FIC: "The Winter of Banked Fires" (NC17, Charles/Erik, Logan/Rogue) Ch. 6-11 of 37
More, more, more!
6.
She will call herself Raven.
Mystique was her powerful self. Mystique was her true self. Raven is the unwanted one, all she will ever be now.
Sometimes she remembers who the people surrounding her are - remembers battling Wolverine in the Liberty Island gift shop, remembers lightning bolts crackling all around storm. But their names go away as fast as they come. The one constant is that she knows they are Charles’ friends.
Earlier they said Charles was dead, and now they say he’s alive, so clearly she’s not the only one who’s confused.
Raven lies in bed in the room they’ve given her, though it is clearly not her room. Her room is on the second floor, just down the hall from Charles. She can look out at the pond from her window, and all her books are in a little shelf under the window seat.
(That was long ago, a lifetime ago, a life she’s repudiated and torn up and refused to look back on ever ever ever - )
(Magneto looking down at her, walking away, because she’s not a mutant any longer, she’s one of them and everybody knows they are worthless, they can’t be trusted - )
(She looks down at her hand and wills it to go back to itself, to be blue, but it won’t, so it’s true. She can’t be trusted anymore.)
Her fingers rake through her disheveled hair. The headaches have started again, and she doesn’t know if that’s from the shocks the humans gave her or all the crying she’s done. Things like cause and effect, now and later, are too jumbled to make any sense of now.
But maybe she would feel better in her own room.
Raven rises from the bed and wraps a robe around her; now that she is wearing foreign skin, she wants to keep it covered from everyone, especially from herself. Carefully she avoids the third step, which creaks, and tiptoes down the hallway of the second floor. Mommy doesn’t always remember her when Charles is asleep.
When she opens the door, though, her bedroom is all wrong, and there are strangers inside.
“If the rumors are true, and China really had mass executions of mutants today - the Professor might have felt that, and that could be why he slipped back into the coma. The psychic trauma would have been tremendous.”
“I don’t want us to become overly alarmed by rumors. If you believed everything about mutants that you read on the internet - ”
“Why would the Chinese be killin’ mutants when they can just change ‘em? That’s what I don’t - the hell is she doing in here?”
That last one is Wolverine, and now he is staring at Raven as though she is the one intruding.
“Why are you in my room?” she says.
The woman with the snow-white hair - Storm, it’s Storm, she knows this - Storm rises and speaks to her slowly. “This is a reading room. Your room is this way - ”
“This is my room!” Raven needs one thing she knows to be true. “This room! This one!”
“My God,” says the third one, the big blue one who is rising to his feet. “Raven.”
She stares at him, and then it comes to her. They have not laid eyes on one another in decades - that, she knows for sure. In a small voice, she whispers, “Beast?”
Beast steps closer to her, but he’s not talking to her anymore. “When did Raven get here? Why didn’t you tell me she’d come to the mansion?”
“We’ve been kinda distracted, what with people rising from the dead,” Wolverine snaps.
“You two knew each other. Of course.” Storm looks at Raven again, still kindly. “She’s not herself.”
“I see that.” Beast looks so worried. He used to look like that when he was playing with his chemicals, not sure how an experiment would turn out. Raven realizes she’s the experiment. “Would the two of you let me talk with her? Here?”
“Why here?” Wolverine says.
Beast’s voice is very gentle as he smiles at Raven. “Because she’s quite right. This was her room.”
Storm and Wolverine exchange a look, but they leave, shutting the door behind them. Raven goes to the window seat; there are still books piled on the shelves beneath, but not her books, not any longer. She sits down, suddenly aware that she has been awake a very long time. Days, perhaps.
Beast takes his place next to her. He’s larger than she remembered. The blue of his fur has deepened, and his features are farther from human than before. But his eyes are the same.
“What brought you here?” he asks. The others demanded to know; he just wants to hear. The difference is one of the few things Raven understands very clearly right now.
“I wanted to find Charles. Is he dead or isn’t he?”
“-that question should be simpler to answer than it is.” Beast sighs. “He’s with us, but very ill. Not awake. We have to let him rest, and see.”
That answer makes sense to her. Raven hugs herself as she stares out the window at the pond. “Does Erik still live here?”
“No, he doesn’t. Did you want to find him too?”
“Erik doesn’t want to find me. I’m human. He hates humans.”
“But you’re still you,” he says, as if he were sure of that. And it’s the one thing Raven’s never been sure of, not ever, not since the first time her skin flushed blue as a child. For a long time her mission sustained her - the one she shared with Erik - but that’s gone now, and she doesn’t know what’s left behind.
Very softly, Beast says, “Who hurt you, Raven? What did they do to you?”
“The police. FBI. Somebody. I don’t know who, but they had badges and guns.” Raven rakes her fingernails through her hair. “They taped wires to me, and the shocks - ”
The shocks made her transform, her body rippling from blue to beige to brown to scarlet, female to male, person to animal, naked to clothed. The screams coming out of her throat belonged to a hundred voices and yet she couldn’t make them not belong to her. Everything stopped making sense a long time before they put her in the truck, before Erik came to get her. Sometimes Raven thinks it doesn’t matter that they made her human there, because she’d already stopped being who she was.
“I am so sorry,” Beast says.
“Humans are evil.”
He hesitates. “People can be evil.”
Those aren’t the same thing, not exactly, but Raven can’t think about it right now. She wants to go to sleep, in her room. But there’s no bed in here. “Can I sleep on the couch?”
“Of course.”
But even here she doesn’t feel entirely safe. “Will you stay?”
His big paw settles over her shoulder. “Of course.”
And as she lies on the couch, she watches Beast in the nearest chair standing guard over her, and Raven doesn’t take her eyes off him until finally, finally, her head slumps down and she rests.
7.
Who is Marie?
She asks herself this question for the first time when she wakes up the morning after Professor X rises from the dead, a day when anything seems possible. Yes, she’s in her old room - same clothes, same face - but everything else has changed, or can change.
“What are you still doing here?” asks Volt, an obnoxious upperclassman with electric powers, but not the personality to match. “Don’t you have a mundane existence to lead somewhere else?”
“I’m still a part of this school,” Marie replies, though she’s still figuring out what that means.
Logan, true to his word, sets her up with stuff to do; she inherits one of Mr. Summers’ old jobs, cataloging and servicing most of the tech equipment. The fancier stuff has to be left to Forge, but Marie is more than capable of checking out the uniforms and communicators, and soon she’ll be ready to work with the vehicles, too. Maybe they’ll even teach her how to fly the Blackbird, since she made a start at it one time.
“Okay.” The cigar clamped in Logan’s teeth makes it look like he’s grinning as he looks at the motorcycle she’s been studying, but he’s not. “Tell me the four main components of the bike’s starter system - in order of how likely they are to break down on you.”
“The battery. The starter switch.” Motor or relay next? Marie tucks her white lock of hair behind one ear. “The starter relay and the starter motor.”
Anybody else would say “good job”; Logan’s version of this is to say nothing at all, just nod. By now that gesture means as much to her as the highest praise.
They’re in the garage, where she now spends a fair bit of her time; Logan’s not the only one who smells like motor oil now. To her surprise, she kind of likes being a grease monkey, wearing beat-up jeans and a tank top, working with her hands, and listening to the radio for hours on end. Logan likes old music from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but he’s let her choose the station a time or two. She actually caught him tapping his fingers against the Blackbird to some hip-hop the other day, not that she called him on it.
Though why couldn’t she tease him? Rogue couldn’t have - she was too shy - but Marie can be a little bolder, she decides.
Logan uses his cigar to gesture at the motorcycle. “Say the starter motor’s not working. What’s most likely to be the problem?”
“Most likely to be plain old dirt. But you could also check to see if the brushes or bushings are worn, or maybe the commutators.”
“The bushings?” He gives her a look.
Shit, should she have said bearings? Is it bearings instead? Marie considers this for a second before answering, “Yeah. The bushings.”
A real grin spreads across Logan’s face. “All right then, kid.”
Time to start teasing back. “Kid? Isn’t it time you dropped that?”
“I’m still older than you.”
“You’re older than Storm, too, but you don’t call her kid.” She pretends to examine the bike more carefully, fingers brushing along the chrome. “Maybe I should start calling you Gramps.”
“Gramps?” Logan gives her a look, and she can’t tell whether he’s amused or pissed off. Probably both.
So Marie puts on her most innocent face. “Or Paw Paw?”
“If so much as one ‘Paw’ comes outta your mouth - ” But Logan doesn’t finish the sentence, because she’s laughing too hard to listen.
So, Marie has real skills that are useful to the team. Marie stands up for herself. Marie can tease Logan - maybe even flirt a little.
But that doesn’t answer the whole question of who she is.
The other students always gave her a wide berth in the hallways, not because they were unfriendly or anything, just because it was the smart thing to do. Marie never minded, exactly - most of the time it was a relief to know she wouldn’t hurt anybody on accident. But she was looking forward to having people tap her on the shoulder, brush against her or just touch her like it was no big deal. She’s missed that so much. A hug, or a handshake, or even a freakin’ high five would make her day.
It doesn’t happen. The space between Marie and the other students shrinks physically, but has widened emotionally. The Cure changed more than her DNA, as far as they’re concerned. She has become an outsider in the only place she ever felt like she belonged.
The TV ads don’t help the situation either. They start up about two weeks after the big announcement of synthetic Cure, around about the time Professor X - still comatose - is brought back to the mansion in an ambulance. All the ads make the Cure sound so great. They always show the worst mutations possible - facial deformities, or animal claws and paws gunked up to look totally feral - and then have people walking out afterward as gorgeous as supermodels. As they stride into the sunshine, in slow motion, a banner reads HELP US HELP YOU. It’s as if every mutation is one of the bad ones, and as if taking that shot is supposed to fix everything in your life and make you sexy, too. As far as Marie can see, she’s the best-case scenario for the Cure … and she’s still got plenty of problems to deal with. The worst-case scenario looks a lot more like Mystique.
Mystique - hard to think of her as Raven Darkholme - has become the school ghost. She’s allowed to stay, mostly because Beast sticks up for her and keeps her out of the way, but Marie thinks being here isn’t helping her. Mystique’s eyes are unfocused, her posture hunched. Storm said Magneto abandoned her when she was made human. When Marie glances at Bobby - walking next to Kitty in the hallways, now, holding her hand like it’s no big deal - she thinks maybe she understands a little how that feels.
One night, though, when Marie tiptoes down to see if there’s any root beer left in the fridge, she peeks into the kitchen to see Bobby sitting alone at the counter. He looks tired. Depressed, even. So she says the first word she’s spoken to him since their breakup: “Hey.”
Bobby glances over at her, but he doesn’t look thrilled to see her. He doesn’t look ashamed of himself, either. He looks - the kindest word for it would be “irritated.”
It’s natural that they’d rub each other the wrong way for a while, she figures, so she tries to keep it casual. “You’re up late.”
“I got an email from my parents,” Bobby says. “They asked me to take the Cure.”
Back when Marie first took the Cure, she emailed her parents to let them know. It was the first time she’d reached out to them since she’d told them about the school, and the first time her mother had ever written back. Her heart had leaped when she’d seen the return email.
Momma had been so happy, saying It’s all okay now; you can come home. That was the first time Marie had been sure she couldn’t have come home before.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Bobby whirls on her. “You took it already. You’re human. Why don’t you go home?” His voice breaks on the word home, and tears glimmer in his eyes. “You can go home! You can see your family! Why wouldn’t you go? Why wouldn’t anyone - ”
He pushes away from the counter and rushes out of the kitchen. Marie thinks again of those cloying television ads. HELP US HELP YOU.
She’s not the only one wondering who she really is.
8.
Erik doesn’t sleep. He hardly eats. The small bank account he maintained under this alias is down to its last dollars; he won’t be able to go on more than another couple of months, at this rate.
He doesn’t care. Either he will regain his power or he will be lost. Everything will be lost.
Those stupid blithering television commercials were bad enough. But now the humans have brought God into it.
“God created man in his image!” cries Reverend Matthew Risman, leader of the Purity movement. He seems to be on every station now, his photo in every newspaper, usually with a cross silhouetted behind him “These mutations take humanity farther from God’s image, and thus farther from God’s will. But the Lord’s grace has provided a way for them to return to the fold. Satan claims these mutants at birth, marking them with his stains. Do they not have claws? Do some not have tails just like Lucifer? Now some of them refuse to take the Cure. They refuse to reflect the image of God. They choose the likeness of the devil!”
And such. Risman has gone from obscurity to celebrity within months; his tent revivals are drawing crowds. He draws more publicity than real followers, apparently - many news reports call him a firebrand, a radical. His faithful, the Purifiers, are considered to be on the fringe of society, closely akin to the militia groups of the 1990s. This marginalization doesn’t comfort Erik in the slightest. Quite the opposite: A radical on the fringes gives the average human being someone to compare himself to and feel self-satisfied. I’m not prejudiced against mutants, they can think, not like that Risman. And so they feel no guilt as they consider voting for mandatory registration, or mandatory Cures.
Erik notes that Beast has been strangely quiet about the matter, but probably he’s being censored by the very government he chose to join. Oh, no doubt they’d let him say a few token words about mutant pride, but they won’t let him speak against Jesus. Political suicide.
Once, Charles would have spoken out, but now there is no one left to speak. No one who will be listened to, anyway: Erik knows he lost his public voice with his powers. The price of force - one he paid willingly, but it has proved dear.
The old cane chair furnished with the apartment creaks under Erik’s slight weight as he steadies himself for one more attempt. Atop the battered table is a roll of quarters, unwrapped and stacked. That’s as much money as Erik has to spend on food this week.
Extending one hand, he tries to smell the metal - to taste it - to roll the feel of it along his skin. And it’s not the numbness that encased him for weeks after being hit with the Cure: Erik can sense something there. Perhaps this is what it would be like for someone long-blinded to again glimpse one wavering shaft of light. The muscles in his hand tense as he urges the quarters to rise, to rotate, to spin around the room in a circle …
The roll of quarters jiggles, and a few coins slide off the top and clatter onto the table. One of them spins in the air for a half-second, maybe less, before falling alongside the rest.
Erik slumps forward. His disappointment is too great for grief; it erases feeling, leaves him numb.
If he had no powers and no hope of ever regaining them, he’d know what to do. He’d walk down to the river with stones in his pockets, and there he would drown. Drowning in a river called the Charles would be his final statement - both a bleak joke and a declaration of love, neither of which anyone would ever understand.
There he would die, and so he could never watch his race perish.
It’s different this time. Worse this time. Mutantkind is choosing to eradicate itself. They line up in front of clinics. They give cheerful interviews about returning to normal life. Their skin fades from indigo or scarlet to the usual and banal. They toss their shriveled wings into the trash bin along with their fingernail clippings. They claim not to miss their fangs.
The worst moment, for Erik, was when he saw Chimera on television, the latest to be made pure. Chimera, once among the most loyal of the Brotherhood, now willingly human.
“I tried to use my powers the best way I knew how,” she said in the interview. “I went after drug runners, people like that. But I still had to live with the knowledge that I would always be hated, be hunted It’s a lonelier feeling than most mutants want to admit.”
What made it hardest to bear hearing her words was hearing the echo of his own.
How often had he told the Brotherhood that they’d always be apart? That they would always be despised, that domination and supremacy were their only safety? He had given the Brotherhood no reason to believe in anything other than a desperate struggle to survive. When they were given another choice, a surprising number of them had taken it.
This is what’s left of his life’s work: Frightened mutants throwing away their birthrights, leaving only the thugs behind. Erik’s great mission lies in ruins, and now he has to second-guess nearly every choice he ever made.
If only he could restore his powers! But if his recovery never goes beyond this, it’s essentially meaningless. The Cure will still cripple his kind beyond their ability to fight back, if they even want to fight.
His hand shakes as he pushes back strands of gray hair. So tired.
Honing his talents took time, he reminds himself. Decades. He spent his entire youth making himself strong; precision came only in adulthood. Only after he began working with Charles Xavier.
My God, Charles, how I need you now.
Shopworn memories descend upon him, and he’s too exhausted and sad to push them back. Erik remembers walking through the streets of New York City, Charles at his side, their hats cocked at angles they considered rakish. He remembers tiptoeing through the school’s hallway late at night, lest any of the students realize where he was going and why, and feeling Charles’ eagerness all the while. He remembers a night they opened the windows while “Stardust” played on the hi-fi, and he and Charles made out like teenagers for almost an hour, until long after the needle had found the inner groove of the Nat King Cole LP and hissed in its course.
And he remembers how it all began -
The far edges of the grounds on a blustery, gray spring day, one of those that suggests winter is returning for an encore.
Charles’ plans for an airstrip right here in New Salem, gesturing at the place it will go while occasionally squinting up at the clouds overhead and the occasional cold splash of rain.
Running to the car before the rain could soak them both, cold air raw in Erik’s throat, damp earth soft beneath his feet.
The front seat, the low whirr of the heater.
“Haven’t you any gloves, Erik? You know you could borrow some of mine.”
Charles slipping off his fine leather gloves, and Erik thinking he’d be given them as some sort of well-meaning present.
Charles instead taking Erik’s red, chapped hands in his, rubbing them, warming them.
“The thing about being a telepath - once people know, everyone assumes you understand everything. Hearing’s not the same as understanding.”
Glancing away from the sight of Charles’ hands massaging his to see blue eyes, uncertain but gentle, so close to his own.
Erik’s dark eyes, always so wary and yet now alight with hope.
“And I’ve tried to tell myself - we’ve got to think of the children first, what we’re building for them, because we can’t endanger that for … personal concerns, but - my God, Erik - ”
The realization that his futile, solitary passion is neither solitary nor futile. Raindrops spattering hard on the windshield. His pulse leaping as his fingers close around Charles’, as a touch becomes a caress, as they lean closer to one another.
Erik’s voice, softer than ever before, whispering only “Charles,” and the sound of it melting down his spine like hot wax from a candle’s flame.
“I can’t tell if you want me or not - because I want you so much and I can’t tell where I end and you begin - ”
Pulling Charles to him. Opening Charles’ mouth with his own. The feel of stubble beneath his fingertips, Charles’ tongue between his lips, the desperate need to be closer, closer still, pushing Charles down on the front seat and kissing him until they were both dizzy.
“I want you. God, how I want you.”
Erik’s eyes open wide.
Those are true memories of that afternoon. But the memories aren’t all his own.
The sight of his own face, the sound of his own voice -
It can’t be possible. He saw Charles die. The Dark Phoenix energy tore him to shreds while Erik could do no more than watch.
And yet.
Shakily he rises from the chair and walks to the table. The quarters are counted out by hand.
If he doesn’t eat much, he can still travel. Although the school is the obvious first stop, Erik senses that he may have to go farther than that. But he thinks he at least has a star to steer by.
9.
Six weeks after the announcement of the synthetic Cure, the crisis comes.
“What the hell is this crap?” Logan demands as he stands by Ororo’s side at the window.
“A protest,” she says. “The Purifiers. They say we’re encouraging the children to live in sin.”
Which now means, living as a mutant. There’s at least 300 Purifiers out there at the far gates, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” like that has jack shit to do with anything.
“Guess you guys have dealt with this before,” he says, because it’s all he can think of.
“No.” Ororo’s voice sounds distant; her expression is forlorn. “The school’s real purpose was secret until recently, and since then there have been a handful of demonstrations in New Salem. At first when I saw them today, I thought they were getting bolder. Then I realized, it was the Professor. It had to be. People would have picketed the school as soon as they found out. But now I believe he always went in and changed their minds so they’d stay in town instead of harassing the children.”
The kids must be watching from the upstairs windows. They’re all getting those letters and emails from home now, like the one that made Marie cry for an hour and a half. Nobody’s left yet, but a lot of them are finding it hard to stay at the school - hard to stay who and what they are. What’s it doing to them, seeing this? The Purifiers look really fucking angry for people who claim to be acting out of love. THINK OF THE CHILDREN, one sign says. Like one single person in that crowd spent two minutes thinking about how any of the kids in this school feel when they see those signs right outside their windows.
Another sign reads: DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR CHILDREN ARE?
“Wish Xavier would wake up again,” Logan says.
“That makes two of us.” Ororo pushes back her snowy hair. “In the meantime, I’m going to see how the Purifiers feel about protesting outside in a hailstorm.”
“Knock ‘em dead.” It’s a metaphor. More or less.
Before she can get started, though, a couple of the older kids stroll onto the grounds, clearly as ticked off as they are stupid. One of them - Dionne, who has telekinesis, magenta hair and the ears of a cat - yells back at the Purifiers. “Nobody wants you here!”
“Repent!” someone shouts - and then there’s the sound of a rifle shot.
Dionne is still falling as Logan shoves open the twin panels of the French window leaps outside. Above him he hears Ororo cry out in anger - she’s flying high, and the sky overhead is darkening fast. Already the protest has broken up as the Purifiers scatter; they weren’t prepared for actual violence.
Not most of ‘em, Logan thinks. Just one. That’s all it took.
As lightning crashes down just behind the fleeing protestors, Logan reaches Dionne where she’s fallen. To his surprise and relief, there’s not much blood; she’s propped up on her forearms, even, obviously not badly hurt.
He only sees the dart protruding from her shoulder as her hair begins to change from magenta to black.
“No!” Dionne cries, reaching toward her ears. Her human ears. She reaches out with a hand; no telling what it is she’s trying to move with her mind, because she fails. She starts to sob. “They Cured me!”
Logan had been on the verge of going after them and shaking out just who fired that gun, once he was sure Dionne had survived. Now he remains still. If the Purifiers have the Cure, then they can undo the threat he represents in an instant.
And chasing them now won’t change the fact that more will come.
**
That night, there’s an emergency meeting in the Danger Room, the only space at the school large enough for the entire student body, faculty and gathered alumni. Logan finds himself standing next to Ororo and Hank, up front; the school is in some serious trouble if he counts as senior faculty.
How the hell did he get into this? Wasn’t that long ago Logan wasn’t even sure about remaining on Xavier’s team - now here he is helping to lead it. The responsibility feels like a leash around his neck, maybe a noose, until he sees Marie standing in the back of the crowded room. It’s a reminder of why this team matters: For Logan, it pretty much all boils down to the fact that Xavier gave Marie a home when nobody else would. Whatever led Xavier to do that - well, that’s the kind of lead Logan doesn’t mind following. For now, anyway.
“Everybody, listen to me,” Storm calls out; the crowd settles slightly. “After what happened to Dionne today, the school has received multiple requests from parents to send their children home. I’m afraid that, for students under the age of majority, we must comply.”
Another clamor - angry, afraid, unsure. Dionne herself insisted on going back to Beaumont within an hour of the attack; she didn’t even want to show her face in the corridors. Apparently being human isn’t as easy as it looks.
Logan finds himself again searching through the crowd for Marie; she’s standing in the back, clearly unsure whether she belongs here.
“However,” Ororo says, holding up one hand, “many of you are here without any input from your families. Other parents feel you are safer with other mutants than you would be at home. But we can’t remain here now that the school has become a target.”
“The cops can set up guards - ” someone says.
Hank looks solemn as he interjects, “The New Salem police department has refused any special security measures. No funding, they said. The truth, I suspect, is that they don’t see the problem. One person I spoke to even claimed Dionne’s difficulties had been ‘solved.’”
A hush falls. Normally, they don’t worry too much about protecting the school; even the one time they got jumped with all the adults besides Logan gone, the majority of the kids got away and took out plenty of soldiers in the process. But if the Purifiers now have the Cure, they can turn any mutant into a human instantly. Their mutant powers, their main defense, can’t be counted on any longer.
Ororo continues, “Obviously, if any of you don’t want to come along, if you’d rather return to your families - whether to take the Cure or not - that’s your business. We’ll help any of you who want to do that. But this school must find another, more secret location immediately.”
A roar of conversation, protests and plans and no clear center to any of it: It’s deafening. Logan wonders if it’s so loud, on a mental level, that it might awaken Xavier. He’d like to hear the Professor’s advice around now. Nobody wants to leave this place they know and love so well.
Beast steps to the center of the room, and his rich voice rings out above the crowd. “The fact is that the Cure is now available, cheap and limitless. The humans who sympathize with us now primarily want to take away our mutations for what they believe to be our own good. The humans who don’t sympathize want to use this Cure to remove us from existence. Today we saw the harm caused by extremists. That will be as nothing compared to the harm caused by the well-meaning and misguided. Defending this mansion is too short-sighted a goal.”
“We should reach out to more alumni we can trust for help,” Storm says. “And it’s important that we move quietly, without any fuss - if this becomes a public event, it becomes a hundred times harder. But with a new base of operations, we can keep the children safe while we decide how we respond to this Purifier threat. The school must come first.”
Beast adds, “No one should underestimate the gravity of the situation. Please, everyone, your decision to join us or not must be made with a full understanding of the risks.”
In the silence that follows, a student says, “Are we going to reach out to the Brotherhood about this? I mean - if we need help - maybe they do too.”
To Logan’s shock - and to judge by the ensuing hush, that of the entire room - Mystique is the one who answers. “Not now.” She tugs at a lock of her hair, too hard, as if she is contemplating pulling it out. “Erik would have listened. Pyro won’t.”
No, Pyro won’t listen. If that jerk’s in charge? He’s going to go after humanity no matter what; the Cure will only make him more reckless. Logan’s been around long enough to see guys go bad, and Pyro’s rotting from the inside out.
“Okay,” says Kitty, with resolve. She’s a spunky little thing; Logan likes her. Too bad she’s dating that punk. “We’re on our own. But where do we go?”
“There are options, most of them outside this country.” Beast begins ticking them off on his paws. “Switzerland requires registration by all mutants, but such registration is completely confidential and they’ve steadfastly refused mutant extradition on any grounds. Most Scandinavian nations also have registration but provide ample civil liberties protections. Argentina isn’t asking any questions right now. And Italy? Hah! The government’s collapsed four times merely debating the question.” Then he seems to remember this isn’t a merely theoretical discussion. “Logistically speaking, our first choice should be Canada.”
Canada has voted down mutant registration by a large margin, and the Purifier movement doesn’t have much traction there. It’s well known that mutants are starting to cross the border - sometimes with paperwork, sometimes not. R.D.s, they’re called: Registration dodgers. Some newsmagazines and websites claim that Canada is essentially trying to arm themselves with mutants, a kind of evolution-based arms race. Logan figures they can deal with that when it comes down to it. More troubling: vigilante parties of Purifier militias are starting to form at the borders. Mostly it’s yahoos with more beer than ammo, a few church groups there to do more singing than fighting, but the situation could get uglier.
But it’s a few hours’ drive away, and Logan figures they could get there easier than anyplace else.
To Logan’s surprise, Marie tentatively raises a hand. “I think I know where we ought to go.”
Everybody stares at her. A gangly kid in the back, the one named Volt, says, “You’re not even a mutant anymore! Why haven’t you gone home?”
“Hey. We’re all in this together,” Logan says, giving Volt a glare he’ll remember well into his next life. “So can it, okay? Marie, what were you saying?
She now looks shy again, but her voice remains steady. “We should go back to Alkali Lake.”
People murmur in disapproval, and Logan frowns. The government knows about that place, seeing as how they built it and all. Also, it was flooded under about a hundred feet of water. Plus that’s where Scott died, and Jean … the real Jean, not the Phoenix. He doesn’t think of the lake as a top vacation destination.
But Beast straightens up, whiskers twitching in excitement. “Of course! We ought to have thought of it immediately.” When everyone stares, he continues, “Somewhere at the bottom of that lake is a version of Cerebro. A version we might be able to fix, given time.”
He doesn’t have to add the rest. When the Professor recovers, he could use Cerebro to talk to all mutants, everywhere. That’s the single best thing that could happen for their side.
And if the Professor never wakes up - they’re no worse off around Alkali Lake than they would be anyplace else.
People are nodding, chatting, settling into agreement. Marie straightens slightly, proud of herself like she ought to be.
That’s his old stomping grounds, so Logan mulls it over for a second. “Got a thought,” he finally says. “An old mining town up around that way - couple hours’ drive from Alkali. Built up for an iron mine that went bust around 1975, the Claremont vein. Lotta houses up there standing around empty. They’re probably not in great shape, but they were still okay last time I was up there. Far away from everything else. We could do something with that.”
Beast fluffs up with satisfaction. “So we have a plan.”
They have the beginnings of one, anyway, and a smaller group is quickly chosen to figure out the details. Logan is chosen for the committee. It makes sense, kind of, since he knows the terrain, but shit, is this what he’s come to? Serving on committees? He’d rather be out there swinging his claws straight through some Purifier’s skull. But if the price is leaving the kids on their own - well, he’s stuck.
He deals with the uneasiness by asking to take a cigar break, and nobody seems to notice that he usually smokes anywhere he likes without asking first. Logan steps into a side corridor, one that isn’t used much. Turns out he’s not alone, but the person standing there is about the only one he’d want to see right now. “Heya, kid. Good idea you had in there.”
“I told you, stop callin’ me kid.” But Marie smiles at Logan as she says it. It’s a joke between them now. “And thanks.”
The light overhead is filtered through a metal grid, and lines of shadow criss-cross Marie’s face as he says, “Now you need to head home.”
“What?”
“Your parents asked you back, right? That’s where you ought to be. You have a normal life waiting for you. Maybe you ought to live it.”
Oh, she’s got a temper on her once she’s riled. “You of all people ought to know I didn’t take the Cure because I was afraid of what other people thought of me! I didn’t do it to go back to who I was before. I wanted to be somebody new. How do you not see that?”
“Hey, hey.” Logan holds his hands up. “I see it, okay? But this is gonna be dangerous. I don’t like the idea of you getting hurt.”
Her eyes take on that soft look that tells him he’s on dangerous ground - maybe he said too much, even though it was no more than the truth. Marie leans against the wall, hands behind her back. Quietly, she says, “Running away from you guys feels cowardly.”
“Not a cowardly bone in your body.” His eyes lock with hers as he steps slightly closer. “But this is a serious situation, and if you can be safe - you oughta be.”
“I’m not leaving,” she says. “I’m not a mutant anymore, but - I’m still one of you. If that means putting everything on the line, well, then, it does. I mean, you get it, Logan, right? You’re coming too, because you’re one of us.”
A leash, or a noose, tightening all the time - and Logan doesn’t even want to shake loose, not with Marie standing there looking at him like he’s actually worth something. He almost believes her. “Yeah. I get it.”
10.
Raven goes back to her room after the meeting. She’s taken it back; first she disassembled her bed and put it back together in the middle of the floor, then hunted through the attic for any of her old things. Now there’s a moth-eaten green afghan covering the desk that shouldn’t be there, and a yellowed Raggedy Ann nestled on the bookshelf. Nobody tries to come in here anymore, nobody except her - and Beast, but Beast is different.
So when she hears the rap on her door, Raven doesn’t mind saying, “Come in.”
“Good evening,” Beast says. He’s always so polite. He always was, even when they were teenagers. Alex and Armando would flirt outrageously with her, Sean and Angel would try to tell grosser jokes than the other - but Hank always asked nicely. Opened doors. Once, when they all walked out of an Elvis Presley movie to find a thunderstorm had begun, he held his jacket over her head in the rain. “I’ve hardly seen you today. How are you?”
“The same.” Alone. Frightened. Unsure of who or what she is any longer. But - eating again. The nightmares are less frequent. Nobody is going out of their way to be friendly, save for Beast, but nobody is going out of their way to be rude, either. “A little better, maybe.”
He sits in the chair nearest her makeshift bed. “I wanted to say - what you said at the meeting today was a valuable contribution.”
“Like anybody wouldn’t know not to trust Pyro.”
“Well, yes, but you were the one who understood that Pyro has probably taken over leadership of the Brotherhood. None of us would have guessed that. He’s so young.”
“He has fire.”
“… we did know his power, of course …”
“I’m not talking about his power.” Raven hugs herself as she leans back on her pillows. Recalling the Brotherhood is difficult for her, in every sense, but she finds she wants to answer correctly. “I mean, Pyro has energy. Drive. His hate is like a furnace.” How she remembers that warm glow. “People are drawn to him even when they don’t agree. These days, most people will agree.”
Beast mulls this over, concern knitting his deep blue brows together. “Do you have any idea where they are?”
“None. They’ll have gone someplace new. Nowhere Magneto or I ever saw.”
“I’d like to warn the authorities about him. But without specifics, it’s useless, isn’t it? Like those blithering ‘orange alerts’ at the airport. Something might happen, but there’s no saying when or where.” He leans back, resting his head against the wall, and Raven realizes he’s nearly as tired as she is. “That’s another reason to move quickly. If Pyro attacks and somehow vindicates the actions of the Purifiers - the last thing we need is to fight our way out.”
We, Beast says. He assumes she will be coming with them. Raven doesn’t know how she feels about that. Really she’d like to stay here at the house. She could put everything back how it used to be once there are no students in the way.
But another part of her - the deepest part, the adult part, the one who felt the pain and from whom she has been hiding - knows there’s no going back to the way things were.
So why not the X-Men? Why not Canada? At least Beast will be there.
His eyes still shut, he says, “If you think of anything else about Pyro that might be useful - anything at all - will you tell us?”
“I’ll tell you.”
Beast doesn’t catch the distinction. “Don’t think people haven’t noticed the help. There’s a place for you here, Raven. Personally I believe there always was.”
He’s so naïve - no. Innocent. In some ways, Hank remains as innocent as he was when they first met, when he wore a human’s face and blushed at the sight of her and was too shy even to steal a kiss. “We don’t need always. We just need now.”
“Nicely put.” Beast rubs at his temples.
“You’re tired,” she says. “Do you need to sleep?”
“Rather. But rest is hard to come by these days.”
“If it would help - I would watch over you. Like you did for me.”
He opens his eyes, and she sees that he wasn’t talking about that at all … but her mistake has touched him, deeply. “That’s kind of you.”
“So sleep.”
Beast pauses before replying, “Just a catnap. Don’t let me sleep past the hour.”
“Promise,” Raven says, and she means it. Beast may be the last person left to whom she would ever make a promise, however small.
11.
He is within himself and without himself.
That’s from a Beatles lyric, isn’t it? Charles loves the Beatles, has from the first moment he heard “Love Me Do.” His favorite is “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” because it reminds him of Erik. Favorite - that’s not the right word, because the song hurts to hear, and yet he never turns the song off, always wants to hear the words, always wants to think of Erik again.
“Professor?” That’s Ororo; he knows her voice. “Professor, we’re going to leave the school.”
And they must, Charles sees that through Ororo’s mind. Through the windows of her eyes he sees the protesters standing on the grounds, chanting close enough for the children to hear, one of them striking out at Dionne, whose fear jabs into him like a cold dart.
Then he’s off again, sifting through minds with no plan, no action, only the moment. This is Reverend Matthew Risman, speaking to cable news stations about how mutants are no part of God’s plan. Risman gilds his words with the misused word of the Lord, and yet Charles can see into his heart, knows that his hatred of mutants is purely calculated, a grab at ratings success - or maybe political power, who knows? It’s going so well -
Charles skirts through the minds of Risman’s followers - so many, so many more than there should be - and he sees mutants as pitiful freaks, mutants as demons, mutants as lepers, mutants as homosexuals, mutants as everything people think of as other, everything they refuse to accept, so many minds, so many explanations and so little understanding -
And at that moment, when he can take no more, his connection to the infinite breaks. His world shrinks from a globe to a pinpoint, to the most essential things: The warmth of this school, the beating of his own heart, and the memories he holds most dear.
Jean as a little girl.
Bashing around Oxford pubs with Raven on his arm.
Hank calling with the word of his appointment to the Cabinet, pride shining from his voice.
And Erik - no one moment. Every second with him, the good and the bad. Always Erik.
“Charles, we’re going to move you.” That’s Moira. He can’t remember if she’s still the young, headstrong woman he first met or the brilliant physician she becomes later. She is both and neither. “If we jostle you, I’m sorry. But it’s got to be done.”
Nervous as a schoolboy, fumbling with Erik’s belt as Erik’s hands pull at his shirt. Their open mouths eager for each other. Rain against the windowpanes.
“The children - ”
“Gone for another hour yet.” Erik’s whisper against his throat, the heat of his breath sending shivers along his body. His hands running up the length of Charles’ back. “They went to an Elvis Presley movie.”
“Long live the King.”
Erik laughing, low rumble in his chest, Charles grinning just to know that he’s made Erik smile. There hasn’t been enough joy in Erik’s life, but now that can change, with them together the whole world can change -
“I thought it was impossible to want you more.” Erik’s breath warm against his ear, Erik’s fingers pulling his shirt open to brush against his chest. “I was wrong.”
Backing him against the wall, his tongue in Charles’ mouth, his hand groping for Charles’ cock through his trousers. Desire clenching Charles in its white-hot fist. The whole world melts away, there’s nothing but Erik, nothing but the way they begin to move together.
Straps across his chest. The beeping of a monitor. He recognizes that it keeps time with his heartbeat. Is he still alive, then? Charles is beginning to forget the difference between death and life.
The children are less frightened now; there is something to do, and any task, no matter how mundane or how dangerous, cuts through dread better than words of comfort or advice ever could. Through the children Charles loads the trucks. Locks the doors. Says goodbye to the one place in the world that has ever felt like home.
Then he is running through the corridors, a boy again, Raven at his heels. “Catch me if you can!”
Raven sitting apart from the others, trying to be far away, and yet she’s close, closer to him than she’s been in decades - Charles reaches for her -
What he finds is chaos. He spins away from her, away from his own body, into the vast unknowable dark. Once again Charles feels the fear and pain of the hunted and lost mutants across the globe, his untethered mind reaching further and deeper than he ever could, consciously, without Cerebro, and the anguish of it overwhelms him.
The monitor’s beeps become unsteady. Moira is swearing. Charles thinks he should be worried but he does not remember why.
As the sounds steady themselves again, he drifts away, seeking any anchor in this terrible storm.
Seeking Erik.
Erik is at a bus stop, huddling in a thin coat against the late-November wind. Dry leaves skitter across the sidewalk at his feet. He is both the younger man Charles first met and the older one he last saw at the moment of his death. The eyes are the same.
“Charles,” Erik whispers, lifting his head. “Is that you?”
Joyfully, Charles rushes into Erik, into the past, towing them both into a place he recognizes. Solid ground to stand on. They’re in bed together, just after that first time, breathing fast and gazing at each other in wonder.
“I didn’t mean to leave you in suspense.” Charles can’t help grinning as he runs one hand through his rain-damp hair. “If I’d been certain you wanted me too, all this while - God, Erik, I wouldn’t have left it this long, not for the sake of the children, not for anything.”
“Listen to me.” Erik’s hand curves around Charles’ face; his thumb strokes along Charles’ cheekbone, steady and reassuring. “This happened before.”
“And it’s going to happen again. Soon.” Already his body is responding to Erik once more. Charles nestles closer to him, unwilling to be even a few inches away. “You’re right, you know. There are no authorities to check on us or take the kids away because we’re - and besides, we can keep it private. Like you said, whose business is it but ours?” He smiles, more shyly. “This is the best secret I’ve ever kept.”
Erik kisses him, fast and almost too urgent. “Charles, concentrate. Can you tell me what’s happening to you now?”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the fact that we’re together.”
“It matters to me. You must try.”
Charles tries. The room seems to waver, as if he is viewing it through the water running down the windowpanes. Walls are oddly transparent, though he’s not sure what he sees through them. Only Erik remains blessedly real; Charles can feel his touch, smell his skin.
He whispers, “I’m lost. Every time I think I’ve found the path back to myself, it turns out I’m more lost than before. I can’t tell which mind is my own, sometimes.” He leans his head against Erik’s chest, needing that solidity. “They’re taking me away. I don’t know where. I should be there to help them - I want to be, I’m trying to be - but there’s no way out of the maze. You’re the only real thing here.”
“Charles, I’m coming to find you. Do you understand?” Erik embraces him, and they twine their limbs together, chest against chest so that their heartbeats collide, as if they will physically prevent anyone from tearing them apart. “No matter what, I will find you.”
“Don’t leave me - ”
He’s looking up at Erik, but Erik is older now, wearing a helmet that separates their minds. Cerebro circles them both, but the wrong Cerebro, a broken and evil one designed to turn Charles against everything he values most. And Erik is helping it.
“Kill them all,” Erik says. Every human being on earth, he means, and Charles can’t stop himself from trying to comply. Something at the core of him cries out in the pain of knowing the wrong he is about to do - and the pain of knowing that Erik has finally, utterly betrayed him.
Then all those human minds rush in, gasping for breath, shrieking in agony, and the agony claims Charles, swirling around him.
He must save Erik from himself. He leaps from the ship into the frigid ocean. But Erik isn’t down there, nobody’s down there, and Charles is drowning alone in the dark.
***
Continued tomorrow!
6.
She will call herself Raven.
Mystique was her powerful self. Mystique was her true self. Raven is the unwanted one, all she will ever be now.
Sometimes she remembers who the people surrounding her are - remembers battling Wolverine in the Liberty Island gift shop, remembers lightning bolts crackling all around storm. But their names go away as fast as they come. The one constant is that she knows they are Charles’ friends.
Earlier they said Charles was dead, and now they say he’s alive, so clearly she’s not the only one who’s confused.
Raven lies in bed in the room they’ve given her, though it is clearly not her room. Her room is on the second floor, just down the hall from Charles. She can look out at the pond from her window, and all her books are in a little shelf under the window seat.
(That was long ago, a lifetime ago, a life she’s repudiated and torn up and refused to look back on ever ever ever - )
(Magneto looking down at her, walking away, because she’s not a mutant any longer, she’s one of them and everybody knows they are worthless, they can’t be trusted - )
(She looks down at her hand and wills it to go back to itself, to be blue, but it won’t, so it’s true. She can’t be trusted anymore.)
Her fingers rake through her disheveled hair. The headaches have started again, and she doesn’t know if that’s from the shocks the humans gave her or all the crying she’s done. Things like cause and effect, now and later, are too jumbled to make any sense of now.
But maybe she would feel better in her own room.
Raven rises from the bed and wraps a robe around her; now that she is wearing foreign skin, she wants to keep it covered from everyone, especially from herself. Carefully she avoids the third step, which creaks, and tiptoes down the hallway of the second floor. Mommy doesn’t always remember her when Charles is asleep.
When she opens the door, though, her bedroom is all wrong, and there are strangers inside.
“If the rumors are true, and China really had mass executions of mutants today - the Professor might have felt that, and that could be why he slipped back into the coma. The psychic trauma would have been tremendous.”
“I don’t want us to become overly alarmed by rumors. If you believed everything about mutants that you read on the internet - ”
“Why would the Chinese be killin’ mutants when they can just change ‘em? That’s what I don’t - the hell is she doing in here?”
That last one is Wolverine, and now he is staring at Raven as though she is the one intruding.
“Why are you in my room?” she says.
The woman with the snow-white hair - Storm, it’s Storm, she knows this - Storm rises and speaks to her slowly. “This is a reading room. Your room is this way - ”
“This is my room!” Raven needs one thing she knows to be true. “This room! This one!”
“My God,” says the third one, the big blue one who is rising to his feet. “Raven.”
She stares at him, and then it comes to her. They have not laid eyes on one another in decades - that, she knows for sure. In a small voice, she whispers, “Beast?”
Beast steps closer to her, but he’s not talking to her anymore. “When did Raven get here? Why didn’t you tell me she’d come to the mansion?”
“We’ve been kinda distracted, what with people rising from the dead,” Wolverine snaps.
“You two knew each other. Of course.” Storm looks at Raven again, still kindly. “She’s not herself.”
“I see that.” Beast looks so worried. He used to look like that when he was playing with his chemicals, not sure how an experiment would turn out. Raven realizes she’s the experiment. “Would the two of you let me talk with her? Here?”
“Why here?” Wolverine says.
Beast’s voice is very gentle as he smiles at Raven. “Because she’s quite right. This was her room.”
Storm and Wolverine exchange a look, but they leave, shutting the door behind them. Raven goes to the window seat; there are still books piled on the shelves beneath, but not her books, not any longer. She sits down, suddenly aware that she has been awake a very long time. Days, perhaps.
Beast takes his place next to her. He’s larger than she remembered. The blue of his fur has deepened, and his features are farther from human than before. But his eyes are the same.
“What brought you here?” he asks. The others demanded to know; he just wants to hear. The difference is one of the few things Raven understands very clearly right now.
“I wanted to find Charles. Is he dead or isn’t he?”
“-that question should be simpler to answer than it is.” Beast sighs. “He’s with us, but very ill. Not awake. We have to let him rest, and see.”
That answer makes sense to her. Raven hugs herself as she stares out the window at the pond. “Does Erik still live here?”
“No, he doesn’t. Did you want to find him too?”
“Erik doesn’t want to find me. I’m human. He hates humans.”
“But you’re still you,” he says, as if he were sure of that. And it’s the one thing Raven’s never been sure of, not ever, not since the first time her skin flushed blue as a child. For a long time her mission sustained her - the one she shared with Erik - but that’s gone now, and she doesn’t know what’s left behind.
Very softly, Beast says, “Who hurt you, Raven? What did they do to you?”
“The police. FBI. Somebody. I don’t know who, but they had badges and guns.” Raven rakes her fingernails through her hair. “They taped wires to me, and the shocks - ”
The shocks made her transform, her body rippling from blue to beige to brown to scarlet, female to male, person to animal, naked to clothed. The screams coming out of her throat belonged to a hundred voices and yet she couldn’t make them not belong to her. Everything stopped making sense a long time before they put her in the truck, before Erik came to get her. Sometimes Raven thinks it doesn’t matter that they made her human there, because she’d already stopped being who she was.
“I am so sorry,” Beast says.
“Humans are evil.”
He hesitates. “People can be evil.”
Those aren’t the same thing, not exactly, but Raven can’t think about it right now. She wants to go to sleep, in her room. But there’s no bed in here. “Can I sleep on the couch?”
“Of course.”
But even here she doesn’t feel entirely safe. “Will you stay?”
His big paw settles over her shoulder. “Of course.”
And as she lies on the couch, she watches Beast in the nearest chair standing guard over her, and Raven doesn’t take her eyes off him until finally, finally, her head slumps down and she rests.
7.
Who is Marie?
She asks herself this question for the first time when she wakes up the morning after Professor X rises from the dead, a day when anything seems possible. Yes, she’s in her old room - same clothes, same face - but everything else has changed, or can change.
“What are you still doing here?” asks Volt, an obnoxious upperclassman with electric powers, but not the personality to match. “Don’t you have a mundane existence to lead somewhere else?”
“I’m still a part of this school,” Marie replies, though she’s still figuring out what that means.
Logan, true to his word, sets her up with stuff to do; she inherits one of Mr. Summers’ old jobs, cataloging and servicing most of the tech equipment. The fancier stuff has to be left to Forge, but Marie is more than capable of checking out the uniforms and communicators, and soon she’ll be ready to work with the vehicles, too. Maybe they’ll even teach her how to fly the Blackbird, since she made a start at it one time.
“Okay.” The cigar clamped in Logan’s teeth makes it look like he’s grinning as he looks at the motorcycle she’s been studying, but he’s not. “Tell me the four main components of the bike’s starter system - in order of how likely they are to break down on you.”
“The battery. The starter switch.” Motor or relay next? Marie tucks her white lock of hair behind one ear. “The starter relay and the starter motor.”
Anybody else would say “good job”; Logan’s version of this is to say nothing at all, just nod. By now that gesture means as much to her as the highest praise.
They’re in the garage, where she now spends a fair bit of her time; Logan’s not the only one who smells like motor oil now. To her surprise, she kind of likes being a grease monkey, wearing beat-up jeans and a tank top, working with her hands, and listening to the radio for hours on end. Logan likes old music from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but he’s let her choose the station a time or two. She actually caught him tapping his fingers against the Blackbird to some hip-hop the other day, not that she called him on it.
Though why couldn’t she tease him? Rogue couldn’t have - she was too shy - but Marie can be a little bolder, she decides.
Logan uses his cigar to gesture at the motorcycle. “Say the starter motor’s not working. What’s most likely to be the problem?”
“Most likely to be plain old dirt. But you could also check to see if the brushes or bushings are worn, or maybe the commutators.”
“The bushings?” He gives her a look.
Shit, should she have said bearings? Is it bearings instead? Marie considers this for a second before answering, “Yeah. The bushings.”
A real grin spreads across Logan’s face. “All right then, kid.”
Time to start teasing back. “Kid? Isn’t it time you dropped that?”
“I’m still older than you.”
“You’re older than Storm, too, but you don’t call her kid.” She pretends to examine the bike more carefully, fingers brushing along the chrome. “Maybe I should start calling you Gramps.”
“Gramps?” Logan gives her a look, and she can’t tell whether he’s amused or pissed off. Probably both.
So Marie puts on her most innocent face. “Or Paw Paw?”
“If so much as one ‘Paw’ comes outta your mouth - ” But Logan doesn’t finish the sentence, because she’s laughing too hard to listen.
So, Marie has real skills that are useful to the team. Marie stands up for herself. Marie can tease Logan - maybe even flirt a little.
But that doesn’t answer the whole question of who she is.
The other students always gave her a wide berth in the hallways, not because they were unfriendly or anything, just because it was the smart thing to do. Marie never minded, exactly - most of the time it was a relief to know she wouldn’t hurt anybody on accident. But she was looking forward to having people tap her on the shoulder, brush against her or just touch her like it was no big deal. She’s missed that so much. A hug, or a handshake, or even a freakin’ high five would make her day.
It doesn’t happen. The space between Marie and the other students shrinks physically, but has widened emotionally. The Cure changed more than her DNA, as far as they’re concerned. She has become an outsider in the only place she ever felt like she belonged.
The TV ads don’t help the situation either. They start up about two weeks after the big announcement of synthetic Cure, around about the time Professor X - still comatose - is brought back to the mansion in an ambulance. All the ads make the Cure sound so great. They always show the worst mutations possible - facial deformities, or animal claws and paws gunked up to look totally feral - and then have people walking out afterward as gorgeous as supermodels. As they stride into the sunshine, in slow motion, a banner reads HELP US HELP YOU. It’s as if every mutation is one of the bad ones, and as if taking that shot is supposed to fix everything in your life and make you sexy, too. As far as Marie can see, she’s the best-case scenario for the Cure … and she’s still got plenty of problems to deal with. The worst-case scenario looks a lot more like Mystique.
Mystique - hard to think of her as Raven Darkholme - has become the school ghost. She’s allowed to stay, mostly because Beast sticks up for her and keeps her out of the way, but Marie thinks being here isn’t helping her. Mystique’s eyes are unfocused, her posture hunched. Storm said Magneto abandoned her when she was made human. When Marie glances at Bobby - walking next to Kitty in the hallways, now, holding her hand like it’s no big deal - she thinks maybe she understands a little how that feels.
One night, though, when Marie tiptoes down to see if there’s any root beer left in the fridge, she peeks into the kitchen to see Bobby sitting alone at the counter. He looks tired. Depressed, even. So she says the first word she’s spoken to him since their breakup: “Hey.”
Bobby glances over at her, but he doesn’t look thrilled to see her. He doesn’t look ashamed of himself, either. He looks - the kindest word for it would be “irritated.”
It’s natural that they’d rub each other the wrong way for a while, she figures, so she tries to keep it casual. “You’re up late.”
“I got an email from my parents,” Bobby says. “They asked me to take the Cure.”
Back when Marie first took the Cure, she emailed her parents to let them know. It was the first time she’d reached out to them since she’d told them about the school, and the first time her mother had ever written back. Her heart had leaped when she’d seen the return email.
Momma had been so happy, saying It’s all okay now; you can come home. That was the first time Marie had been sure she couldn’t have come home before.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Bobby whirls on her. “You took it already. You’re human. Why don’t you go home?” His voice breaks on the word home, and tears glimmer in his eyes. “You can go home! You can see your family! Why wouldn’t you go? Why wouldn’t anyone - ”
He pushes away from the counter and rushes out of the kitchen. Marie thinks again of those cloying television ads. HELP US HELP YOU.
She’s not the only one wondering who she really is.
8.
Erik doesn’t sleep. He hardly eats. The small bank account he maintained under this alias is down to its last dollars; he won’t be able to go on more than another couple of months, at this rate.
He doesn’t care. Either he will regain his power or he will be lost. Everything will be lost.
Those stupid blithering television commercials were bad enough. But now the humans have brought God into it.
“God created man in his image!” cries Reverend Matthew Risman, leader of the Purity movement. He seems to be on every station now, his photo in every newspaper, usually with a cross silhouetted behind him “These mutations take humanity farther from God’s image, and thus farther from God’s will. But the Lord’s grace has provided a way for them to return to the fold. Satan claims these mutants at birth, marking them with his stains. Do they not have claws? Do some not have tails just like Lucifer? Now some of them refuse to take the Cure. They refuse to reflect the image of God. They choose the likeness of the devil!”
And such. Risman has gone from obscurity to celebrity within months; his tent revivals are drawing crowds. He draws more publicity than real followers, apparently - many news reports call him a firebrand, a radical. His faithful, the Purifiers, are considered to be on the fringe of society, closely akin to the militia groups of the 1990s. This marginalization doesn’t comfort Erik in the slightest. Quite the opposite: A radical on the fringes gives the average human being someone to compare himself to and feel self-satisfied. I’m not prejudiced against mutants, they can think, not like that Risman. And so they feel no guilt as they consider voting for mandatory registration, or mandatory Cures.
Erik notes that Beast has been strangely quiet about the matter, but probably he’s being censored by the very government he chose to join. Oh, no doubt they’d let him say a few token words about mutant pride, but they won’t let him speak against Jesus. Political suicide.
Once, Charles would have spoken out, but now there is no one left to speak. No one who will be listened to, anyway: Erik knows he lost his public voice with his powers. The price of force - one he paid willingly, but it has proved dear.
The old cane chair furnished with the apartment creaks under Erik’s slight weight as he steadies himself for one more attempt. Atop the battered table is a roll of quarters, unwrapped and stacked. That’s as much money as Erik has to spend on food this week.
Extending one hand, he tries to smell the metal - to taste it - to roll the feel of it along his skin. And it’s not the numbness that encased him for weeks after being hit with the Cure: Erik can sense something there. Perhaps this is what it would be like for someone long-blinded to again glimpse one wavering shaft of light. The muscles in his hand tense as he urges the quarters to rise, to rotate, to spin around the room in a circle …
The roll of quarters jiggles, and a few coins slide off the top and clatter onto the table. One of them spins in the air for a half-second, maybe less, before falling alongside the rest.
Erik slumps forward. His disappointment is too great for grief; it erases feeling, leaves him numb.
If he had no powers and no hope of ever regaining them, he’d know what to do. He’d walk down to the river with stones in his pockets, and there he would drown. Drowning in a river called the Charles would be his final statement - both a bleak joke and a declaration of love, neither of which anyone would ever understand.
There he would die, and so he could never watch his race perish.
It’s different this time. Worse this time. Mutantkind is choosing to eradicate itself. They line up in front of clinics. They give cheerful interviews about returning to normal life. Their skin fades from indigo or scarlet to the usual and banal. They toss their shriveled wings into the trash bin along with their fingernail clippings. They claim not to miss their fangs.
The worst moment, for Erik, was when he saw Chimera on television, the latest to be made pure. Chimera, once among the most loyal of the Brotherhood, now willingly human.
“I tried to use my powers the best way I knew how,” she said in the interview. “I went after drug runners, people like that. But I still had to live with the knowledge that I would always be hated, be hunted It’s a lonelier feeling than most mutants want to admit.”
What made it hardest to bear hearing her words was hearing the echo of his own.
How often had he told the Brotherhood that they’d always be apart? That they would always be despised, that domination and supremacy were their only safety? He had given the Brotherhood no reason to believe in anything other than a desperate struggle to survive. When they were given another choice, a surprising number of them had taken it.
This is what’s left of his life’s work: Frightened mutants throwing away their birthrights, leaving only the thugs behind. Erik’s great mission lies in ruins, and now he has to second-guess nearly every choice he ever made.
If only he could restore his powers! But if his recovery never goes beyond this, it’s essentially meaningless. The Cure will still cripple his kind beyond their ability to fight back, if they even want to fight.
His hand shakes as he pushes back strands of gray hair. So tired.
Honing his talents took time, he reminds himself. Decades. He spent his entire youth making himself strong; precision came only in adulthood. Only after he began working with Charles Xavier.
My God, Charles, how I need you now.
Shopworn memories descend upon him, and he’s too exhausted and sad to push them back. Erik remembers walking through the streets of New York City, Charles at his side, their hats cocked at angles they considered rakish. He remembers tiptoeing through the school’s hallway late at night, lest any of the students realize where he was going and why, and feeling Charles’ eagerness all the while. He remembers a night they opened the windows while “Stardust” played on the hi-fi, and he and Charles made out like teenagers for almost an hour, until long after the needle had found the inner groove of the Nat King Cole LP and hissed in its course.
And he remembers how it all began -
The far edges of the grounds on a blustery, gray spring day, one of those that suggests winter is returning for an encore.
Charles’ plans for an airstrip right here in New Salem, gesturing at the place it will go while occasionally squinting up at the clouds overhead and the occasional cold splash of rain.
Running to the car before the rain could soak them both, cold air raw in Erik’s throat, damp earth soft beneath his feet.
The front seat, the low whirr of the heater.
“Haven’t you any gloves, Erik? You know you could borrow some of mine.”
Charles slipping off his fine leather gloves, and Erik thinking he’d be given them as some sort of well-meaning present.
Charles instead taking Erik’s red, chapped hands in his, rubbing them, warming them.
“The thing about being a telepath - once people know, everyone assumes you understand everything. Hearing’s not the same as understanding.”
Glancing away from the sight of Charles’ hands massaging his to see blue eyes, uncertain but gentle, so close to his own.
Erik’s dark eyes, always so wary and yet now alight with hope.
“And I’ve tried to tell myself - we’ve got to think of the children first, what we’re building for them, because we can’t endanger that for … personal concerns, but - my God, Erik - ”
The realization that his futile, solitary passion is neither solitary nor futile. Raindrops spattering hard on the windshield. His pulse leaping as his fingers close around Charles’, as a touch becomes a caress, as they lean closer to one another.
Erik’s voice, softer than ever before, whispering only “Charles,” and the sound of it melting down his spine like hot wax from a candle’s flame.
“I can’t tell if you want me or not - because I want you so much and I can’t tell where I end and you begin - ”
Pulling Charles to him. Opening Charles’ mouth with his own. The feel of stubble beneath his fingertips, Charles’ tongue between his lips, the desperate need to be closer, closer still, pushing Charles down on the front seat and kissing him until they were both dizzy.
“I want you. God, how I want you.”
Erik’s eyes open wide.
Those are true memories of that afternoon. But the memories aren’t all his own.
The sight of his own face, the sound of his own voice -
It can’t be possible. He saw Charles die. The Dark Phoenix energy tore him to shreds while Erik could do no more than watch.
And yet.
Shakily he rises from the chair and walks to the table. The quarters are counted out by hand.
If he doesn’t eat much, he can still travel. Although the school is the obvious first stop, Erik senses that he may have to go farther than that. But he thinks he at least has a star to steer by.
9.
Six weeks after the announcement of the synthetic Cure, the crisis comes.
“What the hell is this crap?” Logan demands as he stands by Ororo’s side at the window.
“A protest,” she says. “The Purifiers. They say we’re encouraging the children to live in sin.”
Which now means, living as a mutant. There’s at least 300 Purifiers out there at the far gates, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” like that has jack shit to do with anything.
“Guess you guys have dealt with this before,” he says, because it’s all he can think of.
“No.” Ororo’s voice sounds distant; her expression is forlorn. “The school’s real purpose was secret until recently, and since then there have been a handful of demonstrations in New Salem. At first when I saw them today, I thought they were getting bolder. Then I realized, it was the Professor. It had to be. People would have picketed the school as soon as they found out. But now I believe he always went in and changed their minds so they’d stay in town instead of harassing the children.”
The kids must be watching from the upstairs windows. They’re all getting those letters and emails from home now, like the one that made Marie cry for an hour and a half. Nobody’s left yet, but a lot of them are finding it hard to stay at the school - hard to stay who and what they are. What’s it doing to them, seeing this? The Purifiers look really fucking angry for people who claim to be acting out of love. THINK OF THE CHILDREN, one sign says. Like one single person in that crowd spent two minutes thinking about how any of the kids in this school feel when they see those signs right outside their windows.
Another sign reads: DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR CHILDREN ARE?
“Wish Xavier would wake up again,” Logan says.
“That makes two of us.” Ororo pushes back her snowy hair. “In the meantime, I’m going to see how the Purifiers feel about protesting outside in a hailstorm.”
“Knock ‘em dead.” It’s a metaphor. More or less.
Before she can get started, though, a couple of the older kids stroll onto the grounds, clearly as ticked off as they are stupid. One of them - Dionne, who has telekinesis, magenta hair and the ears of a cat - yells back at the Purifiers. “Nobody wants you here!”
“Repent!” someone shouts - and then there’s the sound of a rifle shot.
Dionne is still falling as Logan shoves open the twin panels of the French window leaps outside. Above him he hears Ororo cry out in anger - she’s flying high, and the sky overhead is darkening fast. Already the protest has broken up as the Purifiers scatter; they weren’t prepared for actual violence.
Not most of ‘em, Logan thinks. Just one. That’s all it took.
As lightning crashes down just behind the fleeing protestors, Logan reaches Dionne where she’s fallen. To his surprise and relief, there’s not much blood; she’s propped up on her forearms, even, obviously not badly hurt.
He only sees the dart protruding from her shoulder as her hair begins to change from magenta to black.
“No!” Dionne cries, reaching toward her ears. Her human ears. She reaches out with a hand; no telling what it is she’s trying to move with her mind, because she fails. She starts to sob. “They Cured me!”
Logan had been on the verge of going after them and shaking out just who fired that gun, once he was sure Dionne had survived. Now he remains still. If the Purifiers have the Cure, then they can undo the threat he represents in an instant.
And chasing them now won’t change the fact that more will come.
**
That night, there’s an emergency meeting in the Danger Room, the only space at the school large enough for the entire student body, faculty and gathered alumni. Logan finds himself standing next to Ororo and Hank, up front; the school is in some serious trouble if he counts as senior faculty.
How the hell did he get into this? Wasn’t that long ago Logan wasn’t even sure about remaining on Xavier’s team - now here he is helping to lead it. The responsibility feels like a leash around his neck, maybe a noose, until he sees Marie standing in the back of the crowded room. It’s a reminder of why this team matters: For Logan, it pretty much all boils down to the fact that Xavier gave Marie a home when nobody else would. Whatever led Xavier to do that - well, that’s the kind of lead Logan doesn’t mind following. For now, anyway.
“Everybody, listen to me,” Storm calls out; the crowd settles slightly. “After what happened to Dionne today, the school has received multiple requests from parents to send their children home. I’m afraid that, for students under the age of majority, we must comply.”
Another clamor - angry, afraid, unsure. Dionne herself insisted on going back to Beaumont within an hour of the attack; she didn’t even want to show her face in the corridors. Apparently being human isn’t as easy as it looks.
Logan finds himself again searching through the crowd for Marie; she’s standing in the back, clearly unsure whether she belongs here.
“However,” Ororo says, holding up one hand, “many of you are here without any input from your families. Other parents feel you are safer with other mutants than you would be at home. But we can’t remain here now that the school has become a target.”
“The cops can set up guards - ” someone says.
Hank looks solemn as he interjects, “The New Salem police department has refused any special security measures. No funding, they said. The truth, I suspect, is that they don’t see the problem. One person I spoke to even claimed Dionne’s difficulties had been ‘solved.’”
A hush falls. Normally, they don’t worry too much about protecting the school; even the one time they got jumped with all the adults besides Logan gone, the majority of the kids got away and took out plenty of soldiers in the process. But if the Purifiers now have the Cure, they can turn any mutant into a human instantly. Their mutant powers, their main defense, can’t be counted on any longer.
Ororo continues, “Obviously, if any of you don’t want to come along, if you’d rather return to your families - whether to take the Cure or not - that’s your business. We’ll help any of you who want to do that. But this school must find another, more secret location immediately.”
A roar of conversation, protests and plans and no clear center to any of it: It’s deafening. Logan wonders if it’s so loud, on a mental level, that it might awaken Xavier. He’d like to hear the Professor’s advice around now. Nobody wants to leave this place they know and love so well.
Beast steps to the center of the room, and his rich voice rings out above the crowd. “The fact is that the Cure is now available, cheap and limitless. The humans who sympathize with us now primarily want to take away our mutations for what they believe to be our own good. The humans who don’t sympathize want to use this Cure to remove us from existence. Today we saw the harm caused by extremists. That will be as nothing compared to the harm caused by the well-meaning and misguided. Defending this mansion is too short-sighted a goal.”
“We should reach out to more alumni we can trust for help,” Storm says. “And it’s important that we move quietly, without any fuss - if this becomes a public event, it becomes a hundred times harder. But with a new base of operations, we can keep the children safe while we decide how we respond to this Purifier threat. The school must come first.”
Beast adds, “No one should underestimate the gravity of the situation. Please, everyone, your decision to join us or not must be made with a full understanding of the risks.”
In the silence that follows, a student says, “Are we going to reach out to the Brotherhood about this? I mean - if we need help - maybe they do too.”
To Logan’s shock - and to judge by the ensuing hush, that of the entire room - Mystique is the one who answers. “Not now.” She tugs at a lock of her hair, too hard, as if she is contemplating pulling it out. “Erik would have listened. Pyro won’t.”
No, Pyro won’t listen. If that jerk’s in charge? He’s going to go after humanity no matter what; the Cure will only make him more reckless. Logan’s been around long enough to see guys go bad, and Pyro’s rotting from the inside out.
“Okay,” says Kitty, with resolve. She’s a spunky little thing; Logan likes her. Too bad she’s dating that punk. “We’re on our own. But where do we go?”
“There are options, most of them outside this country.” Beast begins ticking them off on his paws. “Switzerland requires registration by all mutants, but such registration is completely confidential and they’ve steadfastly refused mutant extradition on any grounds. Most Scandinavian nations also have registration but provide ample civil liberties protections. Argentina isn’t asking any questions right now. And Italy? Hah! The government’s collapsed four times merely debating the question.” Then he seems to remember this isn’t a merely theoretical discussion. “Logistically speaking, our first choice should be Canada.”
Canada has voted down mutant registration by a large margin, and the Purifier movement doesn’t have much traction there. It’s well known that mutants are starting to cross the border - sometimes with paperwork, sometimes not. R.D.s, they’re called: Registration dodgers. Some newsmagazines and websites claim that Canada is essentially trying to arm themselves with mutants, a kind of evolution-based arms race. Logan figures they can deal with that when it comes down to it. More troubling: vigilante parties of Purifier militias are starting to form at the borders. Mostly it’s yahoos with more beer than ammo, a few church groups there to do more singing than fighting, but the situation could get uglier.
But it’s a few hours’ drive away, and Logan figures they could get there easier than anyplace else.
To Logan’s surprise, Marie tentatively raises a hand. “I think I know where we ought to go.”
Everybody stares at her. A gangly kid in the back, the one named Volt, says, “You’re not even a mutant anymore! Why haven’t you gone home?”
“Hey. We’re all in this together,” Logan says, giving Volt a glare he’ll remember well into his next life. “So can it, okay? Marie, what were you saying?
She now looks shy again, but her voice remains steady. “We should go back to Alkali Lake.”
People murmur in disapproval, and Logan frowns. The government knows about that place, seeing as how they built it and all. Also, it was flooded under about a hundred feet of water. Plus that’s where Scott died, and Jean … the real Jean, not the Phoenix. He doesn’t think of the lake as a top vacation destination.
But Beast straightens up, whiskers twitching in excitement. “Of course! We ought to have thought of it immediately.” When everyone stares, he continues, “Somewhere at the bottom of that lake is a version of Cerebro. A version we might be able to fix, given time.”
He doesn’t have to add the rest. When the Professor recovers, he could use Cerebro to talk to all mutants, everywhere. That’s the single best thing that could happen for their side.
And if the Professor never wakes up - they’re no worse off around Alkali Lake than they would be anyplace else.
People are nodding, chatting, settling into agreement. Marie straightens slightly, proud of herself like she ought to be.
That’s his old stomping grounds, so Logan mulls it over for a second. “Got a thought,” he finally says. “An old mining town up around that way - couple hours’ drive from Alkali. Built up for an iron mine that went bust around 1975, the Claremont vein. Lotta houses up there standing around empty. They’re probably not in great shape, but they were still okay last time I was up there. Far away from everything else. We could do something with that.”
Beast fluffs up with satisfaction. “So we have a plan.”
They have the beginnings of one, anyway, and a smaller group is quickly chosen to figure out the details. Logan is chosen for the committee. It makes sense, kind of, since he knows the terrain, but shit, is this what he’s come to? Serving on committees? He’d rather be out there swinging his claws straight through some Purifier’s skull. But if the price is leaving the kids on their own - well, he’s stuck.
He deals with the uneasiness by asking to take a cigar break, and nobody seems to notice that he usually smokes anywhere he likes without asking first. Logan steps into a side corridor, one that isn’t used much. Turns out he’s not alone, but the person standing there is about the only one he’d want to see right now. “Heya, kid. Good idea you had in there.”
“I told you, stop callin’ me kid.” But Marie smiles at Logan as she says it. It’s a joke between them now. “And thanks.”
The light overhead is filtered through a metal grid, and lines of shadow criss-cross Marie’s face as he says, “Now you need to head home.”
“What?”
“Your parents asked you back, right? That’s where you ought to be. You have a normal life waiting for you. Maybe you ought to live it.”
Oh, she’s got a temper on her once she’s riled. “You of all people ought to know I didn’t take the Cure because I was afraid of what other people thought of me! I didn’t do it to go back to who I was before. I wanted to be somebody new. How do you not see that?”
“Hey, hey.” Logan holds his hands up. “I see it, okay? But this is gonna be dangerous. I don’t like the idea of you getting hurt.”
Her eyes take on that soft look that tells him he’s on dangerous ground - maybe he said too much, even though it was no more than the truth. Marie leans against the wall, hands behind her back. Quietly, she says, “Running away from you guys feels cowardly.”
“Not a cowardly bone in your body.” His eyes lock with hers as he steps slightly closer. “But this is a serious situation, and if you can be safe - you oughta be.”
“I’m not leaving,” she says. “I’m not a mutant anymore, but - I’m still one of you. If that means putting everything on the line, well, then, it does. I mean, you get it, Logan, right? You’re coming too, because you’re one of us.”
A leash, or a noose, tightening all the time - and Logan doesn’t even want to shake loose, not with Marie standing there looking at him like he’s actually worth something. He almost believes her. “Yeah. I get it.”
10.
Raven goes back to her room after the meeting. She’s taken it back; first she disassembled her bed and put it back together in the middle of the floor, then hunted through the attic for any of her old things. Now there’s a moth-eaten green afghan covering the desk that shouldn’t be there, and a yellowed Raggedy Ann nestled on the bookshelf. Nobody tries to come in here anymore, nobody except her - and Beast, but Beast is different.
So when she hears the rap on her door, Raven doesn’t mind saying, “Come in.”
“Good evening,” Beast says. He’s always so polite. He always was, even when they were teenagers. Alex and Armando would flirt outrageously with her, Sean and Angel would try to tell grosser jokes than the other - but Hank always asked nicely. Opened doors. Once, when they all walked out of an Elvis Presley movie to find a thunderstorm had begun, he held his jacket over her head in the rain. “I’ve hardly seen you today. How are you?”
“The same.” Alone. Frightened. Unsure of who or what she is any longer. But - eating again. The nightmares are less frequent. Nobody is going out of their way to be friendly, save for Beast, but nobody is going out of their way to be rude, either. “A little better, maybe.”
He sits in the chair nearest her makeshift bed. “I wanted to say - what you said at the meeting today was a valuable contribution.”
“Like anybody wouldn’t know not to trust Pyro.”
“Well, yes, but you were the one who understood that Pyro has probably taken over leadership of the Brotherhood. None of us would have guessed that. He’s so young.”
“He has fire.”
“… we did know his power, of course …”
“I’m not talking about his power.” Raven hugs herself as she leans back on her pillows. Recalling the Brotherhood is difficult for her, in every sense, but she finds she wants to answer correctly. “I mean, Pyro has energy. Drive. His hate is like a furnace.” How she remembers that warm glow. “People are drawn to him even when they don’t agree. These days, most people will agree.”
Beast mulls this over, concern knitting his deep blue brows together. “Do you have any idea where they are?”
“None. They’ll have gone someplace new. Nowhere Magneto or I ever saw.”
“I’d like to warn the authorities about him. But without specifics, it’s useless, isn’t it? Like those blithering ‘orange alerts’ at the airport. Something might happen, but there’s no saying when or where.” He leans back, resting his head against the wall, and Raven realizes he’s nearly as tired as she is. “That’s another reason to move quickly. If Pyro attacks and somehow vindicates the actions of the Purifiers - the last thing we need is to fight our way out.”
We, Beast says. He assumes she will be coming with them. Raven doesn’t know how she feels about that. Really she’d like to stay here at the house. She could put everything back how it used to be once there are no students in the way.
But another part of her - the deepest part, the adult part, the one who felt the pain and from whom she has been hiding - knows there’s no going back to the way things were.
So why not the X-Men? Why not Canada? At least Beast will be there.
His eyes still shut, he says, “If you think of anything else about Pyro that might be useful - anything at all - will you tell us?”
“I’ll tell you.”
Beast doesn’t catch the distinction. “Don’t think people haven’t noticed the help. There’s a place for you here, Raven. Personally I believe there always was.”
He’s so naïve - no. Innocent. In some ways, Hank remains as innocent as he was when they first met, when he wore a human’s face and blushed at the sight of her and was too shy even to steal a kiss. “We don’t need always. We just need now.”
“Nicely put.” Beast rubs at his temples.
“You’re tired,” she says. “Do you need to sleep?”
“Rather. But rest is hard to come by these days.”
“If it would help - I would watch over you. Like you did for me.”
He opens his eyes, and she sees that he wasn’t talking about that at all … but her mistake has touched him, deeply. “That’s kind of you.”
“So sleep.”
Beast pauses before replying, “Just a catnap. Don’t let me sleep past the hour.”
“Promise,” Raven says, and she means it. Beast may be the last person left to whom she would ever make a promise, however small.
11.
He is within himself and without himself.
That’s from a Beatles lyric, isn’t it? Charles loves the Beatles, has from the first moment he heard “Love Me Do.” His favorite is “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” because it reminds him of Erik. Favorite - that’s not the right word, because the song hurts to hear, and yet he never turns the song off, always wants to hear the words, always wants to think of Erik again.
“Professor?” That’s Ororo; he knows her voice. “Professor, we’re going to leave the school.”
And they must, Charles sees that through Ororo’s mind. Through the windows of her eyes he sees the protesters standing on the grounds, chanting close enough for the children to hear, one of them striking out at Dionne, whose fear jabs into him like a cold dart.
Then he’s off again, sifting through minds with no plan, no action, only the moment. This is Reverend Matthew Risman, speaking to cable news stations about how mutants are no part of God’s plan. Risman gilds his words with the misused word of the Lord, and yet Charles can see into his heart, knows that his hatred of mutants is purely calculated, a grab at ratings success - or maybe political power, who knows? It’s going so well -
Charles skirts through the minds of Risman’s followers - so many, so many more than there should be - and he sees mutants as pitiful freaks, mutants as demons, mutants as lepers, mutants as homosexuals, mutants as everything people think of as other, everything they refuse to accept, so many minds, so many explanations and so little understanding -
And at that moment, when he can take no more, his connection to the infinite breaks. His world shrinks from a globe to a pinpoint, to the most essential things: The warmth of this school, the beating of his own heart, and the memories he holds most dear.
Jean as a little girl.
Bashing around Oxford pubs with Raven on his arm.
Hank calling with the word of his appointment to the Cabinet, pride shining from his voice.
And Erik - no one moment. Every second with him, the good and the bad. Always Erik.
“Charles, we’re going to move you.” That’s Moira. He can’t remember if she’s still the young, headstrong woman he first met or the brilliant physician she becomes later. She is both and neither. “If we jostle you, I’m sorry. But it’s got to be done.”
Nervous as a schoolboy, fumbling with Erik’s belt as Erik’s hands pull at his shirt. Their open mouths eager for each other. Rain against the windowpanes.
“The children - ”
“Gone for another hour yet.” Erik’s whisper against his throat, the heat of his breath sending shivers along his body. His hands running up the length of Charles’ back. “They went to an Elvis Presley movie.”
“Long live the King.”
Erik laughing, low rumble in his chest, Charles grinning just to know that he’s made Erik smile. There hasn’t been enough joy in Erik’s life, but now that can change, with them together the whole world can change -
“I thought it was impossible to want you more.” Erik’s breath warm against his ear, Erik’s fingers pulling his shirt open to brush against his chest. “I was wrong.”
Backing him against the wall, his tongue in Charles’ mouth, his hand groping for Charles’ cock through his trousers. Desire clenching Charles in its white-hot fist. The whole world melts away, there’s nothing but Erik, nothing but the way they begin to move together.
Straps across his chest. The beeping of a monitor. He recognizes that it keeps time with his heartbeat. Is he still alive, then? Charles is beginning to forget the difference between death and life.
The children are less frightened now; there is something to do, and any task, no matter how mundane or how dangerous, cuts through dread better than words of comfort or advice ever could. Through the children Charles loads the trucks. Locks the doors. Says goodbye to the one place in the world that has ever felt like home.
Then he is running through the corridors, a boy again, Raven at his heels. “Catch me if you can!”
Raven sitting apart from the others, trying to be far away, and yet she’s close, closer to him than she’s been in decades - Charles reaches for her -
What he finds is chaos. He spins away from her, away from his own body, into the vast unknowable dark. Once again Charles feels the fear and pain of the hunted and lost mutants across the globe, his untethered mind reaching further and deeper than he ever could, consciously, without Cerebro, and the anguish of it overwhelms him.
The monitor’s beeps become unsteady. Moira is swearing. Charles thinks he should be worried but he does not remember why.
As the sounds steady themselves again, he drifts away, seeking any anchor in this terrible storm.
Seeking Erik.
Erik is at a bus stop, huddling in a thin coat against the late-November wind. Dry leaves skitter across the sidewalk at his feet. He is both the younger man Charles first met and the older one he last saw at the moment of his death. The eyes are the same.
“Charles,” Erik whispers, lifting his head. “Is that you?”
Joyfully, Charles rushes into Erik, into the past, towing them both into a place he recognizes. Solid ground to stand on. They’re in bed together, just after that first time, breathing fast and gazing at each other in wonder.
“I didn’t mean to leave you in suspense.” Charles can’t help grinning as he runs one hand through his rain-damp hair. “If I’d been certain you wanted me too, all this while - God, Erik, I wouldn’t have left it this long, not for the sake of the children, not for anything.”
“Listen to me.” Erik’s hand curves around Charles’ face; his thumb strokes along Charles’ cheekbone, steady and reassuring. “This happened before.”
“And it’s going to happen again. Soon.” Already his body is responding to Erik once more. Charles nestles closer to him, unwilling to be even a few inches away. “You’re right, you know. There are no authorities to check on us or take the kids away because we’re - and besides, we can keep it private. Like you said, whose business is it but ours?” He smiles, more shyly. “This is the best secret I’ve ever kept.”
Erik kisses him, fast and almost too urgent. “Charles, concentrate. Can you tell me what’s happening to you now?”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the fact that we’re together.”
“It matters to me. You must try.”
Charles tries. The room seems to waver, as if he is viewing it through the water running down the windowpanes. Walls are oddly transparent, though he’s not sure what he sees through them. Only Erik remains blessedly real; Charles can feel his touch, smell his skin.
He whispers, “I’m lost. Every time I think I’ve found the path back to myself, it turns out I’m more lost than before. I can’t tell which mind is my own, sometimes.” He leans his head against Erik’s chest, needing that solidity. “They’re taking me away. I don’t know where. I should be there to help them - I want to be, I’m trying to be - but there’s no way out of the maze. You’re the only real thing here.”
“Charles, I’m coming to find you. Do you understand?” Erik embraces him, and they twine their limbs together, chest against chest so that their heartbeats collide, as if they will physically prevent anyone from tearing them apart. “No matter what, I will find you.”
“Don’t leave me - ”
He’s looking up at Erik, but Erik is older now, wearing a helmet that separates their minds. Cerebro circles them both, but the wrong Cerebro, a broken and evil one designed to turn Charles against everything he values most. And Erik is helping it.
“Kill them all,” Erik says. Every human being on earth, he means, and Charles can’t stop himself from trying to comply. Something at the core of him cries out in the pain of knowing the wrong he is about to do - and the pain of knowing that Erik has finally, utterly betrayed him.
Then all those human minds rush in, gasping for breath, shrieking in agony, and the agony claims Charles, swirling around him.
He must save Erik from himself. He leaps from the ship into the frigid ocean. But Erik isn’t down there, nobody’s down there, and Charles is drowning alone in the dark.
***
Continued tomorrow!