Chapter Text
The funeral wasn’t a surprise. The children were.
The letter had been the first surprise, but Charles was full of surprises. He was disgustingly predictable in all of the worst ways, but somehow he had always managed to blindside Erik with his ridiculous choices. Maybe it was his own fault for constantly assuming the man would make a rational decision. Clearly he had never quite picked up the habit.
Would never pick up the habit.
Erik arrived at the ridiculous Xavier estate with a letter clenched in one fist and a suitcase in the other. The suitcase was black leather, and once every few months Erik fastidiously worked the old leather to keep it from cracking. He had picked it up in Hungary in 1967, on a cold day, and nobody made suitcases like it anymore. He never went anywhere without it, which was why he held it now. It contained three dress shirts, two slacks, two pairs of sleeping pants, a straight edge metal razor, various and assorted forged documents and passports, a slab of vibranium, and five pairs of socks and underwear. Charles had told him to bring most of what he owned in that old suitcase of his. Erik would have refused on principle, but it was his only suitcase.
He didn’t bother with the gate, ducking around and slipping past slightly overgrown shrubbery. His makeshift entrance into the gate had gone unrepaired - barely more than two bars easily pulled apart to allow a man to step through - and the ruptured sensors around the spot were still deactivated. He stepped through, saving his hat from an unfortunate encounter with a tree, and let his feet lead him towards the back gardens. He’d enter in through the back garden door, where the weaker security point could easily be disrupted with a magnetic pulse. There was a very good reason why Erik was sneaking into the home he’d been invited into, and Erik had occupied himself attempting to conjure it before Charles would inevitably ask.
But there were already figures in the back garden. Erik’s strong and steady pace slowed as he descended the gentle hills of the estate, approaching a small group of figures assembled in front of the old willow tree. No - in front of a plaque in front of the tree. He didn’t recognize any of them. A blue teenage boy was reading from a Bible. There was a small round patch of upturned dirt in front of the plaque.
Erik picked up his pace.
All four of the figures were teenagers - two boys and two girls, if the dark blue and disconcertingly fuzzy one was a boy. One of them had tacky red glasses and another had hair to match. They were all wearing black and looking solemn in that particular teenage way, where they experienced a human emotion and felt distinctly uncomfortable with it.
He was only yards away until they noticed him, to the point where Erik could clearly hear the boy’s German recitation of the Bible. He stopped short when a girl who had somehow managed to turn her black outfit trendy straightened, eyes widening, and everybody stopped to turn around and gawk at him.
Erik finally skidded ignobly down the hill and stopped in front of them. The willow gusted gently in the breeze, leaves rattling together, dappling soft shadow over the stone plaque set into the ground. A small handful of rocks politely lined the metal plate.
That was when Erik knew. Or maybe he had known long before, the second a letter on familiar thick stationary arrived on the front step of his remote cabin in the Swiss alps, which he only left to commit terrorism. He wouldn’t have come if he hadn’t known.
Or perhaps that was simply something he told himself to alleviate the shock of it and dampen the weight falling down over his shoulders. Retroactively changing history to fit a narrative that made Erik look just a little bit more refined and feel a little bit better.
The teenagers looked at him, then looked at each other, then back at him, then back to each other. They silently pushed the burden of interaction with old men on each other.
The boy in red glasses clearly lost, stepping forward in his loose and overlarge suit. “Are you, uh, Erik Lensherr?”
Erik didn’t make a habit of giving his real name to people, but he didn’t make a habit of stepping on Charles’ property either. He loosely held up the letter, still clutched in his right hand. “A letter arrived from him two days ago. He told me to come visit him.”
The blue boy winced. The two girls abruptly looked in opposite directions, but the boy in the glasses didn’t look away from him.
Erik walked forward, stopping in front of the metal plate hammered on stone. He looked at it for a few seconds, memorizing the curve of letters and the two years set side by side with only a small gap between them. 1934 - 2000. In that dash lay infinity.
“You’re two days late,” the boy in red glasses said. “Sorry. Were you close?”
“Once.”
“Uh. Cool.” Paper rustled, and Erik tore his eyes away from the plaque to see the boy step forward with a familiar letter in his hand with Erik’s name scrawled across the front. It was identical to Erik’s own. “In that case, I think this is for you?”
Erik stepped forward and took the letter, tearing it open with one thumb. The thick yellow paper smelled like mahogany - everything in Charles’ office eventually gathered the smell of his great-great-grandfather’s furniture. The ink was a dark black with a light blue sheen - the old ink from Prague, inherited from the one aunt he enjoyed. The spidery handwriting was all his.
Erik read the letter.
The children hovered anxiously.
“Well?” The fuzzy boy demanded. “What does it say?”
“Kurt, it’s obviously private.”
“Trust me,” the brown haired girl said, “it is very much our business.”
“Oh my god , Kitty, did you read this old man’s mail?”
Erik reread the letter.
“You aren’t supposed to call old people old,” the boy in glasses fretted. “It’s really rude.”
“Is that what you’re worried about, Scott?” The red haired girl said flatly. “Not the mail reading?”
“He read it too,” Kitty said, bored.
Erik dropped the letter.
“ Mein gott , the old guy’s having a heart attack.”
“Don’t call him old !”
“Is that what you’re worried about, Scott? Not the heart attack?”
“Look, you don’t even need to read his mail,” Kitty told the now anxious blue haired boy. “You just had to go through the will. It was, like, eighty pages, but so worth it. The Professor left everything -”
“He can’t have left everything ,” the red haired girl said.
“Why do you think the old man’s having a heart attack?”
Erik slowly bent down and picked up the letter, carefully brushing off flecks of dirt. He reread it, as if another go-around would make it magically make sense.
My dear Erik,
I’m surprised you came. Is that what you’d like me to say? Unfortunately, I shall win this round posthumously. I never doubted for a second that you would come. My plans hinged on it.
Don’t inquire into how I died. The children would not know, and implying that there was some mystery or conspiracy would only upset them. Save the investigation for the other interested parties. You will know them when you see them. I would like your attention turned to other matters. The question of how I would know the time and date of my death is irrelevant for your purposes. Your focus is so single-minded, my friend, and your passions run so deeply. I would like to see them turned towards a loftier goal than myself.
The children, the will, and my own various and assorted diaries and writings will explain this endeavor in far greater detail than I could here, but I will orient you. I have decided to make my idea - the one I shared with you on that balmy night in Panama, not the one that took the entire unfortunate Siberian week to recount - a reality. Cerebro has been created and installed in the basement, where you will find a cornucopia of other things necessary to nurture the growth of a young mutant. Upstairs, you will find the trappings of a boarding school. I only had time to gather four students so far, but I have chosen them carefully and with great deliberation.
They are good children. Scott may seem similar to myself at first glance, but it is you who he truly resembles. Kitty has a voracious thirst for knowledge and action, somewhat exhaustingly so. Kurt is flighty, but once he finds someplace safe he will settle down. You, Kitty, and Kurt share a heritage, and I hope it shall be of comfort to all three of you. I have left several notebooks of notes for Jean, and another notebook of a teaching guide for her. Do not let her exterior and personality fool you - she will be your most difficult student.
The school is yours. I have left my estate and everything within - from its training facilities to the private jet - to you. It’s under your Erik Maximoff alias, so have those documents prepared. Most of the liquid assets are placed in trusts for maintenance of the school and the Xavier Foundation for Mutantkind. There are several other trusts for Holocaust victim charities, to save you the trouble. The details are in the will. The children will explain the rest. I have taught them as much as I could in the time that I have - the rest is up to you.
In these final days of my life, I now accept that I cannot make you do anything. I could fill up five more pages swaying you towards accepting what I now offer and persuading you to take up the role as headmaster and teach these children what they must know to survive. I could call it my dying wish and make a very nice guilt trip out of it. This time, I shall not. I will only present this to you and stand back, watching avidly to see what choice you make. If you take it up it shall become yours. Whatever you wish to do with it, whatever direction you shall take it in, will be of your own design.
I remain firm in my conviction that your path is misguided. I will always believe that peace, equity, equality, and harmony is the path that will build the best future for our descendants. But looking back on it now, I wonder if my path was always correct. I wonder if I have prioritized human happiness over mutant safety. Perhaps neither of us were truly wrong, and neither of us were completely correct. Maybe what the world needs is both of our voices. You and I together as one, in death as we never entirely were in life, creating a future together. We were too stubborn and prideful to ever achieve that. But I believe it is not too late - that these children can be our shared future.
True education hears all voices. As educators, we teach our students how to listen. We teach them how to decide right and wrong for themselves, and how to speak their own truths. I want your voice to reach these children. I hope you stay long enough to hear what their voices will become. I believe they will be far wiser than ours.
Our past is ghosts and pain. All I can give to you is the future. Take care of it, Erik.
Your affectionate friend,
Charles Xavier
(“Charles, you fucking centrist,” Erik said.
Kitty leaned over to Jean, whispering loudly. “I think they were gay .”)
Erik unpacked in his old bedroom. He would have unpacked in the master bedroom if it wasn’t for the soppily earnest Scott informing him that the Professor ( Professor ) had died in his sleep the night before last, which thoroughly quenched any desire to spend time in the bed he actually slept in.
When he opened the wardrobe to place his clothing inside he found his old clothing neatly hung on the rack and folded underneath. He sniffed his forgotten caulderoys. Freshly laundered. Disturbing.
He sat down on the bed, withdrawing the slab of vibranium from the suitcase and placing it on the nightstand. He couldn’t help but stare at it longingly. It had been difficult to procure, the months-long process racking up an impressive body count, but he had it. He hadn’t done anything with it yet: just stared at it or touched it, allowing it to feature in his dreams and nightmares. His smith friend had yet to hear back from him. Perhaps he never would - without a telepath, what was the point of a mind-shielding helmet?
It had been a long flight from Zurich and he was far too old to pointlessly fight jet lag. He packed away his clothing, locked his bedroom door, and fell asleep immediately. As usual in the Xavier estate, he was spared the usual nightmares.
He woke up to the sound of hesitant knocking, confusing and panicking him deeply until he snapped to full awareness and realized that he was a world away from his cabin and closer to children than usual. The hesitance became increasingly firm as he threw on the first t-shirt he found in a drawer and opened the door, squinting down at the interloper.
It was Scott, slowly realizing how tall Erik was. He pulled himself up to his own height before abruptly thinking better of it and returning to his best attempts to look nonthreatening, which was very easy.
“Uh,” Scott said. Did nobody teach diction these days? “Sorry. Did I wake you up…?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Scott clearly waited for Erik to accept the apology. Erik did not. “Right. Well, it’s been, like, six hours, so…”
That would put the time at around six at night. Too early for bedtime and not nearly early enough for the morning. “Get to the point.”
Finally, Scott straightened and fixed his expression. It was easy - on closer inspection, the glasses were trendy wraparound sunglasses. A ruby monstrosity that didn’t fit the seemingly mild boy’s personality, but when Erik saw that the lenses were almost a full inch thick he found himself hesitating. A very strange fashion statement.
“We want to know how long you’re going to be staying.”
A loaded question, and the boy knew it. “I haven’t decided.”
“The lawyer’s coming about the will in a week.”
“Then I will be here at least a week.”
“Are they going to send us home?”
Erik stopped short. Scott’s jaw was clenched tightly, a vein almost jumping out, and he bunched his hands in his blue shirt before he clearly forced himself to untangle them.
Without waiting for an answer, Scott continued in a rush of breath. “Because Jean’s parents still like her so she can go home, and Kitty’s parents are probably going to put up with her, and Kurt was going to go home and visit the circus sometimes anyway, but I can’t go home because I don’t have parents. They died when I was nine. So if the school’s not going to be a thing anymore then I don’t know where you want me to go.”
Ah.
“How about a group meeting.”
Some part of Erik expected the estate to be exactly the same. It had been eight years since he stepped foot inside - five since he’d seen Charles - but ancestral family homes under the purview of such an uncaring master never changed. Twenty five years and the only things that had ever changed about the house were elevators and wheelchair ramps. Charles only maintained it enough to keep it sanitary and whole and he forgot about the whole thing otherwise. Granted, the less said about the basement the better.
It was far from unrecognizable. But it was different. Erik noted with some small amusement that the pricier and more fragile vases and statuary had been packed away or swapped out for sturdier, more colorful paintings. The heavy window curtains had been replaced with lighter ones showcasing clean window panes, and every lightbulb was replaced. The place was well-lit for the first time in its three hundred year old life.
Nothing had been redone or undone. But the wallpaper had been replaced and the ugly old carpeting torn up to reveal pleasant hardwood; the mold patches and sagging ceilings straightened and fixed. The ancient furniture was uncovered and cleaned, and when Scott led Erik through the old living room and site of much drunken revelry he was shocked to see that the dusty couches and furniture had been replaced with something more modern and plusher and friendlier. The ancient television was now top of the line, and there were video games underneath it. Erik was appalled.
There was no other way to put it: the crumbling old mansion that Charles had detested so thoroughly was now a pleasant place to live. No - a place for children to live.
Scott navigated it easily, leading Erik into the kitchen. The kitchen was the only place in the mansion that had been modernized in the last decade, due in part to the necessary changes in countertop heights and whatnot for Charles’ chair and in part because the man lived off microwaved noodles. But even the kitchen was different - notably, it now boasted two industrial fridges alongside an industrial sink and dishwasher. The rickety kitchen table had been replaced by a nicer wooden table, where an unimpressed Jean shoved cereal into her mouth as Kitty watched in fascinated horror as Kurt set his skillet on fire.
He yelped, muttering curses in German under his breath as he quickly shoved it into the sink and turned the tap on full blast. The water hissed as it hit the hot pan, venting steam into the air, and Scott groaned as Kitty broke into sarcastic applause. Jean, above it all, slurped at her milk.
“Did that idiot forget to put a working fire alarm system in this kitchen?” Erik asked flatly. Kurt made a slightly inhuman noise. “How did he forget something so simple?”
“There’s a working fire alarm in the Danger Room,” Jean volunteered.
“The what room?”
Jean shoved another spoonful of cereal in her mouth - ‘not handling that one’.
Scott just looked pained. “After what happened at lunch you’re still trying to make dinner?”
“Pffankuchen is easy!” Kurt protested. Sure enough, there was a bowl of badly beaten eggs and a slouching pack of powdered sugar near the stove. How do you set pancakes on fire? “I can do it!”
“Just have cereal,” Kitty said.
“I hate your cold cereal.”
“We have a lot of noodles,” Jean said. “We can eat that.”
Erik prayed to God for deliverance. He walked over and neatly took the pan from Kurt’s three fingered hands - Erik had met a lot of strange mutants in his time, but Kurt was up there on the strangeness - and replaced it on the stove. He gently pushed him aside so he could bend down and grab the dented pot, unmoved after eight years, and thumped it on the stove burner.
Cautiously, terrified, Kurt ventured, “What are you doing?”
“Eintopf. What’s our potato situation.”
“Many potatoes! Can you put in our tomatoes? My aunt always uses tomatoes.”
“Get the ingredients from the fridge.” Kurt scrambled to obey as Erik shoved the pot under the tap. “Jean, Kitty, you’re chopping the vegetables.” Kitty opened her mouth. “It’s just soup. Get to it.”
“What can I do?” Scott asked eagerly.
“You’re telling me what’s going on.”
“Sexism,” Kitty denounced.
“Fine. Then you tell me and Scott chops.”
Kitty was not the best at explaining things, but seeing as Scott was very talented with a knife it balanced out. Erik eventually managed to glean the most important things from her: that Charles had pushed through with that ridiculous school situation, and that he had successfully managed to convince two pairs of parents, one circus, and a predictably apathetic foster system to sign over custody of their children to him. So far as Erik could tell, Jean’s parents were scared of her and Kitty’s existence embarrassed them. And…Kurt’s adopted mother was an old friend of Charles’ and thought it would be a good experience for him to attend and get away from all of the angry mobs. Alright.
Scott had arrived three months ago; Jean two months; Kitty a month and a bit; Kurt a month. A scary woman named Raven had shown up, took care of the cremation and talked to a bunch of adults, gave them a series of vague instructions and an urn, and then left them to bury Charles’ ashes under the willow tree. They held the grim camaraderie of prisoners of war and had resigned themselves to living off rats and cereal like feral forest children.
“So what’s your deal?” Kitty demanded. Out of a can-do feminist spirit she had attempted to chop vegetables too before she had to give up. The knife was going through her hand too many times. Erik was glad he didn’t make facial expressions as a rule and nobody had seen him momentarily panic before the knife slid straight through her ghostly hand into the cutting board.
Erik confiscated the two expertly diced vegetables from Scott and Jean and slid them into the pot. “I don’t have a deal.”
Kitty wasn’t buying it. “Everybody has a deal.”
“Not me.”
“I think anybody who would marry the Professor has to have some kind of deal,” Jean said, obviously comparing her and Scott’s vegetables to see who had done a better job chopping.
“We never married.” Erik sealed the lid onto the pot, leaving it to simmer. The children ‘oooh’d through the implicit confirmation of the gay rumor. It was the new millennium and Kurt was blue, they could deal with it. “And I haven’t seen the man in five years.”
“Bad divorce,” Kitty whispered to Kurt, who nodded fastidiously.
But Scott just folded his arms, unconvinced. “That letter made it seem like you and the Professor had a lot of history. You were mutant advocates in the sixties together, weren’t you?”
“Define advocate,” the Kennedy assassin said.
“What do you do now?” Kitty asked. “You’re retired from fighting the man, right? Do you fish? My grandpa fishes.”
“Define retired,” the occasional terrorist said.
“Have you met Martin Luther King?” Jean asked with interest. “The Professor said that he and Martin Luther King were friends.”
“Dr. King was not my biggest fan.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Was MLK a homophobe?” Scott asked Kurt. Kurt, who likely did not know who MLK was, shrugged.
“All of you sit down. Now.”
They sat down at the table, which did not dampen their attentiveness and interest. Erik felt somewhat kidnapped. He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, trying to obscure the feeling but conscientious that teenagers could smell fear.
“My name is Erik Lensherr. I am seventy years old. I am a Jew. That is all any of you need to know about me, and I hope it is all you ever find out.” Kitty perked up. It had been her who placed the rocks, then. “Did Raven leave you any way to get in contact with her? A phone number, anything?”
Scott shook his head. “We asked and she laughed at us?”
Damn it, Mystique. “Do you know where his address book is?” They all looked at Scott, who shook his head. “Have you met anyone over the past three months?”
“Jean and I met Logan,” Scott volunteered. Erik did not like that sentence. “He was cool. He’s in Canada now, though.”
“Sasketchawan,” Jean added unnecessarily.
“If you’re wondering if there’s anybody else who could take over for the Professor, we sure as hell don’t know them.” Kitty propped her elbow on her table, resting her chin on her hand. “Are you going to take the money and run? I’d take the money and run.”
“I do not care about the money.” The will probably stipulated that Erik could refuse it all and the manor would go to Ororo or something. It was almost large enough to fit her ego. “If I leave then you would all be asked to go home, correct?”
Everybody looked at Scott, who set his jaw again and stared at the ground.
Jean reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “My parents would totally adopt you.”
“No they wouldn’t.”
“I’d make them,” Jean said easily, as if this was a thing that people other than Charles said. “I think I can make people do things now, it’s pretty convenient.”
“Is anybody else hearing this?” Kurt asked.
So leaving two of them alone would be disasters: Scott would return to the foster system and Jean would become a supervillain. Kitty and Kurt would probably be alright. Provided the angry mob didn’t get Kurt. Kitty would be fine.
Kitty yelped as her arm faded into transparency and her head fell down, hitting her chin on the wood.
Were these the voices of the future? These impudent and scattered children? They did not even have a future. Their lives going forward would be hard and cruel. They would be lucky if discrimination and hatred was all that they faced. Nobody would protect them. Nobody had protected Erik sixty years ago, and the world rarely changed.
Erik thought of the vibranium slab sitting on the nightstand. It had been meant to protect them and all of mutantkind. He dreamed of a safe world for mutants, a world he was willing to fight for. Slaughter if need be.
As Erik carved metal through flesh, Charles had been building a home for children. As Erik tore holes in SHIELD, Charles had been rescuing a young boy from the foster system. What had Erik accomplished? What had Charles?
It no longer mattered what Charles had accomplished or what he wanted. He was dead. Or it shouldn’t matter - but that was always the point of a legacy.
“The soup should be ready.” Erik stood up, turning his back on the table. “Set the table and wash up.”
Kitty squinted at him. “It’s been, like, twenty minutes?”
“I pressure cooked it.” Erik stepped aside so they could see it and held his hand over the pot. He made a small gesture, as if he was picking up a bead with two fingers, and the crumpled edges of the pot where the lid had been fused onto metal wrinkled themselves apart and back into place. The pot itself was from the fifties - a thick and durable steel that nobody bothered to make anymore. “See?”
The children made various impressed noises. Jean stood up in her seat, her already intent expression focusing harder. “Will you teach me how to do that?”
“Can you control metal?”
Jean frowned. She straightened and raised a hand, mimicking Erik’s pinching motion. A cutting board shook and thrust itself into the air like a bullet from a gun, forcing Kurt to duck as it crashed against the refrigerator.
Jean looked crestfallen. “Not again. I thought I’d gotten the hang of that.”
Telekinesis. She had said as much when they all introduced their powers - everybody but Scott, who remained stubbornly silent - but she had failed to mention how powerful it was. Erik was one of the few people who could pick out those details, but after enough time with Charles that sort of thing was clear as day.
Strike that. She’d definitely become a supervillain. Or worse - Charles.
Charles without the crusade. Worst case scenario.
The children ran off to wash up, but Scott stayed behind. He slouched in a chair, arms crossed and stewing, as Erik opened the fridge and dug out a thankfully intact carton of milk and carafe of water. Did teenagers still drink milk? Were they too old for it? Last time he checked Pietro and Wanda drank milk, but they had admittedly been eight at the time.
After Scott failed to explain the inscrutable workings of his fifteen year old mind, Erik was forced to compensate. “May I help you?”
“So are you staying or not!”
The firmness of the outburst was slightly ruined by his voice cracking halfway through. Erik sighed and placed the milk and water on the table. “You aren’t returning to foster care. Charles knew almost every open mutant in America, there’s more than a few mutant couples who would like nothing more than to adopt.” Mutants who would never be approved to serve as real foster parents or adoptive parents, but the state would make an exception for another freak child. If the state refused to make an exception then Charles had a few friends who were gay couples barred from adopting children for similar reasons. “You’d be perfectly fine.”
“They can’t teach me how to control my powers!” Scott cried. He stood up, the wooden chair skittering backwards on the hardwood. “The Professor said that he would help me control them! I can’t live in somebody’s house like this!”
“Like what?” Erik arched an eyebrow as Scott scowled and looked away. “Alright, don’t tell me. If you’re such a danger to others then I know a man who’d appreciate some help on his middle of nowhere farm upstate. The world would be safe from your evil. You could survive.”
“I don’t want to survive ,” Scott said. “I want to help people. Are you going to help us do that or not?”
“I’m still deciding.”
Then the kids traipsed back in - in Kurt’s case, trapezed - and Eric could focus on serving dinner instead of watching Scott try to murder him through his mirrored sunglasses. He’s a lot like you indeed.
The dinner was insufferable. Pietro and Wanda were young enough that they fit neatly in the category of aliens, but young teenagers were just close enough to people that Erik acutely felt his age. They were clearly all overwhelmed with a dozen competing feelings - grief over Charles, distant shock at the suddenness of his death, fascination with Erik, affection for each other, hatred for each other, and generalized fear of the unknown future yawning ahead of them. This mostly manifested in endless clashes of manic energy and sniping. Erik focused on his soup, deflecting the increasingly intrusive questions regarding his fascinatingly elderly person.
Finally, the second the last sliver of carrot was scraped into his mouth, Erik wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and pointedly balled it up before dropping it on the table. Three sets of eyes and one pair of sunglasses snapped to him.
Slowly and with great care, Erik said, “There is nobody else who can take over this school.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher,” Jean said brightly. “I think I could -”
“Nobody,” Kitty said.
“Charles chose all four of you because your powers were uncontrollable, dangerous, and required intensive training.”
“My power isn’t dangerous,” Kitty complained. “It’s so lame. All I can do is fall through things. It’s just inconvenient and stupid and it sucks.”
“Don’t say that about your gift. It’s the only thing that will protect you from here on out.” The teenagers mouthed the word ‘gift’ in confusion. “Yes, it is a gift. Don’t let that rancid human propaganda poison your minds. You’re better than them and they hate you because they know it.” Everybody was beginning to look uncomfortable. “Of course Charles poisoned your mind with that peace and love drivel. Ignore him. He was an idealist fool.”
“You found out your ex-husband died seven hours ago,” Jean said.
“He was an idealist fool for forty years and seven hours hasn’t changed that.”
“What does human propaganda even mean?” Jean asked, twirling her spoon in her hands. If Erik paid close attention, he could see the metal slowly bend. “You always talk about humans like they’re a different species.”
“They are.” All of the assorted children looked varying stages of uncomfortable. Somehow, Kurt especially. “Let me guess. You still feel like humans, right? You’ve lived your entire life among them. Mistook yourself for one of them for fourteen or fifteen years. You would still call yourself a human, if a strange one.” Erik fixed his eyes on Jean, who froze as the spoon continued twisting itself in circles. “You do not have the privilege to label yourself. It is them who label you. They will call you an inhuman monster. They will attempt to murder you on the street and they will lose no sleep at night because they have decided you are not one of them. You do not choose if you are human or not. The humans will make that decision. And they will choose to eliminate monsters from this world.”
Awkward silence stretched.
They weren’t too young to hear these things. Charles may have wanted to protect them; Erik had no such delusions. They probably acutely missed Charles, and Erik couldn’t imagine that they wanted to hear anything other than vague platitudes of harmony and a happy future. A future where they would be just fine, even if Charles left them and their one sanctuary closed down.
Well, nobody had ever made the mistake of calling Erik kind and lived to tell about it. He sighed, carefully wiping his mouth with a dusty cloth napkin and standing up from the table. “I will tell you my decision in the morning. Do the dishes and put away the leftovers immediately. This place is prone to vermin.”
They made no sound as he left, and the second the door swung shut they erupted into frantic whispers. Erik didn’t care enough to eavesdrop. What would be the point? They wouldn’t survive a week in the real world.
He could almost hear Charles’ insipid voice. If they were destined to live their next sixty years in pain, then why not give them as much of a childhood as possible? Hard lessons were inevitable, but not all pain was unavoidable. Life was more than pain, Erik. Life was more than death.
A fool to the end. Pain was the only method by which to preserve life. Erik clung stubbornly to life with a vehemence that was almost embarrassing in a seventy year old, but he was not finished yet. If only pain could preserve life, then life was worth very little without pain. Life was worth nothing without death.
They could argue the topic around in circles for hours at an eternal stalemate, and they frequently had. Considering the fact that Erik was alive and Charles was dead, it felt safe to say that he won this round. It didn’t feel as good as he thought it would.
Erik attempted to return to sleep and failed miserably, mind idly engaging in its favorite pastime of arguing mentally with Charles before remembering that he was dead before reminiscing on him before remembering another one of his idiot opinions and returning to arguing mentally with him until it remembered that he was dead.
He chose to attack the library instead, mindlessly pulling out hardback books with moth-eaten covers he’d read a thousand times when he struggled to sleep. A tattered Beckett lay limply face down on a shelf, almost obscuring the suspicious series of holes in the cover that may have indicated it was attacked by a rain of unbent staples. In Erik’s defense, plays should be about things.
He fell asleep halfway through D.H. Lawrence again, and struggled through strange dreams of flashing color and the sounds of grinding metal before something jolted him awake. He straightened instantly, Sons and Lovers falling off his lap and fluttering to the ground as the steel coaster on the side table rattled.
But the only intruder was a teenage girl poking her head out from behind a bookshelf, thick computer science textbooks clasped in her arms and watching him with bug-eyed fascination.
“If you didn’t want me to wake you up then you shouldn’t fall asleep in common spaces,” Kitty said, automatically on the defensive. “It’s household conscientiousness.”
A steel coaster launched at sufficiently high velocity could decapitate a human. “No harm done,” Erik gritted out. He leaned over and picked up the book again, flipping it open to a random page and pointedly resuming reading.
Kitty did not pick up on the obvious dismissal. She just stepped out from behind the bookshelf, adjusting the thick textbooks in her arms. “Can I ask you a question?”
Erik grunted, not looking up from his book and attempting to do what he did best and exude homicidal energy.
It had no effect. “You’re, like, German-from-Germany, right?” Erik grunted. “And you’re Jewish?” Erik turned a page. “And you said you were seventy.” Kitty shifted where she stood, hesitant for the first time that he’d seen her. “So I…was just wondering…”
Erik sighed, replacing the book on his lap and closing it. He gestured her closer before rolling up his sleeve, and Kitty approached with uncharacteristic hesitance as he turned his arm and showed her the tattoo.
A look cut into her face. It was fairly unique. Erik had only seen it a few times before - only on the faces of the Jewish children as they saw his arm or heard his story. It wasn’t as distant as sympathy or horror, or as intimate as revulsion and disgust. Rather, he saw in them what he saw in Kitty now: confused pain, as if the sight of him was a tangible wound in their own sides. Or as if they had looked down at their own bodies and noticed a weeping wound for the first time. It hurt, and he always saw them struggle to realize why something that happened to somebody very old a very long time ago in a land very far away hurt them so deeply.
“And that is why you do not want me teaching your school,” Erik said tartly, rolling his sleeve back down and cutting the moment to an end. “I couldn’t regurgitate Charles’ peace and love drivel for the life of me. I am incapable - and worse, uninterested.”
But Kitty didn’t seem so impressed. She just narrowed her eyes, as if the numbers on his arm had provided a new equation for her to solve. Why she felt the need to solve him instead of the algorithms in those textbooks, he had no idea. “Why did the Prof give the school to you if he knew that you didn’t want it?”
Assuming, of course, that Charles was perfectly aware Erik didn’t want it. Correctly - Charles knew everything, or everything about Erik. “Optimism.”
Kitty bit her lip. “The Professor said I was really insightful.”
“How nice.”
“Look, I just think - personally , if you ask me -” He had not. “ - then I think your experiences are why you should teach the school. I think the Professor thought so too. You can teach us things nobody else can. If the Prof wanted someone who can spread peace and love then he would have just asked somebody else.” Kitty shifted uncomfortably, hoisting her heavy textbooks higher. “People like Scott aren’t really built to spread peace and love, if you know what I mean.”
The sentence hit something strange in Erik. He wasn’t certain why, or what that thing was. But he found himself putting the book on the side table anyway, placing it on the gently shaking metal coaster and stilling its rattles. “Why do you say that?”
Kitty shrugged. She shifted her textbooks in her arms, bringing up one hand and making little exploding hand movements in front of her eyes. “You know, his superpower? He almost killed his entire foster family. You can’t really call that a gift. All it does is wreck things.” Her pert mouth twisted unhappily. “Who could be proud of something that only hurts people?”
The question was inane. Tony Stark pumped out warhead after warhead and bragged about it on Larry King. Dark magicians were revered in underground mystic circles for their dominance over life and death. Erik’s gift cut swathes through the worst of humanity, and that was what made it his gift.
Scott’s obscured face flashed in Erik’s vision, his anger only truly evident by the cut of his mouth and the tension in his shoulders. An angry young man who only wanted to help people. A perceptive young woman who found help and harm mutually exclusive concepts.
It couldn’t be avoided. Erik sighed and stood up, instantly brightening Kitty. “I need to get it out of your teenage skulls that your gifts make you monsters. Go fetch Scott. Tell him to meet me in the garden. If he uses his power to his heart’s content he’ll get over this silly phobia.”
Kitty grinned widely, almost bouncing on her toes. “Oh, he’s already destroyed the backyard. The Professor made us a whole place to let loose and train!”
Erik stared at her, uncomprehending. “A gym?”
“I guess you could call it a gym?”
This was not a gym.
By no stretch of the imagination was it a gym. It was not in the same vicinity as a gym. It aspirationally existed in the same taxonomy as a gym, but it was as much a gym as Erik was a blacksmith. It was as much a gym as Charles was a schoolteacher.
The children called it ‘the Danger Room’, and Erik wondered why before Kurt proudly showed off a long stripe of blue fur burnt black. Erik expressed concern over this. Kurt eagerly assured Erik that this was nothing before proceeding to rattle off five increasingly horrific near-death experiences. Three of which included OSHA violations and two of which included angry mobs. The boy was quieter in his shaky English and effusive in his native German, which prompted Erik to declare immersive learning and ban German from the premises. This backfired, since the children now assumed that he meant to teach them something.
Erik’s sense of desolation sparked when all four children filtered into the Danger Room instead of only one, and it only grew as Jean primly taught him how to work the operations console. Jean loved explaining things, mostly because it reassured her that she knew things other people did not.
“The Professor gated every level above two,” Kitty said, infinitely depressed that she could not access Level Nine Of The Danger Room Located Inside An English Nobleman’s Basement. “I’m trying to hack it but it’s slow going.”
“She wants a pet robot,” Kurt volunteered. “Scott is being a loser about it.”
“I just don’t think we should have robots until we know we can defeat the robot!” Scott cried furiously. “It’s basic robot husbandry!”
“We are marrying the robots?”
“Only girl who’d marry Scott,” Jean muttered. She and Kitty high fived.
“None of you are allowed down here unsupervised anymore.” They all broke into simultaneous moaning and groaning. “Quiet. Scott, you’re with me.”
The…Danger Room, in its deactivated form, was little more than a large arena composed of energy absorbing and highly resilient mobile tile. Erik idly detached his belt buckle and drove it into the floor with the force of a bullet, only for it to spring straight upwards with equal power until it crashed onto the ceiling and clattered to the ground. He straightened it back out with a twitch of his finger, turning his attention back to the scowling Scott. The room was admittedly helpful for containing the more dangerous powers. No doubt Charles had intended on filling his classes with students who needed the insanely high-tech room to use their powers at all.
“I thought you weren’t teaching us anything,” Scott said snidely, crossing his arms. “What’s with the PE class?”
“You will not give me that tone again.” Erik was not tolerating the unfortunate outcomes of the insipid modern parenting. Not that the boy had parents. “I am not here to teach you. I want you to demonstrate your gift to me.”
“Yeah, that’s what Kitty said. I don’t want to.” Scott set his jaw hard, squeezing his arms tighter. “End of story.”
The intercom buzzed, and the dulcet tones of Kurt’s voice echoed through the room. “Scott never uses his power during PE!”
“Kurt, stop freaking snitching!”
“I am not a - Kitty, what does -”
The intercom fuzzed off. Erik did not know how to deal with this.
Charles would know. Charles could give a pep talk. One that wouldn’t make them all cry. He had probably given the boy a thousand pep talks. They had probably been very moving and inspirational.
But none of them had worked, and Charles was gone. Only Erik was left - Erik, and Scott’s bitterness.
“I thought you wanted Charles to train you,” Erik said. He tried hard to force his voice into something gentle instead of harsh, but it probably just came out cold. Close enough. “How do you expect to train your power without using it?”
“He said he would help me control it. I don’t need to make it stronger, I need it to stop.” Scott squeezed his arms again, almost hugging himself. “You don’t know what it’s like. You and Jean just move stuff around. Kitty just goes through stuff and all Kurt can do is teleport.” Wait, Kurt could teleport? People couldn’t teleport. “You guys aren’t monsters. I am.”
Goodness. Had Erik sounded like this at fifteen? Erik had a body count in the hundreds at fifteen, and even he hadn’t been this bad. It was a miracle his little adopted Romanian village didn’t turn around and kick him out.
With impressive patience, Erik said, “I’ll be the judge of that. What even is your power, Scott? How do you activate it?”
“It is activated,” Scott said. “I can’t turn it off .”
Erik looked Scott up and down. He arched an eyebrow.
“Very destructive,” Erik drawled. “Help me. Help me. I’m dying.” Scott demonstrated his favorite facial expression and scowled at his chin. “I told you to cut out the attitude, Scott. Look at me in the eyes when I’m talking to you.”
“I am!”
“How am I supposed to know? You look like a delinquent wearing those sunglasses indoors. Take them off.”
“I can’t take off the dumb glasses! That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
Erik lost his very limited patience. Backtalk, attempted suicide by robot, squabbling, Danger Rooms, too much Charles, too little Charles - these children were impossible. They were hopeless and Erik was worse, and there was nothing he could do for any of them.
He raised a hand and pulled Scott’s ridiculous sunglasses into his hand. Scott cried out, hand flying to his temple in a desperate attempt to grab them out of the air, but he was far too slow. The sunglasses smacked firmly into Erik’s palm a second before his world became red.
Red filled his vision. Something impacted his chest. He could only compare it to a direct punch from Marko, but even that was insufficient. He felt his feet leave the floor and his body go sailing through the air, and the barest push of his instinct reached out for any metal in the vicinity.
Red became black, and Erik blacked out.
“ - mean, we already have one -”
“And I know how to do a funeral now! I am practiced.”
“Yeah, but two in one day is just kind of embarrassing. It makes it look like we’re running through old men like tissue paper. Can’t we wait a bit?”
“He’s Jewish, Jean, it has to be ASAP. There’s, like, rules.”
“Can’t believe he survived the Holocaust and Scott got him,” Kurt said sadly. “So much work. And for what?”
“I’m just saying,” Jean said, “we look irresponsible!”
“This is a school, not a nursing home,” Kitty said. “I didn’t sign any paperwork to take care of them. I take no responsibility.”
“What a surprise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean!”
“I’m just saying -”
“Saying what!”
“Saying it’s a surprise that you don’t care about our image -”
Erik groaned.
“Mr. Lensherr!”
“Mr. Lensherr, you aren’t dead!”
“Mr. Lensherr, it’s not our fault Scott tried to kill you -”
“Scott didn’t try , it’s all his fault -”
“Blame the murder victim, Jean, nice one -”
“He’s not murdered, I can blame him all I want!”
A fat, fuzzy appendage poked his cheek. Erik slapped it away.
“Congratulations, guys,” Kitty said dully. “We are officially the first gang of teenagers to chase a guy away from a bazillion dollar inheritance. Go team.”
Erik opened his eyes.
Of course, four teenagers were crowded around him. No, three - three round and occasionally fuzzy faces blinked at him in soppy concern, and one teenager stood away from the group looking away with crossed arms.
Erik pushed himself upwards, gasping. Three - no, four ribs cracked. Jean quickly bent down to help him up, but Erik shook her off. He looked backwards, head still ringing like a bell - note to self, check for a concussion later - and saw a large sheet of metal with the imprint of a man. It was almost Wil E Coyote, and it took a second glance to realize that the meal had ripped outwards from the wall. The outside surface of the wall was the energy absorbing material. Erik’s powers must have pulled forward the metal insulation from further inside the wall to catch his fall. What would have double murdered anybody else saved Erik from major injury and the school’s reputation.
He turned away from the wall, facing the children. Jean was wringing her hands, a curtain of red hair falling over her face. Kitty was facing away from him, face solid, biting her lip. Kurt’s tail drooped onto the floor, even as he offered Erik a weak and fanged smile.
Scott was crying. He was turned away from all of them - trying to hide it and perfectly cognizant that they all knew. His shoulders were shaking with it, his breath hitching softly and weakly, but he didn’t rub at his eyes. He couldn’t. His glasses were fixed in place, and he had to let the tears run. The sound was small, suited for a much younger child, and Erik recognized it acutely. It was the tears of a child who expected nobody to come and wipe them away.
Erik had cried those tears himself a lifetime ago, a world away. Nobody had helped him. Nobody had ever come. Nobody had protected him from the pain, and so the pain had never ceased. Not for him. Not for any mutant.
It wasn’t a decision at all.
“Is everybody alright?” Erik asked. He shook out his head, willing the double vision to fade. Definitely check for concussion. He had to stop collecting the things. Hank had rambled to him about some syndrome or something from too many concussions, but Erik always tuned out Hank and his silly factoids of the day. “Anybody hurt?”
“Hurt!” Kitty screeched. “You flew through half the Danger Room!”
“I am more worried about the Danger Room,” Kurt told her. “Did you see the way the metal came from the wall? It exploded . Like boom!”
“We should get you to a hospital,” Jean said, face pale. “Senior citizens were not made to crash into walls.”
“I am a bit bruised and perfectly fine.” Erik forced himself to drop his hand away from massaging his three-or-four cracked ribs. He’d tape them up later. “First lesson of the Danger Room is…safety first, apparently.”
“The Professor’s ex-husband is indestructible,” Jean said blankly.
“The Professor’s ex-husband is insane ,” Kurt said, delighted.
Scott wiped at his cheeks the best he could, sniffling hard. Jean raised a hand, as if to put it on his shoulder, before loosely dropping it. “Mr. Lensherr, I - I’m sorry, I didn’t - I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I said I can’t control it. I’m -”
“Do it again.”
Scott froze, tears dripping from the heel of his hand. “What?”
Erik snapped his fingers impatiently, twirling his finger in a clear motion to turn around. “Jean, get back to the operations booth and set up some targets. Scott, whatever you just did, do it again. What was it, some sort of explosion triggered by your eyes?”
“It’s a deadly laser,” Kitty said, unnecessarily gleeful. Jean immediately rushed off for the control booth. “It’s like a beam of red from his eyes. And it goes - shkrazoom! It’s super cool.”
“It almost killed Mr. Lensherr -”
“Obviously, I am perfectly fine,” Erik said, through his four broken ribs. “It’ll take a lot more than that to kill me. You weren’t there when Charles lost that grant to Reed Richards. Closest to death I’ve ever come.”
Kurt turned to Kitty - something Erik was beginning to realize he did whenever he didn’t understand something. “Do we know who Reed Richards is?”
“Have you been living under a rock -”
“Circus.”
“ - right, yeah, so you’ll never guess. So you know how normal people were getting ready for planes to fall out of the sky and everything on Y2K?” Kurt stared at Kitty blankly. “Yeah, okay, just know that you would have had to be some sort of idiot to run a space mission on New Year’s Eve last year. It was, like, some ring in the new millennium futurism, new space age hippie stuff. So obviously Dr. Eccentric Genius number fifty three or whatever goes on all these talk shows about how it’s perfectly safe to launch you and two other guys into space during actual Y2K, nothing’ll go wrong we swear.” Kitty paused a beat for dramatic effect. Kurt leaned in, eyes widening. “And then they all got superpowers .”
Kurt continued to stare.
“One of the guys got turned into a rock,” Kitty added helpfully.
“I’m sorry,” Kurt said, “is this good or bad or…?”
“They’re calling themselves the Fantastic Four now and I think they’re fighting space crime.”
“So it’s bad.”
“Pretty bad, yeah.”
The targets swung up from the opposite wall, diverting Erik from his increasingly firm belief that the 21st century would be worse than the 20th. Erik flicked his fingers at Kitty and Kurt, cuing Kurt to grab Kitty’s arm and vanish them both in a puff of sulfurous smoke. Erik pretended that this was an ordinary thing people could do. Judging from Scott’s surly side glances he desperately wanted Erik to retreat to the observation booth too, but Erik just arched an eyebrow at him instead.
“One more time,” Erik said. “On my count. Three.” Scott sunk into a grounded position, lowering his center of balance. Was there a physical recoil? “Two…” Scott’s hand raised to the arms visor, curling around the plastic wrapped metal. “One. Fire.”
Scott took off his glasses.
Kitty had been correct: it was a shkrazoom. The red pulse of light flared at his eyes before cutting forwards, displacing the air and causing a noticeable gust of pressurized air. It emitted a high and sharp buzz, and the sound lasted until Scott put his glasses back on. Erik noticed that his own hand passed through or blocked the beams easily, and he was careful only to raise them over his nose lens first. The lens must block the beams. Somehow. His eyes were not constantly glowing red, so maybe something else was at work.
The targets were blown off their stands, and Erik watched in interest as the strange form of microtechnology deconstructed itself and melted back into the walls. Or something. Erik didn’t pretend to understand silly things like technology.
Erik stared at the empty poles where the targets once stood. Destroyed utterly. What great power. It could destroy buildings, strike down swathes of people. It was physically intimidating and distinctly inhuman, and the sight of it could easily strike fear into the hearts of humanity.
What Erik could do with this power. What couldn’t Erik do with this power? Erik had been considering how to build a following - recruit helping hands more intelligent than Marko’s and more obedient than Raven’s. Between Scott’s laser, Jean’s immense psychic talents, Kurt’s teleportation, and Kitty’s phase ability - the potential was unlimited. Kurt and Kitty on their own would be perfect thieves. Jean could bend any politician or corrupt official to her will. Scott already wanted to help people. If Erik could just teach him the real definition of help, what it really meant to fight for mutantkind…
Erik had done a lot to Charles. He had tried to kill him and he had broken his heart. He had abandoned him, condemned him, and hated him. Turning his school into a boot camp would go against everything Charles wanted for them, and would doubtlessly hurt him far worse than a spinal cord injury or two.
But Charles was dead, and there was no longer any purpose in harming him. There would be no satisfaction or triumph. The only person he would harm was himself - himself and Scott, whose cheeks were still ruddy with tears.
It was one of the hardest decisions he had ever made. But Magneto and the Brotherhood of Mutants could wait for another day.
“Inefficient,” Erik remarked. Scott whirled around, opening his mouth in protest. “We’ll have to devise a method for you to control your power output. Greater precision would increase the utility of the blast a hundredfold.”
“The utility!” Scott squawked. “What utility!”
“Protecting yourself from angry mobs is slightly useful,” Erik said. The other kids were already leaving the observation booth and running over, eager to join the debrief. “See the obvious, Scott. Your blasts are uncontrolled because you are afraid of them. The longer you shy away from this power, the more it controls you.”
Scott wiped at his cheeks again, looking away. “The Professor told me I could help people with it. I thought maybe…but it can’t. I can’t. It’s even hurting people here. I can’t do it.”
“No, you cannot. Not alone. No man is an island. You and your classmates are unpracticed, naive, and dangerous to yourself and others.” The classmates rapidly joining them looked either embarrassed or put-out, but Erik forced himself to step back and meet their eyes. They clustered together, eyes fixed on him. Already they move together instead of apart. “You will become better together. Together, learning to control your gifts and bend them to your desires, you will unlock potential you never dared to dream.
“Mutants together are unstoppable, and I will not allow this potential squandered due to fear or reluctance.” Erik’s heart pounded hard in his chest - attempting to block his path or push him forwards, he did not know. He was at a crossroads, and he no longer pretended to know the future. “Charles dreamed of a future where mutants could become whoever they wished to be. He wanted a future that produced no more mutants like me. That is something…even I want. Whatever you four want to do - whoever you want to be - that is a decision you shall make. I will see that you are allowed to make it.” Erik’s throat ran dry, and he swallowed. “I will make it happen. If you will allow it.”
Xavier’s children stared at him.
Jean grabbed Kitty and Kurt’s hands. “We will have a family meeting about it. Can we have some privacy?”
As if they were the ones who decided - Erik sighed. “Sure. I’ll be in the observation room.”
“And don’t listen in!”
“I will not listen in.”
Erik sat in the swivel chair in the observation room, idly surveying the dashboard. He really was interested in that level nine. He looked up and surveyed the children too, who seemed to be passionately arguing with each other. He was already noticing that Scott and Kitty were the most likely to get into it, with Jean frequently taking Scott’s side and Kurt mostly abstaining. Ugh. He’d have to learn dynamics.
“Charles,” Erik said, “what have you gotten me into now?”
After twenty minutes, fifteen of which were spent asleep, the door opened. Erik jolted awake only to see four children standing in the doorway - youthful faces cautious, resolved, hopeful. Everything that he used to feel, and everything he had lost a long time ago.
Jean stood in front, having apparently elected herself spokeswoman. “We accept you as Headmaster of the Xavier School for Mutants. On the condition that you don’t change the name.”
Lord, he had no intention. “I accept your proposal,” Erik panned. “I’m honored.”
Kitty popped up behind her, ignoring Jean’s put-out look. “So speaking of, uh, Professor Xavier’s last wishes -”
“He told us this explicitly,” Jean interjected. “He was super clear.”
“It was, like, Xavier’s dying wish that we fight crime!” Kitty attempted to look as sober and serious as possible. “Like the Fantastic Four!”
“Super crime,” Kurt added, tail lashing excitedly. “Not normal crime. Or space crime like the Fantastic Four do. Mutant crime!”
“Yes! The Professor wanted us to fight mutant crime.” Jean nodded firmly, tossing her long curtain of hair over her shoulder. “He said it was part of training and really important for learning control. So we can fight mutant crime better.”
“Professor Xavier wanted us to help people,” Scott corrected. He was still scowling faintly, but something unfocused and hurt in his demeanor had sharpened. “He wanted us to help protect humanity and mutants. If we’re going to become the most powerful mutants in America, then we have to use this power for something. Like fighting mutant crime.”
Erik stared at them blankly. The children held their breaths.
Finally, Erik said, “That’s stupid. You aren’t doing that.”
“ What -”
“You’re fourteen and fifteen. Crime is a social construct imposed by a fascist state. Charles wanted a school, so I’m running a school. Not a breeding ground for authoritarianism.”
“Dying wish, Mr. Lensherr!” Jean cried. “Dying wish!”
“If that man wanted me to care about his dying wishes he shouldn’t have died.”
“I have a presentation!” Kitty added, somewhat desperately. “It’s very persuasive!”
“You’re all being ridiculous. Nobody in this house is becoming a paramilitary tool of the state and that’s final.”
“ Nein, we thought of a team name and everything -”
“That’s final!”
Four months later, Kitty’s cell phone rang in class.
The dulcet tones of NSYNC blared as Kitty jumped, diving to dig through her backpack and retrieve the sparkly pink Hello Kitty flip phone. Erik caught a bare glance of the caller ID - ‘Cerebro’ - before she turned it off with a guilty smile.
Erik put down the copy of Bellum Gallicum , arching an eyebrow at Kitty. The other four students around the conference table affected innocence, leaving her to the wolves. Rogue practically whistled. “I’m sorry. If you have more important commitments we can reschedule. The recount of Caesar’s defeat of the Helvetian forces can wait for another day.”
“Actually, Mr. Lensherr, it’s almost three.” Jean pointed at the clock, and Erik turned around to squint at it. So it was. He could have sworn it was only half past two. “So it might actually be time for math.”
Kitty rocketed upwards, slamming her notebook closed. “I think I’ll hold math class outside today! Kurt got to hold German in the attic so I think I get to hold math outside.”
“It’s forty degrees outside,” Erik said, confused.
“Adversity breeds math skills,” Jean said. The other kids were hurriedly packing up their own books, jumping up from their chairs and waggling eyebrows with each other. “Bye, Mr. Lensherr, thanks for the lesson!”
The children chorused their goodbyes and ‘see you at history’s, and within a few seconds they had all poured out of the room whispering furiously to each other. Erik was left sitting at an empty desk, a creased and dog-eared copy of Caesar laying flat in front of him, mildly confused but mostly uncaring.
After only a few seconds Kurt bamf’d back into the library, holding an envelope between two fingers. “I almost forgot to mention. A letter came for you. It doesn’t look like it’s from the lawyers so I do not know what is up with it. Later, dude!”
“You aren’t allowed to call me dude, Kurt -”
But Kurt had already poofed away, leaving Erik to snatch the letter out of the air. It was addressed to Erik Lensherr, almost illegibly. He didn’t recognize the return address, but he did recognize the sender’s name. Unfortunately worth reading. He stood up from his chair, looking around for his reading glasses. Where had he put the wretched things? Damn this mansion. It was a black hole of misplaced glasses and socks. Had he left them in the den?
He exited the library, winding down two flights of stairs and kicking aside Kitty’s latest ill-conceived robotics project. He stopped only to look at a framed picture on the wall by the staircase: Erik, unsmiling and solemn, standing behind five children. The children themselves, with the exception of Rogue’s angry squint to the left, were bright - Scott and Jean had arms around each other’s shoulders, and Kitty was grinning and holding up two fingers in a peace sign. Kurt knelt on the ground, holding up a small banner over his torso. In Jean’s precise script, it read Xavier School for Mutants: Class of 2000.
He had tried telling them that ‘Class of’ was for the graduating class, but Kurt had spouted some nonsense about how they were all eternal students in the school of life and Erik had decided he didn’t care. He stared at the class portrait for one second, two, before continuing his descent.
The glasses were in the den, hidden behind Rogue’s Kafka. He fetched them and collapsed on his usual armchair, taking a second to turn the radio on for background noise. The children would be occupied for another few hours with their lessons and frostbite.
He slid the glasses on his nose and read the letter. It continued as follows:
Erik,
I hope that you’re well and that you are not partaking in any of your usual hobbies. To begin, I want to say how sorry I am about Charles. Despite your differences , I know how deeply you two cared for each other. I also want to yell at you a bit for not even thinking to inform Ororo and I (nobody on Earth or in the heavens knows how to stay in contact with Logan), but it seems as if Charles himself has already gone through the trouble to inform me of his own death.
I had to crack open the old smelling salts after reading his letter. I couldn’t decide which was worse: that Charles had somehow predicted his own death to the extent that he drafted a letter to be sent four months after the fact, or that he left everything to you . Including the school!
He seemed very confident that you had accepted the headmastership of the school, and that you’d been in charge of some ankle-biters for months. He assured me (from beyond the grave!) that you’re doing a spirited job. I can only pray that Charles is incorrect - he is somehow always right and always wrong about you - and that this letter will reach nobody. I do not know your usual address and my calls aren’t getting through to the manor, so I’m left with the faint hope that this letter goes unnoticed and unread.
(Oh, right. Erik had unplugged the non-emergency phone lines - partly to prevent his lawyers from talking to him, partly to stop the children from ordering pizza all the time.)
Charles’ death is, of course, deeply suspicious, but he requested that Ororo, Logan (who knew, and did not see fit to mention this to us ), and I allow you room to focus on the students over any detective work. I am inclined to agree and leave you space to grieve.
His other request was that we come visit the school and help you with this monumental task before we access our own inheritances from him. He also said to expect Longshot, which is deeply alarming. It shall be my pleasure to aid in sheltering and nurturing these young minds, and I suspect I know what the inheritance may be. He was always very free with lending his resources to us and helping coordinate our meager efforts to keep the world safe from rapscallions such as Creed, and it is likely he has also assembled a more permanent system to help us in our endeavors.
Strangely, we may not be the only ones who have chosen to undertake this duty - Logan has reported to me that a small gang of mutants has thrashed Creed and left him for SHIELD arrest. Would you know anything about this? If there’s mutant violence run amok you’re usually involved somehow. I doubt you would allow SHIELD into your affairs in any capacity, so I am left scratching my furry head.
If this incredible series of events is true, then five children have been left in a manor for four months with only you as adult supervision. I don’t know if they’re all dead or if we have miniature terrorists on our hands.
Ororo, Logan, and I (hopefully not Longshot) will be there as soon as possible. Please don’t burn anything down, kill any politicians, commit any acts of domestic terrorism, or traumatize any children until we get there.
I can’t believe any of this is happening. I knew the 21st century would hold far greater marvels than the last, but these exceptional events are coming faster than even I could have anticipated. First Reed’s insanity and now this. What else does the future have in store for us?
Your mutual friend,
Dr. Hank McCoy
P.S. Apparently this gang of mutants are calling themselves the X-Men - are you sure you don’t know anything about this?
“ - an amazing scene! Truly, folks, I’ve never seen anything like it before. Black Tom Cassidy’s reign of terror seems to be at an end! The heroic group of young men and women calling themselves the X-Men have arrived at the scene, and they have arrived with a bang! Literally, folks, that is literal - and Black Tom Cassidy is creating another sort of concussive wave from that stick of his, but it is passing straight through one of the X-Men - I’ve never seen anything like it, I’ve never seen anything in my life like this -”
Erik turned off the radio and went back to sleep.