X-Men First Class fic: Dismantle the Sun (4/5)
Title: Dismantle the Sun
Pairing: Erik/Charles (M/M)
Rating: R
Warnings: Hospitals. Drinking. Death. Violence. Betrayals.
Author's Notes: Fix-it. Sequel to Inevitable Things. This fanfic is a much belated New Year's early birthday 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.
Oh, and what? Chapter 4 of 5? I am a bad, bad person. Or maybe this is just Chapter 4, Part 1!
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, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3.
Dismantle the Sun: Part Four
Pack Up the Moon
Appearances could be deceiving, as Charles well knew. A painfully shy young woman could be the bravest person in the room, an awkward boy could be the most nurturing, and the largest, loudest person he'd ever met, who looked as though no four walls or barred cage could contain him, whose clothes looked fit to burst off his body at a moment's notice if he merely flexed the wrong way, could be perfectly at ease in the Xavier mansion. If the mansion was big enough for Logan, perhaps it would be big enough for ten more gifted young people, or twenty. Maybe, someday, all of them.
Charles encouraged the boys to help him get settled and find an acceptable room, with the eminently capable Mrs. Tydahl overseeing the proceedings. Left behind, nearly forgotten in the quiet uproar instigated by yet another alpha male being introduced to the mix, Charles wheeled himself to his office, his desk, and his phone.
He took one of Levine's business cards from his wallet and flipped it over -- it was the one with Rebecca's number on the back -- and he hesitated for just a moment, his mouth gone dry. He swallowed, the moment passed, and the heavy black bakalite receiver was in his hand, his fingers on the rotary dialing the number. The familiar clicks sounded as the connection was made, and then on the far end a woman's voice greeted him with an icy "Hello, Charles. Or is it 'Professor X' these days?"
"Hello, Emma," he said, and there was a slight echo on the line, as if he was speaking into a great dark cavern or a deep well. "I'd like to say it's nice to hear your voice."
"Likewise. You should know that I'm not speaking just for myself, here." In the background he could hear movement, the shuffling of feet, a sole scraping against a hard floor. He reached with his mind, trying to follow the cables, but there was nothing for him to grasp onto just yet. "And I must say my new employers are delighted you called, and would love to meet with you in person to discuss the new terms of your old contract."
He was certain that the line was being tapped, recorded, and shared among who-knew-how-many pairs of ears. "You can tell them I haven't the faintest idea what you mean."
"They," Emma said slowly, "are authorized to pick up where the CIA left off."
"Funny, that. There was never a contract with the CIA." The lie rolled off Charles' tongue easily. He had told himself it was necessary, had convinced himself it was true, and somewhere in the intervening months it had become second-nature. We were never G-Men. We were always X-Men.
"I have found that bureaucracies --" and here her voice dripped with venom, so much so that Charles could practically taste the sour bitterness on his tongue, "-- seem to be able to remember things even when individuals… forget. And they can be very persuasive." He heard her voice give just a little there at the end. She hadn't been the least bit rattled by Erik's idea of persuasion in Russia, nor by Charles' admittedly rough foray through her mind afterwards; so he took it as a warning that someone had managed to frighten the ice queen. Who was, after all, a fellow telepath, for all that her skillset was more limited than Charles' own. She waited a while, perhaps to give it time to sink in, or for her handlers to give her another line to recite, or for her to regain her composure. Regardless, Charles was not about to cave and start babbling just to fill the silence, which was finally broken by Frost's terse, "Tomorrow morning at 9. Come alone."
She gave him directions.
"I'll have a driver with me," he said as he scrawled the description of the last turn on his notepad. "I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. You can thank the CIA for that."
"Really?" she asked with a hint of a smile in her voice, cold and calculating and so falsely light that it couldn't be anything but mean. "I thought that was Magneto's doing." He wouldn't dignify that with an answer, though she gave him plenty of time to do so, and when she continued, there was perhaps a little disappointment shading her words. "Well. As long as your driver stays in the car, he won't be bothered. Tomorrow, 9 am. Alone, driver stays in the car."
"My driver will have to fetch my chair from the trunk."
"Fine," she snapped into the phone. Her cheek brushed the receiver and her voice took on a distant, muffled sound as she spoke to someone else, "His driver needs to fetch his wheelchair from the trunk." And then louder again, directly into his ear, and sharp enough to make him wince: "But he returns immediately to the car and stays there while you attend your meeting."
Now it was Charles' turn to smile; once again he'd unsettled her, made her draw her attention away from him to someone else, and in that unguarded moment he'd gotten just a flash -- an impression of short-cropped hair incongruous with a black poorly-fitted suit, and Agent Stryker's visage somewhere in the background like a memory. And wasn't that interesting?
"Tomorrow at 9, then, Miss Frost," he said, and pressed his finger on the handset button to end the call cleanly before returning it to its cradle. "And Agent Stryker," he added quietly to his empty office, "you'd better hope I get to you first. But even then, I can't promise it'll be pretty."
* * * * * *
They decided to reconvene in his office when he called them -- reaching out to their minds had become such a convenient habit, easy as breathing, now that he had so many fellow mutants to practice his telepathy with -- and even Logan hadn't seemed the least bit surprised by the mental communication. The triple-A maps of the East Coast were spread across his desk when Mrs. Tydahl arrived with the tea tray, and on her heels followed Sean, then Alex, then Hank and Logan still eyeing each other warily.
"We have a matter requiring a quick response, and possibly a less cautious approach. We are here," Charles tapped his finger on the dot reading New Salem, "and tomorrow at 9 I have a meeting with my would-be abductors here," he reached over and pointed out a green smudge in West Virginia. "I'm allowed a driver, but otherwise I must be alone."
"I'm the driver," Logan said. "Any of you kids shape shifters?"
"No," Charles answered peremptorily, "and -- No, Logan. It is vital that I go. As it's a small installation, I might even be able to take the whole place myself, sitting down the entire time."
Logan crossed his arms over his chest and had the gall to look down at him. "With your hands tied behind your back?" he grumbled.
"If necessary." He'd been working on that. He was confident he had broken that habit well enough -- as long as he wasn't drugged -- but he gave Logan an easy smile just in case.
"It doesn't' matter," Alex butted in. "We're all going." He waved his hand before Charles could respond. "You guys can go in the front door if you want. The rest of us can find our own way in."
"I'd prefer it if the rest of you kept an eye on things from the outside and made sure we're not followed when we leave." Charles corrected. "And yes, that means I'd like you to be a part of this, if you're willing."
"Of course we're--" Hank began, accompanied by Sean's triumphant "yessss!", but Charles' upraised hand cut him off.
"There are reasons why you might not be willing to go." Charles said, his voice slipping into the professorial cadences he favored when his mind split things into lists and timelines, correlations and consequences. "Firstly, there's no Blackbird and no backup, so we'll all be responsible for making sure that Hank isn't seen by anyone or anything. I can't wipe a camera's memory, after all."
Logan muttered something low; Hank grimaced but said nothing in response, and only shook his head when Alex shot him a worried glance.
"Secondly, we haven't trained for this, and we don't have time to. Covering our tracks at the CIA was easy, because we had a brilliant inside man." He glanced at Hank, mostly for Logan's benefit. "It could be that all we're looking at is a small installation, Agent Stryker's own private CIA in miniature, that has already been infiltrated by Emma Frost--" the boys' thoughts and expressions ranged from shock to surprise and curiosity, whereas Logan merely snorted at the name, "-- or we could be facing something much more entrenched. Presumably these are the people who've held John Turner captive for nearly 6 years."
Charles felt the anger building in the minds around him, itching at his edges. But it was Mrs. Tydahl, the epitome of a sweet grandmotherly soul, who gave voice to it first. "Those bastards haven't the right, Charles!" she burst out. "They ought to be cut down a notch or two. Alex here could do it, I've seen the havoc he wreaks on a daily basis." She nodded approvingly at Alex with a tight, grim smile. "If you burned the place to the ground, there would be no recordings from cameras or anything that might link the Xavier name to the place."
"Mrs. Tydahl--" Charles was supposed to be arguing with the boys, not with the woman who made them pies and nonchalantly swept up the tufts of blue fur that wafted across the hardwood floors. "We cannot engage in terrorism. It's not right."
"You cannot expect children to attend the Xavier School for Gifted Youth if this mysterious agency is just going to swoop down on them and steal them in the middle of the night!" Her words rang in the silence, and left him exposed and transparent. It was the thing he worried about when he forgot to worry about himself. Logan's mindset shifted at her words, gone from resigned and slightly curious to a live wire poised for fight or flight, watching him with an unnerving intensity.
"Of course not," Charles said quietly, garnering nods all around. "But I would argue that we are in less danger of that if our enemies are unaware that we are a threat at all, instead of presenting them with a bigger one than they're expecting."
"But if Magneto did it--" Sean began, but Charles cut him off with a furious, "Absolutely not! We are in this mess because I screwed up, and I will not compound my mistake by implicating him, or Raven, or any other mutant!" His hand smarted from where he'd hit the arm of his chair emphatically.
"Professor--" Hank said carefully. "The recording material being used by the cameras is a magnetic tape, and if Mr. Lehnsherr happened to be there, he could -- what I mean to say is, a strong magnetic field can wipe those recordings clean. We might not have to burn the place down to cause the same effect."
Logan picked at his nails nonchalantly. "Or someone with very sharp claws could tear the tapes to shreds." He looked at Hank, openly sizing him up. "Mine are longer."
Alex, Sean and Hank all gave Logan disbelieving looks. "His are razor sharp," Alex pointed out, nodding towards Hank. "And if you need a nail trimmer…" he glanced over at Charles with a question, and a cartoon-like image of a plasma burst neatly slicing Logan's fingernails and leaving him looking like a disheveled Wile E. Coyote popped into Charles' mind. Charles nearly choked on the laugh, attempted to cover it with a cough. If not for the tension in the room, it would have been an abject failure.
"Hank, can you make a magnet strong enough to wipe, say, a roomful of tape recordings?" Charles asked, before the tension in the room could erupt into a boyish cat fight of epic proportions. "Or, if you were outside and could only communicate with me telepathically, do you think you could coach me through rigging up a solenoid?"
Hank gave Logan an openly calculating glance, as if he were a piece of equipment in his lab. "Wolverine is essentially a rod of Adamantine; depending on the size of the room, you'd need a pretty good length of conductive wire, but… yeah, theoretically it could be done. It would be easier if Mr. Lehnsherr--"
"I know." Charles held his hand up, letting the gesture speak for him: Talk to the hand, I can't take it anymore. "I know. Mrs. Tydahl, please accept my promise that when we are done, these people will not remember who we are, and will not come looking for the students. We will do our best not to give them any reason to remember us, and no matter the cost or how it plays out, I'll make sure to clean up any evidence that could lead back to us."
Mrs. Tydahl nodded, satisfied, though her shoulders were still held stiffly. "I'll pack you some meals for the road," she said and stalked out, her heels ringing sharply as she marched down the hall.
Charles exhaled quietly. It hadn't gone the way he'd expected, not by a long shot; but he felt more hopeful than he was reasonably justified to feel. He was buoyed by the thought that he wasn't going to face this one alone, and now that he'd learned his lesson in humility, no one was going to be blindsided, least of all him.
They discussed the logistics of the 9-hour drive, then got down to packing. A few hours of preparation was all they had to spare, even aided as they were by Mrs. Tydhal setting aside sandwiches and several thermoses of coffee and Mr. Tydahl making sure the vehicles were in proper working order and outfitted with extra gas cans and comprehensive kits should anything break down. They rolled down the drive and away from the estate at sundown, as the light faded into the soft shades of twilight. Midnight found them zipping along the interstate through Pennsylvania, curving along the valleys and ridges of the Appalachians. Logan drove the town car with Charles sitting impatiently in the back seat, trying not to wonder how much of a disaster it would be when Erik arrived and hoping beyond hope that Raven was being kept away from the intrigue. The boys were following in the van, packed with supplies for a number of scenarios, limited only by Hank's rampant imagination and the space requirements for transporting John and whatever support equipment he might need. One of those "supplies" was Logan's motorcycle, which Charles suspected could be considered to function as a security blanket. He reached back periodically to check on them, only to be treated to off-key renditions of Elvis Presley tunes, in stark contrast to the dead silence in the car and Logan's thoughts.
* * * * * *
Logan spoke sometime before dawn, pulling Charles from a dreamless sleep to look blearily at the outlines of huge trees looming over them and, in the occasional gaps, the barely distinguishable horizon.
"I heal fast. That's how I survived the Weapon X program and what they did to me." Logan kept his eyes on the road while he talked. "I don't know how much you learned when you found me at Earl's, but I haven't felt you poking around in here, so I figured I should just say it. I don't believe in mutants working for the government. Or being used by the government. I don't much like taking orders from anybody."
"Ah," Charles intoned quietly, but held his tongue. There would be time later to explain to Logan how Charles' particular brand of telepathy worked.
"Easy enough when it was just me. Still pretty easy when it was just me, and a couple of over-powered lunatics in the United States playing with the mob. But now there's kids involved, and I don't want to see any of them end up as Weapon Y or Weapon Z. A kid's gotta have a childhood, or else they'll just grow up to be monsters."
"Some will say they're monsters, anyway," Charles said. "Until there are enough of us to prove them otherwise."
"So you're in it for the long haul, eh?" Now those shrewd eyes glanced up and met his in the rear-view mirror. Charles said nothing as the realization hit him, but something on his face must have shown. Logan's lips curled upwards, and he said "Guess I better make sure you survive this, then."
They rode on in an amiable silence as the car climbed the highlands of West Virginia and the world around them gently filled with light. They skirted around the edge of the Monongahela National Forest, driving along a ridge until it tucked into the forest proper and turned to reveal an isolated valley far below, with a cluster of buildings and a paved road that was not included on any commercially-available map. They pulled over and waited for the boys in the van to arrive, and then, with Logan's aid, they found a good vantage point from which to study the lay of the land.
The compound -- for what else could it be called? -- was nearly identical to the facility the late Man in the Black Suit had run. It looked for all the world like a new office park built at the end of a curving road that could, in some young and exuberant urban planner's optimistic portfolio, accommodate an unhealthy amount of sprawling bedroom communities, should the economy desire it. This economy, however, desired helipads -- one large H graced a paved circle where a fountain would have been, tucked in the center of the circular drive, and another, smaller helipad could be seen on the roof of the complex's tallest building.
“Pretty quiet for a wednesday morning," Hank whispered, pointing down the hill from the viewpoint to the front gate. The circular drive beyond the gate was conveniently empty; the parking lot less than a quarter full. "There are usually more early-risers and night-owls than this. But that's a lot of surveillance they've got set up." He pointed at the closed-circuit television cameras placed in clusters. "It looks like standard video surveillance, but they've arranged the cameras for nearly full-coverage. If we're lucky, the guards watching the screens are overwhelmed."
"Let's find out, shall we?" Charles muttered to himself, and cast his thoughts forward and down, into the valley and minds below. He was barely aware of the thin wool blanket and the cold ground beneath that he lay on; but after drifting around and seeing only a few screens in lobbies, he pulled back into himself and discovered the annoying feeling that his toes were cold. He imagined wiggling them and sighed; there was a time and place for indulging in such nonsense, and that would be later and at home, preferably in the library in front of the fire. "It looks like the only screens being watched are of reception desks and main doors," he said, handing his binoculars to Hank. "But it looks like they've got another Cerebro installation underway, the upper half is visible just beyond the rightmost building.”
“Yeah, I see it.” He accepted the binocs, adjusted them, peered through. “Good news is they're using the wrong antenna spacing; you haven't felt anything, have you?”
Charles shook his head. “No, but we should dismantle it regardless.”
From behind them, Alex piped up, “I'm pretty sure I can take it out from here, probably.”
“And give our location away before we even get started?” Sean asked. “That never works in the movies.”
“I'm more concerned about the ’probably’ part." Charles commented, frowning as he took in the lack of a separate road to the complex. He had hoped there would be an access road, at least, from some place in the national forest lands that bordered the complex; the maps suggested as much, but the best he could make out with the binoculars was a narrow dirt trail. "Alex, let's save the destruction for when you’re close enough to knock it out without wrecking the building next to it, shall we?”
“Wish we still had the Blackbird,” Hank grumbled. “It’d make this easier.”
“Easy, yes; subtle, no. You all agreed to the objectives of this little mission: find John Turner and liberate him, and if Erik’s team are here, keep them from killing anyone. While not getting killed or captured ourselves.” He congratulated himself for not stumbling over Erik's name; it was getting easier. "So, once again, gentlemen, what's the plan?"
Alex jerked his head upwards in a quick nod, a leftover gesture from the prison yard. "Banshee and I stay up here and keep watch; I stay in touch with you, Professor, in case you need us for air support or diversion." Sean yawned wide to relax his throat. "And if everything goes well, you call us in to pick up John in the van, and then I take Wolverine's bike and follow you home."
"No, you follow until we get clear of these chumps and you can relieve me as the Professor's driver," Logan corrected him grumpily. "And you don't wreck my bike."
"No, I just think about it." Alex replied with a roll of the eyes.
"I'll head down the trail to the back way, keep an eye on the loading docks at the back entrance and be ready to charge in if you need it." Hank recited.
"But?" Charles prompted.
"But I should focus on exit strategies."
"Yes. Logan?"
Wolverine crossed his arms in front of his chest. "We go in the front door. You do your mind-thing, we find this John Turner, load him in the van and drive away." He smiled tightly, his eyes roaming over Sean, Hank, and finally coming to rest on Alex. "And the kids stay out of trouble."
"Yes, well, hopefully we all stay out of trouble." Charles said drily. "And if the Brotherhood shows up?"
"We tell them we have this under control, and ask them to leave," Hank answered, then added with a slight show of fangs, "politely."
Logan put on a good show for the kids; he helped Charles to his chair only as much as his help was actually required, held the door for Charles but stood by patiently and let him maneuver himself into place, and did not make any suggestion that Charles wasn't up for this. It wasn't until they had driven back down to the main road and turned towards the compound that he spoke up.
“You going in there’s a bad idea, Prof.” Wolverine nodded towards the road ahead. “Things tend to happen real fast once they get going, and you ain’t exactly the speediest thing on wheels, y'know?”
Charles allowed himself a small smile. “Thank you for your concern, Logan. I won’t stray too far from the exit.”
His watch read 7:45 when they drove through the last turn in the road and out of the trees. From the ground, the compound and its guardhouse looked much more impressive, seen through the tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
The guard at the gate did a quick double-take when he leaned around Logan to see Charles in the back passenger seat. Charles was ready to take control of the guard if he needed to, was already slipping into the calm mental space to do it, but before he tried the guard abruptly shook his head and said “Go ahead,” waving them forward. Just before Logan started to pull away, the guard added in a soft voice, clipping the words lest they be overheard, “Second building on the left, lower level.”
Logan rolled the window up before speaking again. “Don't know why we're bothering with all this make-believe when it’s obvious they know we're here, even though we're nice and early. Rolled out the red carpet, eh?”
“We don't yet know who has made the invitation,” Charles said quietly. "But that tidbit of information was courtesy of Miss Frost, I believe. I couldn't get ahold of that soldier's mind, it was as though it were wrapped in…," he thought for a moment, recalling a frigid Christmas holiday on the coast of Maine which seemed to have the same flavor, "…freezing fog."
"Sounds like a lovely lady," Logan said. "Can't wait to meet her." But he was thinking "Like a fucking flash-frozen cod," and Charles would have laughed at that if they weren't already pulling up to the curb in front of the second building on the left, leaving him directly in front of a security camera. He needed his concentration to convince the security guard at the front desk that both he and Logan were expected and not a threat, and he needed to do it without the tell-tale gesture of placing his fingers against his temples.
Erik had told him once that all the times Charles had accidentally bent the minds of those around him without intending to -- and more importantly, without the give-away hand gesture -- proved that he didn't actually need to rest his fingers against his temple to focus his power, that it was either a psychological crutch or a weakness he'd created for himself to put humans somehow at ease. The latter, Erik supposed, was due to Charles' own sense of discomfort with his abilities, which stung, because his pride wouldn't admit it but his head knew it was true. Erik's mind had been full of eagles with their wings clipped, which drifted quickly to the stylized black eagle standard that the Nazi party had used, and as complicated as that association was, Erik felt that Charles had more of a claim to the eagle symbolism than anyone, if he'd just stop clipping his own damn wings.
So he kept his hands folded on his lap, preternaturally aware of how cold and clammy they were, as he reached out to the guard at the front desk and guided him in to thinking "Oh, they're finally here. The brass is expecting them; The fellows at the gate must have checked them out thoroughly and made them late, so no need to do that again, better make this quick--" and Private First Class Lewis made two checkmarks to the right of the two names next on the list, which had no relation whatsoever to Charles and Logan, and he stood up and went over to the door of his own volition -- mostly -- and held the door open, waiting patiently while Logan fetched the wheelchair for Charles.
"Thank you," Charles said politely when Logan wheeled him through the open door into the chill lobby. Nice, steady hands on the back of the wheelchair, patently, obviously, and without a doubt completely unthreatening. And Charles himself rifling unobtrusively through Lewis's mind, absolutely not a threat to anyone in this -- Charles clamped his jaw tight to keep a dismayed gasp from escaping as the map unfurled before his mind's eye, but Logan's sniff made it clear that the body's signals could not be hidden -- gigantic paramilitary complex, a veritable ant-hive burrowing 9 stories deep into the earth and stretching out to incorporate some natural cave formations. Large portions of that map in Lewis's mind were grayed-out under the heading of "need-to-know-basis-and-I-don't-need-to-know". Somewhere, in that portion of the map, Charles was sure John Turner was being kept.
And probably Emma Frost, most likely still posing as a hostage.
"Miss Frost," he thought, reaching out, as gently as he could, shoving aside the taste of distrust at the back of his throat, the jealousy that tightened the corners of his eyes and made the back of his neck itch. An involuntary shiver coursed through him when his mind brushed near the edge of hers, like a cold mist just this side of freezing. A tendril of anxiety formed in the mist and uncurled, twisting to keep itself just out of his reach; she was distrustful of him as well, and she must have been just shy of her diamond form, barely open to telepathic contact and ready to tuck inside her crystal cocoon at the first hint of danger. Wherever she was, though, she was near. "We're here for John, Miss Frost. We've no intention of interfering with the Brotherhood."
He fully expected her to crystallize. He half-expected her to block him, or to try to hold him in place until Erik came storming through the door, and so he was quite surprised when the letters S7 appeared on the closed elevator door before him, shimmering like hoarfrost. Perhaps she couldn't bring herself to share her voice with him; perhaps she couldn't hide her dislike for him as well as he assumed he was hiding his dislike for her, or maybe -- and he felt this was more likely -- she simply found it easier to create illusions in the minds of others as opposed to projecting her own voice.
"Thank you," he replied, letting the gratitude slip like syrup over the words.
He pressed Lewis for the 7th floor down, and the man obliged as well as he could by handing over his elevator key, which Charles promptly passed on to Logan. "We're in with no problems," Charles thought towards Alex, the bright, fluid spot on the hill, and added "it's a warren that extends to 9 basements; we should be in the 7th and out again before long." Alex replied with an image of Sean sketching a tic-tac-toe board in the dirt at their feet with an air of nonchalance, but it didn't hide the memory of Sean nibbling at his hangnails as they kept an eye on the car parked in front of Building 2. Charles turned his thoughts toward Hank, hiding in the shadow of the trees closer to the back entrance than he should have been, and relayed the same message.
"They've got a couple canine units, Professor," Hank said, the words spoken out loud an echo in his thoughts.
"Fall back a couple hundred yards, then, Hank," Charles thought to him. "None of those dogs are Duchess, and you know I can't control animals."
"It's fine, Professor. They've already been by once, the German Shepard didn't even twitch an ear my way, and I… I want to be close, just in case."
"Fine, but…" Charles sighed as the elevator door finally opened. "Be careful."
"You, too."
The elevator door closed. Logan inserted the key, but no matter how much he pressed the button for the 7th sub-floor, the elevator remained resolutely still. Charles reached out and placed a hand on his forearm, just as he started to tense.
"Let's keep our disguises as long as we can, shall we? Try the 6th level."
Logan's thick eyebrows lowered. "Aren't we going to find your boy on the 7th?" he asked aloud.
"Think it, and I'll hear it." Charles reminded him. "Emma said so; but Erik doesn't trust her terribly much, and I find I'm not inclined to, either."
That won a half-smile from Logan, who punched the 6th sub-floor button and grinned like a maniac when the button lit up a dingy yellow and the elevator started to slide downwards. Finally.
S1…. S2…. S3… the numbers of the subfloors lit up regularly… S4… S5… and although there was no perceptible change in the elevator's descent, it took twice as long for S6 to appear as he expected. The door of the elevator slid open a moment before the door sealing the 6th subfloor opened, and he caught a brief glimpse of a machine and a slender window giving a view of trees beyond, the view framed by a fall of blonde hair. Once they'd passed through and the double sets of doors slid shut behind them, Charles realized he could no longer sense Hank or Alex or Sean. Or, for that matter, Emma Frost.
"Logan, I don't mean to alarm you," Charles thought with all the sense of calm he could muster, "but it appears I've been psychically cut off from the boys outside."
"You don't say," Logan muttered.
"But the good news is that I can sense the minds of the people on this floor and the floor below. And these chaps, obviously." The four guards standing at attention in the elevator's foyer immediately before the security doors leading to the hallway beyond remained standing rigidly at attention, as though frozen. "And Miss Frost is held somewhere in a room with a view of the trees outside, upstairs." Charles' hand drifted upwards, but he bit his lower lip instead and willed himself to concentrate harder. There were seventeen people on this floor, and he was holding them all in place while he scanned through the minds of the men standing guard before him. One had the necessary security clearance; his memories clearly showed a guarded hospital wing on the 4th floor, and a glimpse -- in passing, once, anywhere between 3 months and 3 years ago -- of a man with a pale face dusted with freckles being wheeled on a gurney into the room marked 412b. The memory tasted of peppermint and wintertime.
"412b," he said quietly to Logan, "Mr. Samwell here has the appropriate access, if you would take his keys?"
Logan strode forward and snatched the keys from around Mr. Samwell's neck. He returned to Charles' side immediately and punched the up elevator button impatiently. "How long can--?" he wondered.
"As long as I have to," Charles said grimly. The elevator returned from wherever it had retreated to, and Logan wheeled him in backwards, thinking that Charles needed to see the people he was controlling. The doors closed, and he scanned his thoughts upwards only to find himself blocked. "But I'm sorry to say it appears to be a trap."
"Yeah, well, what else would it be?" Logan asked rhetorically and without rancor, stepping around Charles
The doors of the elevator slid open with a squeak and a whine, and Charles's fingers were at his temple, the old bad habit back again. He reached out first to Wolverine, who turned on command without the slightest hint of realization that there had been a command at all. The larger man crouched slightly, spreading his bulk into a living wall, one that Charles hoped would be sufficient in case -- and yes, even as he fixed his eye's on Logan's and made contact with the minds of the men in the corridor, their trigger-happy fingers clenched down tight and the bullets sprang forward, propelled by nine tiny contained explosions. Pat-pa-pat! the thick hollowpoint bullets blossomed upon impact, and Charles fought to keep his face neutral as Logan grimaced with the pain. He felt it, he felt all of it -- the flesh being torn open, the hunks of deformed metal thunking against Logan's adamantium skeleton and sliding down along the metal bones and out.
"Thank you," Charles' hoarse voice sounded perfectly in accord with Logan's ragged breathing. "I'm sorry I couldn't catch them sooner."
"S'Okay," Logan gritted out through his teeth. He turned to glance over his shoulder when the first of their bodies hit the floor like sacks of wet cement, limp and unconscious. "Better me than you."
"You take bullets to the back far better than I do, Logan," he said. "Still…" Charles reached his free hand out to rest against Logan's chest. If Logan considered flinching, it was brief -- too much of his attention was focused on the pain, and this was what Charles gently laid aside. It took twice as long as usual to unravel the pain pathways while simultaneously making sure none of the unconscious men on the floor started to recover, but it was the least he could do.
"It's just practice," Logan replied, and of course it wasn't that at all, but Charles wasn't about to argue. He stopped abruptly and stared at Charles wide-eyed, then twisted around to look at his still-bleeding side. "You won't feel it, so be careful."
"10 minutes is all I need. And we need to find a different way up."
Charles exhaled slowly and carefully pushed the mental map he'd acquired from Mr. Samwell downstairs into the forefront of Logan's mind, while struggling to keep the vicious headache that was starting to set up shop behind his eyes at bay. He'd expected mental exertion, but he hadn't expected this much of it so early on. Logan stepped into the hallway and began collecting the guns and extra magazines carried in little pouches on the men's hips. Charles wheeled himself out in his wake, being careful not to roll over anyone's fingers. "You know how to use one of--?" Logan started to ask from where he was crouched over one of the men, holding a pistol up, but when he looked up at Charles, his expression was one of surprise. "Hunh. That was the funniest sounding explosion I've ever heard," he said, and then the elevator behind them plummeted down the shaft, zipping off its lines.
"That's it, Prof," he said, placing a gun in Charles' lap and tossing the rest down the shaft after the elevator. "Time to get you out of here."
"Not without John," Charles said. "We might not get another chance at this." Logan looked for a moment like he was considering throwing Charles over his shoulder and running for the stairs, but there was indecision there. Charles could feel that the scales hadn't yet tipped one way or the other. "I'm not ordering you, I'm asking you to consider what will happen to him if we leave him behind."
"They'll bury him alive and we'll never find him," Logan snarled. "412b it is. But if we come to a closed door, I go through it first."
"Agreed," Charles said. "If you push my chair for me, I can focus on making sure the people around us are conveniently out cold." He found he was smiling; he'd always wondered how many people he could control, given the need, and so far it turned out to be more than he'd expected, at least when they were nearby. And now that the elevator was out of his way, there might be a gap in the shielding thought which he could reach Alex or Hank.
With his attention divided between holding all the humans he could reach unconscious and reaching up the elevator shaft to search for the boys, he almost didn't understand what he was seeing with his eyes. Logan cursed and stumbled to his knees, but only for a moment. He leapt forward quickly, the momentum carrying him forward while his legs coiled underneath and he twisted in mid-air like a cat, adamantine claws extending with a shnick as his arm sailed out and missed Charles by a hair's breadth. "Get out of here, Professor," he snarled, "I'll hold 'em off." He looked around wildly, his nostrils flaring wide and his eyes focusing on empty air, and with a curse he swung out again and pounced on nothing, his claws sliding forward at the end of the arc to slice into a shadow.
Charles abandoned everything else to try to slip into Logan's mind, but he came up against hard diamond walls with spikes. "Logan, listen to me, focus on my voice!" he said, but he knew it was no good -- Emma's illusions stopped the ears, closed the eyes, replaced the tactile senses. "You know exactly where I am," he tried again, still feeling the crystalline wall for a crack, a thin spot, a spike less sharp than its neighbors, anything. "You can smell my aftershave, focus on that, that's real--"
The full force of Logan's weight crashed into him, sending the chair backwards against the wall, the spikes of his claws coming to impossibly infintessimal sharp points before Charles' eyes. In his peripheral vision he could see the other set of claws, pressed through the cloth of his slacks.
That probably hurts, he thought to himself. In fact, he was pretty sure he could feel it, the muscles crying out make it stop! and his spine most likely answering sorry, we're rather busy right now, as the cloth under the claws turned dark and damp.
"What did you do with the Professor?" Logan growled, his pupils tiny pinpoints of dark. Charles could find no purchase on the diamond shield around his mind, could only watch as Logan drew his right fist back, the claws in his leg grinding down with the movement. Charles's hands were on Logan's chest, trying in vain to push him back.
There was bile in the back of his throat. That's from the pain, he told himself gleefully, perhaps madly. I can feel it. Perhaps I should let Emma know how this feels.
The wall around Logan's mind had a tail, a glittering thread he could not sever. He swept along at it the speed of thought and found, at the bitter end, a twisting sharpness he could almost wrap his mind around…
A sound pulled him back, a deep reverberation that echoed in his torso and along his arms, and made his chair hum. Wolverine flew back with a shriek, impacting the far wall hard enough to crack the cement blocks, pale green chips of paint falling to the floor beneath.
"You double-crossing--!" Erik's face was twisted in rage as he strode into Charles' field of vision. The cape and helmet did nothing to hide the fury his entire body expressed. Logan screamed as Erik's hands twisted the air, the movement mirrored in the fields around Logan's body.
"Erik!" Charles shouted. "It's not him, it's Emma! That woman is--"
in my head.
The world went white.
Pairing: Erik/Charles (M/M)
Rating: R
Warnings: Hospitals. Drinking. Death. Violence. Betrayals.
Author's Notes: Fix-it. Sequel to Inevitable Things. This fanfic is a much belated New Year's early birthday 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.
Oh, and what? Chapter 4 of 5? I am a bad, bad person. Or maybe this is just Chapter 4, Part 1!
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, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3.
Dismantle the Sun: Part Four
Pack Up the Moon
Appearances could be deceiving, as Charles well knew. A painfully shy young woman could be the bravest person in the room, an awkward boy could be the most nurturing, and the largest, loudest person he'd ever met, who looked as though no four walls or barred cage could contain him, whose clothes looked fit to burst off his body at a moment's notice if he merely flexed the wrong way, could be perfectly at ease in the Xavier mansion. If the mansion was big enough for Logan, perhaps it would be big enough for ten more gifted young people, or twenty. Maybe, someday, all of them.
Charles encouraged the boys to help him get settled and find an acceptable room, with the eminently capable Mrs. Tydahl overseeing the proceedings. Left behind, nearly forgotten in the quiet uproar instigated by yet another alpha male being introduced to the mix, Charles wheeled himself to his office, his desk, and his phone.
He took one of Levine's business cards from his wallet and flipped it over -- it was the one with Rebecca's number on the back -- and he hesitated for just a moment, his mouth gone dry. He swallowed, the moment passed, and the heavy black bakalite receiver was in his hand, his fingers on the rotary dialing the number. The familiar clicks sounded as the connection was made, and then on the far end a woman's voice greeted him with an icy "Hello, Charles. Or is it 'Professor X' these days?"
"Hello, Emma," he said, and there was a slight echo on the line, as if he was speaking into a great dark cavern or a deep well. "I'd like to say it's nice to hear your voice."
"Likewise. You should know that I'm not speaking just for myself, here." In the background he could hear movement, the shuffling of feet, a sole scraping against a hard floor. He reached with his mind, trying to follow the cables, but there was nothing for him to grasp onto just yet. "And I must say my new employers are delighted you called, and would love to meet with you in person to discuss the new terms of your old contract."
He was certain that the line was being tapped, recorded, and shared among who-knew-how-many pairs of ears. "You can tell them I haven't the faintest idea what you mean."
"They," Emma said slowly, "are authorized to pick up where the CIA left off."
"Funny, that. There was never a contract with the CIA." The lie rolled off Charles' tongue easily. He had told himself it was necessary, had convinced himself it was true, and somewhere in the intervening months it had become second-nature. We were never G-Men. We were always X-Men.
"I have found that bureaucracies --" and here her voice dripped with venom, so much so that Charles could practically taste the sour bitterness on his tongue, "-- seem to be able to remember things even when individuals… forget. And they can be very persuasive." He heard her voice give just a little there at the end. She hadn't been the least bit rattled by Erik's idea of persuasion in Russia, nor by Charles' admittedly rough foray through her mind afterwards; so he took it as a warning that someone had managed to frighten the ice queen. Who was, after all, a fellow telepath, for all that her skillset was more limited than Charles' own. She waited a while, perhaps to give it time to sink in, or for her handlers to give her another line to recite, or for her to regain her composure. Regardless, Charles was not about to cave and start babbling just to fill the silence, which was finally broken by Frost's terse, "Tomorrow morning at 9. Come alone."
She gave him directions.
"I'll have a driver with me," he said as he scrawled the description of the last turn on his notepad. "I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. You can thank the CIA for that."
"Really?" she asked with a hint of a smile in her voice, cold and calculating and so falsely light that it couldn't be anything but mean. "I thought that was Magneto's doing." He wouldn't dignify that with an answer, though she gave him plenty of time to do so, and when she continued, there was perhaps a little disappointment shading her words. "Well. As long as your driver stays in the car, he won't be bothered. Tomorrow, 9 am. Alone, driver stays in the car."
"My driver will have to fetch my chair from the trunk."
"Fine," she snapped into the phone. Her cheek brushed the receiver and her voice took on a distant, muffled sound as she spoke to someone else, "His driver needs to fetch his wheelchair from the trunk." And then louder again, directly into his ear, and sharp enough to make him wince: "But he returns immediately to the car and stays there while you attend your meeting."
Now it was Charles' turn to smile; once again he'd unsettled her, made her draw her attention away from him to someone else, and in that unguarded moment he'd gotten just a flash -- an impression of short-cropped hair incongruous with a black poorly-fitted suit, and Agent Stryker's visage somewhere in the background like a memory. And wasn't that interesting?
"Tomorrow at 9, then, Miss Frost," he said, and pressed his finger on the handset button to end the call cleanly before returning it to its cradle. "And Agent Stryker," he added quietly to his empty office, "you'd better hope I get to you first. But even then, I can't promise it'll be pretty."
* * * * * *
They decided to reconvene in his office when he called them -- reaching out to their minds had become such a convenient habit, easy as breathing, now that he had so many fellow mutants to practice his telepathy with -- and even Logan hadn't seemed the least bit surprised by the mental communication. The triple-A maps of the East Coast were spread across his desk when Mrs. Tydahl arrived with the tea tray, and on her heels followed Sean, then Alex, then Hank and Logan still eyeing each other warily.
"We have a matter requiring a quick response, and possibly a less cautious approach. We are here," Charles tapped his finger on the dot reading New Salem, "and tomorrow at 9 I have a meeting with my would-be abductors here," he reached over and pointed out a green smudge in West Virginia. "I'm allowed a driver, but otherwise I must be alone."
"I'm the driver," Logan said. "Any of you kids shape shifters?"
"No," Charles answered peremptorily, "and -- No, Logan. It is vital that I go. As it's a small installation, I might even be able to take the whole place myself, sitting down the entire time."
Logan crossed his arms over his chest and had the gall to look down at him. "With your hands tied behind your back?" he grumbled.
"If necessary." He'd been working on that. He was confident he had broken that habit well enough -- as long as he wasn't drugged -- but he gave Logan an easy smile just in case.
"It doesn't' matter," Alex butted in. "We're all going." He waved his hand before Charles could respond. "You guys can go in the front door if you want. The rest of us can find our own way in."
"I'd prefer it if the rest of you kept an eye on things from the outside and made sure we're not followed when we leave." Charles corrected. "And yes, that means I'd like you to be a part of this, if you're willing."
"Of course we're--" Hank began, accompanied by Sean's triumphant "yessss!", but Charles' upraised hand cut him off.
"There are reasons why you might not be willing to go." Charles said, his voice slipping into the professorial cadences he favored when his mind split things into lists and timelines, correlations and consequences. "Firstly, there's no Blackbird and no backup, so we'll all be responsible for making sure that Hank isn't seen by anyone or anything. I can't wipe a camera's memory, after all."
Logan muttered something low; Hank grimaced but said nothing in response, and only shook his head when Alex shot him a worried glance.
"Secondly, we haven't trained for this, and we don't have time to. Covering our tracks at the CIA was easy, because we had a brilliant inside man." He glanced at Hank, mostly for Logan's benefit. "It could be that all we're looking at is a small installation, Agent Stryker's own private CIA in miniature, that has already been infiltrated by Emma Frost--" the boys' thoughts and expressions ranged from shock to surprise and curiosity, whereas Logan merely snorted at the name, "-- or we could be facing something much more entrenched. Presumably these are the people who've held John Turner captive for nearly 6 years."
Charles felt the anger building in the minds around him, itching at his edges. But it was Mrs. Tydahl, the epitome of a sweet grandmotherly soul, who gave voice to it first. "Those bastards haven't the right, Charles!" she burst out. "They ought to be cut down a notch or two. Alex here could do it, I've seen the havoc he wreaks on a daily basis." She nodded approvingly at Alex with a tight, grim smile. "If you burned the place to the ground, there would be no recordings from cameras or anything that might link the Xavier name to the place."
"Mrs. Tydahl--" Charles was supposed to be arguing with the boys, not with the woman who made them pies and nonchalantly swept up the tufts of blue fur that wafted across the hardwood floors. "We cannot engage in terrorism. It's not right."
"You cannot expect children to attend the Xavier School for Gifted Youth if this mysterious agency is just going to swoop down on them and steal them in the middle of the night!" Her words rang in the silence, and left him exposed and transparent. It was the thing he worried about when he forgot to worry about himself. Logan's mindset shifted at her words, gone from resigned and slightly curious to a live wire poised for fight or flight, watching him with an unnerving intensity.
"Of course not," Charles said quietly, garnering nods all around. "But I would argue that we are in less danger of that if our enemies are unaware that we are a threat at all, instead of presenting them with a bigger one than they're expecting."
"But if Magneto did it--" Sean began, but Charles cut him off with a furious, "Absolutely not! We are in this mess because I screwed up, and I will not compound my mistake by implicating him, or Raven, or any other mutant!" His hand smarted from where he'd hit the arm of his chair emphatically.
"Professor--" Hank said carefully. "The recording material being used by the cameras is a magnetic tape, and if Mr. Lehnsherr happened to be there, he could -- what I mean to say is, a strong magnetic field can wipe those recordings clean. We might not have to burn the place down to cause the same effect."
Logan picked at his nails nonchalantly. "Or someone with very sharp claws could tear the tapes to shreds." He looked at Hank, openly sizing him up. "Mine are longer."
Alex, Sean and Hank all gave Logan disbelieving looks. "His are razor sharp," Alex pointed out, nodding towards Hank. "And if you need a nail trimmer…" he glanced over at Charles with a question, and a cartoon-like image of a plasma burst neatly slicing Logan's fingernails and leaving him looking like a disheveled Wile E. Coyote popped into Charles' mind. Charles nearly choked on the laugh, attempted to cover it with a cough. If not for the tension in the room, it would have been an abject failure.
"Hank, can you make a magnet strong enough to wipe, say, a roomful of tape recordings?" Charles asked, before the tension in the room could erupt into a boyish cat fight of epic proportions. "Or, if you were outside and could only communicate with me telepathically, do you think you could coach me through rigging up a solenoid?"
Hank gave Logan an openly calculating glance, as if he were a piece of equipment in his lab. "Wolverine is essentially a rod of Adamantine; depending on the size of the room, you'd need a pretty good length of conductive wire, but… yeah, theoretically it could be done. It would be easier if Mr. Lehnsherr--"
"I know." Charles held his hand up, letting the gesture speak for him: Talk to the hand, I can't take it anymore. "I know. Mrs. Tydahl, please accept my promise that when we are done, these people will not remember who we are, and will not come looking for the students. We will do our best not to give them any reason to remember us, and no matter the cost or how it plays out, I'll make sure to clean up any evidence that could lead back to us."
Mrs. Tydahl nodded, satisfied, though her shoulders were still held stiffly. "I'll pack you some meals for the road," she said and stalked out, her heels ringing sharply as she marched down the hall.
Charles exhaled quietly. It hadn't gone the way he'd expected, not by a long shot; but he felt more hopeful than he was reasonably justified to feel. He was buoyed by the thought that he wasn't going to face this one alone, and now that he'd learned his lesson in humility, no one was going to be blindsided, least of all him.
They discussed the logistics of the 9-hour drive, then got down to packing. A few hours of preparation was all they had to spare, even aided as they were by Mrs. Tydhal setting aside sandwiches and several thermoses of coffee and Mr. Tydahl making sure the vehicles were in proper working order and outfitted with extra gas cans and comprehensive kits should anything break down. They rolled down the drive and away from the estate at sundown, as the light faded into the soft shades of twilight. Midnight found them zipping along the interstate through Pennsylvania, curving along the valleys and ridges of the Appalachians. Logan drove the town car with Charles sitting impatiently in the back seat, trying not to wonder how much of a disaster it would be when Erik arrived and hoping beyond hope that Raven was being kept away from the intrigue. The boys were following in the van, packed with supplies for a number of scenarios, limited only by Hank's rampant imagination and the space requirements for transporting John and whatever support equipment he might need. One of those "supplies" was Logan's motorcycle, which Charles suspected could be considered to function as a security blanket. He reached back periodically to check on them, only to be treated to off-key renditions of Elvis Presley tunes, in stark contrast to the dead silence in the car and Logan's thoughts.
* * * * * *
Logan spoke sometime before dawn, pulling Charles from a dreamless sleep to look blearily at the outlines of huge trees looming over them and, in the occasional gaps, the barely distinguishable horizon.
"I heal fast. That's how I survived the Weapon X program and what they did to me." Logan kept his eyes on the road while he talked. "I don't know how much you learned when you found me at Earl's, but I haven't felt you poking around in here, so I figured I should just say it. I don't believe in mutants working for the government. Or being used by the government. I don't much like taking orders from anybody."
"Ah," Charles intoned quietly, but held his tongue. There would be time later to explain to Logan how Charles' particular brand of telepathy worked.
"Easy enough when it was just me. Still pretty easy when it was just me, and a couple of over-powered lunatics in the United States playing with the mob. But now there's kids involved, and I don't want to see any of them end up as Weapon Y or Weapon Z. A kid's gotta have a childhood, or else they'll just grow up to be monsters."
"Some will say they're monsters, anyway," Charles said. "Until there are enough of us to prove them otherwise."
"So you're in it for the long haul, eh?" Now those shrewd eyes glanced up and met his in the rear-view mirror. Charles said nothing as the realization hit him, but something on his face must have shown. Logan's lips curled upwards, and he said "Guess I better make sure you survive this, then."
They rode on in an amiable silence as the car climbed the highlands of West Virginia and the world around them gently filled with light. They skirted around the edge of the Monongahela National Forest, driving along a ridge until it tucked into the forest proper and turned to reveal an isolated valley far below, with a cluster of buildings and a paved road that was not included on any commercially-available map. They pulled over and waited for the boys in the van to arrive, and then, with Logan's aid, they found a good vantage point from which to study the lay of the land.
The compound -- for what else could it be called? -- was nearly identical to the facility the late Man in the Black Suit had run. It looked for all the world like a new office park built at the end of a curving road that could, in some young and exuberant urban planner's optimistic portfolio, accommodate an unhealthy amount of sprawling bedroom communities, should the economy desire it. This economy, however, desired helipads -- one large H graced a paved circle where a fountain would have been, tucked in the center of the circular drive, and another, smaller helipad could be seen on the roof of the complex's tallest building.
“Pretty quiet for a wednesday morning," Hank whispered, pointing down the hill from the viewpoint to the front gate. The circular drive beyond the gate was conveniently empty; the parking lot less than a quarter full. "There are usually more early-risers and night-owls than this. But that's a lot of surveillance they've got set up." He pointed at the closed-circuit television cameras placed in clusters. "It looks like standard video surveillance, but they've arranged the cameras for nearly full-coverage. If we're lucky, the guards watching the screens are overwhelmed."
"Let's find out, shall we?" Charles muttered to himself, and cast his thoughts forward and down, into the valley and minds below. He was barely aware of the thin wool blanket and the cold ground beneath that he lay on; but after drifting around and seeing only a few screens in lobbies, he pulled back into himself and discovered the annoying feeling that his toes were cold. He imagined wiggling them and sighed; there was a time and place for indulging in such nonsense, and that would be later and at home, preferably in the library in front of the fire. "It looks like the only screens being watched are of reception desks and main doors," he said, handing his binoculars to Hank. "But it looks like they've got another Cerebro installation underway, the upper half is visible just beyond the rightmost building.”
“Yeah, I see it.” He accepted the binocs, adjusted them, peered through. “Good news is they're using the wrong antenna spacing; you haven't felt anything, have you?”
Charles shook his head. “No, but we should dismantle it regardless.”
From behind them, Alex piped up, “I'm pretty sure I can take it out from here, probably.”
“And give our location away before we even get started?” Sean asked. “That never works in the movies.”
“I'm more concerned about the ’probably’ part." Charles commented, frowning as he took in the lack of a separate road to the complex. He had hoped there would be an access road, at least, from some place in the national forest lands that bordered the complex; the maps suggested as much, but the best he could make out with the binoculars was a narrow dirt trail. "Alex, let's save the destruction for when you’re close enough to knock it out without wrecking the building next to it, shall we?”
“Wish we still had the Blackbird,” Hank grumbled. “It’d make this easier.”
“Easy, yes; subtle, no. You all agreed to the objectives of this little mission: find John Turner and liberate him, and if Erik’s team are here, keep them from killing anyone. While not getting killed or captured ourselves.” He congratulated himself for not stumbling over Erik's name; it was getting easier. "So, once again, gentlemen, what's the plan?"
Alex jerked his head upwards in a quick nod, a leftover gesture from the prison yard. "Banshee and I stay up here and keep watch; I stay in touch with you, Professor, in case you need us for air support or diversion." Sean yawned wide to relax his throat. "And if everything goes well, you call us in to pick up John in the van, and then I take Wolverine's bike and follow you home."
"No, you follow until we get clear of these chumps and you can relieve me as the Professor's driver," Logan corrected him grumpily. "And you don't wreck my bike."
"No, I just think about it." Alex replied with a roll of the eyes.
"I'll head down the trail to the back way, keep an eye on the loading docks at the back entrance and be ready to charge in if you need it." Hank recited.
"But?" Charles prompted.
"But I should focus on exit strategies."
"Yes. Logan?"
Wolverine crossed his arms in front of his chest. "We go in the front door. You do your mind-thing, we find this John Turner, load him in the van and drive away." He smiled tightly, his eyes roaming over Sean, Hank, and finally coming to rest on Alex. "And the kids stay out of trouble."
"Yes, well, hopefully we all stay out of trouble." Charles said drily. "And if the Brotherhood shows up?"
"We tell them we have this under control, and ask them to leave," Hank answered, then added with a slight show of fangs, "politely."
Logan put on a good show for the kids; he helped Charles to his chair only as much as his help was actually required, held the door for Charles but stood by patiently and let him maneuver himself into place, and did not make any suggestion that Charles wasn't up for this. It wasn't until they had driven back down to the main road and turned towards the compound that he spoke up.
“You going in there’s a bad idea, Prof.” Wolverine nodded towards the road ahead. “Things tend to happen real fast once they get going, and you ain’t exactly the speediest thing on wheels, y'know?”
Charles allowed himself a small smile. “Thank you for your concern, Logan. I won’t stray too far from the exit.”
His watch read 7:45 when they drove through the last turn in the road and out of the trees. From the ground, the compound and its guardhouse looked much more impressive, seen through the tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
The guard at the gate did a quick double-take when he leaned around Logan to see Charles in the back passenger seat. Charles was ready to take control of the guard if he needed to, was already slipping into the calm mental space to do it, but before he tried the guard abruptly shook his head and said “Go ahead,” waving them forward. Just before Logan started to pull away, the guard added in a soft voice, clipping the words lest they be overheard, “Second building on the left, lower level.”
Logan rolled the window up before speaking again. “Don't know why we're bothering with all this make-believe when it’s obvious they know we're here, even though we're nice and early. Rolled out the red carpet, eh?”
“We don't yet know who has made the invitation,” Charles said quietly. "But that tidbit of information was courtesy of Miss Frost, I believe. I couldn't get ahold of that soldier's mind, it was as though it were wrapped in…," he thought for a moment, recalling a frigid Christmas holiday on the coast of Maine which seemed to have the same flavor, "…freezing fog."
"Sounds like a lovely lady," Logan said. "Can't wait to meet her." But he was thinking "Like a fucking flash-frozen cod," and Charles would have laughed at that if they weren't already pulling up to the curb in front of the second building on the left, leaving him directly in front of a security camera. He needed his concentration to convince the security guard at the front desk that both he and Logan were expected and not a threat, and he needed to do it without the tell-tale gesture of placing his fingers against his temples.
Erik had told him once that all the times Charles had accidentally bent the minds of those around him without intending to -- and more importantly, without the give-away hand gesture -- proved that he didn't actually need to rest his fingers against his temple to focus his power, that it was either a psychological crutch or a weakness he'd created for himself to put humans somehow at ease. The latter, Erik supposed, was due to Charles' own sense of discomfort with his abilities, which stung, because his pride wouldn't admit it but his head knew it was true. Erik's mind had been full of eagles with their wings clipped, which drifted quickly to the stylized black eagle standard that the Nazi party had used, and as complicated as that association was, Erik felt that Charles had more of a claim to the eagle symbolism than anyone, if he'd just stop clipping his own damn wings.
So he kept his hands folded on his lap, preternaturally aware of how cold and clammy they were, as he reached out to the guard at the front desk and guided him in to thinking "Oh, they're finally here. The brass is expecting them; The fellows at the gate must have checked them out thoroughly and made them late, so no need to do that again, better make this quick--" and Private First Class Lewis made two checkmarks to the right of the two names next on the list, which had no relation whatsoever to Charles and Logan, and he stood up and went over to the door of his own volition -- mostly -- and held the door open, waiting patiently while Logan fetched the wheelchair for Charles.
"Thank you," Charles said politely when Logan wheeled him through the open door into the chill lobby. Nice, steady hands on the back of the wheelchair, patently, obviously, and without a doubt completely unthreatening. And Charles himself rifling unobtrusively through Lewis's mind, absolutely not a threat to anyone in this -- Charles clamped his jaw tight to keep a dismayed gasp from escaping as the map unfurled before his mind's eye, but Logan's sniff made it clear that the body's signals could not be hidden -- gigantic paramilitary complex, a veritable ant-hive burrowing 9 stories deep into the earth and stretching out to incorporate some natural cave formations. Large portions of that map in Lewis's mind were grayed-out under the heading of "need-to-know-basis-and-I-don't-need-to-know". Somewhere, in that portion of the map, Charles was sure John Turner was being kept.
And probably Emma Frost, most likely still posing as a hostage.
"Miss Frost," he thought, reaching out, as gently as he could, shoving aside the taste of distrust at the back of his throat, the jealousy that tightened the corners of his eyes and made the back of his neck itch. An involuntary shiver coursed through him when his mind brushed near the edge of hers, like a cold mist just this side of freezing. A tendril of anxiety formed in the mist and uncurled, twisting to keep itself just out of his reach; she was distrustful of him as well, and she must have been just shy of her diamond form, barely open to telepathic contact and ready to tuck inside her crystal cocoon at the first hint of danger. Wherever she was, though, she was near. "We're here for John, Miss Frost. We've no intention of interfering with the Brotherhood."
He fully expected her to crystallize. He half-expected her to block him, or to try to hold him in place until Erik came storming through the door, and so he was quite surprised when the letters S7 appeared on the closed elevator door before him, shimmering like hoarfrost. Perhaps she couldn't bring herself to share her voice with him; perhaps she couldn't hide her dislike for him as well as he assumed he was hiding his dislike for her, or maybe -- and he felt this was more likely -- she simply found it easier to create illusions in the minds of others as opposed to projecting her own voice.
"Thank you," he replied, letting the gratitude slip like syrup over the words.
He pressed Lewis for the 7th floor down, and the man obliged as well as he could by handing over his elevator key, which Charles promptly passed on to Logan. "We're in with no problems," Charles thought towards Alex, the bright, fluid spot on the hill, and added "it's a warren that extends to 9 basements; we should be in the 7th and out again before long." Alex replied with an image of Sean sketching a tic-tac-toe board in the dirt at their feet with an air of nonchalance, but it didn't hide the memory of Sean nibbling at his hangnails as they kept an eye on the car parked in front of Building 2. Charles turned his thoughts toward Hank, hiding in the shadow of the trees closer to the back entrance than he should have been, and relayed the same message.
"They've got a couple canine units, Professor," Hank said, the words spoken out loud an echo in his thoughts.
"Fall back a couple hundred yards, then, Hank," Charles thought to him. "None of those dogs are Duchess, and you know I can't control animals."
"It's fine, Professor. They've already been by once, the German Shepard didn't even twitch an ear my way, and I… I want to be close, just in case."
"Fine, but…" Charles sighed as the elevator door finally opened. "Be careful."
"You, too."
The elevator door closed. Logan inserted the key, but no matter how much he pressed the button for the 7th sub-floor, the elevator remained resolutely still. Charles reached out and placed a hand on his forearm, just as he started to tense.
"Let's keep our disguises as long as we can, shall we? Try the 6th level."
Logan's thick eyebrows lowered. "Aren't we going to find your boy on the 7th?" he asked aloud.
"Think it, and I'll hear it." Charles reminded him. "Emma said so; but Erik doesn't trust her terribly much, and I find I'm not inclined to, either."
That won a half-smile from Logan, who punched the 6th sub-floor button and grinned like a maniac when the button lit up a dingy yellow and the elevator started to slide downwards. Finally.
S1…. S2…. S3… the numbers of the subfloors lit up regularly… S4… S5… and although there was no perceptible change in the elevator's descent, it took twice as long for S6 to appear as he expected. The door of the elevator slid open a moment before the door sealing the 6th subfloor opened, and he caught a brief glimpse of a machine and a slender window giving a view of trees beyond, the view framed by a fall of blonde hair. Once they'd passed through and the double sets of doors slid shut behind them, Charles realized he could no longer sense Hank or Alex or Sean. Or, for that matter, Emma Frost.
"Logan, I don't mean to alarm you," Charles thought with all the sense of calm he could muster, "but it appears I've been psychically cut off from the boys outside."
"You don't say," Logan muttered.
"But the good news is that I can sense the minds of the people on this floor and the floor below. And these chaps, obviously." The four guards standing at attention in the elevator's foyer immediately before the security doors leading to the hallway beyond remained standing rigidly at attention, as though frozen. "And Miss Frost is held somewhere in a room with a view of the trees outside, upstairs." Charles' hand drifted upwards, but he bit his lower lip instead and willed himself to concentrate harder. There were seventeen people on this floor, and he was holding them all in place while he scanned through the minds of the men standing guard before him. One had the necessary security clearance; his memories clearly showed a guarded hospital wing on the 4th floor, and a glimpse -- in passing, once, anywhere between 3 months and 3 years ago -- of a man with a pale face dusted with freckles being wheeled on a gurney into the room marked 412b. The memory tasted of peppermint and wintertime.
"412b," he said quietly to Logan, "Mr. Samwell here has the appropriate access, if you would take his keys?"
Logan strode forward and snatched the keys from around Mr. Samwell's neck. He returned to Charles' side immediately and punched the up elevator button impatiently. "How long can--?" he wondered.
"As long as I have to," Charles said grimly. The elevator returned from wherever it had retreated to, and Logan wheeled him in backwards, thinking that Charles needed to see the people he was controlling. The doors closed, and he scanned his thoughts upwards only to find himself blocked. "But I'm sorry to say it appears to be a trap."
"Yeah, well, what else would it be?" Logan asked rhetorically and without rancor, stepping around Charles
The doors of the elevator slid open with a squeak and a whine, and Charles's fingers were at his temple, the old bad habit back again. He reached out first to Wolverine, who turned on command without the slightest hint of realization that there had been a command at all. The larger man crouched slightly, spreading his bulk into a living wall, one that Charles hoped would be sufficient in case -- and yes, even as he fixed his eye's on Logan's and made contact with the minds of the men in the corridor, their trigger-happy fingers clenched down tight and the bullets sprang forward, propelled by nine tiny contained explosions. Pat-pa-pat! the thick hollowpoint bullets blossomed upon impact, and Charles fought to keep his face neutral as Logan grimaced with the pain. He felt it, he felt all of it -- the flesh being torn open, the hunks of deformed metal thunking against Logan's adamantium skeleton and sliding down along the metal bones and out.
"Thank you," Charles' hoarse voice sounded perfectly in accord with Logan's ragged breathing. "I'm sorry I couldn't catch them sooner."
"S'Okay," Logan gritted out through his teeth. He turned to glance over his shoulder when the first of their bodies hit the floor like sacks of wet cement, limp and unconscious. "Better me than you."
"You take bullets to the back far better than I do, Logan," he said. "Still…" Charles reached his free hand out to rest against Logan's chest. If Logan considered flinching, it was brief -- too much of his attention was focused on the pain, and this was what Charles gently laid aside. It took twice as long as usual to unravel the pain pathways while simultaneously making sure none of the unconscious men on the floor started to recover, but it was the least he could do.
"It's just practice," Logan replied, and of course it wasn't that at all, but Charles wasn't about to argue. He stopped abruptly and stared at Charles wide-eyed, then twisted around to look at his still-bleeding side. "You won't feel it, so be careful."
"10 minutes is all I need. And we need to find a different way up."
Charles exhaled slowly and carefully pushed the mental map he'd acquired from Mr. Samwell downstairs into the forefront of Logan's mind, while struggling to keep the vicious headache that was starting to set up shop behind his eyes at bay. He'd expected mental exertion, but he hadn't expected this much of it so early on. Logan stepped into the hallway and began collecting the guns and extra magazines carried in little pouches on the men's hips. Charles wheeled himself out in his wake, being careful not to roll over anyone's fingers. "You know how to use one of--?" Logan started to ask from where he was crouched over one of the men, holding a pistol up, but when he looked up at Charles, his expression was one of surprise. "Hunh. That was the funniest sounding explosion I've ever heard," he said, and then the elevator behind them plummeted down the shaft, zipping off its lines.
"That's it, Prof," he said, placing a gun in Charles' lap and tossing the rest down the shaft after the elevator. "Time to get you out of here."
"Not without John," Charles said. "We might not get another chance at this." Logan looked for a moment like he was considering throwing Charles over his shoulder and running for the stairs, but there was indecision there. Charles could feel that the scales hadn't yet tipped one way or the other. "I'm not ordering you, I'm asking you to consider what will happen to him if we leave him behind."
"They'll bury him alive and we'll never find him," Logan snarled. "412b it is. But if we come to a closed door, I go through it first."
"Agreed," Charles said. "If you push my chair for me, I can focus on making sure the people around us are conveniently out cold." He found he was smiling; he'd always wondered how many people he could control, given the need, and so far it turned out to be more than he'd expected, at least when they were nearby. And now that the elevator was out of his way, there might be a gap in the shielding thought which he could reach Alex or Hank.
With his attention divided between holding all the humans he could reach unconscious and reaching up the elevator shaft to search for the boys, he almost didn't understand what he was seeing with his eyes. Logan cursed and stumbled to his knees, but only for a moment. He leapt forward quickly, the momentum carrying him forward while his legs coiled underneath and he twisted in mid-air like a cat, adamantine claws extending with a shnick as his arm sailed out and missed Charles by a hair's breadth. "Get out of here, Professor," he snarled, "I'll hold 'em off." He looked around wildly, his nostrils flaring wide and his eyes focusing on empty air, and with a curse he swung out again and pounced on nothing, his claws sliding forward at the end of the arc to slice into a shadow.
Charles abandoned everything else to try to slip into Logan's mind, but he came up against hard diamond walls with spikes. "Logan, listen to me, focus on my voice!" he said, but he knew it was no good -- Emma's illusions stopped the ears, closed the eyes, replaced the tactile senses. "You know exactly where I am," he tried again, still feeling the crystalline wall for a crack, a thin spot, a spike less sharp than its neighbors, anything. "You can smell my aftershave, focus on that, that's real--"
The full force of Logan's weight crashed into him, sending the chair backwards against the wall, the spikes of his claws coming to impossibly infintessimal sharp points before Charles' eyes. In his peripheral vision he could see the other set of claws, pressed through the cloth of his slacks.
That probably hurts, he thought to himself. In fact, he was pretty sure he could feel it, the muscles crying out make it stop! and his spine most likely answering sorry, we're rather busy right now, as the cloth under the claws turned dark and damp.
"What did you do with the Professor?" Logan growled, his pupils tiny pinpoints of dark. Charles could find no purchase on the diamond shield around his mind, could only watch as Logan drew his right fist back, the claws in his leg grinding down with the movement. Charles's hands were on Logan's chest, trying in vain to push him back.
There was bile in the back of his throat. That's from the pain, he told himself gleefully, perhaps madly. I can feel it. Perhaps I should let Emma know how this feels.
The wall around Logan's mind had a tail, a glittering thread he could not sever. He swept along at it the speed of thought and found, at the bitter end, a twisting sharpness he could almost wrap his mind around…
A sound pulled him back, a deep reverberation that echoed in his torso and along his arms, and made his chair hum. Wolverine flew back with a shriek, impacting the far wall hard enough to crack the cement blocks, pale green chips of paint falling to the floor beneath.
"You double-crossing--!" Erik's face was twisted in rage as he strode into Charles' field of vision. The cape and helmet did nothing to hide the fury his entire body expressed. Logan screamed as Erik's hands twisted the air, the movement mirrored in the fields around Logan's body.
"Erik!" Charles shouted. "It's not him, it's Emma! That woman is--"
in my head.
The world went white.