FIC: Utopia 14/? (WIP)
Title: Utopia
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Pairings: Charles/Erik
Genre: drama, angst, au, dystopia, future!fic
Rating: R
Word Count: 6600/?
Warnings: dubcon, emotional manipulation, realistic discussion of cancer
Summary: Based on this 1stclass_kink prompt (and originally posted there).
"Erik has succeeded in taking over the world, but mutant utopia has yet to materialize. Charles is his reluctant companion."
Beta'd by idioticonion, whose arrival is often heralded by uncanny malarky.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23
lxxvii.
“So I heard that Magneto is throwing a party!” Raven exclaimed the next night, throwing herself down onto his couch.
Charles winced. “I doubt it will be anything quite so cheerful as that.”
His sister crossed her legs, a book pressed to her knee, and pouted primly. “You don’t have to be such a wet blanket all the time, you know.”
He pursed his lips and shrugged; it was hard not to be, given the situation. That day, Beast had only been in the lab for a few minutes before running off to work in Engineering, and in that time Charles had probed his memories. Since the incident with the trash bin the telepath had taken to leaving the leonine scientist with a conscious drive to solve the problem of mutants with insensitivity to anesthetics, so he didn’t need to remember their conspiracy in order to investigate.
Beast, however, hadn’t yet managed to find an alternate way to get a hold of the drugs or any of their obvious precursors, so Charles had retreated from his head after propping up a little extra self-righteous determination to bolster what the genius already possessed in spades.
“It’s just that most of these people don’t seem like the celebratory type,” Charles explained, and then added, “Besides, isn’t it suppose to be a soirée?”
Raven rolled her eyes. “‘Soirée,’ Charles? Really? Well, you can take the man out of the tweed, but apparently you can’t take the tweed out of the man. Anyway, can you think of a group of people more reckless and irresponsible? I think not!”
“That’s heartening. I hadn’t been fearing for my life previously but I’m certainly considering it now,” Charles replied with a grimace.
Shaking the book at him, Raven chided, “Oh, come on, don’t be silly! It’s not dangerous at all.”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Charles commented dryly, “but don’t people in this organization rise to power by being powerful?”
Raven shrugged self-consciously. “To an extent, maybe. There are plenty of decent people who’ll be there, though, and nobody’ll try anything too overt. I think Magneto’s planning on going too, and everyone knows that he considers you a friend.”
Charles’ throat caught; then he swallowed and said, “He strangled me, you know. In front of everyone.”
His adopted sister went still, but where he expected her to look shocked or outraged she instead nodded seriously; she was possibly even a little embarrassed, of all things. “Yes, I knew; but I told Magneto the same thing I told you, about hurting each other and how I would feel about that. Maybe this will offend your sensibilities, but… Charles, that really was just a slap on the wrist, comparatively.”
“Raven, he cut off the blood flow to my brain until I passed out,” Charles insisted, staring at her with furrowed brows.
She sighed and looked down at the book’s cover, tracing her fingers beneath the cardboard without actually flipping it open. “Yes,” she agreed, softly. “But it wasn’t painful, and it didn’t leave any lasting damage. Do you know what happened to the few other people who’ve learned Magneto’s human name and dared use it to his face?”
Charles studied her face cautiously; her mottled yellow eyes were wide with sincerity. “What happened to them?” he asked, finally.
“I don’t know,” Raven answered, returning her gaze to the book. She opened it to the flyleaves and ran her fingers down their blank, weathered surfaces. Her skin was starkly indigo over the rust-mottled cream of the paper and together they made a sound like a sigh.
The geneticist worked the inside of his bottom lip between his teeth for a moment before stating, “That doesn’t really make me feel any better about it.”
Raven shrugged again and Charles saw it on her face when she pushed that part of the conversation out of her mind. “Well, anyway, it’ll be interesting to see who all shows up. It’s on such short notice! Five days really isn’t enough time to prepare.”
Charles kept his expression very carefully neutral as he commented, “I should think it would be very easy for you to choose something to wear.”
She smiled brightly; a sudden surprised smile like he’d done something unexpected; and Charles realized that it was because, although he’d technically been referring to her recent habit of running about unclothed, he had also just inadvertently complimented her mutation. He experienced a twinge of guilt that this was not something he would have thought to do on purpose.
“Sure, I mean, I can just make whatever dress I want,” Raven acknowledged, “but when I try to design my own they just look like burlap sacks, although I’m getting better. I need to look through some magazines and find something nice. Anyway, that’s why I’m here tonight-Magneto recommended that I come spend some time with you since he’s busy with the plans and invites and such.”
“Fair enough,” Charles agreed, since really it would have been awkward to sit across from Erik just then, knowing that the man was waiting until after, possibly imagining what he would do and-let’s face it, he thought-Charles would probably spend much of the time appraising Erik in turn and that would be… Less than helpful.
“So what do you want to do?” Raven asked him, tapping the book on her knee. She paused and glanced down at it. “Oh! I could read to you!”
Charles froze, and Raven rushed to explain, “I mean, maybe that’s a little strange, but you know you always read to me and I can do all the voices…”
“No, no, it’s all right, Erik does-” The geneticist choked to a stop and said instead, “You can do the voices? That’s quite marvelous.”
“Charles, don’t think you can flatter me into changing the subject,” Raven admonished, leaning forward eagerly. “Were you about to say that Erik reads to you?”
Charles searched for an alternate explanation, but his mind had chosen that moment to go absolutely, utterly blank, and so it was without protest that Raven exclaimed, “I knew it! I knew there was something going on between you two.”
Folding his hands together primly over his thigh, Charles arched an eyebrow and remarked, “We have similar tastes in literature. There aren’t usually multiple copies of the same book so it’s simply… More efficient, if one of us reads aloud.”
Raven guffawed, a loud rude noise. “What? Oh, you are so full of it!”
“I’m telling the truth,” Charles insisted coolly.
“Yes, I can see it now: you were both sitting there reading and you looked over and said-” her voice dropped in pitch and Charles was startled to hear his voice, low and seductive- “‘Why Erik, my friend, whatever are you reading? It looks very… Groovy.’” Her voice deepened further and, despite what must surely have been a visible flush of red to Charles’ face-or perhaps because of it-she replied to herself using Erik’s long vowels and neatly clipped consonants: “‘Alas, Charles, I have only the one copy, but if you’d like I could… Read it to you.’”
“Stop it,” Charles muttered, cheeks burning. “It wasn’t like that.”
Raven looked about to gloat, but she took a last glance at him as she opened her mouth and then settled back down into the couch. “Whoa. Okay. I didn’t realize it was such a touchy subject. I’ll just leave the book here when I go?”
The telepath cleared his throat and told her, “No, it’s all right. You can read.”
His adoptive sister raised her eyebrows doubtfully. “Are you sure?”
“I’d like you to,” Charles urged, smiling so that his eyes wrinkled up in the way he knew women found charming.
Raven shook her head once, slowly, puffed air from her cheeks, and propped open the book. “Okay, if you say so.” Then she mumbled to herself, “Really, just kiss the guy and get it over with.”
Charles frowned at her and she fluttered her eyelashes at him innocently before looking back down to read, “One. ‘It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien…’”
lxxviii.
Over the next few days, Charles was somewhat surprised to find that Erik stuck to his word; he never touched the geneticist once, not even accidentally.
This did not mean that Erik left him in peace: every long slow reach of Erik’s hand toward the chessboard; every time that his index and middle fingers closed to either side of a piece, pinching the soapstone between his knuckles while the pad of his thumb smoothed over the head of the knight, the pawn, the bishop-it was positively distracting.
Charles had found himself about to open his mouth and scold Erik for-for what? Touching the chess pieces in the same way he’d always manipulated them? And anyway, the moment that he looked up to say it, Erik’s eyes had flickered to meet his and they’d glittered with dark amusement above a smirk that suggested Erik knew exactly what sort of effect his mere existence had upon the telepath.
So Charles had exhaled silently through his nose, kept an eye on the elegant angle of Erik’s wrist as he made his move, and almost before the other man’s fingers had even left the pawn Charles leaned forward to give his response. Their hands did not brush.
Despite this-despite the fact that Charles now found himself lying in bed staring up at the ceiling until it blurred to gray, his hand groping blindly for the waistband of his boxers-Charles tried to keep in good spirits. He had successfully bargained some breathing space from Erik, after all, and even if it was only temporary, then, well… There were worse fates than living in luxury and being sexually pleasured by a handsome, powerful man. There were many people out there, Charles knew, who would hate him for his ingratitude.
And really, it weren’t as if he had no hope-Charles had been tempted, briefly, to leave Beast’s memories alone; to let him go on wondering whether Charles was a collaborator even as he searched innocently around for a solution for their plot. That, however, seemed like a slippery slope to tread on, and so Charles found himself again in Beast’s office. Really, only the first time had been difficult; now the choice was easy.
“No luck yet,” the leonine scientist informed him, and it was not surprising news. For all that there were many sympathizers in amidst the rational ranks of the scientists, few were willing to risk the Brotherhood’s ire even for something as apparently harmless as acquiring experimental sedatives for a fellow principle investigator.
Charles sighed and it went on for a long time. When the last of the air had left his lungs he inhaled again, gathered his words to himself, and said, “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that would be more unrest than the world needs right now.”
Beast tilted his head down and gave him a look from over his glasses. “Professor, Magneto is a tyrant. He orchestrated the razing of Argentina and the burning of thirty nuclear fission plants. He personally took part in the invasion of major rivers by nuclear-powered submarines and the release of their reactors. His organization enforces mandatory human labor at minimal wages in unsafe work environments. You can’t tell me that someone like that should remain in charge.”
Charles fidgeted with his lab coat sleeve where it had drawn up over the cuff of his shirt. How could he claim that it was more complicated than that without seeming like exactly the sort of person Beast thought him to be when he forgot the things they did together? Because then I would be, he reminded himself, and that’s half the trouble. “Perhaps not, no. But right now we at least have the semblance of order, and Erik seems willing to compromise.”
Pulling his lips tight against the bristle of his teeth, Beast replied, “Are you listening to yourself? Charles, you should know better than anyone not to trust Magneto-look at what he did to you, and what he made your sister into! We trusted him and he learned everything he needed from us before turning that knowledge against us. Any apparent compromise, I’m sure, comes at the cost of a worse crime. It’s like entropy: you might see an increase in order on a small scale, but in the end chaos wins out.”
The telepath hesitated because, yes, he had trusted Erik before, but… Well, it was a bit of a stretch to call it a mere difference of opinion at this point, wasn’t it? “That may be true, but what happens once Erik’s gone?”
“We’re not alone,” Beast answered. “Out in the rest of the world, even here in the manor-you might be surprised by how many followers you could have, if you asked for them.”
Charles scoffed, then quieted as he saw that Beast was being serious. “What-me-oh, no, I would be a terrible leader! I’m only a geneticist, anyway-what would anyone want with me?”
“But, Professor, you’re not merely a geneticist to everyone out there-you’re a hero! You’re a hero and a martyr and they believe that you’re going to come back and save us all,” Beast insisted, leaning forward in his desk chair. His yellow eyes glinted with eagerness and Charles felt a wave of horrified pity; here was one of the most reliable, rational men he knew, and he thought-god, he thought that Charles was some kind of savior!
“I’m not that person,” Charles protested urgently. “Beast, I’m-I’m just a scientist, a teacher at most, and I surrendered! They have to hate me. I surrendered; I’m responsible for Erik’s success.”
“That may be,” Beast acknowledged, pinning the telepath’s gaze with his own. “You might not be that person, in reality-but for them, you have to be. The anti-extinctionists all, deep down, believe that you’re the only one who can take down Magneto, since you helped to make him who he is. You have to be able to do that, or maybe no one will.”
“But I’m not…” Charles repeated, weakly. He paused, exhaling slowly with his fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose. He drew his eyebrows tightly together and pronounced, “All right; if you can get me the drugs, then I will at least make the attempt.”
“Good,” Beast confirmed, removing his glasses and polishing them with a small cloth meant for microscope lenses. He didn’t look up from this as he continued, “I’ll do my best to fulfill my part of the deal, and then…” His fierce yellow eyes darkened as he lifted them to Charles’ face. “You said yourself that it will be difficult to handle the Brotherhood once Magneto is out of the way, even without needing to work around a prisoner. You may want to reconsider your willingness to spare his life.”
Charles lifted his chin and stated, “I’ll do whatever I think is best when it comes to it.”
The leonine scientist scrutinized him as if waiting to see if he might change his mind, then nodded and asked, “So how is your research going?”
And it was going well, really; Charles had no reason to complain on that front. He’d been given the task of comparing the products of some of the known human genes to their counterparts in mutants, and it was something that intrigued him. He worried, of course, that the knowledge could be used to test for humans, should those proteins prove significantly different-but ultimately, even the Brotherhood lacked the resources to distribute any such test, once formulated.
Of course, they had yet to find anything so distinctive-they hardly knew anything about human proteins, let alone their mutant counterparts, and nearly all of them were bound to be identical. They might even find that there were a whole spectrum of mutations; in fact it seemed likely that many humans would share some number of mutant features at the cellular level without any change in their apparent phenotype.
The results would be interesting, to say the least.
Charles returned to his workstation to find himself alone except for a note nestled between the rapidly accumulating detritus of his work. “There is a pH gel for you in the clean fridge,” it read, in Hannah’s nearly vowelless handwriting.
The geneticist curled his lips down into a bemused curve and went back out into the main part of the lab, pushing a chair out of his way to get into the fridge. He opened the door and cold air caressed the arch of his cheekbones; sure enough, there was a little glass tray wrapped up next to his tray of chilled reagents. Charles lifted it carefully and the fragile blue gel, still wet from its creation, slid alarmingly-he imagined it slipping out through the plastic and flopping onto the floor, so he tipped the tray back quickly; it slithered back the other direction and pressed against the palm of his hand, clammy through the double layers of wrap and glove but quite safe.
He closed the refrigerator door and heard it lock shut as it labored to cool itself back down to four degrees Celsius.
Charles balanced the tray carefully as he made his way back to the room-he was almost more cautious, in fact, than he had been carrying the flask of LB broth. The broth, after all, could be mopped up and the glass shoveled into a bin, but the gel-no longer than his palm, only a centimeter deep and carefully partitioned by pH-represented a few hour’s worth of time spent waiting for it to solidify and then form an even gradient.
Charles, in fact, had yet to actually make one of his own; this was the first he’d ever handled and although the theory was simple enough, the practical application was very new. The electrophoresis device-nothing more elaborate than a dish of liquid with a positive current on one end and a negative on the other-would draw the proteins toward the oppositely-charged electrode until they reached an acidity-or alkalinity-at which their total charge was precisely zero.
At that point every protein would stop moving; if the mutant protein stopped at a different point than the human version, then they would know to pay more attention to that gene and perhaps purify enough of its product to analyze its structure with x-ray crystallography. Courtesy of the engineers they now had the advantage of having computers advanced enough to perform some of those calculations, but the actual process of forcing a protein to crystallize had not gotten any easier and they wanted to avoid that where possible.
The world of science is changing, Charles mused, feeling his throat tighten with equal parts awe and nostalgia. Well. Hopefully it will be for the better. Although, if what Beast had said was true-and it certainty seemed that way, judging by the names of the labs on the publications Charles had been reading-then “the world of science” was rather severely limited to the fewer than two hundred scientists living and working in the Brotherhood’s stronghold.
The geneticist reached up to a shelf and retrieved a shallow glass dish, shaped like a very square saddle and pierced on either side by an electrode-the gel electrophoresis device. He set it down on the table next to its power supply box and gingerly lowered the rectangle of stiff, jellied sugars onto the central platform. It slid again, but Charles nudged it back into place before it could go far.
There was a flask of pre-mixed buffer sitting next to the bottle of salts he would otherwise have used to make his own; Charles paused, fingers outstretched-it wasn’t labeled with don’t touch, so there was no reason to think that he couldn’t use it… Except that the jar hadn’t been there yesterday and it obviously wasn’t his, so…
Frowning, the telepath closed his hand around the neck of the flask and brought it down to his level. He was already running somewhat late; too much longer, and the gel would lose its neat gradient of low to high pH. He could replace the solution, if Hannah needed it for herself-which she probably did, because why would she spend extra time making materials for his research when she could have been doing her own? It wasn’t as if she’d ever shown any pity for him, certainly.
Charles mentally shrugged as he poured the buffer solution into each side of the tray until it just barely met over the surface of the gel; then he backed out from his table and turned to head back out into the lab. His colleague did practically live in that room, after all, and even waiting for one’s own test tubes to centrifuge could make for a long and dull evening.
He reached the negative-twenty freezer, opened the door, and stared numbly at the metal racks full of white, frost-encrusted boxes-then Charles remembered dimly that, if he was going to have his protein samples out, he ought to retrieve some ice to set them on so that they didn’t decay. Or maybe-well, it was a moot point; in his indecision, Charles’ hand had pushed the door closed again and tugging on it reminded him that, oh yes, the doors locked when the temperature inside changed.
Anyway. He needed ice, first.
Charles attempted to remember where the ice machine was-failed-then realized with a huff that he was a telepath, after all, and he didn’t need to remember; he fumbled for the knowledge, feeling smooth around the other scientist’s minds like a handful of river stones, and knew: the ice was in past the autoclaves.
So he left, again, and went out into the hallway; down to the swinging metal doors with the yellow stains of damp creeping out from beneath them. Charles pushed through with the footrests of his chair, hoping absently that there would be ice buckets by the machine so that he didn’t have to make the trip again, and that the ice wouldn’t be too clumped up…
Charles paused, his hands ready on the rims of his wheels, tensed and immobile. He had heard something, over the dragon’s breath of the autoclaves-a muffled clattering noise.
It came again and he realized that it was the sound of someone coughing.
Slowly, Charles moved forward, toward a different door than the one he now knew contained the ice machine; toward the room where the biosafety hoods sat closed and sterile. The perfect place to go, really, if someone was going to spew contagions into the environment; the hoods were air-tight when closed and of course they would be, if such a person had a mind to be considerate.
As he crept level with the open door, the telepath peeked in and confirmed what a light mental brush had told him. Hannah stood hunched between her bony shoulders, shuddering with the tightly controlled spasms of her ribs. She was out of her lab coat, and a more clinical part of Charles realized that he had never seen her without before; and unlike the rest of the female scientists, who wore pants because they had to, he suspected that she did not change into anything looser when she returned to whatever place she rested in at night.
Perhaps she had heard him, or she might have been about to pace around, but she half-turned and froze as she saw him, her eyes huge and guilty over the shadows of her skin, translucent in the harsh white lighting. The lab coat was bundled in her hands where she held its sleeve submerged in a jar of yellow-tinged fluid; Charles smelled the frayed tang of bleach heavy in the humid air, but she had not yet been there long enough to dissolve the drops of blood soaked into the white fabric.
He gazed at her coolly and remarked, “You might want to see somebody about that cough.”
The cell biologist blinked, dazed, and attempted a smile with one side of her face. “I don’t think so,” she replied.
Charles raised his eyebrows at her, but remained otherwise immobile-he kept his shoulders relaxed, his hands down at his sides, and didn’t raise his voice much beyond what it took to be heard over the rattle of the dysfunctional autoclave in the room behind him. “Is that because you already know what’s wrong, or because the doctor would find out that you’re human?”
Her eyes had been wide before, but now they almost started from her head. For a moment her face was taunt with denial; then, as she took in the telepath’s carefully composed calm, she let her breath out in a long slow sigh and looked at him appraisingly. “Did you read my mind?” she asked.
‘No,” Charles denied, with a short shake of his head. “Or at least, not on purpose; it’s easily the first thing I sense about someone.”
“So you’ve always known,” Hannah observed, leaning against a hood. She kept the sleeve dipped into the jar of bleach.
“Essentially,” the geneticist agreed. “Empathy is difficult to prove and a good thing to claim if you don’t want people to know you don’t really have a mutation, but it’s fairly obvious to a telepath.”
“Ah, but there you’re wrong,” Hannah corrected, showing her teeth. She tapped her sternum. “I do have a mutation; it’s just not in all of my cells.”
“Then you know that you probably don’t have much time,” Charles stated. “Why delay treatment if there’s a chance you might live?”
The cell biologist gave a voiceless chuckle that turned into another cough, then began, quietly, “You know, I always wanted to be like Maud Menten when I grew up. I wanted to be this woman who did all the things people said she couldn’t do and changed the world of science.” Hannah seemed about to breathe deeply, then thought better of it; instead, she crossed one of her ankles over the other and settled more firmly against the hood.
“I spent my entire time in university struggling to be taken seriously; if my professors thought that I was serious at all then it was because I was just some headstrong anti-man fool, and the only work they’d give me was to clean up the lab and mix the stock solutions.” She crooked up a corner of her mouth, and continued, wryly, “Well, I started reading everyone’s lab notes when they went home at night and within a year I finished this professor’s project almost by myself. Things changed pretty fast after that.”
“And you know, I only just about had my thesis done when civilization ended. All that work, all that sleep deprivation, and I never even got to be a scientist,” Hannah said. She swirled the coat sleeve around in the bleach a little; the stain was already lifting out. “Until I came here, everywhere I went it was just-‘survival of the species, survival of the species, do your womanly duty!’-and, well, I might be in with the wolves now, but science doesn’t take sides and I’ve already made more contributions to the field than I’d ever thought possible. More than Maud ever did, in less time.”
Charles nodded politely, and then pointed out, “It’s going to be difficult to do science once you’re dead.”
Hannah pursed her lips. “It’ll be difficult to do science once I’m human. At least I’m doing good here; good that will last into the future.”
“Perhaps, but you’ll be dead,” Charles repeated. “Isn’t having any future at all better than that?”
“Do you know how much research has been done on cancer since the mutants took over?” Hannah asked, looking out at him from beneath her eyebrows. Then she carefully shaped the word, “None. Absolutely none; the drugs available today are the same indiscriminate poisons we had on our shelves four years ago. There’s no profit in saving human lives.”
“They might still work,” Charles insisted. “It might not be too late.”
“It is,” the cell biologist told him. “And anyway, chemotherapy drugs are a regulated substance; only humans need them, so there aren’t any stocked here.”
The geneticist frowned. “Regulated?” he inquired.
“To stop people like me from taking honest mutant jobs,” Hannah explained, with a lopsided shrug. “Just about everything’s toxic to us, now; it’s a surprisingly effective policy.”
“That’s…” Charles stared at her as if she might reveal that she’d been mocking him. “That’s inhumane.”
“I believe that’s kind of the point,” she remarked, dryly. “Anyway. There are plenty of other good drugs downstairs that I can take when I need to.” His colleague stirred the lab coat’s sleeve around the jar of bleach a last time before withdrawing it, touching it to the edge of the glass to drain out the remaining bleach, and then moving to the sink to rinse the fabric under the faucet, her back to him.
As he watched her scapula shift beneath the fabric of her blouse, Charles realized with a shiver of horror that all of the things he had noticed about her body before-thin, pale, bruised from lack of sleep-they weren’t the signs of a more dedicated science, as he’d first assumed; they were the marks of chronic illness. Although, in way he supposed that they were related.
The geneticist cleared his throat, anchoring himself in the grind of his vocal cords, but it did not help him find the right words to say as he began, “I…”
Hannah’s eyes darted sharp and bright over the jut of her shoulder, and he remembered again that this was the same woman who’d outdone her scientific hero after fewer than four years of work. He had to give her the respect of assuming that she’d already weighed her values and made an informed decision. Still… Perhaps Charles couldn’t-well, wouldn’t-change her mind, but if the situation changed…
“You knew all this time that I was human and you never treated me any different,” Hannah was saying, wringing her lab coat out over the sink without looking at it. Her hands were sluggish with distraction.
Charles blinked. “Why would I? And anyway, you never treated me any differently either.”
“Didn’t I?” Hannah asked. “You’re a telepath, you’re in a chair, and you’re Charles Xavier, the man who once turned entire armies around with a thought.” Before Charles could protest that the last part simply wasn’t true, she continued, “I couldn’t have treated you more differently if I’d tried.”
The telepath’s eyebrows steepled helplessly and he bit the smile out of his lower lip before remarking, “…Well. Thank you for your honestly, then. Does it help to know that it’s how I would have chosen to be treated?”
She shrugged self-consciously.
“Come on back to the lab, then,” Charles coaxed, beckoning. “All this scientific progress isn’t going to make itself.”
Hannah stepped forward cautiously, then with more assurance as he backed out of the door. Charles smiled up at her warmly, thinking to himself that he’d found his muse again.
lxxix.
There was almost something of a bounce to Erik’s step as he strode into Charles’ rooms.
“The get-together is tomorrow,” he proclaimed. “You’ll be able to have as many drinks as you like with anyone you want.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re very excited about my burgeoning social life,” Charles stated. “I heard that you would be in attendance as well? Remember that I stipulated that there would be no standing over my shoulder.”
“I’ll be otherwise occupied,” Erik replied, his voice deepening to a growl as he added, “My attention is highly sought after.”
“It must be terrible to be so loved,” Charles mused as Erik sank down onto his couch.
“I don’t like these people,” he said, baring his teeth with distaste. “These… Politicians. Not a one of them would talk to me if they didn’t think it would benefit themselves.”
Charles pursed his lips. “Is that so.”
Erik’s eyes snapped up to the telepath’s face. “Is something bothering you?”
“I don’t know, Erik,” Charles answered, wearily. “But it seems like every time I start to think that maybe you’re redeemable, that maybe I could find some defense for you, I find out about some new atrocity done in your name.”
Erik went still; the muscles in his throat tightened into visibility for a moment before fading again. “And what is it that I’ve done this time?”
“Did you know that chemotherapy drugs are a controlled substance?” Charles asked. Erik was silent, studying him mutely, so Charles repeated, “Did you know?”
“Yes,” Erik admitted, finally. “But they’re not illegal.”
“No, not illegal-just tracked and monitored while nitrogen mustard is sold on the black market by people who care more about money than whether or not they’re poisoning their patients,” Charles elaborated, flicking his consonants like hail.
“Nobody should be buying from the black market,” Erik explained, frowning. “They’re as inexpensive as we could make them. I saw to that.”
“Yes, well, isn’t that convenient for all those sick humans,” Charles bit. “I’m sure they’re all appropriately grateful that the potentially lifesaving drugs they require because of the illnesses you gave them cost only a fraction of their yearly wage, considering the sort of work they can get once everyone knows they aren’t mutant.”
“That’s a problem only freelancers have,” the other man corrected, his eyebrows drawn tightly together. “Humans who choose not to work for the Brotherhood don’t receive the same protections, and anyway, if they’re trying to pass as mutant then they-”
“What, then they deserve everything that happens to them?” Charles inquired. “Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? To weed humans out of mutant society?”
“Charles, that’s not…” Erik began, looking pained.
“You can’t tell me that wasn’t your goal,” Charles pointed out. “You couldn’t have thought that you were just going to flood the atmosphere with radioactive smog and then all the non-mutants would quietly drop over dead after popping out some mutated babies. You can’t say that this isn’t what you wanted.”
“I didn’t know what I wanted,” Erik replied, softly; his voice had lost all of its gravel. For a moment he looked almost… Vulnerable, but Charles decided not to allow him that leniency.
“If you had second thoughts about committing genocide, now isn’t the time to wish that maybe you’d thought a little harder,” the geneticist commented.
Erik’s gaze sharpened as he lifted his head fractionally. “As the ruler of this new world, I can’t afford to have any doubts.”
“Go ahead, then,” Charles urged. “Explain to me how right it was to condemn humanity to a slow, agonizing death.”
“I…” Erik’s eyes were wide, cornered; then he blinked and drew his chin in. The arm that he draped over the back of the couch, however, was just a little too tense to sell his nonchalance completely. “Given how passionate you suddenly are, I take it that your interest in this subject is more than hypothetical?”
Charles’ fingers curled around his armrests. “Excuse me?”
“I assume that you wouldn’t have found out about this if you didn’t know someone who was affected by it,” Erik clarified, his eyes glittering in the shadows of his helmet.
“I never implied anything of the kind,” Charles protested, furrowing his brow.
The man tilted his head as he examined the telepath. “Someone’s relative, perhaps? No, they must work here, if they’re so worried about their identity.”
Charles matched his stare evenly. “I don’t need a personal angle in order to care, Erik.”
The ghost of a smile twitched onto Erik’s face. “Of course you don’t-but I think you have one.”
Charles adopted his sternest expression, warning, “Erik…”
The other mutant sighed and tipped his head down; he glanced to his lap and then looked sidelong at Charles. “I could give you the drugs,” Erik offered.
The geneticist gaped at him. “What?”
“For the human you aren’t personally acquainted with. I could supply them to you.”
Charles’ mouth worked silently-Hannah probably didn’t have much time and treatment wasn’t very effective; if he could get it to her now then maybe she would live, except… Except… He took a deep, shuddering breath. She would probably not appreciate it if Charles confirmed her existence to the leader of the Brotherhood. There were not, after all, very many people whom Charles associated with on a regular basis.
“Making an exception for someone I might know doesn’t make you any better in my eyes,” Charles replied at last.
“I don’t care about that,” Erik insisted, urging, “Just accept my offer, Charles. I don’t care if you think I’m trying to bribe you-this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Then why did you allow that law to go into effect?” Charles asked.
“I didn’t-” Erik caught himself and looked away. Silence stretched between them; then a muscle in the other man’s cheek twitched and he turned back, jaw set with determination. “I can’t give you a satisfying explanation.”
“Then reverse it,” Charles demanded.
Erik stared at the telepath uncomprehendingly.
“Reverse the law,” Charles repeated. “If you’re really that upset with its applications-if you really want to be a better person, if you want me to think that you are-then get rid of it.”
Charles caught a glimpse of Erik’s lower teeth as his mouth hung open somewhere between speech and sigh; then the man gave a slight, abrupt shake of his head. “I can’t; they’ll think-the rest of the Brotherhood-they already believe that I’m going soft.”
“Then so be it,” the geneticist declared with a flick of his hand. “Go soft. Or, maybe, grow a spine and fight back against these politicians you claim to dislike so much.”
Erik’s eyes shined out at him unblinkingly; his eyebrows pressed low and his lips were a thin line. He held himself perfectly still, coiled on top of the cushions like a snake or-perhaps-a spring: movement stored in linear shape.
Charles’ breath evaporated water cold from the inside of his lip in short little gusts; he almost didn’t dare exhale at all, in case the direction Erik finally sprang was toward him-because it really seemed uncertain, right then. It wouldn’t have been the first time Erik snapped.
How does he go so long without blinking? Charles wondered, as he felt his own eyes drying out.
Erik blinked, finally, shifting his gaze over Charles’ face as his shoulders relaxed. His fingers stroked over the back of the couch, absently, and he looked away to the dark window. “I’ll consider it,” he agreed, voice rough.
Charles waited for the triumph to settle into his chest, but what came to him was only a thin and bitter anxiety, shifting restlessly around his ribs. He didn’t know if this was a victory; if Erik would really follow through or if he were simply avoiding the conversation. He didn’t know if this was progress.
Charles supposed he would have to wait to find out.
Chapter 15
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Pairings: Charles/Erik
Genre: drama, angst, au, dystopia, future!fic
Rating: R
Word Count: 6600/?
Warnings: dubcon, emotional manipulation, realistic discussion of cancer
Summary: Based on this 1stclass_kink prompt (and originally posted there).
"Erik has succeeded in taking over the world, but mutant utopia has yet to materialize. Charles is his reluctant companion."
Beta'd by idioticonion, whose arrival is often heralded by uncanny malarky.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23
lxxvii.
“So I heard that Magneto is throwing a party!” Raven exclaimed the next night, throwing herself down onto his couch.
Charles winced. “I doubt it will be anything quite so cheerful as that.”
His sister crossed her legs, a book pressed to her knee, and pouted primly. “You don’t have to be such a wet blanket all the time, you know.”
He pursed his lips and shrugged; it was hard not to be, given the situation. That day, Beast had only been in the lab for a few minutes before running off to work in Engineering, and in that time Charles had probed his memories. Since the incident with the trash bin the telepath had taken to leaving the leonine scientist with a conscious drive to solve the problem of mutants with insensitivity to anesthetics, so he didn’t need to remember their conspiracy in order to investigate.
Beast, however, hadn’t yet managed to find an alternate way to get a hold of the drugs or any of their obvious precursors, so Charles had retreated from his head after propping up a little extra self-righteous determination to bolster what the genius already possessed in spades.
“It’s just that most of these people don’t seem like the celebratory type,” Charles explained, and then added, “Besides, isn’t it suppose to be a soirée?”
Raven rolled her eyes. “‘Soirée,’ Charles? Really? Well, you can take the man out of the tweed, but apparently you can’t take the tweed out of the man. Anyway, can you think of a group of people more reckless and irresponsible? I think not!”
“That’s heartening. I hadn’t been fearing for my life previously but I’m certainly considering it now,” Charles replied with a grimace.
Shaking the book at him, Raven chided, “Oh, come on, don’t be silly! It’s not dangerous at all.”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Charles commented dryly, “but don’t people in this organization rise to power by being powerful?”
Raven shrugged self-consciously. “To an extent, maybe. There are plenty of decent people who’ll be there, though, and nobody’ll try anything too overt. I think Magneto’s planning on going too, and everyone knows that he considers you a friend.”
Charles’ throat caught; then he swallowed and said, “He strangled me, you know. In front of everyone.”
His adopted sister went still, but where he expected her to look shocked or outraged she instead nodded seriously; she was possibly even a little embarrassed, of all things. “Yes, I knew; but I told Magneto the same thing I told you, about hurting each other and how I would feel about that. Maybe this will offend your sensibilities, but… Charles, that really was just a slap on the wrist, comparatively.”
“Raven, he cut off the blood flow to my brain until I passed out,” Charles insisted, staring at her with furrowed brows.
She sighed and looked down at the book’s cover, tracing her fingers beneath the cardboard without actually flipping it open. “Yes,” she agreed, softly. “But it wasn’t painful, and it didn’t leave any lasting damage. Do you know what happened to the few other people who’ve learned Magneto’s human name and dared use it to his face?”
Charles studied her face cautiously; her mottled yellow eyes were wide with sincerity. “What happened to them?” he asked, finally.
“I don’t know,” Raven answered, returning her gaze to the book. She opened it to the flyleaves and ran her fingers down their blank, weathered surfaces. Her skin was starkly indigo over the rust-mottled cream of the paper and together they made a sound like a sigh.
The geneticist worked the inside of his bottom lip between his teeth for a moment before stating, “That doesn’t really make me feel any better about it.”
Raven shrugged again and Charles saw it on her face when she pushed that part of the conversation out of her mind. “Well, anyway, it’ll be interesting to see who all shows up. It’s on such short notice! Five days really isn’t enough time to prepare.”
Charles kept his expression very carefully neutral as he commented, “I should think it would be very easy for you to choose something to wear.”
She smiled brightly; a sudden surprised smile like he’d done something unexpected; and Charles realized that it was because, although he’d technically been referring to her recent habit of running about unclothed, he had also just inadvertently complimented her mutation. He experienced a twinge of guilt that this was not something he would have thought to do on purpose.
“Sure, I mean, I can just make whatever dress I want,” Raven acknowledged, “but when I try to design my own they just look like burlap sacks, although I’m getting better. I need to look through some magazines and find something nice. Anyway, that’s why I’m here tonight-Magneto recommended that I come spend some time with you since he’s busy with the plans and invites and such.”
“Fair enough,” Charles agreed, since really it would have been awkward to sit across from Erik just then, knowing that the man was waiting until after, possibly imagining what he would do and-let’s face it, he thought-Charles would probably spend much of the time appraising Erik in turn and that would be… Less than helpful.
“So what do you want to do?” Raven asked him, tapping the book on her knee. She paused and glanced down at it. “Oh! I could read to you!”
Charles froze, and Raven rushed to explain, “I mean, maybe that’s a little strange, but you know you always read to me and I can do all the voices…”
“No, no, it’s all right, Erik does-” The geneticist choked to a stop and said instead, “You can do the voices? That’s quite marvelous.”
“Charles, don’t think you can flatter me into changing the subject,” Raven admonished, leaning forward eagerly. “Were you about to say that Erik reads to you?”
Charles searched for an alternate explanation, but his mind had chosen that moment to go absolutely, utterly blank, and so it was without protest that Raven exclaimed, “I knew it! I knew there was something going on between you two.”
Folding his hands together primly over his thigh, Charles arched an eyebrow and remarked, “We have similar tastes in literature. There aren’t usually multiple copies of the same book so it’s simply… More efficient, if one of us reads aloud.”
Raven guffawed, a loud rude noise. “What? Oh, you are so full of it!”
“I’m telling the truth,” Charles insisted coolly.
“Yes, I can see it now: you were both sitting there reading and you looked over and said-” her voice dropped in pitch and Charles was startled to hear his voice, low and seductive- “‘Why Erik, my friend, whatever are you reading? It looks very… Groovy.’” Her voice deepened further and, despite what must surely have been a visible flush of red to Charles’ face-or perhaps because of it-she replied to herself using Erik’s long vowels and neatly clipped consonants: “‘Alas, Charles, I have only the one copy, but if you’d like I could… Read it to you.’”
“Stop it,” Charles muttered, cheeks burning. “It wasn’t like that.”
Raven looked about to gloat, but she took a last glance at him as she opened her mouth and then settled back down into the couch. “Whoa. Okay. I didn’t realize it was such a touchy subject. I’ll just leave the book here when I go?”
The telepath cleared his throat and told her, “No, it’s all right. You can read.”
His adoptive sister raised her eyebrows doubtfully. “Are you sure?”
“I’d like you to,” Charles urged, smiling so that his eyes wrinkled up in the way he knew women found charming.
Raven shook her head once, slowly, puffed air from her cheeks, and propped open the book. “Okay, if you say so.” Then she mumbled to herself, “Really, just kiss the guy and get it over with.”
Charles frowned at her and she fluttered her eyelashes at him innocently before looking back down to read, “One. ‘It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien…’”
lxxviii.
Over the next few days, Charles was somewhat surprised to find that Erik stuck to his word; he never touched the geneticist once, not even accidentally.
This did not mean that Erik left him in peace: every long slow reach of Erik’s hand toward the chessboard; every time that his index and middle fingers closed to either side of a piece, pinching the soapstone between his knuckles while the pad of his thumb smoothed over the head of the knight, the pawn, the bishop-it was positively distracting.
Charles had found himself about to open his mouth and scold Erik for-for what? Touching the chess pieces in the same way he’d always manipulated them? And anyway, the moment that he looked up to say it, Erik’s eyes had flickered to meet his and they’d glittered with dark amusement above a smirk that suggested Erik knew exactly what sort of effect his mere existence had upon the telepath.
So Charles had exhaled silently through his nose, kept an eye on the elegant angle of Erik’s wrist as he made his move, and almost before the other man’s fingers had even left the pawn Charles leaned forward to give his response. Their hands did not brush.
Despite this-despite the fact that Charles now found himself lying in bed staring up at the ceiling until it blurred to gray, his hand groping blindly for the waistband of his boxers-Charles tried to keep in good spirits. He had successfully bargained some breathing space from Erik, after all, and even if it was only temporary, then, well… There were worse fates than living in luxury and being sexually pleasured by a handsome, powerful man. There were many people out there, Charles knew, who would hate him for his ingratitude.
And really, it weren’t as if he had no hope-Charles had been tempted, briefly, to leave Beast’s memories alone; to let him go on wondering whether Charles was a collaborator even as he searched innocently around for a solution for their plot. That, however, seemed like a slippery slope to tread on, and so Charles found himself again in Beast’s office. Really, only the first time had been difficult; now the choice was easy.
“No luck yet,” the leonine scientist informed him, and it was not surprising news. For all that there were many sympathizers in amidst the rational ranks of the scientists, few were willing to risk the Brotherhood’s ire even for something as apparently harmless as acquiring experimental sedatives for a fellow principle investigator.
Charles sighed and it went on for a long time. When the last of the air had left his lungs he inhaled again, gathered his words to himself, and said, “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that would be more unrest than the world needs right now.”
Beast tilted his head down and gave him a look from over his glasses. “Professor, Magneto is a tyrant. He orchestrated the razing of Argentina and the burning of thirty nuclear fission plants. He personally took part in the invasion of major rivers by nuclear-powered submarines and the release of their reactors. His organization enforces mandatory human labor at minimal wages in unsafe work environments. You can’t tell me that someone like that should remain in charge.”
Charles fidgeted with his lab coat sleeve where it had drawn up over the cuff of his shirt. How could he claim that it was more complicated than that without seeming like exactly the sort of person Beast thought him to be when he forgot the things they did together? Because then I would be, he reminded himself, and that’s half the trouble. “Perhaps not, no. But right now we at least have the semblance of order, and Erik seems willing to compromise.”
Pulling his lips tight against the bristle of his teeth, Beast replied, “Are you listening to yourself? Charles, you should know better than anyone not to trust Magneto-look at what he did to you, and what he made your sister into! We trusted him and he learned everything he needed from us before turning that knowledge against us. Any apparent compromise, I’m sure, comes at the cost of a worse crime. It’s like entropy: you might see an increase in order on a small scale, but in the end chaos wins out.”
The telepath hesitated because, yes, he had trusted Erik before, but… Well, it was a bit of a stretch to call it a mere difference of opinion at this point, wasn’t it? “That may be true, but what happens once Erik’s gone?”
“We’re not alone,” Beast answered. “Out in the rest of the world, even here in the manor-you might be surprised by how many followers you could have, if you asked for them.”
Charles scoffed, then quieted as he saw that Beast was being serious. “What-me-oh, no, I would be a terrible leader! I’m only a geneticist, anyway-what would anyone want with me?”
“But, Professor, you’re not merely a geneticist to everyone out there-you’re a hero! You’re a hero and a martyr and they believe that you’re going to come back and save us all,” Beast insisted, leaning forward in his desk chair. His yellow eyes glinted with eagerness and Charles felt a wave of horrified pity; here was one of the most reliable, rational men he knew, and he thought-god, he thought that Charles was some kind of savior!
“I’m not that person,” Charles protested urgently. “Beast, I’m-I’m just a scientist, a teacher at most, and I surrendered! They have to hate me. I surrendered; I’m responsible for Erik’s success.”
“That may be,” Beast acknowledged, pinning the telepath’s gaze with his own. “You might not be that person, in reality-but for them, you have to be. The anti-extinctionists all, deep down, believe that you’re the only one who can take down Magneto, since you helped to make him who he is. You have to be able to do that, or maybe no one will.”
“But I’m not…” Charles repeated, weakly. He paused, exhaling slowly with his fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose. He drew his eyebrows tightly together and pronounced, “All right; if you can get me the drugs, then I will at least make the attempt.”
“Good,” Beast confirmed, removing his glasses and polishing them with a small cloth meant for microscope lenses. He didn’t look up from this as he continued, “I’ll do my best to fulfill my part of the deal, and then…” His fierce yellow eyes darkened as he lifted them to Charles’ face. “You said yourself that it will be difficult to handle the Brotherhood once Magneto is out of the way, even without needing to work around a prisoner. You may want to reconsider your willingness to spare his life.”
Charles lifted his chin and stated, “I’ll do whatever I think is best when it comes to it.”
The leonine scientist scrutinized him as if waiting to see if he might change his mind, then nodded and asked, “So how is your research going?”
And it was going well, really; Charles had no reason to complain on that front. He’d been given the task of comparing the products of some of the known human genes to their counterparts in mutants, and it was something that intrigued him. He worried, of course, that the knowledge could be used to test for humans, should those proteins prove significantly different-but ultimately, even the Brotherhood lacked the resources to distribute any such test, once formulated.
Of course, they had yet to find anything so distinctive-they hardly knew anything about human proteins, let alone their mutant counterparts, and nearly all of them were bound to be identical. They might even find that there were a whole spectrum of mutations; in fact it seemed likely that many humans would share some number of mutant features at the cellular level without any change in their apparent phenotype.
The results would be interesting, to say the least.
Charles returned to his workstation to find himself alone except for a note nestled between the rapidly accumulating detritus of his work. “There is a pH gel for you in the clean fridge,” it read, in Hannah’s nearly vowelless handwriting.
The geneticist curled his lips down into a bemused curve and went back out into the main part of the lab, pushing a chair out of his way to get into the fridge. He opened the door and cold air caressed the arch of his cheekbones; sure enough, there was a little glass tray wrapped up next to his tray of chilled reagents. Charles lifted it carefully and the fragile blue gel, still wet from its creation, slid alarmingly-he imagined it slipping out through the plastic and flopping onto the floor, so he tipped the tray back quickly; it slithered back the other direction and pressed against the palm of his hand, clammy through the double layers of wrap and glove but quite safe.
He closed the refrigerator door and heard it lock shut as it labored to cool itself back down to four degrees Celsius.
Charles balanced the tray carefully as he made his way back to the room-he was almost more cautious, in fact, than he had been carrying the flask of LB broth. The broth, after all, could be mopped up and the glass shoveled into a bin, but the gel-no longer than his palm, only a centimeter deep and carefully partitioned by pH-represented a few hour’s worth of time spent waiting for it to solidify and then form an even gradient.
Charles, in fact, had yet to actually make one of his own; this was the first he’d ever handled and although the theory was simple enough, the practical application was very new. The electrophoresis device-nothing more elaborate than a dish of liquid with a positive current on one end and a negative on the other-would draw the proteins toward the oppositely-charged electrode until they reached an acidity-or alkalinity-at which their total charge was precisely zero.
At that point every protein would stop moving; if the mutant protein stopped at a different point than the human version, then they would know to pay more attention to that gene and perhaps purify enough of its product to analyze its structure with x-ray crystallography. Courtesy of the engineers they now had the advantage of having computers advanced enough to perform some of those calculations, but the actual process of forcing a protein to crystallize had not gotten any easier and they wanted to avoid that where possible.
The world of science is changing, Charles mused, feeling his throat tighten with equal parts awe and nostalgia. Well. Hopefully it will be for the better. Although, if what Beast had said was true-and it certainty seemed that way, judging by the names of the labs on the publications Charles had been reading-then “the world of science” was rather severely limited to the fewer than two hundred scientists living and working in the Brotherhood’s stronghold.
The geneticist reached up to a shelf and retrieved a shallow glass dish, shaped like a very square saddle and pierced on either side by an electrode-the gel electrophoresis device. He set it down on the table next to its power supply box and gingerly lowered the rectangle of stiff, jellied sugars onto the central platform. It slid again, but Charles nudged it back into place before it could go far.
There was a flask of pre-mixed buffer sitting next to the bottle of salts he would otherwise have used to make his own; Charles paused, fingers outstretched-it wasn’t labeled with don’t touch, so there was no reason to think that he couldn’t use it… Except that the jar hadn’t been there yesterday and it obviously wasn’t his, so…
Frowning, the telepath closed his hand around the neck of the flask and brought it down to his level. He was already running somewhat late; too much longer, and the gel would lose its neat gradient of low to high pH. He could replace the solution, if Hannah needed it for herself-which she probably did, because why would she spend extra time making materials for his research when she could have been doing her own? It wasn’t as if she’d ever shown any pity for him, certainly.
Charles mentally shrugged as he poured the buffer solution into each side of the tray until it just barely met over the surface of the gel; then he backed out from his table and turned to head back out into the lab. His colleague did practically live in that room, after all, and even waiting for one’s own test tubes to centrifuge could make for a long and dull evening.
He reached the negative-twenty freezer, opened the door, and stared numbly at the metal racks full of white, frost-encrusted boxes-then Charles remembered dimly that, if he was going to have his protein samples out, he ought to retrieve some ice to set them on so that they didn’t decay. Or maybe-well, it was a moot point; in his indecision, Charles’ hand had pushed the door closed again and tugging on it reminded him that, oh yes, the doors locked when the temperature inside changed.
Anyway. He needed ice, first.
Charles attempted to remember where the ice machine was-failed-then realized with a huff that he was a telepath, after all, and he didn’t need to remember; he fumbled for the knowledge, feeling smooth around the other scientist’s minds like a handful of river stones, and knew: the ice was in past the autoclaves.
So he left, again, and went out into the hallway; down to the swinging metal doors with the yellow stains of damp creeping out from beneath them. Charles pushed through with the footrests of his chair, hoping absently that there would be ice buckets by the machine so that he didn’t have to make the trip again, and that the ice wouldn’t be too clumped up…
Charles paused, his hands ready on the rims of his wheels, tensed and immobile. He had heard something, over the dragon’s breath of the autoclaves-a muffled clattering noise.
It came again and he realized that it was the sound of someone coughing.
Slowly, Charles moved forward, toward a different door than the one he now knew contained the ice machine; toward the room where the biosafety hoods sat closed and sterile. The perfect place to go, really, if someone was going to spew contagions into the environment; the hoods were air-tight when closed and of course they would be, if such a person had a mind to be considerate.
As he crept level with the open door, the telepath peeked in and confirmed what a light mental brush had told him. Hannah stood hunched between her bony shoulders, shuddering with the tightly controlled spasms of her ribs. She was out of her lab coat, and a more clinical part of Charles realized that he had never seen her without before; and unlike the rest of the female scientists, who wore pants because they had to, he suspected that she did not change into anything looser when she returned to whatever place she rested in at night.
Perhaps she had heard him, or she might have been about to pace around, but she half-turned and froze as she saw him, her eyes huge and guilty over the shadows of her skin, translucent in the harsh white lighting. The lab coat was bundled in her hands where she held its sleeve submerged in a jar of yellow-tinged fluid; Charles smelled the frayed tang of bleach heavy in the humid air, but she had not yet been there long enough to dissolve the drops of blood soaked into the white fabric.
He gazed at her coolly and remarked, “You might want to see somebody about that cough.”
The cell biologist blinked, dazed, and attempted a smile with one side of her face. “I don’t think so,” she replied.
Charles raised his eyebrows at her, but remained otherwise immobile-he kept his shoulders relaxed, his hands down at his sides, and didn’t raise his voice much beyond what it took to be heard over the rattle of the dysfunctional autoclave in the room behind him. “Is that because you already know what’s wrong, or because the doctor would find out that you’re human?”
Her eyes had been wide before, but now they almost started from her head. For a moment her face was taunt with denial; then, as she took in the telepath’s carefully composed calm, she let her breath out in a long slow sigh and looked at him appraisingly. “Did you read my mind?” she asked.
‘No,” Charles denied, with a short shake of his head. “Or at least, not on purpose; it’s easily the first thing I sense about someone.”
“So you’ve always known,” Hannah observed, leaning against a hood. She kept the sleeve dipped into the jar of bleach.
“Essentially,” the geneticist agreed. “Empathy is difficult to prove and a good thing to claim if you don’t want people to know you don’t really have a mutation, but it’s fairly obvious to a telepath.”
“Ah, but there you’re wrong,” Hannah corrected, showing her teeth. She tapped her sternum. “I do have a mutation; it’s just not in all of my cells.”
“Then you know that you probably don’t have much time,” Charles stated. “Why delay treatment if there’s a chance you might live?”
The cell biologist gave a voiceless chuckle that turned into another cough, then began, quietly, “You know, I always wanted to be like Maud Menten when I grew up. I wanted to be this woman who did all the things people said she couldn’t do and changed the world of science.” Hannah seemed about to breathe deeply, then thought better of it; instead, she crossed one of her ankles over the other and settled more firmly against the hood.
“I spent my entire time in university struggling to be taken seriously; if my professors thought that I was serious at all then it was because I was just some headstrong anti-man fool, and the only work they’d give me was to clean up the lab and mix the stock solutions.” She crooked up a corner of her mouth, and continued, wryly, “Well, I started reading everyone’s lab notes when they went home at night and within a year I finished this professor’s project almost by myself. Things changed pretty fast after that.”
“And you know, I only just about had my thesis done when civilization ended. All that work, all that sleep deprivation, and I never even got to be a scientist,” Hannah said. She swirled the coat sleeve around in the bleach a little; the stain was already lifting out. “Until I came here, everywhere I went it was just-‘survival of the species, survival of the species, do your womanly duty!’-and, well, I might be in with the wolves now, but science doesn’t take sides and I’ve already made more contributions to the field than I’d ever thought possible. More than Maud ever did, in less time.”
Charles nodded politely, and then pointed out, “It’s going to be difficult to do science once you’re dead.”
Hannah pursed her lips. “It’ll be difficult to do science once I’m human. At least I’m doing good here; good that will last into the future.”
“Perhaps, but you’ll be dead,” Charles repeated. “Isn’t having any future at all better than that?”
“Do you know how much research has been done on cancer since the mutants took over?” Hannah asked, looking out at him from beneath her eyebrows. Then she carefully shaped the word, “None. Absolutely none; the drugs available today are the same indiscriminate poisons we had on our shelves four years ago. There’s no profit in saving human lives.”
“They might still work,” Charles insisted. “It might not be too late.”
“It is,” the cell biologist told him. “And anyway, chemotherapy drugs are a regulated substance; only humans need them, so there aren’t any stocked here.”
The geneticist frowned. “Regulated?” he inquired.
“To stop people like me from taking honest mutant jobs,” Hannah explained, with a lopsided shrug. “Just about everything’s toxic to us, now; it’s a surprisingly effective policy.”
“That’s…” Charles stared at her as if she might reveal that she’d been mocking him. “That’s inhumane.”
“I believe that’s kind of the point,” she remarked, dryly. “Anyway. There are plenty of other good drugs downstairs that I can take when I need to.” His colleague stirred the lab coat’s sleeve around the jar of bleach a last time before withdrawing it, touching it to the edge of the glass to drain out the remaining bleach, and then moving to the sink to rinse the fabric under the faucet, her back to him.
As he watched her scapula shift beneath the fabric of her blouse, Charles realized with a shiver of horror that all of the things he had noticed about her body before-thin, pale, bruised from lack of sleep-they weren’t the signs of a more dedicated science, as he’d first assumed; they were the marks of chronic illness. Although, in way he supposed that they were related.
The geneticist cleared his throat, anchoring himself in the grind of his vocal cords, but it did not help him find the right words to say as he began, “I…”
Hannah’s eyes darted sharp and bright over the jut of her shoulder, and he remembered again that this was the same woman who’d outdone her scientific hero after fewer than four years of work. He had to give her the respect of assuming that she’d already weighed her values and made an informed decision. Still… Perhaps Charles couldn’t-well, wouldn’t-change her mind, but if the situation changed…
“You knew all this time that I was human and you never treated me any different,” Hannah was saying, wringing her lab coat out over the sink without looking at it. Her hands were sluggish with distraction.
Charles blinked. “Why would I? And anyway, you never treated me any differently either.”
“Didn’t I?” Hannah asked. “You’re a telepath, you’re in a chair, and you’re Charles Xavier, the man who once turned entire armies around with a thought.” Before Charles could protest that the last part simply wasn’t true, she continued, “I couldn’t have treated you more differently if I’d tried.”
The telepath’s eyebrows steepled helplessly and he bit the smile out of his lower lip before remarking, “…Well. Thank you for your honestly, then. Does it help to know that it’s how I would have chosen to be treated?”
She shrugged self-consciously.
“Come on back to the lab, then,” Charles coaxed, beckoning. “All this scientific progress isn’t going to make itself.”
Hannah stepped forward cautiously, then with more assurance as he backed out of the door. Charles smiled up at her warmly, thinking to himself that he’d found his muse again.
lxxix.
There was almost something of a bounce to Erik’s step as he strode into Charles’ rooms.
“The get-together is tomorrow,” he proclaimed. “You’ll be able to have as many drinks as you like with anyone you want.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re very excited about my burgeoning social life,” Charles stated. “I heard that you would be in attendance as well? Remember that I stipulated that there would be no standing over my shoulder.”
“I’ll be otherwise occupied,” Erik replied, his voice deepening to a growl as he added, “My attention is highly sought after.”
“It must be terrible to be so loved,” Charles mused as Erik sank down onto his couch.
“I don’t like these people,” he said, baring his teeth with distaste. “These… Politicians. Not a one of them would talk to me if they didn’t think it would benefit themselves.”
Charles pursed his lips. “Is that so.”
Erik’s eyes snapped up to the telepath’s face. “Is something bothering you?”
“I don’t know, Erik,” Charles answered, wearily. “But it seems like every time I start to think that maybe you’re redeemable, that maybe I could find some defense for you, I find out about some new atrocity done in your name.”
Erik went still; the muscles in his throat tightened into visibility for a moment before fading again. “And what is it that I’ve done this time?”
“Did you know that chemotherapy drugs are a controlled substance?” Charles asked. Erik was silent, studying him mutely, so Charles repeated, “Did you know?”
“Yes,” Erik admitted, finally. “But they’re not illegal.”
“No, not illegal-just tracked and monitored while nitrogen mustard is sold on the black market by people who care more about money than whether or not they’re poisoning their patients,” Charles elaborated, flicking his consonants like hail.
“Nobody should be buying from the black market,” Erik explained, frowning. “They’re as inexpensive as we could make them. I saw to that.”
“Yes, well, isn’t that convenient for all those sick humans,” Charles bit. “I’m sure they’re all appropriately grateful that the potentially lifesaving drugs they require because of the illnesses you gave them cost only a fraction of their yearly wage, considering the sort of work they can get once everyone knows they aren’t mutant.”
“That’s a problem only freelancers have,” the other man corrected, his eyebrows drawn tightly together. “Humans who choose not to work for the Brotherhood don’t receive the same protections, and anyway, if they’re trying to pass as mutant then they-”
“What, then they deserve everything that happens to them?” Charles inquired. “Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? To weed humans out of mutant society?”
“Charles, that’s not…” Erik began, looking pained.
“You can’t tell me that wasn’t your goal,” Charles pointed out. “You couldn’t have thought that you were just going to flood the atmosphere with radioactive smog and then all the non-mutants would quietly drop over dead after popping out some mutated babies. You can’t say that this isn’t what you wanted.”
“I didn’t know what I wanted,” Erik replied, softly; his voice had lost all of its gravel. For a moment he looked almost… Vulnerable, but Charles decided not to allow him that leniency.
“If you had second thoughts about committing genocide, now isn’t the time to wish that maybe you’d thought a little harder,” the geneticist commented.
Erik’s gaze sharpened as he lifted his head fractionally. “As the ruler of this new world, I can’t afford to have any doubts.”
“Go ahead, then,” Charles urged. “Explain to me how right it was to condemn humanity to a slow, agonizing death.”
“I…” Erik’s eyes were wide, cornered; then he blinked and drew his chin in. The arm that he draped over the back of the couch, however, was just a little too tense to sell his nonchalance completely. “Given how passionate you suddenly are, I take it that your interest in this subject is more than hypothetical?”
Charles’ fingers curled around his armrests. “Excuse me?”
“I assume that you wouldn’t have found out about this if you didn’t know someone who was affected by it,” Erik clarified, his eyes glittering in the shadows of his helmet.
“I never implied anything of the kind,” Charles protested, furrowing his brow.
The man tilted his head as he examined the telepath. “Someone’s relative, perhaps? No, they must work here, if they’re so worried about their identity.”
Charles matched his stare evenly. “I don’t need a personal angle in order to care, Erik.”
The ghost of a smile twitched onto Erik’s face. “Of course you don’t-but I think you have one.”
Charles adopted his sternest expression, warning, “Erik…”
The other mutant sighed and tipped his head down; he glanced to his lap and then looked sidelong at Charles. “I could give you the drugs,” Erik offered.
The geneticist gaped at him. “What?”
“For the human you aren’t personally acquainted with. I could supply them to you.”
Charles’ mouth worked silently-Hannah probably didn’t have much time and treatment wasn’t very effective; if he could get it to her now then maybe she would live, except… Except… He took a deep, shuddering breath. She would probably not appreciate it if Charles confirmed her existence to the leader of the Brotherhood. There were not, after all, very many people whom Charles associated with on a regular basis.
“Making an exception for someone I might know doesn’t make you any better in my eyes,” Charles replied at last.
“I don’t care about that,” Erik insisted, urging, “Just accept my offer, Charles. I don’t care if you think I’m trying to bribe you-this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Then why did you allow that law to go into effect?” Charles asked.
“I didn’t-” Erik caught himself and looked away. Silence stretched between them; then a muscle in the other man’s cheek twitched and he turned back, jaw set with determination. “I can’t give you a satisfying explanation.”
“Then reverse it,” Charles demanded.
Erik stared at the telepath uncomprehendingly.
“Reverse the law,” Charles repeated. “If you’re really that upset with its applications-if you really want to be a better person, if you want me to think that you are-then get rid of it.”
Charles caught a glimpse of Erik’s lower teeth as his mouth hung open somewhere between speech and sigh; then the man gave a slight, abrupt shake of his head. “I can’t; they’ll think-the rest of the Brotherhood-they already believe that I’m going soft.”
“Then so be it,” the geneticist declared with a flick of his hand. “Go soft. Or, maybe, grow a spine and fight back against these politicians you claim to dislike so much.”
Erik’s eyes shined out at him unblinkingly; his eyebrows pressed low and his lips were a thin line. He held himself perfectly still, coiled on top of the cushions like a snake or-perhaps-a spring: movement stored in linear shape.
Charles’ breath evaporated water cold from the inside of his lip in short little gusts; he almost didn’t dare exhale at all, in case the direction Erik finally sprang was toward him-because it really seemed uncertain, right then. It wouldn’t have been the first time Erik snapped.
How does he go so long without blinking? Charles wondered, as he felt his own eyes drying out.
Erik blinked, finally, shifting his gaze over Charles’ face as his shoulders relaxed. His fingers stroked over the back of the couch, absently, and he looked away to the dark window. “I’ll consider it,” he agreed, voice rough.
Charles waited for the triumph to settle into his chest, but what came to him was only a thin and bitter anxiety, shifting restlessly around his ribs. He didn’t know if this was a victory; if Erik would really follow through or if he were simply avoiding the conversation. He didn’t know if this was progress.
Charles supposed he would have to wait to find out.
Chapter 15