushing her as she bawled into his shoulder. "Be yourself, Raven, please," he pleaded after the worst of the sobs had subsided, reaching out to see whether anyone had been alerted by the noise and finding Sean standing watch outside the door. "This is too strange for me."
He let her go, and she flickered into the shape he was used to seeing her in, the blonde girl he'd originally recommended as being the form his mother was most likely to approve of, albeit in a candy-striper outfit. He shook his head, thinking of Erik, and how Erik had been right in regards to Raven where he himself had been wrong -- Moira's memories had shown him that -- but she smiled, the tear tracks missing on this new face but her eyes shimmering. "It's okay, Charles. I'm on a covert mission right now, and this is my disguise."
"And what, may I ask, is your mission?"
"Make the world safe for mutants," she said proudly. Her features clouded over, and she added, "only right now, it's make sure one mutant in particular is safe, because another mutant is going to go over the edge if anything else bad were to happen to you, and then the world wouldn't be safe for anyone."
He couldn't feel her hip against his, but he felt the twist in his upper back from the depression she made on the mattress where she sat; he wished he could feel her, so he crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her instead. "Please tell me Erik isn't walking straight into the trap they -- whoever the hell they are -- have laid for him."
She gave him a level glare back. "I don't know anyone who would do anything that stupid." Then she rolled her eyes and added, "Except you, of course. Oh, and him."
"Heads up, Professor, head nurse at 12 o'clock," Sean thought, and Raven leapt up to hit the nurse call button before Charles had opened his mouth.
When the head nurse walked in a minute later, she was blushing furiously, and Sean poked his head in the doorway and gave Raven and Charles the "okay" hand-sign. Charles greeted her, made some nice pleasantries about the kindness of candy-stripers and being grateful for the care he'd received from the hospital's excellent staff, and how he'd just woken up, and impressed upon her the urgency with which he needed to return home. In the jumble of thoughts set into disarray by Sean's shameless flirting, he found the story that had been constructed so far of yesterday afternoon's tragic events -- yesterday afternoon, a whole day lost. Rebecca had been taking him back to her car after a short session, having received help from two nice gentlemen, and it was just bad luck that the wheelchair had caught on something and the gentleman pushing it didn't know how to manage it properly, and they fell in the way of a car, and the driver swerved to miss them and -- tragically -- struck Rebecca and the other fellow. Three dead, one presently in a coma, and the last miraculously walking away with only a severe concussion, although "walking away" was merely a figure of speech.
"Yes," Charles assured her, "That's exactly how it happened."
And although everyone knew about the drunk man who slept it off in Doctor Williams' office and disappeared sometime in the middle of the night, everyone believed that was properly kept a secret from everyone else, so no one talked about it.
Tucked safely away in his coma, Agent Levine was barely responsive to Charles' probing, even when he was sitting right next to him, with one hand placed on top of his ("They say that sometimes people in a coma can feel human touch," the nurse said, unconsciously stroking the gold crucifix pendant at her throat) and the other at his temple. The most he could get were flashes of the car's final approach, as though the last memory was still waiting to be thought. Everything else was locked deep away, beyond his reach.
The only non-physical clue he had was Mr. Moore's thinking of Levine as "the new guy," and the fact that Mr. Smith -- a legitimate representative of the CIA -- had no idea that Moore and Levine were involved. Glassy-eyed, the nurse handed Levine's wallet to Charles, and stood stock-still while he flipped through its contents. A tab for a dry-cleaner in New Salem -- so close to home -- several dollar bills of various denominations, carefully smoothed and facing the same direction, a business card for dance instruction with Rebecca's number written on the back in her tidy script, and three cards with the seal of the National Center for Intelligence Gathering and "Samuel Levine, Field Operations, Extranormal Research Division" printed in dark blue underneath. A 1-800 number with a three-digit extension finished the card.
Charles kept the business cards -- including the one with Rebecca's number -- and handed the wallet back to the nurse. He released her after he'd tucked the cards safely away, and picked up a conversation thread in the middle about how very sorry he was that so much trouble had been caused on his and Rebecca's behalf. He let the nurse think she had lost track of his words, entranced by his smart British accent; it wasn't far from the truth.
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“I think I found your John Turner, Professor, but... Well, you can tell me.” Hank placed a copy of a newspaper clipping on the desk, courtesy of the new Xerox 914 downstairs in the lab. In it were headshots of two freckled boys, evidently school portraits, beneath a photograph of a tractor on its side and the headline “Tragedy Strikes Local Farmers.” Charles tapped the boy on the right with his finger, said “That's him. That's exactly how he looks.”
“Look at the date, Professor.”
Charles did. “1942? Ah.” He peered up at Hank, wondering when the boy had developed a tendency for the dramatic. “What's the rest of the story?”
Hank rubbed the fur at the top of his head, debating. “Hank...” Charles said in a low voice, warning.
“Promise you won't do anything rash?” Hank pleaded.
The corner of Charles' lips twisted upward. It hadn't escaped his notice that an awful lot of people had been asking that of him, lately. “How about if I promise to let you know if the situation warrants quick action and a… less cautious approach?"
“How about you promise to include us this time?” Alex sounded far too reasonable. “I think we can agree that this affects all of us.” Sean and Hank nodded.
"Fine," Charles agreed. What could he do but acquiesce in the face of so much astounding sensibility? He looked at Hank expectantly.
"1942, Northern Illinois. Two brothers were working on their father's cornfields, late summer; the tractor got stuck climbing a hill to the main road and tipped over. The elder brother fell from the cab and was crushed under the wheel, sustaining serious injuries and dying shortly thereafter. He was known for having a "knack" with farm animals; there are several mentions of him being called in to help neighbors with animals that had gotten themselves stuck, cats in trees, that sort of thing. The younger brother was thrown further from the tractor, hit his head on a rock, and was in a coma for a decade."
Hank opened the folder and pulled out another newspaper article, this one with a photo of an older man with his head bowed, being pushed into the back of a police cruiser. "A preacher from his hometown was with him when he woke up. The court records state that he 'went to John's bedside because God told him to; upon seeing John, now twenty-one years old, wake up, he asked him whether he was doing God's work or not. Then the preacher beat him to a bloody pulp with a lead pipe before the nursing staff could pull him off, and John was in a coma for at least another five years. The damage was so bad, they had to amputate his legs."
"Dammit," Charles muttered, putting his head in his hands. He took a deep breath and looked up to meet Hank's amber eyes again. "Why do you say 'at least'?"
"Because men claiming to be with the Federal Bureau of Investigation took him into custody for his protection in 1957, and he hasn't been heard from since."
Sean gave a low whistle. Alex just nodded, leaning against a bookshelf; evidently he'd already heard this.
"Right. So, we have two things to do. First, rescue John Turner from wherever they're keeping him. Second, keep Erik from killing innocents in the process." He sighed. And that's my fault, because I assumed they were responsible for crippling him.
"Great, let's go!" Sean said, leaping forward, then stopping suddenly, pitching forward on the balls of his feet precariously. "Wait. How do we know where to go?"
Charles pulled one of Levine's cards from his jacket pocket and placed it on the desk, next to the photos of the brothers. "We call them and ask for directions."
Hank's ears twitched. He looked at the window the Charles had left cracked open to let in the spring air. “There's a motorcycle coming up the drive, Professor.”
They all looked at Charles expectantly; for a moment he stared at the window and the trees beyond in what felt like slack-jawed amazement, before he recollected himself and verified that he hadn't actually been sitting with his mouth wide open. “It appears we have a guest,” he said, “and I gather he means to stay for a while. We'd better go down and greet him properly.”
The low-slung Harley-Davidson was big and its engine rumbled loudly; its rider was bigger and, if possible, spoke in an even louder rumble, deep in his broad chest. “Here I am,” he announced, knocking the kickstand into place and swinging his leg up over the back of the bike in an easy, thoughtless dismount. “These your kids?”
“Hello, Logan,” Charles greeted him, settling the rising hackles behind him with a gentle petting of their minds. He wouldn't do it every time, but for the moment he needed to keep things from spiraling out of control. They could have their wrestling matches later. “This is my first class -- Dr. Hank McCoy, Alex Summers, and Sean Cassidy.”
“Beast,” Hank said, indicating himself. He nodded towards Alex, who was radiating smugness at Hank's acknowledgement of the name, “Havok, and Banshee.”
“Wolverine,” Logan growled. “Now that we're all warm and fuzzy, when do we eat?”