X-Men First Class fic: Dismantle the Sun (2/4)
Title: Dismantle the Sun
Pairing: Erik/Charles (M/M)
Rating: R
Warnings: Hospitals. Self-harm.
Author's Notes: Fix-it. Sequel to Inevitable Things. This fanfic is a belated New Year's present for delirium1995, who pointed out that Charles' recovery in X-Men: First Class was far too quick and painless, both physically and emotionally, and as James McAvoy said about Xavier, "he's just had a huge part of his physical life taken away from him, by someone he cares about more than anyone else." So he's going to a dark place in this one.
The story is currently being beta-read. Please feel free to comment with critiques or point out spelling/grammar issues. Please especially point out passages that are clunky, where it is too difficult to follow the action, or where characters do things that strike you as out of character.
NB: about the possessive apostrophe and proper nouns that end in s: according to Eats Shoots and Leaves, it is now correct to write Charles's; but I grew up with Charles', and it still just looks completely wrong to me to write it the other way. The Bedford Handbook (5th ed.) claims this is an acceptable exception; The 2011 edition of The Elements of Style is quite clear that it is not.
Previous installments: Chapter 1.
Dismantle the Sun: Part Two
Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts
They met every night that week. At first, they talked a little and fucked a lot, but by the end of the week they'd gotten used to their arrangement, and spent more of their time together walking and talking through what appeared to be the American Heartland, complete with amber waves of grain and a distinct lack of majestic purple mountains.
“And what have you got Raven doing?”
“Reconnaissance.” Erik didn't elaborate, and Charles tried to keep his concern at bay. Let the worry eat at him in private, no one else needed to know. “She's on a fact-finding mission,” Erik added with a ghost of a smile playing on his lips.
Which is to say she's on reconnaissance. You haven't given me any more information, Charles wanted to point out, but doing so would be tantamount to confessing how curious he was. And he did not want to give Erik the satisfaction.
But the longer he could keep him here in John Turner's world, the longer Erik kept the helmet off in the waking one, and the longer Charles could relish the sense of being whole and right in his mind. “Is Emma with her? She could help her keep her disguise when talking with people...” his voice trailed away, confused by Erik's strange look.
“Did you ever--?”
Charles shook his head. “No. I thought about it. I wouldn't experiment like that, though, not with her.”
“You underestimate her, you know.”
“Raven? Or Emma?”
Anyone else would have rolled their eyes; Raven would have rolled her eyes and harrumphed for good measure. Erik just gave him that level look, the one that usually accompanied the droll “This is beneath you,” he'd think so pointedly in Charles' direction.
He missed that look. No one in the mansion would dare challenge him or call him out. Only Rebecca came close, but only in very specific circumstances, and even then, she let him get away with too much.
“Emma is a follower,” Erik said. “You know that. Why else would you have left her at the CIA, if you didn't suspect she lacked the initiative to escape on her own?”
Charles could feel his stomach knotting, his lips curling in distaste. “So you thought you’d help her out?”
That won him the look again. "It was Mystique's idea, once we'd discovered what you’d done. We could use a telepath." Erik's voice had an edge of impatience to it, trying to find words for something he thought should be obvious, and wondering why Charles was being so obtuse, refusing to see it. Or at least, that's what he'd been thinking the last time his voice sounded that way. Now Erik tilted his head to one side, watching Charles. "As you just pointed out. Did you leave her for us on purpose?"
Charles looked away. He wanted to say no, of course he hadn't. But what if he had?
“And while we're on the subject, why did you do that to Moira? I was surprised she didn't remember me.”
Charles looked up, aghast. “Erik, you--” he stopped himself, because of course Erik didn't hurt anyone unless there was a reason for it, and Charles had been careful to make sure there was no reason. He took a deep breath and started again. “You didn't do anything to remind her, did you? I don't want to have to do that to her again.”
“Would you, if I had?”
“I would have to, Erik. To protect--” her, he meant to say, but the word died on his tongue. Erik's eyes flashed green in the bizarre light of the dream world. “Us.” Charles finished, his hand out and palm up, an obvious gesture.
Erik shrugged. “Well, I didn't. She just thinks I was selling magazines door-to-door. Another of Raven's suggestions.”
“Clever,” Charles said, his arm falling back to his side, deflated, but taking some comfort in the fact that Erik had reverted to her real name, at least.
Erik's lip quirked up. “She can be."
"So how did you hide the helmet you were wearing?"
Erik stilled. Charles sighed; he'd already said it before, it wouldn't hurt to say it again. "When you wear that thing, it blocks you out completely. It feels like a numb spot in the back of my head, it's…" He quelled the impulse to look away, keeping his gaze firmly on Erik to impress upon him the truth and import of what he was saying. "I don't like parts of me being gone that way. Even when you're too far away for me to know what you're thinking, even when you're out of reach, I can feel when you're not behind that shield." Now he looked away, at the rich brown earth beneath his feet; now he was confessing something too close for comfort. "You've been wearing it all the time, except when you want to meet with me in our sleep."
"Emma." Erik said after a while, as if it explained everything. And then, unexpectedly, "I'm sorry."
Charles looked up sharply, dread filling him at the word.
"I'll have to wear it for a while longer, and I won't see you, not for a while." They were apart now, six feet, twelve feet, standing on opposite sides of a bridge spanning a chasm between a field of young corn and a field of wheat. "Don't do anything rash," Erik warned.
"Don't make me," Charles warned back.
He woke up before the alarm, rolled himself to his right side, and fell back into a fitful, unhappy slumber.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks spun colorlessly into months. The sun rose earlier and set later; the nights became shorter, and altogether darker. John Turner was nowhere to be found, and the spot in the back of his mind that was Erik stayed resolutely numb.
* * * * * * *
April, 1963
Spring in Westchester was a miserable affair, April showers turning the whole world to mud. Charles seriously entertained the thought of an outdoor-only wheelchair and an indoor-only one; he could hardly berate the boys for leaving muddy footprints trailing past the foyer when he himself left two tell-tale tracks, narrow strips of wet dirt leading down the hall and turning with a wide smudge towards the library. The easy solution was to stay indoors, but that was also the boring solution that leaned too dangerously close to recluse, and as miserable as rolling himself through the muck might be (and really, it wasn't that bad on the fine gravel paths), Charles couldn't imagine life without his daily “restorative perambulation,” however little of an ambulation it actually was.
So it was that he was wheeling himself through the damp spring morning, having survived yet another physical therapy session, casting about for Hank. The scientist-engineer had taken to running early in the morning, while it was still dark, after however many hours he spent in his lab -- now there was a recluse, and Charles hoped he could prevail on Hank to return to a healthier schedule once he no longer had Charles's personal circus of physical therapists, occupational therapists, and private nurses to avoid -- but this morning he had been late to get started on his run, and Charles had been surprised to find his thoughts spiking sharply in his direction with “no, oh no, I'm trapped outside!” as Rebecca's car tires dug tiny ruts into the drive. What was it with nurses and driving like madmen?, Charles had wondered back, thinking it along with Hank in an effort to lead his mind away from the miserable thoughts comparing his plight unfavorably with the old fairytale of the beauty and the beast.
How dearly Charles would have liked to reassure Hank that he was not the beast in this particular instance. Rebecca was a bit of a beauty in the classically pretty way, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes and fingernails perpetually lacquered pink, but she could be an utter sadist with a flick of the wrist. She was very good at what she did, alternately cajoling and shaming him into allowing himself to be subjected to all manner of painful or awkward exercises that were getting better results under her guidance than his doctors had expected. But Charles knew all too well the enjoyment his winces and sharp intakes of breath elicited, which she carefully kept tucked away under her professional shell, often even from herself. As long as she kept it reigned in, she was using her own particular proclivity in a way that appeared to benefit society, and since Charles was immediately benefiting from it, he chose to keep her secret.
He'd been an accessory to far worse, after all; who was he to judge? And if he were to judge, he had known crueler sadists, who did not consider themselves beholden to the rule of law or the mores of their fellow men. So he let her be, and he simply observed her cool assessment of how much she could push him, how much pain he could take without limiting how much he could take tomorrow, and he was dispassionately impressed at how unerring her judgment was. Still, he relished the sound of her car driving away, the view through her eyes of the main gate approaching, then vanishing in the rear view mirror.
Every day, his thoughts followed her until she was gone, in case she caught any additional glances of Sean or Alex or -- as was possible today -- Hank, so he could gently blur them into unremarkable, unmemorable, normal and nameless young men. And once she was gone, he had cast his mind around the mansion for Hank, and finding only Alex and Sean in the basement bunker playing with alternating their talents for maximum destructiveness, cast about the grounds further for Hank. Finally, there by the fishing shed near the pond -- and Hank was yelling “Fetch! I said fetch! No, not -- aw, are you a dog or a beaver? Okay fine, I'll get you a bigger stick, you little stinker!”
“Hank? It's safe to come back.”
“Professor! Um.” Charles was already smiling. It was so obvious what Hank wanted to ask, it was almost unfair to make him go through with it. “I found a sweet dog stuck out here in the cold she-was-probably-abandoned-on-the-road-and” Hank was speaking aloud, as was his habit even when he knew Charles was actually hearing his thoughts, so that the sound of his words came like an odd echo. He took a gulp of air and finished in a rush, “IThinkWeShouldKeepHer!”
“She may be lost, not abandoned, Hank,” Charles reminded him. “but at least bring her inside where it's warm, and perhaps we can figure out who she belongs to.”
The sandy, short-haired, floppy-eared bundle of energy was an immediate hit at the mansion. She won their hearts the moment she burst into the entryway, playfully nipped at Alex's heels, tumbled over Sean's feet, and ran roughshod over Hank, evidently nonplussed by his profusion of blue fur. The only worrisome point was the amount of anxiety the chair induced; at first Charles thought she was growling at him when she saw it, but Hank recognized the behavior immediately, and started talking her through it. It was adorable -- if loud -- the way she planted her front paws wide and barked at the wheels (bigger than she) as if she could somehow make the chair itself cower. Then, having chastised the metal to her satisfaction, she ran up to Charles and slopped her giant warm, wet tongue over his outstretched hand.
“I had meant to pet you, silly dog,” he said crossly, holding his still-wet hand loosely, fingers wide enough to avoid letting the saliva stick them together. If the dog could roll her eyes, she did; but then she went to him docilely and let him dry his hand off in her fur before she darted off to charge into Hank's knees again.
Hank named her Duchess.
The next morning with Rebecca was a disaster, for Duchess took an immediate dislike to the way Rebecca flicked her sharp pink nails against Charles’s bare skin, the way she tugged his legs out, efficiently and without apparent concern for his feelings.
“It's alright Duchess, it doesn't hurt. Really, it doesn't feel like anything,” Charles tried to assure her, but she only whined louder. In the end, he had to call Alex in to take Duchess out, and blur Rebecca's memories just a little; he bit back a retort to the nurse's unspoken remonstrance -- that dog needs a firm hand, he's ruining it, that dog will end up the master of everyone in the household -- and focused back on the task at hand, trying to talk to nerves that hadn't listened to him since October 28th, 1962.
Duchess stayed at Alex's heel when he saw Rebecca out, but she bared her teeth when only Rebecca was looking -- a special message just for her, these teeth, your skin -- that Charles saw only by virtue of piggybacking in Rebecca's mind on her way out. He was exhausted from the morning's session and not on top of his game; the best he could manage was to blank out the memory of the walk from the gym to the door, not bothering to smooth anything out or put a repeat of yesterday's exit in its place. The mind, Charles had discovered, was a resilient and practical thing; it often performed the same sleight-of-hand in selecting representative memories instead of recording each sundry detail of day-to-day life, making use of the fact that any morning's walk down the hall was much the same as any other.
If only spinal cords could heal themselves as quickly.
* * * * * * * *
“His back could be broken, or... or it could just be that the nerves are pinched... or his spine...,” Hank's voice was too close to panicking, and Charles was too much in shock to do anything about it. They talked over him, which was just as well; after he realized he couldn't feel his legs, once he'd said the fateful words out loud, it was the only thing he could observe. “I can't feel my legs,” he whispered to himself, and kept a tight lid on his thoughts and emotions. It would not do to share the horror and shock of it, the simple fear that he would never walk again, never race Hank around the mansion, the shaking left behind after the adrenalin had leaked from his system, its job done before it could begin -- his mind had come to a sudden halt on the memory of it, when his legs gave out under him and the ground flew up to catch him, hard.
And Erik, Erik in that stupid, bloody helmet, his thoughts unknowable, tight-lipped, angry, and so protective.
“I called for extraction before... Before this...” Moira's voice caught, and gave. She gulped back a sob and tried again, “there's a first aid kit in my duffel, in the plane, I saw it by the cockpit, Sean, please, please just go get it.”
Charles didn't want Erik's protection, had probably never wanted it.
“Tell me you packed a critical-care kit.” Hank was remembering his training, if not his manners.
“Standard-issue for hot-ops, Hank,” she answered, trying for soothing but unable to keep her annoyance from sharpening the edges. “Sean!” she all but screamed. “Where's that kit?!” All their nerves were frayed.
Except, perhaps, for Charles -- he reflected that his might actually be cut clean through. The realization was enough to pull his thoughts forcefully away from where they'd been dwelling; he could go back there, later, but for now, time was of the essence. He said as much, and Moira and Hank both stilled to listen to him.
“Moira, what caliber is your gun?”
“40.” God, I just dropped it back there. I threw it down, that's--, for a moment, chagrin drowned out her ability to think in words altogether -- unconscionable, irresponsible, I'll never shoot again.
Charles blocked her out, the mental equivalent of turning his back on her -- oh, how dearly he'd love to be able to turn his back on anyone right now -- and focused on Hank.
“The bulletproofing on our suits, Hank?” Charles wrapped his question in a soft blanket of technical inquiry only and not judging, because there was a litany of should haves running through his mind, and it was interfering with his ability to think the problem through. Charles needed him thinking. “Quickly now, was it tested against a gun like hers?” A simple question as a kickstart.
“It should have been sufficient for any conventional handgun. I tested it against Walther PPK 9mil, Colt 45, and my dad's old .38 special.” his claws clicked out a nervous rhythm against the hard sleeve encasing Charles' arm. “But with Mr. Lehn--... It's possible he increased the bullets’ velocities when he deflected them. I don't know. If he got it up to the typical muzzle velocity from a rifle, if it was supersonic, then it should have -- it could have --”
“I don't think it was, Hank. He pulled the bullet free from my back, I'm sure I would have felt something if it had penetrated far.” Charles couldn't bring himself to say Erik's name out loud. If he did, surely they would know. “If you can,” he started, then paused for a breath, trying not to wince as Moira shifted underneath him; now was not the time to show pain. “feel the back of my uniform. Is it torn? Am I obviously bleeding? Moira, you must have had first aid training. It's required of all agents annually, yes?”
Moira laughed, sharp and high. “Well yes, but just enough to keep you alive until the ambulance shows up.”
“Then you had better go make sure the ambulance gets here.” She was stuck in place, terrified of moving lest it hurt Charles more, and didn’t even look up when Sean returned.
“I got your bag, Moira,” Sean said -- only Charles heard “I got your back, Moira” -- and the interruption was a welcome relief. Alex took the duffel and unzipped it, immediately busy at work laying out its contents while Moira sat frozen. Charles directed Sean to probe his back. “Carefully!” Hank growled, and Sean snaked his hands past Moira's knees, just a light pressure, widely distributed against his upper back to his lower, where it disappeared. He drew his hands back, and Charles willed himself calm as he watched, cool and dispassionate, and Sean raised his hands, the fingers spread wide and oh-thank-god clean.
“There's just a dent in the back of the suit, is all.”
The white noise in his head was the sound of several held breaths finally released.
“Spot of good news, then. But I could be bleeding underneath the suit, and I don’t like the idea of a dent still pressing against my spine.”
Hank spoke up, the gears finally catching and spinning the whole. “We should cut the suit off, but the material's pretty resistant to scissors and such. Which we don't have.”
“You've got claws, Beast," Alex pointed out, "can't you just tear the suit off?”
Ha! Charles squeaked a laugh, high and nervous like Moira's, and it echoed amongst them as he said “God no, I hope that's not necessary! Let's try the zipper first, shall we, hmmn?” He tried to move his left arm, but he could not convince his muscles that his arm was no longer needed to prop himself up against Moira's lap. “Moira, dear, the boys can help here. You’ve got to convince that ambulance to come, yes? And perhaps lying flat would be a good idea.”
He, Charles, was just full of good ideas lately, wasn't he? Why hadn’t he stayed down when Moira started shooting? Why had-- Later! he told himself firmly. Focus on the task at hand.
The task at hand was a muscle spasm forming in his lower back and radiating upward, but stopping invisibly around his tailbone, the pain like a light illuminating his nervous system, showing him what was responding and what was no longer on the map. It could be temporary. If his spinal cord wasn’t cut, it could be temporary.
Moira shifted out from underneath him, her hands under his shoulders to guide him down the few inches to the ground, and carefully resting his head on the sand. He bit the inside of his lip, hard, so he wouldn't cry out as the spasm finished twisting its way through him.
“Sean, there's a field manual in the kit, and it’s got a section on gunshot care and one on acute blunt trauma.” Moira said, finally getting to her feet. Go, go! he willed her.
“Yeah, guys, I got it already.” Alex, of course; he would know his way around a field manual. “Good news is this kit is complete, so we got the steroid shot and everything.”
His arm freed from the need to fight gravity, Charles could finally grasp the zipper and yank it down. But he moved too quickly, and his back tightened and then spasmed again, and this time he did cry out, caught by surprise. When it was over, he wiped the memory from Hank, Sean, Alex and Moira -- it would not do to have them too cautious of him. The pain just meant he could still feel, and if he was lucky, he wouldn't hurt himself more.
Reasoning or rationalizing, professor? Erik's voice taunted him. He reached his arms to his torso, careful this time to isolate the movement, to keep his back relaxed on the ground. The inside of his lip was bleeding where he'd bit down too hard, and the taste of his own blood turned his stomach. The copper tang, Erik, and fast on its heels, left me and took Raven and I pushed them away and...
Focus, Professor Charles thought to himself in Erik's voice, and refused to consider what that signified. He tried something new, in desperation; considered his new numb spots, and copied the feeling.
“There,” he breathed out in relief, looking at the worried faces around him. “I had forgotten that trick of turning off pain receptors. Probably just the stress of the situation,” he said, tightening his lips and making the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkle. See? A real smile, things aren't so bad. He unclasped the buckles and pulled the zipper down to his waist.
“Now, I need your help to get my arm out of this,” Charles directed, his voice calm, the same he'd tried so hard to maintain while training them. It was easier, now. “I'm pretty sure the problem is my right side, so roll me like a log to my left.”
“But professor, it's important to know when it hurts, so nothing gets injured more--”
“Not now, Hank," Charles shushed him, then added, "We need to know the extent of the injury, first" in a softer tone. Hank, still thinking, still right, but still a step behind. Alex and Sean -- Sean's cool fingers surprisingly deft -- slipped his arm free and bared his shoulder, pushed him smoothly to his side and rolled the stiff material down.
“No blood, just one hell of a bruise,” Alex reported, and muttered Jesus under his breath. “Okay, one shot coming up,” he added, and Charles watched Hank watching Alex, a fanged scowl forming on his face.
“How much are you giving him?”
“Manual says a dose is 15 migs.”
“Give him two doses.”
“Beast, the manual says 15.”
“The manual's a year old,” Hank retorted.
“Alex!” Charles interrupted, before the sniping could develop into a full-fledged argument. “Hank's right, the full dose should be 30.” Hank's memory was nearly eidetic, and the medical journal he'd skimmed floated neatly to the surface of his thoughts for Charles to... read, in a sense. More to think about later, Charles Erik's voice whispered. He felt the pressure of the needle going in, but nothing sharp.
Hank stiffened abruptly, and Charles reached in -- no time for niceities -- and heard through his ears the sound of an approaching chopper carried over the waves.
“Hank,” he said, “all of you, listen to me very carefully. We don't know what the situation is anymore, but we can be sure it won't be very friendly. So we're going to play this safe. As long as I stay conscious, I'll be able to make everyone on that chopper see you without recognizing you. You'll look like normal, human G-men -- yes Hank, even you -- and I'll be the only one they recognize. As soon as we land on American soil, I or Moira will get you a vehicle, and you should go straight to the mansion.”
“Shouldn't one of us stay with you?” Hank asked. Alex and Sean shared a long glance, and Charles felt a smile curling up at the corner of his lips unbidden. He could help them out, share their thoughts with each other, but preferred to let them keep their boundaries intact, as inconvenient as it may be. They were teaching themselves how to act like a team. Alex turned to look at Hank, nodded once, and swallowed, resolute.
“Me and Beast'll head up, clear the mansion out if we have to. Sean can be your nephew, or Moira can come up with something, but he should stay with you, and let us know if anything changes.” Barely a stutter over that last word, and Charles was grateful for that.
“Yes, I think that will work, Alex.” The sound of the helicopter’s rotors was plain to all of them now. Moira was directing the landing, marking it out with flares high up on the beach, Good girl. Charles breathed through his mouth, trying to will away the shakes that were somehow cutting through the numbness. He reached out to the pilot and co-pilot, and rewrote their view of the four of them huddled together on the sand. “Just a little longer, and we'll be home.”
He was lying, of course.
Hank and Alex had three long, worry-filled weeks alone in Westchester, eating their way through the pantry and trying not to drive each other insane, while Sean and Moira paced and fretted in the hospital they took Charles to. He'd managed to stay conscious until he felt Alex and Hank pull away in the vehicle Agent Levine had so kindly procured for them -- with only a tiny nudge on Charles' part, and a warm smile from Moira that had been just as persuasive -- and then the darkness came and got him.
He awoke to pain, he slept to pain.
He came to, once, lying on his stomach on a cold metal table in the operating room; fascinated, he watched through one of the nurses' eyes as the surgeon laid his spine bare, revealing tiny fractures in the bones.
"What the hell is going on?" the surgeon asked. He glared at the attending doctor, only five years younger than he, and ordered him to double check the X-rays.
"Right transverse process of L5 is impinging on the spinal column at--" the attending cut himself off when he looked back at the area of the incision. He looked at the X-ray, then swiped the clipboard out of the OR nurse's hands and flipped through the pages furiously. "These charts are messed up. This is--" he grabbed the nurse by the arm. "Look," he snarled at her, "this is somebody else's chart attached to the patient's! You're supposed to make sure things like this don't happen!"
"Shit," the surgeon swore. "Goddamnit, let's just get him sewn up, there's nothing here worth operating on." He looked up at Charles' nurse. "Julie, hand me the number 20 needle. And get some more light over here."
Julie's hand drifted automatically to a steel tray full of implements; but when Charles balked at the idea of a needle and thread so close to his fragile spine, her hand fell roughly and the entire thing went clattering to the floor. He jumped in surprise; only it was his own body on the table that jerked and the entire room erupted in curses and shouts. Someone panicked and hit him with another dose of anesthesia, and the world grew very, very cold and the darkness claimed him again.
He found out later that he'd flatlined.
They were careful with the second surgery, necessary to make up for the damage sustained as a result of the first. So was he; as soon as he felt himself going under, he shoved away from his body, a trick he'd learned to deal with his stepfather's mindless cruelty. Only this time, he wouldn't be able to get back into his own skin until the numbness had faded. It was dangerous, projecting himself like this, but the alternative was no better. So he let his attention drift down the hall, to Moira sitting in the waiting room with the October issue of U.S. News and World Report open on her lap, flipping the pages without reading, her eyes dry but unable to focus on the words. He skimmed her thoughts -- Sean safe back in the hotel room, she'd arranged it so she was standing watch whenever something particularly bad might happen, and the butt of her pistol jutting into her hip was a sharp reminder that she was ready this time -- but he was careful not to alert her to his presence. Like a ghost, he thought to himself, Or, practicing for ghosthood.
He was already familiar with death.
------------------
“One,” Erik's flat voice said.
The coin drifted closer, inexorably, a promise of the end, inevitable. Shaw's attention was riveted on the coin he now recognized, pride and fear and a fierce hunger for something radiating from his twisted mind, but Charles could only see Erik's face, could only watch as the light in his eyes faded. “If you actually loved him,” the terrible, brilliant part of Shaw whispered, and Charles could feel the derisive laughter accompanying that little word even as the voice continued in its cool, seductive way, “you would let me go, and I would spare him. Spare you both.”
“Two.”
“You make such a lovely team, Charles. It would be such a shame to waste that. And you've been making such progress on the foundation I built. Such control he has now -- thanks to you." Charles felt the sense of pride swell, and he knew that Shaw was right; and worse, that the fear and desperation and, yes, the pride was just as much Charles' as Shaw's, and he couldn't distinguish which was his. "He's beautiful like this, isn't he?” Shaw mused, like an artist standing frozen before a tidal wave, entranced by the effect of the light on the water.
“Three.”
The coin was nearly out of view, and Charles got one last clear image of Erik's face before he screwed his eyes shut -- his own eyes, not Shaw's, he wouldn't let the bastard hide from his own death -- and Shaw spoke in his mind, “Last chance, Charles.”
“Die, you fucking monster,” Charles told Shaw viciously, and he knew it was the moment of truth, and he knew he meant it. He still screamed as the coin dug into the skin, pushing its way past the skull, as the snapping of bone being split asunder echoed sickeningly through their joined minds. He couldn't help but scream, because he had to stay, because the amount of energy required to push such a poor projectile forward was energy that Shaw could use if Charles wasn't fighting so hard to keep Shaw's mutant ability at bay.
Erik's face and the entire world in front of Shaw went flat -- perspective belonging to the front portion of the visual cortex, where the coin was still grinding forward. Only a little further, and Charles could let go. The world contracted, the color drained away, and there was only a dark tunnel with Erik illuminated at the receding end, and then, suddenly, it was over.
Charles's ragged scream tattered and fell into the silence. He couldn't remember falling to his knees; he didn't remember pushing Moira away. But he would not forget staggering to his feet with a sob and a gasp for air, and plunging out of the broken plane into the too-bright world of the sandy beach with one thought before him: Erik.
What, if anything, was left of the man he knew?
-------------
For a long time after, he shoved the memory of that day behind him, determined to move forward and convinced that there was nothing to be learned from revisiting it in his mind. But it kept slipping back at odd moments, the sound of an engine recalling the whine of the Blackbird's engines when Hank pulled it into that tight roll, or a flash of light reflecting off the fountain in the yard behind the mansion yanking him back to the moment he stepped out of the broken plane into the light, driven forward by a desperate need to see Erik, to touch him with his mind, to replace the little numb spot in the back of his head with the knowledge that Erik was safe, was still there, was still his.
He hadn't been aware of it then, though; he hadn't consciously recognized the emptiness until the day after the second surgery, three days after the Bullet. The attending doctor from the surgery, Dr. Philip Chandela, brusque and businesslike, had entered the room and stepped immediately to Charles' side, pulling back the covers and flipping aside the hospital gown. "We'll keep this quick, Mr. Xavier, and you can go back to rest," he said, the words flowing swiftly and meaning nothing, the doctor barely aware of saying them. "Fluids and rest is what you need right now, let your body heal at its own rate, and hopefully once the swelling is down, we'll be able to see things go back to normal."
The doctor's hands were cold and clammy where they brushed against his waist, and Charles -- on his left side, facing away from the doctor, scowled to himself at the thoughts underneath Chandela's words. Already three days and no response, the doctor thought, and Charles picked up the sense of a line entitled "full recovery" falling exponentially, with tick marks denoting days-since-injury. The doctor would not apologize for the botched surgery, the one that should not have even happened in the first place; someone had gotten into the patient files and manipulated the charts, had done so inexpertly, evidently in a rush, probably taking advantage of a surprise opportunity, a door left ajar, a receptionist who had stepped outside for a quick cigarette. The details did not matter. They were a government hospital, and mistakes were not acceptable; and yet, sometimes men in black suits whose employers were denoted only by initials, when they learned of such mistakes, nodded without surprise and even, perhaps, with relief. There was a fine line that Chandela couldn't see, but knew existed, and he wasn't sure on which side of it Charles fell.
"This is just a diagnostic test to determine the state of your autonomic reflexes. Let me know if you feel pressure or discomfort," Chandela said, and Charles watched with raised eyebrows as the doctor's fingers reached over and took his helmet, the glans penis, between his fingers. He couldn't feel it, not exactly; but he saw through the other man's eyes as he slipped a finger into his rectum to feel the sphincter muscle.
And he remembered guiding Erik through it, the first time the man had agreed to penetrate him, the first time he'd explored anyone in that fashion. He had been in Erik's mind, guiding but not controlling, and Erik was in him, a tight loop. Erik's happiness glowed in a bright spot in the back of his head.
The doctor's fingers squeezed, and he felt the curious sensation of tightening, a brief moment of penetration. "Ah...," he was about to say, I felt that, but on second thought, he changed it to I think I felt that, but maybe I just felt you feeling that, and realized that he'd be better off just keeping his own counsel for now. It was surreal to watch his penis stiffen just a little bit, and not be able to feel it do so.
"That's a good sign," Chandela said, letting go, flipping the material of Charles' thin gown back into place and replacing the covers. He washed his hands at the sink in the corner. "The smooth muscle is responding to manipulation now, which indicates that you're healing, and will likely have complete bowel function, or close to it." He paused, thinking of Charles' aborted attempt at saying something and remembering a comment in yesterday's rounds about being sensitive to the invasiveness of patient examinations. "It's a perfectly natural response of the body," he added. "Clinical research shows all healthy heterosexual men respond to such stimulation. It doesn't indicate anything abnormal." The doctor made a final note on the chart and returned the clipboard to the foot of the bed. "Plenty of fluids, plenty of rest," he said as he walked out the door, leaving Charles stunned, torn between being hopeful of a full recovery, and utterly hopeless, finally aware of what it was Erik had become to him.
* * * * * * * * * *
Mid-April, 1963.
"I get the revenge thing. I do," Alex muttered, staring at his interlaced fingers on the table, "it doesn't make him that bad of a person."
"People who kill for revenge go to jail." Hank was doing his level best to lay out his argument calmly and simply, but it came out as somehow belligerently calm, instead.
"So he can do some time. Christ, Beast! It still doesn't make him a bad person."
"Maybe he's just misunderstood." Sean was lounging at the table across from Alex, making sure their legs didn't actually touch. Alex looked like he'd explode at the slightest provocation, and Hank was standing safely three feet away, hovering over the percolator. "You know, like Bizarro."
"Unable to tell the difference between right and wrong? It's a compelling analogy, but it falls apart pretty quickly. He knows the difference between right and wrong, but he's more concerned with the means to an end. That lets him justify things like… terrifying a senator and his family to get him to abstain from voting on Stryker's bill. Or kidnapping, which is technically what he did." The newspaper was lying on table before them open to the article in question; the Professor had already marked it in red for saving later, after everyone had a chance to read the paper but before it was crumpled up and turned into kindling for the fireplace in the library.
"But it was just kidnapping." Alex leaned back and pushed his plate aside, not caring when Duchess nosed up to the edge of the table to steal a piece. "And look at the bill, Hank! If that thing passes, the Tydahls wouldn't just be commended for kidnapping you and handing you over to the government, they'd be questioned if they didn't."
"Yeah, that's not cool," Sean said. He picked a piece of bacon off Alex's plate and held it down for Duchess to take from his hand. Hank was about to point out that the bill probably wasn't constitutional and wouldn't hold up under scrutiny, but Sean cut him off with, "You shouldn't let dogs eat off the table. But back to Bizarro, the point was that he wanted to do things right, he just didn't know how. And he was doing pretty good until he lost his girlfriend, right?"
"Everybody knows most villains are either villains because they get disfigured somehow," Alex answered, partly because he didn't want to hear Beast lecture on comics the way he lectured on everything these days, "or they lose their true love in some terrible accident, and it's usually their fault. I swear to God, comics are so predictable."
Sean and Hank stared at one another in stunned silence. Even Duchess sat and stared at Alex with her head cocked and one ear raised, although she might have just been begging for another savory taste of bacon.
"Okay, I said it." Alex looked up Hank and let his shoulders slump, admitting defeat. "I get it, now, what you were saying before about them. Thing is, what can we do about it?"
Sean nodded and leaned back, the epitome of cool in the face of adversity. "Easy. We've just got to get them talking somehow."
---------------
It looked like morning, and it was, technically. Charles had seen 1:30 come and go, rolled over dutifully, and fell asleep slowly. He had been dreaming of John Turner's stylized midwestern landscapes almost every night for a month without actually being in them, so when the boy greeted him and walked him across the bridge, Charles almost forgot the reason why he'd been so anxious to be there. But before he could ask John where he had been for the past several months, the boy was already gone.
Erik walked by his side, the cape swaying gently with his steps, the edges flipped occasionally by the light spring breeze. "A dog, Charles?" he asked, amused. "Whatever for?"
"The boys like her."
Erik snorted.
"No, really. It's good for them, having something to care for besides themselves. And they like the way she looks after me."
"You make it sound like you're an invalid."
"I'm not!" Charles replied, hotly. Erik frowned, his brows creasing together. "I'm just... It's worrisome, what's happening in the political sphere these days. Hank is keeping an eye on some proposed legislation worming its way through the House committees that has Stryker's mark all over it--"
"We're watching that, too." Erik said darkly.
"Yes, I saw that in the papers. Which means other people will have noticed it, too." Charles kicked at a rock lying on the dirt road in front of him. He didn't want to think of obstacles just yet, so he moved the conversation to easier territory. "And we're preparing for the first children -- actual children -- to arrive in a few months. There's a thirteen year-old with an affinity for atmospheric events. I would say she can control the weather, but at that age you can imagine how much control she actually has. And an eleven year-old boy who is essentially a living laser, Hank is already tearing his fur out over prosthetics to control it that won't interfere with the boy's development or ability to interact with his peers."
"That sort of gift would be put to good use in the Brotherhood."
Charles scowled at the thought. "An adult can choose to be on the front lines, Erik. A child needs his childhood, in order to become an adult who can make that decision."
"Did we have childhoods, Charles?" Erik stopped, and the breeze settled with him.
Charles met his gaze and sighed. "No," he said quietly. "But maybe we wouldn't have made so many mistakes if we had."
John Turner's dreamworld spread out around them, an idealized version of spring with soft green rolling hills under a clear blue sky, a lone hawk white as snow circling high overhead and casting its shadow on the fields below.
"What mistakes are you thinking of?"
"God, where to start?" It struck Charles as both horrible and funny at the same time, looking back at everything they'd done and wondering what hadn't been a mistake. "With the worst? Or just the first?" he added with a bitter laugh. He shook his head, the whole of their history flashing before his mind's eye, trying to settle on one point.
Erik watched him, tight-lipped. "This isn't like you, Charles--" he started, but Charles cut him off angrily.
"What?” He rounded on Erik, the pressure building in the back of his head as he stared at that impassive expression, anger building on itself like a thundercloud, seemingly out of nowhere. "What, precisely, isn't like me?"
Something flickered in Erik's eyes, and Charles dove after it like a terrier. "We talk about how best to deal with the problems facing us, and then you go off and do the exact opposite," he yelled, his voice rising in pitch with the volume until he was nearly screaming. “Is that why you had this arrangement set up? So I can be an... an oracle to prompt for answers, so you can ignore them later? And always here for you, no matter what you do?" With the speed of thought, as all things in dreams, he flashed from standing still before Erik in one moment to lunging at him with arms outstretched in the next, shoving him back towards the hill's edge. No time for second-guessing.
Charles blinked awake at 3:42 with a start, the sheets tangled around his arms and bunched up in his fists. It took him twenty long minutes to free his upper body enough to discover that his legs had remained in exactly the same position he'd left them in, and his hope -- the hope he woke with every two hours during the night -- was dashed all to pieces, the same way it always was. The bedsheets thrown aside and his legs lying helpless and inert, his frustration spun into a sudden fury and his hands were fists, pounding down on the tops of his useless legs, once, twice. Nothing, just the feel of unresponsive flesh under his hands, the tension in his upper back responding to the changing pressure on the mattress, and he knew from experience there would be no bruises. The fury was gone as suddenly as it had come, leaving cold detachment in its wake.
What came next made perfect sense to him, then, though it might not have by the light of day. Pressure was one sensation, sharp another. If one could not be felt, perhaps the other could; and he had the perfect tool tucked in the drawer of his bureau, where he put it the night Erik placed it in his safekeeping. Then it had been a promise that Erik would not use it anymore, that he did not need it. Now it was a hope.
Charles rolled himself out of bed, shifted himself to the chair and wheeled over to the window, drawing the curtains wide. The light of the nearly-full moon, waxing gibbous, streamed in, gently illuminating the edges of things and throwing the rest into shadow. Then he moved to the dresser, pulled the drawer open and pushed aside the handkerchiefs and ties to reveal the dagger. He held it up, the cool light catching the gothic script etched into the blade, Blut und Ehre. He touched the tip with his finger -- still perfectly sharp, made so by Erik's power.
He would make it clean and neat; a single poke of the tip, for increasing pressure, just until it had broken the skin -- that would be the sharp that he could observe visually, if he could not feel it. Then he would tilt the blade forward and make a single cut with the edge, not too deep, ideally not deep enough to draw blood, and just long enough to give his nerves a chance to register the sensation. He reached out quickly, quietly scanning the minds around him, Alex and Sean deep in sleep in their rooms, Mr. and Mrs. Tydahl sleeping lightly in the groundskeeper's cottage, Hank... Hank running in the woods. Better to leave the lights off, Charles thought, and did not pursue the reasoning any further than that. He angled the chair to make the best use of the natural light and shimmied the pants of his pajamas down to his knees, a little production all on its own.
He performed the experiment carefully, just as he had thought it out; tip, just to the breaking of the skin, tilt, and slide the edge. Did he feel it there, just a spark? If so, it was fleeting, too quick to be sure; and idiot, he thought, the act of watching spoils the test, it's too easy to imagine feeling something. He frowned, wiped the blade once against a handkerchief, leaving behind a small dark line on the cloth, and started again. This time he watched the point of the blade depress the skin until a small dark pool welled around it, watched as he tilted it forward carefully and aligned it parallel to the faint track of the previous experiment, biting the inside of his lip in concentration. Then he looked up at the moon and listened as hard as he could to his right leg as he dragged the knife forward.
Nothing.
It was the inverse of his experience in Erik's old nightmares; the knife moved of his accord, not its own, and he felt nothing, whereas in the dreams he had felt nothing but the pain.
“Hell!” he yelped when he looked at his handiwork. The blood was welling into the incision and pooling at the initial puncture site. He grabbed he handkerchief hastily and pressed it against the cut, swearing at himself. This would not do. It would not do at all.
He wiped the blade off hurriedly as he heard the front door swing shut, followed by the creaking of the floorboards in the foyer under Hank's weight. He held his breath as he grabbed a handful of cloth from the drawer and shoved the wad against the wound. He couldn't feel the pressure, but it would work anyway to stop the bleeding.
Hank was coming up the stairs, breathing heavily as he reached the top; a scrabble of claws on the hallway floor coming from the far end where the boys' rooms were, tapping out an erratic little dance in the space between the old Persian runner and the bare hardwood at the edges was undoubtedly Duchess, probably winding herself around Hank's legs. Not for the first time Charles wished he could control animals as well as people.
"Hush, hush," Hank's voice carried. "Quiet, Duchess, you'll wake--"
Charles heard him stop mid-course and felt him listen. Holding his breath didn't matter at this point, although he did it anyway; his arms were shaking with the effort of keeping the pressure steady, and the damn chair gave him away with tiny metallic creaks. Hank's hearing was so damn sensitive these days, even with all the fur in his ears.
Hank drew near, outside his door. "Professor?" he inquired.
“Good morning, Hank. Or good night?” Charles thought to him, not trusting his voice.
"Either," Hank said on the other side of the door. Duchess whined and scratched at the wood. "Is everything alright?"
"Fine, Hank. I was just enjoying some time alone to think." Hank would understand that, would respect that. The dog was another matter. Whatever she was doing, it was worrying Hank.
"I think Duchess wants in, Professor. Should I take her--?"
"YES, Hank, take her outside. Don't let her wake the others." Charles was beginning to panic, and his thoughts had picked up a brusque edge. It was more forceful than he intended, but he must not, he must not let Hank see what he'd done in a moment of weakness. He couldn't deny it any more, that he wasn't handling this well; This isn't like you, Charles, Erik's memory whispered, and he had been right, of course. Erik was always good at cutting through things to the heart of the matter.
Charles needed help, but not from his charges.
"Thank you," he added, giving Hank an extra mental nudge. He strained to listen over the sound of the blood rushing in his ears, pounding out the rhythm of his heartbeats. Duchess yelped when Hank picked her up, and then whined as Hank held her jaw shut, going back downstairs with the dog cradled against his chest. The front door opened and closed, and Charles sagged in his chair, relief and embarrassment making his head swim.
The moon was falling quickly towards the dark line of trees on the horizon when Charles finally got himself back into bed, satisfied that the bleeding had stopped. He wrapped the evidence in yesterday's paper and placed it in the trash, hoping Mrs. Tydahl wouldn't take note of it during her morning rounds.
And if she did, he would just take the memory away.
Chatper Three
Pairing: Erik/Charles (M/M)
Rating: R
Warnings: Hospitals. Self-harm.
Author's Notes: Fix-it. Sequel to Inevitable Things. This fanfic is a belated New Year's present for delirium1995, who pointed out that Charles' recovery in X-Men: First Class was far too quick and painless, both physically and emotionally, and as James McAvoy said about Xavier, "he's just had a huge part of his physical life taken away from him, by someone he cares about more than anyone else." So he's going to a dark place in this one.
The story is currently being beta-read. Please feel free to comment with critiques or point out spelling/grammar issues. Please especially point out passages that are clunky, where it is too difficult to follow the action, or where characters do things that strike you as out of character.
NB: about the possessive apostrophe and proper nouns that end in s: according to Eats Shoots and Leaves, it is now correct to write Charles's; but I grew up with Charles', and it still just looks completely wrong to me to write it the other way. The Bedford Handbook (5th ed.) claims this is an acceptable exception; The 2011 edition of The Elements of Style is quite clear that it is not.
Previous installments: Chapter 1.
Dismantle the Sun: Part Two
Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts
They met every night that week. At first, they talked a little and fucked a lot, but by the end of the week they'd gotten used to their arrangement, and spent more of their time together walking and talking through what appeared to be the American Heartland, complete with amber waves of grain and a distinct lack of majestic purple mountains.
“And what have you got Raven doing?”
“Reconnaissance.” Erik didn't elaborate, and Charles tried to keep his concern at bay. Let the worry eat at him in private, no one else needed to know. “She's on a fact-finding mission,” Erik added with a ghost of a smile playing on his lips.
Which is to say she's on reconnaissance. You haven't given me any more information, Charles wanted to point out, but doing so would be tantamount to confessing how curious he was. And he did not want to give Erik the satisfaction.
But the longer he could keep him here in John Turner's world, the longer Erik kept the helmet off in the waking one, and the longer Charles could relish the sense of being whole and right in his mind. “Is Emma with her? She could help her keep her disguise when talking with people...” his voice trailed away, confused by Erik's strange look.
“Did you ever--?”
Charles shook his head. “No. I thought about it. I wouldn't experiment like that, though, not with her.”
“You underestimate her, you know.”
“Raven? Or Emma?”
Anyone else would have rolled their eyes; Raven would have rolled her eyes and harrumphed for good measure. Erik just gave him that level look, the one that usually accompanied the droll “This is beneath you,” he'd think so pointedly in Charles' direction.
He missed that look. No one in the mansion would dare challenge him or call him out. Only Rebecca came close, but only in very specific circumstances, and even then, she let him get away with too much.
“Emma is a follower,” Erik said. “You know that. Why else would you have left her at the CIA, if you didn't suspect she lacked the initiative to escape on her own?”
Charles could feel his stomach knotting, his lips curling in distaste. “So you thought you’d help her out?”
That won him the look again. "It was Mystique's idea, once we'd discovered what you’d done. We could use a telepath." Erik's voice had an edge of impatience to it, trying to find words for something he thought should be obvious, and wondering why Charles was being so obtuse, refusing to see it. Or at least, that's what he'd been thinking the last time his voice sounded that way. Now Erik tilted his head to one side, watching Charles. "As you just pointed out. Did you leave her for us on purpose?"
Charles looked away. He wanted to say no, of course he hadn't. But what if he had?
“And while we're on the subject, why did you do that to Moira? I was surprised she didn't remember me.”
Charles looked up, aghast. “Erik, you--” he stopped himself, because of course Erik didn't hurt anyone unless there was a reason for it, and Charles had been careful to make sure there was no reason. He took a deep breath and started again. “You didn't do anything to remind her, did you? I don't want to have to do that to her again.”
“Would you, if I had?”
“I would have to, Erik. To protect--” her, he meant to say, but the word died on his tongue. Erik's eyes flashed green in the bizarre light of the dream world. “Us.” Charles finished, his hand out and palm up, an obvious gesture.
Erik shrugged. “Well, I didn't. She just thinks I was selling magazines door-to-door. Another of Raven's suggestions.”
“Clever,” Charles said, his arm falling back to his side, deflated, but taking some comfort in the fact that Erik had reverted to her real name, at least.
Erik's lip quirked up. “She can be."
"So how did you hide the helmet you were wearing?"
Erik stilled. Charles sighed; he'd already said it before, it wouldn't hurt to say it again. "When you wear that thing, it blocks you out completely. It feels like a numb spot in the back of my head, it's…" He quelled the impulse to look away, keeping his gaze firmly on Erik to impress upon him the truth and import of what he was saying. "I don't like parts of me being gone that way. Even when you're too far away for me to know what you're thinking, even when you're out of reach, I can feel when you're not behind that shield." Now he looked away, at the rich brown earth beneath his feet; now he was confessing something too close for comfort. "You've been wearing it all the time, except when you want to meet with me in our sleep."
"Emma." Erik said after a while, as if it explained everything. And then, unexpectedly, "I'm sorry."
Charles looked up sharply, dread filling him at the word.
"I'll have to wear it for a while longer, and I won't see you, not for a while." They were apart now, six feet, twelve feet, standing on opposite sides of a bridge spanning a chasm between a field of young corn and a field of wheat. "Don't do anything rash," Erik warned.
"Don't make me," Charles warned back.
He woke up before the alarm, rolled himself to his right side, and fell back into a fitful, unhappy slumber.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks spun colorlessly into months. The sun rose earlier and set later; the nights became shorter, and altogether darker. John Turner was nowhere to be found, and the spot in the back of his mind that was Erik stayed resolutely numb.
* * * * * * *
April, 1963
Spring in Westchester was a miserable affair, April showers turning the whole world to mud. Charles seriously entertained the thought of an outdoor-only wheelchair and an indoor-only one; he could hardly berate the boys for leaving muddy footprints trailing past the foyer when he himself left two tell-tale tracks, narrow strips of wet dirt leading down the hall and turning with a wide smudge towards the library. The easy solution was to stay indoors, but that was also the boring solution that leaned too dangerously close to recluse, and as miserable as rolling himself through the muck might be (and really, it wasn't that bad on the fine gravel paths), Charles couldn't imagine life without his daily “restorative perambulation,” however little of an ambulation it actually was.
So it was that he was wheeling himself through the damp spring morning, having survived yet another physical therapy session, casting about for Hank. The scientist-engineer had taken to running early in the morning, while it was still dark, after however many hours he spent in his lab -- now there was a recluse, and Charles hoped he could prevail on Hank to return to a healthier schedule once he no longer had Charles's personal circus of physical therapists, occupational therapists, and private nurses to avoid -- but this morning he had been late to get started on his run, and Charles had been surprised to find his thoughts spiking sharply in his direction with “no, oh no, I'm trapped outside!” as Rebecca's car tires dug tiny ruts into the drive. What was it with nurses and driving like madmen?, Charles had wondered back, thinking it along with Hank in an effort to lead his mind away from the miserable thoughts comparing his plight unfavorably with the old fairytale of the beauty and the beast.
How dearly Charles would have liked to reassure Hank that he was not the beast in this particular instance. Rebecca was a bit of a beauty in the classically pretty way, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes and fingernails perpetually lacquered pink, but she could be an utter sadist with a flick of the wrist. She was very good at what she did, alternately cajoling and shaming him into allowing himself to be subjected to all manner of painful or awkward exercises that were getting better results under her guidance than his doctors had expected. But Charles knew all too well the enjoyment his winces and sharp intakes of breath elicited, which she carefully kept tucked away under her professional shell, often even from herself. As long as she kept it reigned in, she was using her own particular proclivity in a way that appeared to benefit society, and since Charles was immediately benefiting from it, he chose to keep her secret.
He'd been an accessory to far worse, after all; who was he to judge? And if he were to judge, he had known crueler sadists, who did not consider themselves beholden to the rule of law or the mores of their fellow men. So he let her be, and he simply observed her cool assessment of how much she could push him, how much pain he could take without limiting how much he could take tomorrow, and he was dispassionately impressed at how unerring her judgment was. Still, he relished the sound of her car driving away, the view through her eyes of the main gate approaching, then vanishing in the rear view mirror.
Every day, his thoughts followed her until she was gone, in case she caught any additional glances of Sean or Alex or -- as was possible today -- Hank, so he could gently blur them into unremarkable, unmemorable, normal and nameless young men. And once she was gone, he had cast his mind around the mansion for Hank, and finding only Alex and Sean in the basement bunker playing with alternating their talents for maximum destructiveness, cast about the grounds further for Hank. Finally, there by the fishing shed near the pond -- and Hank was yelling “Fetch! I said fetch! No, not -- aw, are you a dog or a beaver? Okay fine, I'll get you a bigger stick, you little stinker!”
“Hank? It's safe to come back.”
“Professor! Um.” Charles was already smiling. It was so obvious what Hank wanted to ask, it was almost unfair to make him go through with it. “I found a sweet dog stuck out here in the cold she-was-probably-abandoned-on-the-road-and” Hank was speaking aloud, as was his habit even when he knew Charles was actually hearing his thoughts, so that the sound of his words came like an odd echo. He took a gulp of air and finished in a rush, “IThinkWeShouldKeepHer!”
“She may be lost, not abandoned, Hank,” Charles reminded him. “but at least bring her inside where it's warm, and perhaps we can figure out who she belongs to.”
The sandy, short-haired, floppy-eared bundle of energy was an immediate hit at the mansion. She won their hearts the moment she burst into the entryway, playfully nipped at Alex's heels, tumbled over Sean's feet, and ran roughshod over Hank, evidently nonplussed by his profusion of blue fur. The only worrisome point was the amount of anxiety the chair induced; at first Charles thought she was growling at him when she saw it, but Hank recognized the behavior immediately, and started talking her through it. It was adorable -- if loud -- the way she planted her front paws wide and barked at the wheels (bigger than she) as if she could somehow make the chair itself cower. Then, having chastised the metal to her satisfaction, she ran up to Charles and slopped her giant warm, wet tongue over his outstretched hand.
“I had meant to pet you, silly dog,” he said crossly, holding his still-wet hand loosely, fingers wide enough to avoid letting the saliva stick them together. If the dog could roll her eyes, she did; but then she went to him docilely and let him dry his hand off in her fur before she darted off to charge into Hank's knees again.
Hank named her Duchess.
The next morning with Rebecca was a disaster, for Duchess took an immediate dislike to the way Rebecca flicked her sharp pink nails against Charles’s bare skin, the way she tugged his legs out, efficiently and without apparent concern for his feelings.
“It's alright Duchess, it doesn't hurt. Really, it doesn't feel like anything,” Charles tried to assure her, but she only whined louder. In the end, he had to call Alex in to take Duchess out, and blur Rebecca's memories just a little; he bit back a retort to the nurse's unspoken remonstrance -- that dog needs a firm hand, he's ruining it, that dog will end up the master of everyone in the household -- and focused back on the task at hand, trying to talk to nerves that hadn't listened to him since October 28th, 1962.
Duchess stayed at Alex's heel when he saw Rebecca out, but she bared her teeth when only Rebecca was looking -- a special message just for her, these teeth, your skin -- that Charles saw only by virtue of piggybacking in Rebecca's mind on her way out. He was exhausted from the morning's session and not on top of his game; the best he could manage was to blank out the memory of the walk from the gym to the door, not bothering to smooth anything out or put a repeat of yesterday's exit in its place. The mind, Charles had discovered, was a resilient and practical thing; it often performed the same sleight-of-hand in selecting representative memories instead of recording each sundry detail of day-to-day life, making use of the fact that any morning's walk down the hall was much the same as any other.
If only spinal cords could heal themselves as quickly.
* * * * * * * *
“His back could be broken, or... or it could just be that the nerves are pinched... or his spine...,” Hank's voice was too close to panicking, and Charles was too much in shock to do anything about it. They talked over him, which was just as well; after he realized he couldn't feel his legs, once he'd said the fateful words out loud, it was the only thing he could observe. “I can't feel my legs,” he whispered to himself, and kept a tight lid on his thoughts and emotions. It would not do to share the horror and shock of it, the simple fear that he would never walk again, never race Hank around the mansion, the shaking left behind after the adrenalin had leaked from his system, its job done before it could begin -- his mind had come to a sudden halt on the memory of it, when his legs gave out under him and the ground flew up to catch him, hard.
And Erik, Erik in that stupid, bloody helmet, his thoughts unknowable, tight-lipped, angry, and so protective.
“I called for extraction before... Before this...” Moira's voice caught, and gave. She gulped back a sob and tried again, “there's a first aid kit in my duffel, in the plane, I saw it by the cockpit, Sean, please, please just go get it.”
Charles didn't want Erik's protection, had probably never wanted it.
“Tell me you packed a critical-care kit.” Hank was remembering his training, if not his manners.
“Standard-issue for hot-ops, Hank,” she answered, trying for soothing but unable to keep her annoyance from sharpening the edges. “Sean!” she all but screamed. “Where's that kit?!” All their nerves were frayed.
Except, perhaps, for Charles -- he reflected that his might actually be cut clean through. The realization was enough to pull his thoughts forcefully away from where they'd been dwelling; he could go back there, later, but for now, time was of the essence. He said as much, and Moira and Hank both stilled to listen to him.
“Moira, what caliber is your gun?”
“40.” God, I just dropped it back there. I threw it down, that's--, for a moment, chagrin drowned out her ability to think in words altogether -- unconscionable, irresponsible, I'll never shoot again.
Charles blocked her out, the mental equivalent of turning his back on her -- oh, how dearly he'd love to be able to turn his back on anyone right now -- and focused on Hank.
“The bulletproofing on our suits, Hank?” Charles wrapped his question in a soft blanket of technical inquiry only and not judging, because there was a litany of should haves running through his mind, and it was interfering with his ability to think the problem through. Charles needed him thinking. “Quickly now, was it tested against a gun like hers?” A simple question as a kickstart.
“It should have been sufficient for any conventional handgun. I tested it against Walther PPK 9mil, Colt 45, and my dad's old .38 special.” his claws clicked out a nervous rhythm against the hard sleeve encasing Charles' arm. “But with Mr. Lehn--... It's possible he increased the bullets’ velocities when he deflected them. I don't know. If he got it up to the typical muzzle velocity from a rifle, if it was supersonic, then it should have -- it could have --”
“I don't think it was, Hank. He pulled the bullet free from my back, I'm sure I would have felt something if it had penetrated far.” Charles couldn't bring himself to say Erik's name out loud. If he did, surely they would know. “If you can,” he started, then paused for a breath, trying not to wince as Moira shifted underneath him; now was not the time to show pain. “feel the back of my uniform. Is it torn? Am I obviously bleeding? Moira, you must have had first aid training. It's required of all agents annually, yes?”
Moira laughed, sharp and high. “Well yes, but just enough to keep you alive until the ambulance shows up.”
“Then you had better go make sure the ambulance gets here.” She was stuck in place, terrified of moving lest it hurt Charles more, and didn’t even look up when Sean returned.
“I got your bag, Moira,” Sean said -- only Charles heard “I got your back, Moira” -- and the interruption was a welcome relief. Alex took the duffel and unzipped it, immediately busy at work laying out its contents while Moira sat frozen. Charles directed Sean to probe his back. “Carefully!” Hank growled, and Sean snaked his hands past Moira's knees, just a light pressure, widely distributed against his upper back to his lower, where it disappeared. He drew his hands back, and Charles willed himself calm as he watched, cool and dispassionate, and Sean raised his hands, the fingers spread wide and oh-thank-god clean.
“There's just a dent in the back of the suit, is all.”
The white noise in his head was the sound of several held breaths finally released.
“Spot of good news, then. But I could be bleeding underneath the suit, and I don’t like the idea of a dent still pressing against my spine.”
Hank spoke up, the gears finally catching and spinning the whole. “We should cut the suit off, but the material's pretty resistant to scissors and such. Which we don't have.”
“You've got claws, Beast," Alex pointed out, "can't you just tear the suit off?”
Ha! Charles squeaked a laugh, high and nervous like Moira's, and it echoed amongst them as he said “God no, I hope that's not necessary! Let's try the zipper first, shall we, hmmn?” He tried to move his left arm, but he could not convince his muscles that his arm was no longer needed to prop himself up against Moira's lap. “Moira, dear, the boys can help here. You’ve got to convince that ambulance to come, yes? And perhaps lying flat would be a good idea.”
He, Charles, was just full of good ideas lately, wasn't he? Why hadn’t he stayed down when Moira started shooting? Why had-- Later! he told himself firmly. Focus on the task at hand.
The task at hand was a muscle spasm forming in his lower back and radiating upward, but stopping invisibly around his tailbone, the pain like a light illuminating his nervous system, showing him what was responding and what was no longer on the map. It could be temporary. If his spinal cord wasn’t cut, it could be temporary.
Moira shifted out from underneath him, her hands under his shoulders to guide him down the few inches to the ground, and carefully resting his head on the sand. He bit the inside of his lip, hard, so he wouldn't cry out as the spasm finished twisting its way through him.
“Sean, there's a field manual in the kit, and it’s got a section on gunshot care and one on acute blunt trauma.” Moira said, finally getting to her feet. Go, go! he willed her.
“Yeah, guys, I got it already.” Alex, of course; he would know his way around a field manual. “Good news is this kit is complete, so we got the steroid shot and everything.”
His arm freed from the need to fight gravity, Charles could finally grasp the zipper and yank it down. But he moved too quickly, and his back tightened and then spasmed again, and this time he did cry out, caught by surprise. When it was over, he wiped the memory from Hank, Sean, Alex and Moira -- it would not do to have them too cautious of him. The pain just meant he could still feel, and if he was lucky, he wouldn't hurt himself more.
Reasoning or rationalizing, professor? Erik's voice taunted him. He reached his arms to his torso, careful this time to isolate the movement, to keep his back relaxed on the ground. The inside of his lip was bleeding where he'd bit down too hard, and the taste of his own blood turned his stomach. The copper tang, Erik, and fast on its heels, left me and took Raven and I pushed them away and...
Focus, Professor Charles thought to himself in Erik's voice, and refused to consider what that signified. He tried something new, in desperation; considered his new numb spots, and copied the feeling.
“There,” he breathed out in relief, looking at the worried faces around him. “I had forgotten that trick of turning off pain receptors. Probably just the stress of the situation,” he said, tightening his lips and making the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkle. See? A real smile, things aren't so bad. He unclasped the buckles and pulled the zipper down to his waist.
“Now, I need your help to get my arm out of this,” Charles directed, his voice calm, the same he'd tried so hard to maintain while training them. It was easier, now. “I'm pretty sure the problem is my right side, so roll me like a log to my left.”
“But professor, it's important to know when it hurts, so nothing gets injured more--”
“Not now, Hank," Charles shushed him, then added, "We need to know the extent of the injury, first" in a softer tone. Hank, still thinking, still right, but still a step behind. Alex and Sean -- Sean's cool fingers surprisingly deft -- slipped his arm free and bared his shoulder, pushed him smoothly to his side and rolled the stiff material down.
“No blood, just one hell of a bruise,” Alex reported, and muttered Jesus under his breath. “Okay, one shot coming up,” he added, and Charles watched Hank watching Alex, a fanged scowl forming on his face.
“How much are you giving him?”
“Manual says a dose is 15 migs.”
“Give him two doses.”
“Beast, the manual says 15.”
“The manual's a year old,” Hank retorted.
“Alex!” Charles interrupted, before the sniping could develop into a full-fledged argument. “Hank's right, the full dose should be 30.” Hank's memory was nearly eidetic, and the medical journal he'd skimmed floated neatly to the surface of his thoughts for Charles to... read, in a sense. More to think about later, Charles Erik's voice whispered. He felt the pressure of the needle going in, but nothing sharp.
Hank stiffened abruptly, and Charles reached in -- no time for niceities -- and heard through his ears the sound of an approaching chopper carried over the waves.
“Hank,” he said, “all of you, listen to me very carefully. We don't know what the situation is anymore, but we can be sure it won't be very friendly. So we're going to play this safe. As long as I stay conscious, I'll be able to make everyone on that chopper see you without recognizing you. You'll look like normal, human G-men -- yes Hank, even you -- and I'll be the only one they recognize. As soon as we land on American soil, I or Moira will get you a vehicle, and you should go straight to the mansion.”
“Shouldn't one of us stay with you?” Hank asked. Alex and Sean shared a long glance, and Charles felt a smile curling up at the corner of his lips unbidden. He could help them out, share their thoughts with each other, but preferred to let them keep their boundaries intact, as inconvenient as it may be. They were teaching themselves how to act like a team. Alex turned to look at Hank, nodded once, and swallowed, resolute.
“Me and Beast'll head up, clear the mansion out if we have to. Sean can be your nephew, or Moira can come up with something, but he should stay with you, and let us know if anything changes.” Barely a stutter over that last word, and Charles was grateful for that.
“Yes, I think that will work, Alex.” The sound of the helicopter’s rotors was plain to all of them now. Moira was directing the landing, marking it out with flares high up on the beach, Good girl. Charles breathed through his mouth, trying to will away the shakes that were somehow cutting through the numbness. He reached out to the pilot and co-pilot, and rewrote their view of the four of them huddled together on the sand. “Just a little longer, and we'll be home.”
He was lying, of course.
Hank and Alex had three long, worry-filled weeks alone in Westchester, eating their way through the pantry and trying not to drive each other insane, while Sean and Moira paced and fretted in the hospital they took Charles to. He'd managed to stay conscious until he felt Alex and Hank pull away in the vehicle Agent Levine had so kindly procured for them -- with only a tiny nudge on Charles' part, and a warm smile from Moira that had been just as persuasive -- and then the darkness came and got him.
He awoke to pain, he slept to pain.
He came to, once, lying on his stomach on a cold metal table in the operating room; fascinated, he watched through one of the nurses' eyes as the surgeon laid his spine bare, revealing tiny fractures in the bones.
"What the hell is going on?" the surgeon asked. He glared at the attending doctor, only five years younger than he, and ordered him to double check the X-rays.
"Right transverse process of L5 is impinging on the spinal column at--" the attending cut himself off when he looked back at the area of the incision. He looked at the X-ray, then swiped the clipboard out of the OR nurse's hands and flipped through the pages furiously. "These charts are messed up. This is--" he grabbed the nurse by the arm. "Look," he snarled at her, "this is somebody else's chart attached to the patient's! You're supposed to make sure things like this don't happen!"
"Shit," the surgeon swore. "Goddamnit, let's just get him sewn up, there's nothing here worth operating on." He looked up at Charles' nurse. "Julie, hand me the number 20 needle. And get some more light over here."
Julie's hand drifted automatically to a steel tray full of implements; but when Charles balked at the idea of a needle and thread so close to his fragile spine, her hand fell roughly and the entire thing went clattering to the floor. He jumped in surprise; only it was his own body on the table that jerked and the entire room erupted in curses and shouts. Someone panicked and hit him with another dose of anesthesia, and the world grew very, very cold and the darkness claimed him again.
He found out later that he'd flatlined.
They were careful with the second surgery, necessary to make up for the damage sustained as a result of the first. So was he; as soon as he felt himself going under, he shoved away from his body, a trick he'd learned to deal with his stepfather's mindless cruelty. Only this time, he wouldn't be able to get back into his own skin until the numbness had faded. It was dangerous, projecting himself like this, but the alternative was no better. So he let his attention drift down the hall, to Moira sitting in the waiting room with the October issue of U.S. News and World Report open on her lap, flipping the pages without reading, her eyes dry but unable to focus on the words. He skimmed her thoughts -- Sean safe back in the hotel room, she'd arranged it so she was standing watch whenever something particularly bad might happen, and the butt of her pistol jutting into her hip was a sharp reminder that she was ready this time -- but he was careful not to alert her to his presence. Like a ghost, he thought to himself, Or, practicing for ghosthood.
He was already familiar with death.
------------------
“One,” Erik's flat voice said.
The coin drifted closer, inexorably, a promise of the end, inevitable. Shaw's attention was riveted on the coin he now recognized, pride and fear and a fierce hunger for something radiating from his twisted mind, but Charles could only see Erik's face, could only watch as the light in his eyes faded. “If you actually loved him,” the terrible, brilliant part of Shaw whispered, and Charles could feel the derisive laughter accompanying that little word even as the voice continued in its cool, seductive way, “you would let me go, and I would spare him. Spare you both.”
“Two.”
“You make such a lovely team, Charles. It would be such a shame to waste that. And you've been making such progress on the foundation I built. Such control he has now -- thanks to you." Charles felt the sense of pride swell, and he knew that Shaw was right; and worse, that the fear and desperation and, yes, the pride was just as much Charles' as Shaw's, and he couldn't distinguish which was his. "He's beautiful like this, isn't he?” Shaw mused, like an artist standing frozen before a tidal wave, entranced by the effect of the light on the water.
“Three.”
The coin was nearly out of view, and Charles got one last clear image of Erik's face before he screwed his eyes shut -- his own eyes, not Shaw's, he wouldn't let the bastard hide from his own death -- and Shaw spoke in his mind, “Last chance, Charles.”
“Die, you fucking monster,” Charles told Shaw viciously, and he knew it was the moment of truth, and he knew he meant it. He still screamed as the coin dug into the skin, pushing its way past the skull, as the snapping of bone being split asunder echoed sickeningly through their joined minds. He couldn't help but scream, because he had to stay, because the amount of energy required to push such a poor projectile forward was energy that Shaw could use if Charles wasn't fighting so hard to keep Shaw's mutant ability at bay.
Erik's face and the entire world in front of Shaw went flat -- perspective belonging to the front portion of the visual cortex, where the coin was still grinding forward. Only a little further, and Charles could let go. The world contracted, the color drained away, and there was only a dark tunnel with Erik illuminated at the receding end, and then, suddenly, it was over.
Charles's ragged scream tattered and fell into the silence. He couldn't remember falling to his knees; he didn't remember pushing Moira away. But he would not forget staggering to his feet with a sob and a gasp for air, and plunging out of the broken plane into the too-bright world of the sandy beach with one thought before him: Erik.
What, if anything, was left of the man he knew?
-------------
For a long time after, he shoved the memory of that day behind him, determined to move forward and convinced that there was nothing to be learned from revisiting it in his mind. But it kept slipping back at odd moments, the sound of an engine recalling the whine of the Blackbird's engines when Hank pulled it into that tight roll, or a flash of light reflecting off the fountain in the yard behind the mansion yanking him back to the moment he stepped out of the broken plane into the light, driven forward by a desperate need to see Erik, to touch him with his mind, to replace the little numb spot in the back of his head with the knowledge that Erik was safe, was still there, was still his.
He hadn't been aware of it then, though; he hadn't consciously recognized the emptiness until the day after the second surgery, three days after the Bullet. The attending doctor from the surgery, Dr. Philip Chandela, brusque and businesslike, had entered the room and stepped immediately to Charles' side, pulling back the covers and flipping aside the hospital gown. "We'll keep this quick, Mr. Xavier, and you can go back to rest," he said, the words flowing swiftly and meaning nothing, the doctor barely aware of saying them. "Fluids and rest is what you need right now, let your body heal at its own rate, and hopefully once the swelling is down, we'll be able to see things go back to normal."
The doctor's hands were cold and clammy where they brushed against his waist, and Charles -- on his left side, facing away from the doctor, scowled to himself at the thoughts underneath Chandela's words. Already three days and no response, the doctor thought, and Charles picked up the sense of a line entitled "full recovery" falling exponentially, with tick marks denoting days-since-injury. The doctor would not apologize for the botched surgery, the one that should not have even happened in the first place; someone had gotten into the patient files and manipulated the charts, had done so inexpertly, evidently in a rush, probably taking advantage of a surprise opportunity, a door left ajar, a receptionist who had stepped outside for a quick cigarette. The details did not matter. They were a government hospital, and mistakes were not acceptable; and yet, sometimes men in black suits whose employers were denoted only by initials, when they learned of such mistakes, nodded without surprise and even, perhaps, with relief. There was a fine line that Chandela couldn't see, but knew existed, and he wasn't sure on which side of it Charles fell.
"This is just a diagnostic test to determine the state of your autonomic reflexes. Let me know if you feel pressure or discomfort," Chandela said, and Charles watched with raised eyebrows as the doctor's fingers reached over and took his helmet, the glans penis, between his fingers. He couldn't feel it, not exactly; but he saw through the other man's eyes as he slipped a finger into his rectum to feel the sphincter muscle.
And he remembered guiding Erik through it, the first time the man had agreed to penetrate him, the first time he'd explored anyone in that fashion. He had been in Erik's mind, guiding but not controlling, and Erik was in him, a tight loop. Erik's happiness glowed in a bright spot in the back of his head.
The doctor's fingers squeezed, and he felt the curious sensation of tightening, a brief moment of penetration. "Ah...," he was about to say, I felt that, but on second thought, he changed it to I think I felt that, but maybe I just felt you feeling that, and realized that he'd be better off just keeping his own counsel for now. It was surreal to watch his penis stiffen just a little bit, and not be able to feel it do so.
"That's a good sign," Chandela said, letting go, flipping the material of Charles' thin gown back into place and replacing the covers. He washed his hands at the sink in the corner. "The smooth muscle is responding to manipulation now, which indicates that you're healing, and will likely have complete bowel function, or close to it." He paused, thinking of Charles' aborted attempt at saying something and remembering a comment in yesterday's rounds about being sensitive to the invasiveness of patient examinations. "It's a perfectly natural response of the body," he added. "Clinical research shows all healthy heterosexual men respond to such stimulation. It doesn't indicate anything abnormal." The doctor made a final note on the chart and returned the clipboard to the foot of the bed. "Plenty of fluids, plenty of rest," he said as he walked out the door, leaving Charles stunned, torn between being hopeful of a full recovery, and utterly hopeless, finally aware of what it was Erik had become to him.
* * * * * * * * * *
Mid-April, 1963.
"I get the revenge thing. I do," Alex muttered, staring at his interlaced fingers on the table, "it doesn't make him that bad of a person."
"People who kill for revenge go to jail." Hank was doing his level best to lay out his argument calmly and simply, but it came out as somehow belligerently calm, instead.
"So he can do some time. Christ, Beast! It still doesn't make him a bad person."
"Maybe he's just misunderstood." Sean was lounging at the table across from Alex, making sure their legs didn't actually touch. Alex looked like he'd explode at the slightest provocation, and Hank was standing safely three feet away, hovering over the percolator. "You know, like Bizarro."
"Unable to tell the difference between right and wrong? It's a compelling analogy, but it falls apart pretty quickly. He knows the difference between right and wrong, but he's more concerned with the means to an end. That lets him justify things like… terrifying a senator and his family to get him to abstain from voting on Stryker's bill. Or kidnapping, which is technically what he did." The newspaper was lying on table before them open to the article in question; the Professor had already marked it in red for saving later, after everyone had a chance to read the paper but before it was crumpled up and turned into kindling for the fireplace in the library.
"But it was just kidnapping." Alex leaned back and pushed his plate aside, not caring when Duchess nosed up to the edge of the table to steal a piece. "And look at the bill, Hank! If that thing passes, the Tydahls wouldn't just be commended for kidnapping you and handing you over to the government, they'd be questioned if they didn't."
"Yeah, that's not cool," Sean said. He picked a piece of bacon off Alex's plate and held it down for Duchess to take from his hand. Hank was about to point out that the bill probably wasn't constitutional and wouldn't hold up under scrutiny, but Sean cut him off with, "You shouldn't let dogs eat off the table. But back to Bizarro, the point was that he wanted to do things right, he just didn't know how. And he was doing pretty good until he lost his girlfriend, right?"
"Everybody knows most villains are either villains because they get disfigured somehow," Alex answered, partly because he didn't want to hear Beast lecture on comics the way he lectured on everything these days, "or they lose their true love in some terrible accident, and it's usually their fault. I swear to God, comics are so predictable."
Sean and Hank stared at one another in stunned silence. Even Duchess sat and stared at Alex with her head cocked and one ear raised, although she might have just been begging for another savory taste of bacon.
"Okay, I said it." Alex looked up Hank and let his shoulders slump, admitting defeat. "I get it, now, what you were saying before about them. Thing is, what can we do about it?"
Sean nodded and leaned back, the epitome of cool in the face of adversity. "Easy. We've just got to get them talking somehow."
---------------
It looked like morning, and it was, technically. Charles had seen 1:30 come and go, rolled over dutifully, and fell asleep slowly. He had been dreaming of John Turner's stylized midwestern landscapes almost every night for a month without actually being in them, so when the boy greeted him and walked him across the bridge, Charles almost forgot the reason why he'd been so anxious to be there. But before he could ask John where he had been for the past several months, the boy was already gone.
Erik walked by his side, the cape swaying gently with his steps, the edges flipped occasionally by the light spring breeze. "A dog, Charles?" he asked, amused. "Whatever for?"
"The boys like her."
Erik snorted.
"No, really. It's good for them, having something to care for besides themselves. And they like the way she looks after me."
"You make it sound like you're an invalid."
"I'm not!" Charles replied, hotly. Erik frowned, his brows creasing together. "I'm just... It's worrisome, what's happening in the political sphere these days. Hank is keeping an eye on some proposed legislation worming its way through the House committees that has Stryker's mark all over it--"
"We're watching that, too." Erik said darkly.
"Yes, I saw that in the papers. Which means other people will have noticed it, too." Charles kicked at a rock lying on the dirt road in front of him. He didn't want to think of obstacles just yet, so he moved the conversation to easier territory. "And we're preparing for the first children -- actual children -- to arrive in a few months. There's a thirteen year-old with an affinity for atmospheric events. I would say she can control the weather, but at that age you can imagine how much control she actually has. And an eleven year-old boy who is essentially a living laser, Hank is already tearing his fur out over prosthetics to control it that won't interfere with the boy's development or ability to interact with his peers."
"That sort of gift would be put to good use in the Brotherhood."
Charles scowled at the thought. "An adult can choose to be on the front lines, Erik. A child needs his childhood, in order to become an adult who can make that decision."
"Did we have childhoods, Charles?" Erik stopped, and the breeze settled with him.
Charles met his gaze and sighed. "No," he said quietly. "But maybe we wouldn't have made so many mistakes if we had."
John Turner's dreamworld spread out around them, an idealized version of spring with soft green rolling hills under a clear blue sky, a lone hawk white as snow circling high overhead and casting its shadow on the fields below.
"What mistakes are you thinking of?"
"God, where to start?" It struck Charles as both horrible and funny at the same time, looking back at everything they'd done and wondering what hadn't been a mistake. "With the worst? Or just the first?" he added with a bitter laugh. He shook his head, the whole of their history flashing before his mind's eye, trying to settle on one point.
Erik watched him, tight-lipped. "This isn't like you, Charles--" he started, but Charles cut him off angrily.
"What?” He rounded on Erik, the pressure building in the back of his head as he stared at that impassive expression, anger building on itself like a thundercloud, seemingly out of nowhere. "What, precisely, isn't like me?"
Something flickered in Erik's eyes, and Charles dove after it like a terrier. "We talk about how best to deal with the problems facing us, and then you go off and do the exact opposite," he yelled, his voice rising in pitch with the volume until he was nearly screaming. “Is that why you had this arrangement set up? So I can be an... an oracle to prompt for answers, so you can ignore them later? And always here for you, no matter what you do?" With the speed of thought, as all things in dreams, he flashed from standing still before Erik in one moment to lunging at him with arms outstretched in the next, shoving him back towards the hill's edge. No time for second-guessing.
Charles blinked awake at 3:42 with a start, the sheets tangled around his arms and bunched up in his fists. It took him twenty long minutes to free his upper body enough to discover that his legs had remained in exactly the same position he'd left them in, and his hope -- the hope he woke with every two hours during the night -- was dashed all to pieces, the same way it always was. The bedsheets thrown aside and his legs lying helpless and inert, his frustration spun into a sudden fury and his hands were fists, pounding down on the tops of his useless legs, once, twice. Nothing, just the feel of unresponsive flesh under his hands, the tension in his upper back responding to the changing pressure on the mattress, and he knew from experience there would be no bruises. The fury was gone as suddenly as it had come, leaving cold detachment in its wake.
What came next made perfect sense to him, then, though it might not have by the light of day. Pressure was one sensation, sharp another. If one could not be felt, perhaps the other could; and he had the perfect tool tucked in the drawer of his bureau, where he put it the night Erik placed it in his safekeeping. Then it had been a promise that Erik would not use it anymore, that he did not need it. Now it was a hope.
Charles rolled himself out of bed, shifted himself to the chair and wheeled over to the window, drawing the curtains wide. The light of the nearly-full moon, waxing gibbous, streamed in, gently illuminating the edges of things and throwing the rest into shadow. Then he moved to the dresser, pulled the drawer open and pushed aside the handkerchiefs and ties to reveal the dagger. He held it up, the cool light catching the gothic script etched into the blade, Blut und Ehre. He touched the tip with his finger -- still perfectly sharp, made so by Erik's power.
He would make it clean and neat; a single poke of the tip, for increasing pressure, just until it had broken the skin -- that would be the sharp that he could observe visually, if he could not feel it. Then he would tilt the blade forward and make a single cut with the edge, not too deep, ideally not deep enough to draw blood, and just long enough to give his nerves a chance to register the sensation. He reached out quickly, quietly scanning the minds around him, Alex and Sean deep in sleep in their rooms, Mr. and Mrs. Tydahl sleeping lightly in the groundskeeper's cottage, Hank... Hank running in the woods. Better to leave the lights off, Charles thought, and did not pursue the reasoning any further than that. He angled the chair to make the best use of the natural light and shimmied the pants of his pajamas down to his knees, a little production all on its own.
He performed the experiment carefully, just as he had thought it out; tip, just to the breaking of the skin, tilt, and slide the edge. Did he feel it there, just a spark? If so, it was fleeting, too quick to be sure; and idiot, he thought, the act of watching spoils the test, it's too easy to imagine feeling something. He frowned, wiped the blade once against a handkerchief, leaving behind a small dark line on the cloth, and started again. This time he watched the point of the blade depress the skin until a small dark pool welled around it, watched as he tilted it forward carefully and aligned it parallel to the faint track of the previous experiment, biting the inside of his lip in concentration. Then he looked up at the moon and listened as hard as he could to his right leg as he dragged the knife forward.
Nothing.
It was the inverse of his experience in Erik's old nightmares; the knife moved of his accord, not its own, and he felt nothing, whereas in the dreams he had felt nothing but the pain.
“Hell!” he yelped when he looked at his handiwork. The blood was welling into the incision and pooling at the initial puncture site. He grabbed he handkerchief hastily and pressed it against the cut, swearing at himself. This would not do. It would not do at all.
He wiped the blade off hurriedly as he heard the front door swing shut, followed by the creaking of the floorboards in the foyer under Hank's weight. He held his breath as he grabbed a handful of cloth from the drawer and shoved the wad against the wound. He couldn't feel the pressure, but it would work anyway to stop the bleeding.
Hank was coming up the stairs, breathing heavily as he reached the top; a scrabble of claws on the hallway floor coming from the far end where the boys' rooms were, tapping out an erratic little dance in the space between the old Persian runner and the bare hardwood at the edges was undoubtedly Duchess, probably winding herself around Hank's legs. Not for the first time Charles wished he could control animals as well as people.
"Hush, hush," Hank's voice carried. "Quiet, Duchess, you'll wake--"
Charles heard him stop mid-course and felt him listen. Holding his breath didn't matter at this point, although he did it anyway; his arms were shaking with the effort of keeping the pressure steady, and the damn chair gave him away with tiny metallic creaks. Hank's hearing was so damn sensitive these days, even with all the fur in his ears.
Hank drew near, outside his door. "Professor?" he inquired.
“Good morning, Hank. Or good night?” Charles thought to him, not trusting his voice.
"Either," Hank said on the other side of the door. Duchess whined and scratched at the wood. "Is everything alright?"
"Fine, Hank. I was just enjoying some time alone to think." Hank would understand that, would respect that. The dog was another matter. Whatever she was doing, it was worrying Hank.
"I think Duchess wants in, Professor. Should I take her--?"
"YES, Hank, take her outside. Don't let her wake the others." Charles was beginning to panic, and his thoughts had picked up a brusque edge. It was more forceful than he intended, but he must not, he must not let Hank see what he'd done in a moment of weakness. He couldn't deny it any more, that he wasn't handling this well; This isn't like you, Charles, Erik's memory whispered, and he had been right, of course. Erik was always good at cutting through things to the heart of the matter.
Charles needed help, but not from his charges.
"Thank you," he added, giving Hank an extra mental nudge. He strained to listen over the sound of the blood rushing in his ears, pounding out the rhythm of his heartbeats. Duchess yelped when Hank picked her up, and then whined as Hank held her jaw shut, going back downstairs with the dog cradled against his chest. The front door opened and closed, and Charles sagged in his chair, relief and embarrassment making his head swim.
The moon was falling quickly towards the dark line of trees on the horizon when Charles finally got himself back into bed, satisfied that the bleeding had stopped. He wrapped the evidence in yesterday's paper and placed it in the trash, hoping Mrs. Tydahl wouldn't take note of it during her morning rounds.
And if she did, he would just take the memory away.
Chatper Three