X-Men: First Class Fanfiction: Schrödinger’s Coffin
Schrödinger’s Coffin.
Summary: Erik is buried alive. The question is, what state will he be in when they (if they) dig him out? Theoretically he is dead, dying and alive, all at the same time.
A/N: Original Prompt. Some readers may be unsettled by the descriptions of being buried alive. Read at your own discretion.
Warnings for possible character death. I won’t say whether there is for certain, but I’ll just highlight the possibility to keep you on your toes. ;)
҉
Everything tastes like ash and bitter earth. Gritting your teeth, you hear a crack, as if grains of sand were trapped between your teeth. A lingering metallic taste clings to the back of your mouth. It’s like rust and burnt copper; blood and something chemical. These are the first things you notice when you wake.
(What can you remember? You were walking and there was a sudden scraping sound behind you and something wet pressed into your face, too quickly for you to react, the smell burning and artificial, numbing-)
When you try to move, your arms and legs strike against something solid. Your eyes open in a split second, only to see darkness. A strange, abstract feeling of panic seizes at you washing away the earlier sense of lethargy and grogginess. Reaching around blindly, you find that the walls that constrict you are wooden, sealing you in a claustrophobia-inducing space.
You punch the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Not enough room to sit up, so you stay on your back. Hands spread wide you slam them into the unyielding wood with more than a little desperation. Where is the metal? Nothing reaches out to you, you can’t touch anything and that, perhaps, is as bad as the darkness and the confined space.
The air smells sour, like sweat and fear and panic. It gags you and you need to take several deep breaths control yourself. Still, bile rises and you need to swallow it. God, you don’t need to make your situation worse by throwing up.
Clearing your throat, you find your voice is hoarse and a nearly-there raspy whisper. You start to yell, even though it hurts to. You continue yelling, even when you can barely hear the sound yourself. Very quickly, the yelling turns into screaming, though how you could see the difference you’ll never be able to explain, but you just know.
Just like you know that no one can tell that you’re here. Where ever here happened to be.
Though your knuckles hurt like hell, you punch the ceiling again. Something trickles down on your face, faint and powdery like dust. Licking your lips, you taste dirt.
Oh, you realise. Oh.
You’re lying in a coffin, buried underground. It takes you a few moments to realise you’re screaming again. The air is thinning and you wonder how long you’ll have before the oxygen runs out. You force yourself to calm down - the screaming stops, but that might be due to how the fear is choking at you. It has been a long time since you’ve been this trapped, this defenceless.
Shaw’s face swims up to the forefront of your mind and you thrash around, trying to move. He used to strap you down with leather and see just how far he could push you. Irrationally, you wonder whether this is one of his tests, that you’re still stuck in the camp and a helpless child. It can’t be, not when you escaped from him years ago. Still, your heart drops to your gut and you squeeze your eyes shut, not allowing a single tear to escape.
Instinctively you reach for your coin, but it isn’t there. Panic rising even higher, you throw your mind out, searching for Charles, but meeting only silence. Alone. So completely alone and there’s no way to get yourself out. The clothes you wear aren’t your own, plain and cotton, no metal in the buttons or in the belt or in the shoes and even the coffin is devoid of metal and you almost think you can smell the artificial hint of glue or poison.
(How did they know of your power? How did they know how to take it away from you?)
Breathe. You need to remind yourself to breathe. Suck up the precious air; create the countdown to your death.
There are no atheists in the trenches, you remember hearing once. And it’s partially true, in a way. You aren’t praying to God-you haven’t believed in Him for a long time-but your prayers are in German and you think of your mother, her smile and her laugh and you think;
Maybe I’ll see you soon.
*
Charles’ face is contorted into a half snarl of anger, a fury in his eyes that Raven has never seen before. Cerebro is whirring away faster than it has ever done before, Hank staring in amazement at the readings.
(“Professor, you’re concentrating too hard. You’ll hurt them-
“Shut up, I won’t kill anyone,” Charles had snapped. “Unless I find out who did it to begin with.”
Hank had never said the professor would kill anyone. Now he wondered whether he should.)
Instead of speaking, she is silent, trying to project confidence and strength. Raven is watching her brother, watching how intense he is. They are staring at each other, but Charles’ gaze outstripped her, looking through her as if she were glass. His pupils were flickering as he tried to find Erik.
Unbidden, a thought comes of the letter. Three hours, it said in a menacing jagged script. From where he stands, the faintest of flinches passes over Charles’ face, before his expression becomes more or less impassive.
(“You’ll find him,” Raven finally says, voice low and soothing, even as her thoughts betray her, fear and worry spiking in her heart. “We’ll save him.”
“Will we, really?” Charles replies without pausing in concentrating. If anything, the sounds of Cerebro seem to speed up, the whirring rising in pitch. “I have no doubts in finding him. But will we be too late?”
With that tone, no one dares to say anything else.)
His hands on the bar in front of him were turning white with the strength of his grip. She reaches over to cover them with her own hands, blue stark against the pale skin. Charles is startlingly cold to the touch and another sharp bite of worry began gnawing away at her gut.
From where Hank is working with the Cerebro mainframe, he throws a concerned glance her way. Raven never sees it, instead staring at Charles. He was concentrating, intense and determined and-
-utterly, devastatingly terrifying.
*
Your nails are bloodied from your efforts. Scratches make deep grooves in the wood above you, but it doesn’t help. The air keeps growing stale and your breaths grow shorter and weaker with every gasp.
Is this how I will die? you think, nearly offended by how simple and mundane it is. You are not fighting. Should you die here, it will be with a whimper, not a bang. Despite Charles wishing you weren’t, you were a fighter. You have to fight this somehow.
Yet you can’t.
All you can do is lie there. You can’t even speed the process up. For what does it matter if you die now or in fifteen minutes? (It does matter, you know it does. It’s just hard to remember how right now. The darkness is timeless and it stretches ahead of you, never ending.)
Part of you wants to sleep, dream of better times. Perhaps sleeping would help take away the smell of coppery blood and the taste of dirt on your tongue. Maybe it would make you forget, if only for a moment, how hard the wood is against your back, how uncomfortable you were with little grains of sand digging into your skin and making even gritting your teeth painful. If you were lucky, sleeping could bring you memories of Charles and chess and fine whiskey and the warmth of a fireplace-
Still, you don’t sleep. A part of you is scared that if you slept, you wouldn’t be able to wake up again.
Never before have you realised how loud and harsh your breathing is. Never before has the silence and the darkness unsettled you so much.
I can’t feel my legs passes through your mind as an absent thought, your body too overwhelmed on adrenalin to add anymore to the mix. I can’t feel my legs-but it doesn’t matter. The space is so small you could hardly move them to begin with. Everything is numb.
A choked noise escapes you and so does a single tear.
*
“Found him,” Charles says brokenly, relief so intense that it breaks his voice.
A moment later, he says faintly, “I can’t touch his mind. It’s like only a shadow on him is there. It could be the distance, it would be because-”
He cuts himself off there because he would rather not think about that.
Is Erik alive?
Charles’ hears a dozen internal voices throw him the unvoiced question. He cannot answer it, and there is a sudden crushing weight on his chest. Raven is already gently pulling him from Cerebro, Hank pulling co-ordinates from the machine and they are moving quickly down to the car.
Time is running out. Nothing they do is fast enough.
*
The vague floating feeling, you suspect, is due to the lack of oxygen or the remnants of toxins running through your veins. Either way, you’re light-headed and your grip on reality is slipping drastically.
You keep blinking and thinking you’re about to wake up. Colours burst in the darkness when you close your eyes, like exploding fireworks in the night sky; vivid spots dancing before you. Noises other than the sound of your breathing sometimes register; strange electronic noises and once the hiss of a snake. Your hands are throbbing in pain and you keep scratching at your arms.
(Wake up, wake up, wake up-)
Except this isn’t a dream, it’s a nightmare.
*
Alex is driving, being the one with the least inhibition when it comes to driving past legal speed limits. He watches as the red arrow pushes higher and higher and he wonders how far until-
‘If we maintain speed, we’ll arrive in an hour, maybe more.’
-Charles’ internal voice is shaken, unsure and he is trickling panic and worry out worse than a leaky tap. Everyone in the car is restless and it sets Alex’s teeth on edge.
He will never admit it, and he tries to shield his thoughts as best as he can, but he thinks Erik might be dead already. (If he hasn’t escaped by now, what does it say about his situation?)
Turning at a corner, Alex sees the professor send him a small, sad smile, and he knows that Charles knows what he thinks. Perhaps Charles thinks something similar, except hope is keeping his thoughts positive.
Alex wonders when he lost that luxury - the comfort of hope and faith. They were gone, vague spectres in his memory, dead as his mother, father and brother.
The drive is bitterly silent and no one makes a move to break it. All they hear is the wheels crossing dirt roads and the hum of an engine. Again the needle inches higher, faster, and still it doesn’t feel enough. Nothing does.
*
Your joints are all aching and cramping from the confinement. Every suck of air burns a little more than the one before it.
Part of you is almost convinced you can see the edges of the coffin. That’s probably a trick of your mind, since it is so pitch black you can’t see in front of yourself.
What if-
Though you try to stop the thought before it can form, the idea breaks through to the forefront of your mind. Your blood freezes in your veins and you start to shiver, skin burning hot but your heart cold as ice.
What if I’m dead already and this is purgatory?
*
Sean is very quiet.
Funny, isn’t it? His ability works around being able to scream, but that’s not who he is. Even Hank has commented how quiet his speaking voice is normally.
How worthless he is right now. Hank helped with Cerebro, calibrating it so that Charles was able to expand his range even more. Raven’s there as emotional support, probably the only keeping the professor from breaking at the seams. Alex’s up front, driving the car with a ferocity that was both terrifying and necessary.
What can he do? Talk? To say what? Empty condolences to Charles who could read his heart and soul and mind without batting an eyelid; they’d all be pointless lies.
So Sean is very quiet and no one notices.
*
To your ears, though you’re no medical expert, your heartbeat sounds sluggish, tired.
Your eyelids feel far too heavy and your breaths too short and sleep is just so tempting.
Maybe, you can just close your eyes for a minute. Just a minute.
Just until you stop feeling so tired.
Closing your eyes doesn’t change anything; everything’s dark.
(Wake up, don’t sleep, no!-)
*
Charles gets out of the car before it fully stops. They have ten minutes before their time limit runs out.
Looking around, all anyone can see is a cornfield, spanning miles and miles around them. Charles sees what they see, a dozen different angles of the same image being thrown back to him.
Fingers touching his temples, he searches-
“There.”
*
Thankfully, you’re not the type to harbour many regrets. You have some though.
You never did end up killing Shaw.
You never avenged your mother.
You never got to say goodbye.
You never did a lot of things.
Charles, we-
*
“There’s nothing here!” Hank says. He’s taller and stronger than most, and his speed has pushed him to where Charles said Erik would be.
He is spinning on the spot, looking keenly through his glasses for something, anything-
There’s a reason Hank graduated at fifteen. He is brilliant, clever in a way that unsettles some. He’s also unconventional, never thinking anything is impossible. He realises it before anyone else, hearing the others shout about the absence of houses or prisons.
Stepping back slowly, Hank looks down. The earth is freshly turned over. His gut drops to his feet.
That explains the time limit.
A sensation in his mind tells him Charles hears the thought.
They both yell simultaneously, “We need shovels!”
*
Is that noise you hear? You can’t hear it over the ringing sound in your ears, the sluggish beats of your heart and the muted rasps of your lungs.
You don’t even move anymore, your eyes are closed and you might very well be sleeping right now, for all the difference it makes.
(You might as well be dead.)
*
The dirt is soft, but they only have their hands to dig with. All of them are scooping out piles of earth, and Charles is babbling, telling Erik to stay awake-
*
No air. No light. No hope left.
*
Hands strike wood and everyone sucks in a tight breath.
*
Knock, scratch, knock.
Why can’t they shut up? You want to sleep. You’re tired.
(No, Erik, wake up, wake up, please just wake up-)
*
Hank and Alex break the coffin open.
“Erik!”
*
There’s a light.
(Charles?)
*
Now, dearest Reader.
Let me ask you the question.
Is Erik alive-
-or is he dead?
҉
A/N: Yeah, that’s right, I’m ending ambiguously. MWAHAHAHA. Though, honestly, the title says it all if you know the conundrum of Schrödinger’s Cat. :P