Delurking with post-X3 angst (huzzah!)
(Mods - if this is too gen for a slash community, feel free to delete.^^)
Title: Too Ignorant, or Too Slow
Author: desecrets
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1072
Characters: Erik, Raven (implied Erik/Charles)
Summary: After the events of X3, two survivors meet in a park.
Disclaimer: If I owned these guys, canon would have been radically different. No infringement intended, amateur fiction, etc.
--
She slides onto the bench opposite from him one day, in the sunlight of July, with a fluid grace that doesn’t match her appearance.
“I didn’t think it was possible to lose against yourself.” Her voice is positively cocky. He feels his lips give a tiny twitch.
“My dear. Losing against oneself is among the few things in life which are easy. Mankind does little else.”
“We do, you mean,” she corrects bluntly, and seems to study him before she asks, “Why are you here?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?” The question is light, but loaded, and in the past would have brooked no argument. Now she just rolls her eyes.
“Stop answering me with philosophy. You’re not my leader.”
“Very well.” He meets her eyes. “I’m here because it is a place, and I find that one place is much like another these days.” His gaze is direct, defying her to comment. Her own disconcertingly blue eyes take on a hint of warmth in return.
“You sound like a bored old pensioner.”
When he just looks at her, eyebrows raised, she nods.
“I guess we sort of are on a forced retirement.” Then after a pause, she adds, “I was at the funeral.”
He looks up sharply.
“Nobody recognized me. I just waltzed right in the front gate.” She doesn’t sound smug, Erik notes with a pang of regret.
“Beast was there though.” Her tone is quiet. “He might have noticed me. But I don’t think he told anyone. After all… why would he.” She glances down at the frozen chess game on the board, and after a long moment of silence she lifts a hand, fingers outstretched toward a castle.
“You know, if you just…”
“Don’t.”
Feeling a surge of annoyance, for a moment she almost reaches for another shift, wanting to jolt him, but she stops herself before she can even remember that she’s no longer capable. It would be too cruel. And she doesn’t think she could handle remembering the minutiae of this face right now.
“They’re saying you’re missing, did you know that?” She asks instead. “Everyone’s paranoid. The media’s having the time of their lives trying to guess where you’ve gone. Last I heard I think it was Afghanistan.”
Erik gives a tiny snort of amusement.
“I wonder what they’d say,” she continues, “if they knew you were right here, in a regular park, in the heart of New York.”
He looks up, realizing a split second too late that he’s just in time for the coup de grace, which is delivered with unyielding flatness:
“Playing chess with yourself.”
If he half expected her to laugh, he’s disappointed. She doesn’t seem remotely amused, and he can’t think of a single cutting riposte. He feels blunted, like a bad knife. They stare at each other for a long time before she finally gives another impatient eyeroll and levels a penetrating gaze at him, something she surely must have picked up from -
“Are you all right?”
The question catches him off guard, and for a moment… but no.
“I’m fine,” he grits out, feeling his expression harden even as he tries to keep it neutral. He always had a bad poker face. Judging by her expression, she thinks so too. It irritates him.
“I am fine,” he enunciates, “because I have no intention of remaining like this.”
Now she’s frowning.
“When they used that ridiculous cure of theirs against me, they never thought to make sure the syringes stayed in,” he explains. “It may not have had time to work. In fact I believe it did not. I can recover.”
The doubtful look on her face grates along his nerves, and he finds himself snapping, “If not me, then who?”
“But Erik…” she begins, softening.
“I don’t want your pity.” It comes out as a growl.
“Good,” she retorts sharply, patience wearing thin, “because this isn’t it. They got me too, in case you’ve forgotten. This is me telling you that what you’re saying is ridiculous. Even if you did get your powers back by some miracle of science, what would you do? Hank’s been appointed US ambassador, for God’s sake! The Registration Act is out the window; they’re making amendments to the Constitution! What are you gonna do, stop them? Now that it’s finally going our way?”
She stops for a moment to get her voice under control, and he lets her use of the wrong pronoun slide.
“If you care even a little about the species,” she says finally, “you’ll stay out of this.”
His objection is instinctive. “This is not what we were intended for. Subject to their legislation, to their whim - if Charles thinks -“
“Charles is dead, Erik!” She nearly shouts, eyes bright now, just as he inwardly curses his slip in several languages. “He’s dead. It’s over. Don’t you see that?”
He watches, helplessly, as glittering tears slip down her face, silently, inexorably, and her breathing catches, and she places her elbows on the table and hides her frail human face in her hands, clearly trying to stem the flow and not succeeding. Slowly, he reaches across the table and puts a hand on her shoulder, thumb rubbing tiny circles against her collar bone.
“There now, my dear,” he murmurs - still, to his own surprise, seeing in this weeping human the beautiful fighting mutant he’s come to know, and reminded forcibly of the time she came back from the hospital and broke down in his arms, with her message of spinal trauma and no chance of recovery.
Even now, after forty years, the source of their grief is the same, just as it always has been.
And suddenly he knows, even as he lightly strokes her dark hair, mumbles “All is not lost” to her tearstained face, that he’s lying.
It’s taken old age and frailty and loss and death and the sight of Raven’s abject despair to finally get the point across - but he sees it now, and four decades of his life stretch before him like a gaping void of wasted chances. Time spent chasing the wrong dream - warding off the wrong nightmare. Wandering further from home.
When Raven is gone, and the place directly opposite him is left achingly open once more, he reaches out, and the steel castle wobbles on the wooden board, and its gleaming crown sends sparks of brilliant sunlight into his eyes, and he feels nothing.
We are, alas, too ignorant, or too slow.
- Geoffrey Chaucer
The Man of Law’s Tale