The Bell's Toll (15/?)
Title: The Bell's Toll (15/?)
Author: monstrousreg
Word count: 4112
Warnings: I sort of hate to do this again, but THIS CHAPTER. THIS WHOLE CHAPTER. Fragmented mind ahead. Beware. Also bring tissues. And tequila. You've been warned. I know this chapter is short, but when you read the POV and how it works, you'll understand I can't possibly make it longer without seriously disturbing you.
Pairing: Erik/Charles.
Summary: Nikkita AU inspired by this prompt. A sort of fusion between the two series, with a healthy (or not) dose of my own imagination. Charles Xavier goes to prison, and is recruited by a spy/assassin division of the government. Dismal a beginning as this might look, it unbelievably goes downhill. Erik, the necessary stoic ex-military man, gets sidled with him. Not a single person is amused.
Prologue
It started in a cold winter morning. Wolverine was the first.
He woke with an exhalation and a blink. The world solidified around him like mist crystallizing into objects. He laid there in his bed for a moment, blinking slowly as he adjusted to the punding pain in his head.
His most faithful companion, the migraine.
Once he felt he could function again, he sat up slowly and got out of bed. Into the bathroom. Showered, brushed his teeth, spat into the sink.
He straightened and looked at his reflection in the mirror absently for a moment. Distracted, he wiped at the blood on his upper lip and nostrils. He was bleeding again. He hadn’t noticed.
He grabbed the razor and stared at it. Honed it to scalpel-sharpness with his gift. A flash of memory broke across his mind; Charles’ blue eyes half lidded, and his soft pale skin beneath the pads of Erik’s fingers as he slid the razor across his jaw. Heat and softness and power, and a tongue as sharp as the razor.
The image dispersed, and as it left Erik felt gutted and empty like a wooden doll.
Whenever an image of Charles came to him, it brought with it the knowledge that Charles had played him to get out of Division, betrayed him, used him.
What hunted him the most was not the betrayal, though. Nor the dear feeling of Charles writing beneath him, warm and alive and laughing lazily against the skin of Erik’s throat, warm breath and roaming hands.
What haunted Erik’s sleeping and waking hours was the sound of a gunshot and Charles’s body sprawled cooling on the floor.
He blinked at the mirror, the images of his own face, pale and haggard, superimposed with the one of the back of Charles’ skull. So much blood. Blood everywhere.
Blood on his hands there in front of the mirror. He stared at them dumbly. Oh. He’d cut the pad of his thumb on the razor. He brought his hand up and sucked at it, tasting the metal of blood against his tongue. He stared at himself in the mirror. A stranger stared back.
He wet his face, applied the cream, shaved. Then he dressed-a shirt and jeans-and picked up the bottle of vicodin on his way to the mess. Orange juice and a toast. He could hardly hold it in his stomach, but he downed it all the same. He was staring at the second slice on his plate when the boy sat down in front of him, huffing, rubbing a hand through his short blond hair.
“It’s too fucking early.”
Erik blinked mutely.
“I mean, what the fuck, why am I awake this early, what are you, a slave driver? I’m not in the fuck army, asshole.”
“This is a military-like operation,” Erik answered flatly. “You will be instructed in military ways to ensure your safety and efficiency.”
“What are you, like, reading that off a document over my shoulder or something? Hey, Intel Inside, I’m talking to you.”
“Shut up and eat your breakfast.”
Summers made a sound of token disgust-everything seemed to anger and disgust Alex Summers, from Erik’s attitude to the food to the color of the floors and walls-but dug into his bowl of cereal and milk. He chewed noisily. Erik grimaced and sat back, palming the bottle of painkillers. He dropped one tablet onto his hand and swallowed it, chasing it with the last of his orange juice.
“Drug-addict,” muttered Summers, stealing Erik’s abandoned toast and eating it in three loud bites.
Erik didn’t reply, instead rising from his chair and gesturing for Alex to follow.
Routine. Physical training. Mutation training. Tactical instruction. Team maneuvers and discipline.
Alex was a difficult person. He disliked commands, had an instinctive distrust for authority figures, and had some sort of particular dislike for Erik himself, as if the very sight of him made his skin crawl.
Erik couldn’t blame him.
He wasn’t particularly fond of his agent himself, but Alex was his to train, and train him he would. He’d give him all the tools Alex would need to survive in Division, and then not complain when Alex was passed on to another handler, as they had been doing for the last four years.
Erik hadn’t been out of the facility in years. He didn’t need to. He couldn’t handle the field.
After dispatching Alex to his tactics training, he returned to his own room and sat down to do some paperwork. He had just gripped the second document when there was a knock on the door, and Ororo peeked in.
“Yes?”
“Hey, sorry to bother you. Have you seen Wolverine lately?”
Erik thought about it.
“Not for a few days. I figured he was on an assignment. Isn’t he?”
Ororo shook her head. “He wasn’t scheduled on any and no one has seen him in a week.”
Erik frowned. He hadn’t known Logan was missing, but that didn’t surprise him. Frost and Shaw rarely trusted him with information these days. “Did you ask Frost?”
“She has people looking for him all over. She insists she can’t feel him at all. Like something’s blocking her.”
“Could he be dead?” he asked calmly.
Ororo looked unsettled. “What could possibly kill off Logan, Erik?”
The metallokinetic had to agree the idea was disconcerting. “He’s always been resistant to telepathy. But he’s never been able to block her out before. So either he’s well out of range, or he’s dead. Did Tony check all the available tech means of finding him?”
Ororo spread her hands, “I don’t have clearance for the workshop so I don’t know.”
Erik put down his pen and rose, swaying only slightly. He ignored Ororo’s look r abortive hand gesture-as if she reached out to him only to then stop herself-and stepped out into the corridor.
He found Tony sprawled on his back on the workshop under what looked like some sort of metal armor. Tony and his projects. Erik wasn’t in charge of making sure he didn’t blow up the facility anymore, so he didn’t know what he was onto now, but with some luck it wouldn’t end up killing them all.
“Tony,” he greeted, standing over him. Tony grunted. “Could you get out from under there and talk to me for a minute?”
The mechanic did so will little grace, scowling at him from the floor.
“What?”
The hostility was not new, but Erik still didn’t understand it. Something had changed between them, and Erik couldn’t quite pin-point what it was. The Tony that would have gladly shared a tumbler of whiskey with him only as long as four years before now could hardly be kept in a room with him.
“Have you been looking for Wolverine with cameras or GPS?”
“He’s nowhere to be found,” answered Tony. “Anything else?”
Erik stared at him blankly. “What about his chip?”
“The chip I found in a trashcan on downtown Miami. It was not attached to its owner. I don’t know where Wolverine is. Are we done here?”
Erik looked away. He could feel the song of the metal around him, muted, lacking harmony. He could only sometimes correctly grasp it, these days. He and it sang together, but unsynchronized.
Soon enough, he’d lose it entirely.
“Keep looking.”
“Yessir,” muttered Tony, and slid back down beneath the hanging armor, a chest-plate and arms and a helmet with no face, and chains and refrigeration tubes hanging off it like guts split open. Erik swayed on his feet and backed away, swallowing.
Ororo was waiting by the elevator doors, and straightened anxiously when he stepped out.
“He says he found the chip, alone, in Miami.”
Ororo frowned. “Would he have left? He had nowhere else to go.”
Erik thought that he didn’t have anywhere else to go either, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be here. If he could have left, if he had thought he would have made it anywhere, maybe he would have left, too. But there was nowhere to go and no way of getting there.
“I don’t know. Keep an eye open and tell e if you know anything else.”
So Wolverine was the first.
A month after Wolverine had gone missing, Kitty Pryde went on a mission. She did not return. Erik would have presumed her dead, except for the fact her body was never recovered and no traces indicated she had been injured at all. The mission had been going well, the handler told him-Erik wasn’t an active handler anymore-and then suddenly Kitty’s line had gone silent. Not a sound, nothing to indicate complications with what was essentially a find-and-recover mission. Perfectly simple. It as something Kitty did all the damn time. Routine.
They found her chip on a water fountain in Toronto.
Agents got killed on the field often enough. If she had died, or if Wolverine had died, Erik would have felt sorry and moved on. But they weren’t dead. They were just gone. Division had built a whole system to avoid their agents escaping their reach, disappearing as if into thin air, and the system had been working perfectly, like a well-oiled machine, for years. Erik had been in Division for a decade and not once had an agent simply vanished.
For the next two months, nothing happened. But then in October not only did Sean Cassidy disappear, but he disappeared along with his handler, Piotr Rasputin. Erik knew Piotr well; he would not just have walked away. Piotr believed in what Division did. He wanted to help people. There was absolutely no malice in the giant. That he had simply-walked away, or whatever it was that was going on, was bewildering. They found their chips fused together in a small sailboat off the coast of Greece. Which also made no sense because they had been working an assignment in Chile.
Then the harshest blow. Ororo.
Her chip was in a subway station in Moscow. She’s been working in Paris.
How? How could they be just-disappearing, as if they had never even walked the Earth? No traces, no paper trails, not even any indication of what had happened. Nothing to predict who would be next. No clues. No way to find them.
Agents died, of course. But Division prepared its operatives well enough that it happened rarely, and to lose five top-performance operatives in four months was staggering.
And there was Ororo. Gone.
“What are we doing about this?” he asked Frost the next time he saw her. She was sitting primly at her fainting couch, long legs crossed, white cape draped artfully over her lap in rick luxurious folds. Erik hated her with a startling intensity, and had long since given up any attempts to understand why, or even hide it. She knew. Let it crease her finely shaped eyebrows and sit heavy in the pit of her stomach.
Not that it did. She couldn’t care less.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she replied coldly. “So what would you suggest I do?”
“We’re losing valuable assets.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she repeated as if he were stupid.
Erik left the office. He wasn’t sure why she hated Frost so much, just as he wasn’t sure why Tony hated him so much, but the sight of her made his stomach turn violently.
He couldn’t do anything about it, though. He was stuck in the facility. He’d been forbidden to step outside the perimeter. Every day his migraines and nosebleeds got worse. He knew he was dying, though he didn’t know the cause exactly. It didn’t bother him as much as he figured it should. Despite being less than forty years old, he felt ancient and jaded, like a rock wearied by the constant rub of water.
Besides. Charles was dead. He’d been a traitor and a bastard, but. Erik had. Something. He’d felt something. And Charles was dead. He’d killed Charles.
When he woke up the next morning, his pillow was stained with blood. Getting out of bed was a chore, but he got up, shaved, brushed his teeth. Skipped breakfast this time. He wasn’t hungry.
Alex was bizarrely cheerful. Ad they walked he trailed his fingers across the wall, absent-minded, and when he caught Erik’s look he arches his brows.
“Ever heard of the walls picking up thoughts?”
“No.”
“It’s like they remember,” Alex said, and grinned. He pressed his palm flat against the wall, and dragged it down as if smearing paint on the surface. Like he was intending to leave an imprint. “I’m just telling the wall what I think.”
“I don’t think the wall deserves that,” commented Erik.
Alex flipped him off.
Disaster struck three months later.
Tony.
Tony was gone.
Erik stood in the middle of the workshop, listening to the broken song of metal, and Tony was gone. The armor he’d been working on was gone as well. His files and research were corrupted and erased. JARVIS, the AI he’d designed on a long stretch of boredom, had disintegrated into unrelated files.
It was a catastrophe. Not only was Tony their main hacker and the builders of almost all of their high-tech toys, but he was also a brilliant operative and strategist. He’s been an essential part of Division. Spinal column. Part of the brain.
Gone without a trace.
Even worse, Tony had not been on an assignment. He’d been right there in the workshop where Erik stood now. The cameras had recorded it. One second he was sitting there, back to the camera. Then he’d stood up, reached for something behind the armor. Then armor and Tony were gone. The destroying of his systems and research had been remotely done.
His chip was left on a tabletop on a Starbucks in Manhattan.
The next day all chips stopped working entirely.
Colonel Shaw sat Erik down on a chair in his office and insisted he needed to focus and find them with his mind, locate them with his gift.
Erik looked out the wide, floor-to-ceiling window, out towards the city sprawling in the distance. A sea of flickering lights like stars stuck to a pool of blood.
“It’s gone,” he said simply. “I don’t have that power anymore. The song is wrong.”
“You’re not making sense, son.”
Erik turned to him, eyes blank. He saw him sitting there in his smart black suit. Saw him sitting at another desk in another smart suit, what felt like decades prior. Different suit, different desk; same man. Always the same. “I’m not your son.”
He dreamed of skies painted ash-grey. He woke and felt like a writhe, a ghoul, something that walked and did not live.
“This is bullshit,” said Alex, two weeks later. “I’m rotting here, man. If you don’t have a mission for me can I just go? This is lame.”
The next morning Jubilee disappeared. From her room. That same afternoon, Janos.
“Dropping like flies,” muttered Victor Creed. “What the fuck is going on here?”
Alex, sitting back in his chair with his feet up on the table and his fingers laced behind his head, shrugged.
“Cosmic justice? You know. The Universe getting rid of its own mistakes.”
Erik looked at him. The boy couldn’t have cared less who lives and died here. He was not invested in Division in the least, even though he’d been there for almost ten months already. Some people just can’t be domesticated.
He thought of Charles again, like a blade sliding into his temple. Eyes like the sky. Eyes like fire. Skin and fur.
“Your nose is bleeding again,” said Alex, sounding bored. Then he closed his eyes and began humming a tune. Erik knew he’d heard that somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. He got shakily to his feet and went to wash his face.
He dreamed of warm skin and a hand wrapping around his arm, fingertips against his pulse, and your mind lights up with it.
It was worse than the ashen sky.
A week later, Shaw came to find them in the gym, working out in the mat.
“You have an assignment.”
Erik frowned. “He’s not ready, sir. Besides-what about the disappearances? We don’t know-“
Shaw cut him off with a frigid look. Oh. So that’s what that was. Alex was expendable. They wouldn’t bother with him anymore, and if he died, just as well. As for Erik-well, clearly he had become expendable himself. He reminded himself he was dying in any case. Whether he did so choking on his own blood as he slept or with a bullet to the eye made very little difference.
He would take the bullet. A good clean death. He’d given Charles that much. Surely he deserved it as well.
A car to the airport. A plane to Saint Petersburg. A car to the hotel. Erik sat Alex down to the table and briefed him fully on their assignment. To find and retrieve a young mutant girl, Raven, and to protect her. She was being held in a warehouse outside the city. Presumably she was being tortured. Erik wanted to feel horrified. All he felt was numb and tired.
As they waited to the night to fall, Alex sat by the window and looked out. It was December and Russia was covered in blinding white snow.
“You ever heard of the Grim?” the boy asked, turning to him with surprisingly blue eyes. Erik felt himself stiffen, as if the boy’s blue eyes were an accusation. But they were calm, clear.
“The one with the cloak and the scythe?”
Alex grinned crookedly. “That’s the Grim Reaper. I mean the Grim. As in Harry Potter.”
Erik shook his head as he disassembled a gun to clean it. He remembered doing it with his mind, once upon a time. He no longer had the fine control necessary.
“It’s a sign of coming death. Like if you see it, you’re gonna die.”
“Is it the barrel of a gun?”
Alex laughed briefly and turned back to the window. “Nah. It’s a dog. A huge, giant black dog.”
Erik’s eyes snapped up.
“It supposedly bring about your demise,” continued Alex, and turned to grin at Erik. “Crazy shit, right?”
“Have you seen it?” Erik asked, feeling sick to the stomach. So much blood.
Alex snorted. “Of course not, asshole. I was just thinking of walking into danger or whatever.”
Erik stared at him for a long time. Alex was humming that tune again.
“What song is that?”
“Huh?” Alex blinked at him. “Oh. It’s just a song I learned. From and English friend.”
Erik stared down at the parts of his automatic pistol spread on a cloth on the table. He closed his eyes. He could feel the impact of the recoil against his palm as he pressed the trigger. A spray of warm blood. Charles limp on the ground.
He opened his eyes. A drop of blood sat dark on his hand. He wiped his nose and went to wash his face.
“You’re falling apart at the seams, old man,” called Alex, laughing.
Yes, thought Erik, watching himself in the mirror and not recognizing his face. I am.
Night fell. Erik and Alex shrugged their coats on and carefully, quietly, made their way into the warehouse. It was torture. All that metal, and the song broken, distorted, to Erik’s blood. They no longer sung together. The gun was a dead weight in his hand, instead of the leaving, pulsing thing it has once been. Falling apart at the seams indeed.
They fell upon them like a swarm. Erik emptied his clip onto them but never seemed to hit a single one. Alex’ plasma beam sliced through the walls. Though the support beams. Half of the warehouse began to collapse. Erik scrambled to find cover, and then remembered the girl, and scrambled to find her instead.
“Raven!” he called out, dodging falling debris, stumbling away from an exploding window. Shards of glass like diamonds in the moonlight. Hot blood trickled down his cheek from a cut. He swiped at it distractedly as he stumbled into the office. A woman was sitting on a desk there, long legs crossed, examining her fingernails. She was blue from head to toe. Long fire-red hair cascaded down her slender shoulders, stark against her delicate white dress. Her eyes were lion-gold.
“You called?” she grinned.
“Raven?” he frowned.
“Who did you expect? The Grim?”
Erik felt his heart speed up.
“So this is how they disappear.”
Raven laughed, hopping off the desk. “No. This is what happens before.”
“Who are you?”
“I would say I’m your worst nightmare, but…” a theatrical grimace and a wink. “I think we both know that’s not true.”
Erik gritted his teeth. He might die, but he wasn’t about to make it this easy. He lifted his gun and blew out the sole light-bulb in the room. He heard Raven laugh briefly, and darted out the door. He needed to warn Alex. Get him out of here. Keep him safe. He was just a boy. Cold, ill-tempered, and callous, but just a boy.
Everything in the warehouse was quiet. Erik moved cautiously against the decimated wall, eyes darting around. He didn’t dare call for Alex. Once upon a time he might have managed to locate him by his chip with his gift, but now-now that was gone.
Suddenly Alex was standing over him, grabbing his arm.
Erik tugged him down to the floor.
“Raven is a hostile,” he muttered quietly.
“I know, dipshit,” Alex twisted his arm free. “You’re as dull as a spoon, aren’t you?”
The metallokinetic frowned at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“All those people I killed with my beam,” Alex got up and stepped away to the center of the warehouse. “Where are the bodies?”
Erik glanced around. Damnit. Not a single body on the ground. The plasma would have sliced right through them.
“Take cover, Alex,” he said tightly, crouching.
“Fuck you,” replied Alex, and Eric saw Raven walk up to his side, lion-gold eyes sharp, smile soft.
Erik’s eyes darted between them.
“It was you who made the others disappear,” said Erik slowly.
“I just talked to them,” Alex shrugged. “If they heard something they didn’t like, and then decided to leave… that’s not my problem.”
Erik stood, fists clenching. “Why? Who do you work for?”
“Not you, you lying, backstabbing piece of shit,” growled Alex, chest heating. Raven wrapped a hand around his wrist, pulling him back.
“Who do you think, Lehnsherr?” she asked, and her eyes shifted, leaching gold to blue. Erik watche din horror as her face changed into another one. High cheekbones, red lips, eyes as blue as her skin.
“Can’t you tell?” Charles asked, head tilting, lips curling in that familiar mocking smile of his. “Darling?”
Alex’s eyes fell somewhere to the right of Erik’s shoulder. Eager to take his eyes off the fake Charles, Erik turned around.
Worse.
Fur like curling flame and eyes like dying stars.
“You’re dead,” he whispered brokenly, heart beating furiously on a ribcage much too small, breath stuttering. His vision blurred.
Baskerville’s hackles rose to reveal a white row of gleaming fangs.
“No, sweeatheart,” Not-Charles said behind him, accent perfect, tone exact. Whoever Raven was, she knew Charles. “Creatures like me don’t die. We just come back, angrier.”
Erik turned around again. Raven dissolved back into her own form and stepped away, but Alex stood, hands in his pockets, relaxed. His features were Alex’, but the expression. The cold, cold eyes and the mocking cold smile.
“You look somewhat lessened, darling,” he said, and it was Charles in Alex’ mouth. “Years don’t seem to have been kind to you.”
“Leave the boy,” Erik said numbly.
“Alex and I are friends,” Charles said, smiling with Alex’ lips. “I met him before you did.”
Erik nodded. “A spy.”
“A weapon,” Charles admitted. “He begged me to use him. So I did. You see, Division framed his brother Scott. We managed to save him before you sank your claws into him.”
“What have you done to-to the others-“
“I told them the truth. All of it. Even the truths not even you know.”
Erik realized he was shaking violently. It wasn’t the cold. He was terrified. Baskerville circled wide around him, eyes bright red, growling loudly. Erik eyed him.
“You could have killed me then and you didn’t.”
Alex-Charles smiled bitterly. “That was then. This is now.”
Baskerville leapt. Erik was unconscious before he hit the ground, and he hit it hard.
Author: monstrousreg
Word count: 4112
Warnings: I sort of hate to do this again, but THIS CHAPTER. THIS WHOLE CHAPTER. Fragmented mind ahead. Beware. Also bring tissues. And tequila. You've been warned. I know this chapter is short, but when you read the POV and how it works, you'll understand I can't possibly make it longer without seriously disturbing you.
Pairing: Erik/Charles.
Summary: Nikkita AU inspired by this prompt. A sort of fusion between the two series, with a healthy (or not) dose of my own imagination. Charles Xavier goes to prison, and is recruited by a spy/assassin division of the government. Dismal a beginning as this might look, it unbelievably goes downhill. Erik, the necessary stoic ex-military man, gets sidled with him. Not a single person is amused.
Prologue
It started in a cold winter morning. Wolverine was the first.
He woke with an exhalation and a blink. The world solidified around him like mist crystallizing into objects. He laid there in his bed for a moment, blinking slowly as he adjusted to the punding pain in his head.
His most faithful companion, the migraine.
Once he felt he could function again, he sat up slowly and got out of bed. Into the bathroom. Showered, brushed his teeth, spat into the sink.
He straightened and looked at his reflection in the mirror absently for a moment. Distracted, he wiped at the blood on his upper lip and nostrils. He was bleeding again. He hadn’t noticed.
He grabbed the razor and stared at it. Honed it to scalpel-sharpness with his gift. A flash of memory broke across his mind; Charles’ blue eyes half lidded, and his soft pale skin beneath the pads of Erik’s fingers as he slid the razor across his jaw. Heat and softness and power, and a tongue as sharp as the razor.
The image dispersed, and as it left Erik felt gutted and empty like a wooden doll.
Whenever an image of Charles came to him, it brought with it the knowledge that Charles had played him to get out of Division, betrayed him, used him.
What hunted him the most was not the betrayal, though. Nor the dear feeling of Charles writing beneath him, warm and alive and laughing lazily against the skin of Erik’s throat, warm breath and roaming hands.
What haunted Erik’s sleeping and waking hours was the sound of a gunshot and Charles’s body sprawled cooling on the floor.
He blinked at the mirror, the images of his own face, pale and haggard, superimposed with the one of the back of Charles’ skull. So much blood. Blood everywhere.
Blood on his hands there in front of the mirror. He stared at them dumbly. Oh. He’d cut the pad of his thumb on the razor. He brought his hand up and sucked at it, tasting the metal of blood against his tongue. He stared at himself in the mirror. A stranger stared back.
He wet his face, applied the cream, shaved. Then he dressed-a shirt and jeans-and picked up the bottle of vicodin on his way to the mess. Orange juice and a toast. He could hardly hold it in his stomach, but he downed it all the same. He was staring at the second slice on his plate when the boy sat down in front of him, huffing, rubbing a hand through his short blond hair.
“It’s too fucking early.”
Erik blinked mutely.
“I mean, what the fuck, why am I awake this early, what are you, a slave driver? I’m not in the fuck army, asshole.”
“This is a military-like operation,” Erik answered flatly. “You will be instructed in military ways to ensure your safety and efficiency.”
“What are you, like, reading that off a document over my shoulder or something? Hey, Intel Inside, I’m talking to you.”
“Shut up and eat your breakfast.”
Summers made a sound of token disgust-everything seemed to anger and disgust Alex Summers, from Erik’s attitude to the food to the color of the floors and walls-but dug into his bowl of cereal and milk. He chewed noisily. Erik grimaced and sat back, palming the bottle of painkillers. He dropped one tablet onto his hand and swallowed it, chasing it with the last of his orange juice.
“Drug-addict,” muttered Summers, stealing Erik’s abandoned toast and eating it in three loud bites.
Erik didn’t reply, instead rising from his chair and gesturing for Alex to follow.
Routine. Physical training. Mutation training. Tactical instruction. Team maneuvers and discipline.
Alex was a difficult person. He disliked commands, had an instinctive distrust for authority figures, and had some sort of particular dislike for Erik himself, as if the very sight of him made his skin crawl.
Erik couldn’t blame him.
He wasn’t particularly fond of his agent himself, but Alex was his to train, and train him he would. He’d give him all the tools Alex would need to survive in Division, and then not complain when Alex was passed on to another handler, as they had been doing for the last four years.
Erik hadn’t been out of the facility in years. He didn’t need to. He couldn’t handle the field.
After dispatching Alex to his tactics training, he returned to his own room and sat down to do some paperwork. He had just gripped the second document when there was a knock on the door, and Ororo peeked in.
“Yes?”
“Hey, sorry to bother you. Have you seen Wolverine lately?”
Erik thought about it.
“Not for a few days. I figured he was on an assignment. Isn’t he?”
Ororo shook her head. “He wasn’t scheduled on any and no one has seen him in a week.”
Erik frowned. He hadn’t known Logan was missing, but that didn’t surprise him. Frost and Shaw rarely trusted him with information these days. “Did you ask Frost?”
“She has people looking for him all over. She insists she can’t feel him at all. Like something’s blocking her.”
“Could he be dead?” he asked calmly.
Ororo looked unsettled. “What could possibly kill off Logan, Erik?”
The metallokinetic had to agree the idea was disconcerting. “He’s always been resistant to telepathy. But he’s never been able to block her out before. So either he’s well out of range, or he’s dead. Did Tony check all the available tech means of finding him?”
Ororo spread her hands, “I don’t have clearance for the workshop so I don’t know.”
Erik put down his pen and rose, swaying only slightly. He ignored Ororo’s look r abortive hand gesture-as if she reached out to him only to then stop herself-and stepped out into the corridor.
He found Tony sprawled on his back on the workshop under what looked like some sort of metal armor. Tony and his projects. Erik wasn’t in charge of making sure he didn’t blow up the facility anymore, so he didn’t know what he was onto now, but with some luck it wouldn’t end up killing them all.
“Tony,” he greeted, standing over him. Tony grunted. “Could you get out from under there and talk to me for a minute?”
The mechanic did so will little grace, scowling at him from the floor.
“What?”
The hostility was not new, but Erik still didn’t understand it. Something had changed between them, and Erik couldn’t quite pin-point what it was. The Tony that would have gladly shared a tumbler of whiskey with him only as long as four years before now could hardly be kept in a room with him.
“Have you been looking for Wolverine with cameras or GPS?”
“He’s nowhere to be found,” answered Tony. “Anything else?”
Erik stared at him blankly. “What about his chip?”
“The chip I found in a trashcan on downtown Miami. It was not attached to its owner. I don’t know where Wolverine is. Are we done here?”
Erik looked away. He could feel the song of the metal around him, muted, lacking harmony. He could only sometimes correctly grasp it, these days. He and it sang together, but unsynchronized.
Soon enough, he’d lose it entirely.
“Keep looking.”
“Yessir,” muttered Tony, and slid back down beneath the hanging armor, a chest-plate and arms and a helmet with no face, and chains and refrigeration tubes hanging off it like guts split open. Erik swayed on his feet and backed away, swallowing.
Ororo was waiting by the elevator doors, and straightened anxiously when he stepped out.
“He says he found the chip, alone, in Miami.”
Ororo frowned. “Would he have left? He had nowhere else to go.”
Erik thought that he didn’t have anywhere else to go either, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be here. If he could have left, if he had thought he would have made it anywhere, maybe he would have left, too. But there was nowhere to go and no way of getting there.
“I don’t know. Keep an eye open and tell e if you know anything else.”
So Wolverine was the first.
A month after Wolverine had gone missing, Kitty Pryde went on a mission. She did not return. Erik would have presumed her dead, except for the fact her body was never recovered and no traces indicated she had been injured at all. The mission had been going well, the handler told him-Erik wasn’t an active handler anymore-and then suddenly Kitty’s line had gone silent. Not a sound, nothing to indicate complications with what was essentially a find-and-recover mission. Perfectly simple. It as something Kitty did all the damn time. Routine.
They found her chip on a water fountain in Toronto.
Agents got killed on the field often enough. If she had died, or if Wolverine had died, Erik would have felt sorry and moved on. But they weren’t dead. They were just gone. Division had built a whole system to avoid their agents escaping their reach, disappearing as if into thin air, and the system had been working perfectly, like a well-oiled machine, for years. Erik had been in Division for a decade and not once had an agent simply vanished.
For the next two months, nothing happened. But then in October not only did Sean Cassidy disappear, but he disappeared along with his handler, Piotr Rasputin. Erik knew Piotr well; he would not just have walked away. Piotr believed in what Division did. He wanted to help people. There was absolutely no malice in the giant. That he had simply-walked away, or whatever it was that was going on, was bewildering. They found their chips fused together in a small sailboat off the coast of Greece. Which also made no sense because they had been working an assignment in Chile.
Then the harshest blow. Ororo.
Her chip was in a subway station in Moscow. She’s been working in Paris.
How? How could they be just-disappearing, as if they had never even walked the Earth? No traces, no paper trails, not even any indication of what had happened. Nothing to predict who would be next. No clues. No way to find them.
Agents died, of course. But Division prepared its operatives well enough that it happened rarely, and to lose five top-performance operatives in four months was staggering.
And there was Ororo. Gone.
“What are we doing about this?” he asked Frost the next time he saw her. She was sitting primly at her fainting couch, long legs crossed, white cape draped artfully over her lap in rick luxurious folds. Erik hated her with a startling intensity, and had long since given up any attempts to understand why, or even hide it. She knew. Let it crease her finely shaped eyebrows and sit heavy in the pit of her stomach.
Not that it did. She couldn’t care less.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she replied coldly. “So what would you suggest I do?”
“We’re losing valuable assets.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she repeated as if he were stupid.
Erik left the office. He wasn’t sure why she hated Frost so much, just as he wasn’t sure why Tony hated him so much, but the sight of her made his stomach turn violently.
He couldn’t do anything about it, though. He was stuck in the facility. He’d been forbidden to step outside the perimeter. Every day his migraines and nosebleeds got worse. He knew he was dying, though he didn’t know the cause exactly. It didn’t bother him as much as he figured it should. Despite being less than forty years old, he felt ancient and jaded, like a rock wearied by the constant rub of water.
Besides. Charles was dead. He’d been a traitor and a bastard, but. Erik had. Something. He’d felt something. And Charles was dead. He’d killed Charles.
When he woke up the next morning, his pillow was stained with blood. Getting out of bed was a chore, but he got up, shaved, brushed his teeth. Skipped breakfast this time. He wasn’t hungry.
Alex was bizarrely cheerful. Ad they walked he trailed his fingers across the wall, absent-minded, and when he caught Erik’s look he arches his brows.
“Ever heard of the walls picking up thoughts?”
“No.”
“It’s like they remember,” Alex said, and grinned. He pressed his palm flat against the wall, and dragged it down as if smearing paint on the surface. Like he was intending to leave an imprint. “I’m just telling the wall what I think.”
“I don’t think the wall deserves that,” commented Erik.
Alex flipped him off.
Disaster struck three months later.
Tony.
Tony was gone.
Erik stood in the middle of the workshop, listening to the broken song of metal, and Tony was gone. The armor he’d been working on was gone as well. His files and research were corrupted and erased. JARVIS, the AI he’d designed on a long stretch of boredom, had disintegrated into unrelated files.
It was a catastrophe. Not only was Tony their main hacker and the builders of almost all of their high-tech toys, but he was also a brilliant operative and strategist. He’s been an essential part of Division. Spinal column. Part of the brain.
Gone without a trace.
Even worse, Tony had not been on an assignment. He’d been right there in the workshop where Erik stood now. The cameras had recorded it. One second he was sitting there, back to the camera. Then he’d stood up, reached for something behind the armor. Then armor and Tony were gone. The destroying of his systems and research had been remotely done.
His chip was left on a tabletop on a Starbucks in Manhattan.
The next day all chips stopped working entirely.
Colonel Shaw sat Erik down on a chair in his office and insisted he needed to focus and find them with his mind, locate them with his gift.
Erik looked out the wide, floor-to-ceiling window, out towards the city sprawling in the distance. A sea of flickering lights like stars stuck to a pool of blood.
“It’s gone,” he said simply. “I don’t have that power anymore. The song is wrong.”
“You’re not making sense, son.”
Erik turned to him, eyes blank. He saw him sitting there in his smart black suit. Saw him sitting at another desk in another smart suit, what felt like decades prior. Different suit, different desk; same man. Always the same. “I’m not your son.”
He dreamed of skies painted ash-grey. He woke and felt like a writhe, a ghoul, something that walked and did not live.
“This is bullshit,” said Alex, two weeks later. “I’m rotting here, man. If you don’t have a mission for me can I just go? This is lame.”
The next morning Jubilee disappeared. From her room. That same afternoon, Janos.
“Dropping like flies,” muttered Victor Creed. “What the fuck is going on here?”
Alex, sitting back in his chair with his feet up on the table and his fingers laced behind his head, shrugged.
“Cosmic justice? You know. The Universe getting rid of its own mistakes.”
Erik looked at him. The boy couldn’t have cared less who lives and died here. He was not invested in Division in the least, even though he’d been there for almost ten months already. Some people just can’t be domesticated.
He thought of Charles again, like a blade sliding into his temple. Eyes like the sky. Eyes like fire. Skin and fur.
“Your nose is bleeding again,” said Alex, sounding bored. Then he closed his eyes and began humming a tune. Erik knew he’d heard that somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. He got shakily to his feet and went to wash his face.
He dreamed of warm skin and a hand wrapping around his arm, fingertips against his pulse, and your mind lights up with it.
It was worse than the ashen sky.
A week later, Shaw came to find them in the gym, working out in the mat.
“You have an assignment.”
Erik frowned. “He’s not ready, sir. Besides-what about the disappearances? We don’t know-“
Shaw cut him off with a frigid look. Oh. So that’s what that was. Alex was expendable. They wouldn’t bother with him anymore, and if he died, just as well. As for Erik-well, clearly he had become expendable himself. He reminded himself he was dying in any case. Whether he did so choking on his own blood as he slept or with a bullet to the eye made very little difference.
He would take the bullet. A good clean death. He’d given Charles that much. Surely he deserved it as well.
A car to the airport. A plane to Saint Petersburg. A car to the hotel. Erik sat Alex down to the table and briefed him fully on their assignment. To find and retrieve a young mutant girl, Raven, and to protect her. She was being held in a warehouse outside the city. Presumably she was being tortured. Erik wanted to feel horrified. All he felt was numb and tired.
As they waited to the night to fall, Alex sat by the window and looked out. It was December and Russia was covered in blinding white snow.
“You ever heard of the Grim?” the boy asked, turning to him with surprisingly blue eyes. Erik felt himself stiffen, as if the boy’s blue eyes were an accusation. But they were calm, clear.
“The one with the cloak and the scythe?”
Alex grinned crookedly. “That’s the Grim Reaper. I mean the Grim. As in Harry Potter.”
Erik shook his head as he disassembled a gun to clean it. He remembered doing it with his mind, once upon a time. He no longer had the fine control necessary.
“It’s a sign of coming death. Like if you see it, you’re gonna die.”
“Is it the barrel of a gun?”
Alex laughed briefly and turned back to the window. “Nah. It’s a dog. A huge, giant black dog.”
Erik’s eyes snapped up.
“It supposedly bring about your demise,” continued Alex, and turned to grin at Erik. “Crazy shit, right?”
“Have you seen it?” Erik asked, feeling sick to the stomach. So much blood.
Alex snorted. “Of course not, asshole. I was just thinking of walking into danger or whatever.”
Erik stared at him for a long time. Alex was humming that tune again.
“What song is that?”
“Huh?” Alex blinked at him. “Oh. It’s just a song I learned. From and English friend.”
Erik stared down at the parts of his automatic pistol spread on a cloth on the table. He closed his eyes. He could feel the impact of the recoil against his palm as he pressed the trigger. A spray of warm blood. Charles limp on the ground.
He opened his eyes. A drop of blood sat dark on his hand. He wiped his nose and went to wash his face.
“You’re falling apart at the seams, old man,” called Alex, laughing.
Yes, thought Erik, watching himself in the mirror and not recognizing his face. I am.
Night fell. Erik and Alex shrugged their coats on and carefully, quietly, made their way into the warehouse. It was torture. All that metal, and the song broken, distorted, to Erik’s blood. They no longer sung together. The gun was a dead weight in his hand, instead of the leaving, pulsing thing it has once been. Falling apart at the seams indeed.
They fell upon them like a swarm. Erik emptied his clip onto them but never seemed to hit a single one. Alex’ plasma beam sliced through the walls. Though the support beams. Half of the warehouse began to collapse. Erik scrambled to find cover, and then remembered the girl, and scrambled to find her instead.
“Raven!” he called out, dodging falling debris, stumbling away from an exploding window. Shards of glass like diamonds in the moonlight. Hot blood trickled down his cheek from a cut. He swiped at it distractedly as he stumbled into the office. A woman was sitting on a desk there, long legs crossed, examining her fingernails. She was blue from head to toe. Long fire-red hair cascaded down her slender shoulders, stark against her delicate white dress. Her eyes were lion-gold.
“You called?” she grinned.
“Raven?” he frowned.
“Who did you expect? The Grim?”
Erik felt his heart speed up.
“So this is how they disappear.”
Raven laughed, hopping off the desk. “No. This is what happens before.”
“Who are you?”
“I would say I’m your worst nightmare, but…” a theatrical grimace and a wink. “I think we both know that’s not true.”
Erik gritted his teeth. He might die, but he wasn’t about to make it this easy. He lifted his gun and blew out the sole light-bulb in the room. He heard Raven laugh briefly, and darted out the door. He needed to warn Alex. Get him out of here. Keep him safe. He was just a boy. Cold, ill-tempered, and callous, but just a boy.
Everything in the warehouse was quiet. Erik moved cautiously against the decimated wall, eyes darting around. He didn’t dare call for Alex. Once upon a time he might have managed to locate him by his chip with his gift, but now-now that was gone.
Suddenly Alex was standing over him, grabbing his arm.
Erik tugged him down to the floor.
“Raven is a hostile,” he muttered quietly.
“I know, dipshit,” Alex twisted his arm free. “You’re as dull as a spoon, aren’t you?”
The metallokinetic frowned at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“All those people I killed with my beam,” Alex got up and stepped away to the center of the warehouse. “Where are the bodies?”
Erik glanced around. Damnit. Not a single body on the ground. The plasma would have sliced right through them.
“Take cover, Alex,” he said tightly, crouching.
“Fuck you,” replied Alex, and Eric saw Raven walk up to his side, lion-gold eyes sharp, smile soft.
Erik’s eyes darted between them.
“It was you who made the others disappear,” said Erik slowly.
“I just talked to them,” Alex shrugged. “If they heard something they didn’t like, and then decided to leave… that’s not my problem.”
Erik stood, fists clenching. “Why? Who do you work for?”
“Not you, you lying, backstabbing piece of shit,” growled Alex, chest heating. Raven wrapped a hand around his wrist, pulling him back.
“Who do you think, Lehnsherr?” she asked, and her eyes shifted, leaching gold to blue. Erik watche din horror as her face changed into another one. High cheekbones, red lips, eyes as blue as her skin.
“Can’t you tell?” Charles asked, head tilting, lips curling in that familiar mocking smile of his. “Darling?”
Alex’s eyes fell somewhere to the right of Erik’s shoulder. Eager to take his eyes off the fake Charles, Erik turned around.
Worse.
Fur like curling flame and eyes like dying stars.
“You’re dead,” he whispered brokenly, heart beating furiously on a ribcage much too small, breath stuttering. His vision blurred.
Baskerville’s hackles rose to reveal a white row of gleaming fangs.
“No, sweeatheart,” Not-Charles said behind him, accent perfect, tone exact. Whoever Raven was, she knew Charles. “Creatures like me don’t die. We just come back, angrier.”
Erik turned around again. Raven dissolved back into her own form and stepped away, but Alex stood, hands in his pockets, relaxed. His features were Alex’, but the expression. The cold, cold eyes and the mocking cold smile.
“You look somewhat lessened, darling,” he said, and it was Charles in Alex’ mouth. “Years don’t seem to have been kind to you.”
“Leave the boy,” Erik said numbly.
“Alex and I are friends,” Charles said, smiling with Alex’ lips. “I met him before you did.”
Erik nodded. “A spy.”
“A weapon,” Charles admitted. “He begged me to use him. So I did. You see, Division framed his brother Scott. We managed to save him before you sank your claws into him.”
“What have you done to-to the others-“
“I told them the truth. All of it. Even the truths not even you know.”
Erik realized he was shaking violently. It wasn’t the cold. He was terrified. Baskerville circled wide around him, eyes bright red, growling loudly. Erik eyed him.
“You could have killed me then and you didn’t.”
Alex-Charles smiled bitterly. “That was then. This is now.”
Baskerville leapt. Erik was unconscious before he hit the ground, and he hit it hard.