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The subconscious can be everything, or it can be nothing at all.
--
Some nights he dreams about what could have been. He dreams of a mind against his, a body warm in his arms and a house full of laughter and madness. He dreams this, but then there is always a light that wipes it away, the light of a thousand missiles exploding like stars in the sky. Exploding like his life, his heart, everything that had brought him up and tore him down lost somewhere in the Atlantic, a submarine dead at the bottom where he finds the loveliest face with the saddest blue eyes and no way to breathe and surface.
This is what needed to be done. I’m sorry. I’m not sorry.
He dreams, and then he wakes up.
--
Some nights he dreams about what was. He dreams about the crackling of a fire and the sound of chess pieces moving across the board. He dreams about black turtlenecks and twisted metal and a satellite always pointing towards home.
Most dreams he sees him there, that person who is now only a figment, and he kisses him and kisses him, listens to the indistinct roar of his thoughts and can breathe again.
Don’t leave me, he thinks, mouths meeting harder over a chess table, on a plane over Cuba, in the library and in the gardens. Don’t turn away from me.
What was can never be, and he wakes up.
--
“I didn’t think I’d see you so soon,” Charles says. There is a sharp twist to his mouth and his eyes are carefully blank. Erik can’t stop staring at him.
“I heard you were sick.”
“I was. I’m fine now.” Charles doesn’t have anything else to offer. Of course Erik is wearing the helmet, and of course Charles is in the wheelchair. The circumstances that brought them to this point are all there, so very visible, so very painful.
They stare at each other in silence for far too long, trying not to feel the acute pain in the slots where their hearts belong, trying so hard not to get lost in the tangled things between them. Charles has nothing left to offer and Erik has too much left to offer and that, it seems, is that.
Magneto leaves without a word and Professor X feels the sickness that had receded start up again.
--
Most days he knows what he has to do. Magneto is a threat to society, human and mutant alike even if he doesn’t see it, and he must be stopped. But Erik wasn’t a threat. Erik was his best friend, his fellow teacher, his…everything, once. Magneto must be stopped. Erik must come back.
Charles knows this, just as he knows how to do this. He’s never done it before, never even thought to, but people are dying and he is so lonely, selfish from years of being selfless, and he knows that he has the power to do it. If he can make people disappear, why can’t he make them forget too?
The mind is a tricky thing, an instrument, and he knows how to play it masterfully. He’s done it before, with a lovely human girl who simply knew too much. He knows he can do it again. He knows he has to.
At all costs.
--
He doesn’t tell anyone and when it happens it is in the middle of a battle, mutants vs. mutants and Magneto is levitating a car towards a crowded dome of people—innocents—trapped by his power. He doesn’t see Charles coming and when they fall to the ground, Charles so strong now in his arms from that damned wheelchair, the helmet is easy to remove from the shocked mutant’s head.
Magneto’s forehead is hot under his fingers, and his memories blaze as Charles closes his eyes and imagines white and emptiness. The familiar horrors of Erik’s mind he sweeps away, as neatly as he can in such an affair, to a corner of the mind that he imagines is a great room with a great lock and a password only he knows.
That password is, of course—
OldfrienddarlingCharlesShawcoindestroymetalmothercampscreamriprundestroymonsterShawShawdeadhumanmutantworldCharleschildrenCharlesCharlesCharles—
Old friend.
Then Magneto knows no more.
--
When he wakes up he is without a name and without a history in a room full of steel and cold air. He has a steady throbbing in his head and he can feel his pulse shudder throughout every point in his body. Immediately, he closes his eyes and sleeps, because it is all he knows.
--
Of course there are repercussions. Alex and Sean are looking at him like they’ve never seen him before, and Hank won’t look at him at all. Inside the lab Erik is still asleep, face slack and free of lines of worry and thoughts, looking so much younger that Charles could sob.
“Why did you do it?” Raven asks from behind him, where she has teleported in with Azazal. “What did you even do?”
Charles closes his eyes. Erik’s mind is full of static and half formed notions and images, never to be completely clear. “I made him forget everything.”
“Everything?” Sean gapes, “Like, his name…?”
Charles doesn’t answer. Erik is here but he isn’t and he knows that it is his entire fault. “I reached too far,” he breathes, too much to himself. “I took too much. I just wanted things to be the way they were and I couldn’t do it. There was too much…”
Hatepainsadnessdespairrage—
“There was just too much,” Charles’ voice cracks. Everyone is silent. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”
“So he’s not an enemy anymore?” Angel dares to ask quietly.
Raven’s laugh is little more than a bark. Her golden eyes are so bright as she stares down at her brother, slouched down in his wheelchair with his head in his hands. “He’s no one anymore.”
But to Charles Erik will always be everything.
--
He wakes up to a room full of…people. Or at least, they would resemble people, if one of them weren’t blue, another furry and blue, the other red and another with wings coming out of her back. There are two normal looking teenage boys though, and a man. All of them are crowded around his bed side in a fancy looking room that seems oddly familiar in some far off place.
Naturally, the man assumes he is dreaming. He doesn’t say a word; he doesn’t know what to say. They all continue to stare at him until one of the boys, the one with red hair, and leans in close—too close—to say, “Hello?”
The man just stares at him. Everyone shifts nervously. “Is he brain dead?” the blue girl whispers and a curse is expelled from the blonde boy. She has golden eyes and fire red hair and her blue skin is a patchwork of patterns. The man doesn’t remember who he is or where he’s at, but he at least knows that humans aren’t supposed to look like…this.
“Erik?” the red haired boy says again, tentatively. “Mr. Lehnsherr?”
The man feels a throbbing behind his eyes at that name. Is it his name? Again he gets the sensation that it is, but he isn’t sure, not about anything right now.
“Oh this is ridiculous,” the girl with the wings hisses, “Here’s how it’s going to go. Your name is Erik Lehnsherr and you’re a mutant that can move metal and you’re German, I think, and you were on a crazy vengeance mission. Do you understand?”
Oddly, he thinks he does. Slowly he manages to nod, because what choice does he have? This is a crazy dream and he’ll wake up and remember himself and his past and forget all about this hallucination.
His name is Erik Lehnsherr for now.
--
They tell him everything and they tell him nothing. He knows their names now and he knows how he is associated with them and he knows that he is a mutant too.
It is the things that they aren’t telling him that intrigue him. Who was he before he met them? When he asks they all look away or down at the floor and their silence speaks louder than any words ever could. He feels a twisting in his gut that feels like so much rage that it startles him. He wants to go back to sleep. He doesn’t notice everything metal in the room is starting to vibrate and twitch with life it shouldn’t have.
He goes back to sleep with his name and their names and another name he can’t quite reach into his head.
--
He speaks German and he has numbers on his arm and everyone fears him. Metal is the only thing that he wants to be around.
Sometimes he feels like he isn’t alone when he is, he is, and it should frighten him, it should, but it doesn’t, it really doesn’t.
--
Time marches on and Erik gains new memories and relearns almost everything he once knew. His power is getting stronger with each day, but he finds that it can never work as strongly as he wants it to. There is emptiness inside of him, maybe in the shape of the memories he used to have or maybe in the shape of a person he once knew.
Something is missing and he can’t figure out what it is but he wants to know, he needs to know. In his frustration the metal sometimes bends on its own, shudders and shakes within the confines of its shape as though there is something inside of it, those particles who shouldn’t have life, that want to be free.
In the back of his skull, there are words and a voice, lilting and laughing and lovely as he closes his eyes, each and every night.
The point between rage and serenity, it whispers and it taunts. He thinks that he may be a little in love with the voice, even if it is all in his messed up head.
My friend, it tells him, and he can sleep at night.
--
There is a man that goes by the name of Professor X, who owns this mansion and brought everyone together. He is in a wheelchair and he spends all of his days in his study now, causing concern among his students.
There is something burning at the back of his skull like a fire he cannot put out. There is something in the letter X, something he loved once or something he hated once he does not knows.
The letter follows him around all day, into his dreams where he images blue eyes and X, just X.
X marks the spot.
--
Erik hears them talking about the elusive host when he is walking by the kitchen one morning, and he pauses to listen through the door.
“He needs to stop torturing himself,” Sean sighs. “It was the only thing he could think of.”
“But it was a bad thing,” Raven grouses. “Look at this situation—it’s ridiculous! It’s only a matter of time until he remembers.”
Remembers? Erik feels something heavy settle into the pit of his stomach.
“He should just confront him already,” Angel says, sounding irritated. “I don’t know why he hasn’t. I know that he must feel ashamed but seriously, one look at Professor X and he might remember!”
“And if he does remember?” Sean asks. “Where will that leave us? You remember what he was like…before. He’ll just go back to killing.”
“Well he might not remember. No one said it was temporary and really, I like this Magneto better,” Alex confesses. “He’s less violent. “
Erik wonders why he suddenly doesn’t want to listen anymore. Turning away from the door he ascends the stair back to his big empty room that doesn’t feel like his own. He sits on the bed and thinks about leaving. But where would he go?
Words like violent and remember race through his mind and he knows—maybe he’s always known—his amnesia is linked to the mysterious Professor X.
He and Professor X needed to talk, didn’t they?
So then why is Erik hesitating in finding the elusive man?
There are no answers and the things that he does know are hurting his head.
The numbers on his arm are so dark. There is not enough metal in the room.
Outside, the sun is setting.
--
Charles has always tried to be fearless. Growing up in a house of abuse, he had to learn how to be, how to learn the art of just letting things slide off his shoulders. His own mind can sometimes be a mystery, dark holes of things he has purposefully forgotten, a mind field that may one day go off.
He feels the acute press of feelings he has long locked away against the back of his mind now, fears and doubts and sorrow, so much sorrow, over what he has done. What he has yet to do.
It’s been weeks and he still can’t get himself to leave this room and face Erik. He knows that Erik would not regain his memories simply from looking at Charles—Charles would just be another stranger to introduce to his newborn mind.
It is too much to bear and Charles is too much of a coward to deal with it.
“He’s asking about you, you know,” Raven tells him one morning when she brings him up breakfast. He doesn’t look at her as she stares him down, eyes accusing, eyes worrying. “He wants to meet you.”
Charles knows this, has heard the whisperings in his ears every night and felt the pull of Erik’s curiosity. He knows that he cannot hide from the man much longer, can’t hide from the thing he has done, but he wants to believe he can. For all of his powers for possessing and controlling and reading the human mind, Charles finds that he is still so weak.
“I’m just not ready Raven,” he replies and the words feel sticky and thick on his tongue. “I cannot face him yet.”
“You’re being unfair to him,” the blue skinned girl says, so softly in her disappointment. “You can’t keep hiding from him forever, Charles. He needs to remember.”
“Why does he need to remember? So that he can kill more innocent humans?”
Raven’s jaw tightens and Charles wonders if he had gone too far. Raven’s mind is flashing with indignant fury and sorrow, but she says nothing back. When she does speak again it is to tell him that she is going into town and she’ll be back shortly. Then she leaves him alone.
“This is for the best,” Charles says to the empty room. But he knows in his bones that it isn’t, not at all, but the mind is a resilient thing, as he knows so well. It is for the best, and his heart just needs to learn to stop aching.
--
The name Magneto hounds him in his dreams. In these dreams he wears a dark helmet that covers his head completely and he feels like a god in it, a nameless, baseless god who seeks greatness. People flee before him and metal bends under his will. Power courses through him and he feels happy and hollow all at once, and he wonders how it can be.
Why does he feel so lonely, inside of this cavernous helmet?
He tries to remove it, as people—humans, a mind whispers—run past him but he can’t get it off. It is stuck, melded to his skull and he tugs and tugs and tugs until it feels like his head might just come off with it. Desperate and angry he needs to get it off, he knows, he has to or else—
Or else—
He always wakes up with words on his tongue that taste bitter and too big for his mouth.
--
His chest aches and his head hurts. Time goes on and he doesn’t want it to anymore, not with all the dreams he’s been having, the voice in his head and a stranger’s face in his heart. I need to remember, he thinks desperately as he bends a coin into the shape of the moon.
The moon, the moon, hung from a noose in his heart.
And in the moon he sees a face— you know the face— and he wants to weep and weep and weep.
It’s not enough; it’s never been enough.
--
“Who is Professor X?” he asks Raven one sunny day when they are out on the patio watching the trees sway in the distance.
For a second he doesn’t think that she will answer. Then—
“You already know who he is,” she says, and she sounds so sad, world-weary and sagging in the bright sunlight. “You’ve always known who he is.”
And yes, yes, maybe he does, he does.
--
It happens and Charles is expecting it—how could he not have expected it, with his gift? But even knowing and predicting it does not prepare him for it when the day comes and his study door cracks open and he sees that face, that precious, darling face staring back at him from across the room.
He feels dizzy and sick and has to clutch to the arms of his wheelchair as he reaches into Erik’s mind and sees nothing at all but curious fascination for him. Nothing more and nothing less.
Their eyes meet and Erik smiles a little, a polite quirk of the lips that kills Charles a little inside.
“You must be Professor X,” he says, “It’s nice to finally meet you. You…keep to yourself.”
Charles knows that he should respond as he properly should, with a polite hello and yes, yes, I do keep to myself but he can’t, he can’t. He might say too much. He might say too little. Erik’s eyes are so blank and his mind so pristine that Charles feels himself start to shake apart.
“Erik…” he slips up, says without meaning to, watches as the man’s pupil’s contract, and listens as his name repeats in his mind, an endless loop of Erik, Erik, Erik.
“I’ve heard your voice before,” Erik tells him slowly, as though Charles doesn’t already know this. “Where have I heard your voice before? Who the hell are you?”
Charles has nothing to offer. Shrunken down into his chair, he is struck dumb and mute by the frantic struggling of Erik’s mind, churning and churning for things that once were.
“Who am I? Who the hell is Magneto? What did you do to me?” Erik’s questions pour out of him, an endless stream of desperation egged on by the blue of Charles’ eyes. The blue the color of the sky that is always in Erik’s mind, like a window that has been barred up; all he can see now is the sky.
Charles has no answers. But this is a lie, of course; Charles has all the answers, is the only one with the answers. He just doesn’t have a voice. It is lost in the frantic desperation of Erik’s mind, the insatiable curiosity and the hollowness that fills Charles and hurts him like a physical wound. So lost in Erik’s once upon a time mind he doesn’t notice when the man steps up to tower over him, the broken form of a man in a wheelchair. It should be menacing, but it’s Erik.
“Tell me,” Erik demands harshly. “Tell me everything.”
Charles meets those familiar eyes, sees the conflict and the anger and hurt and he smiles, a bittersweet twist of the lips. “I can’t tell you everything. I can barely tell you anything at all. You should know that by now.”
Erik’s rage is not entirely unexpected for Charles as it crashes down around them. With something resembling a snarl Erik starts to violently pace the room like a caged lion, looking just as ferocious as one. Everything metal in the room starts to rattle and underneath his hands Charles feels his wheelchair lift off the ground and tremble like a live, rabid beast above the floor.
“I know nothing, absolutely nothing!” Erik snarls and when he looks at Charles it is not Erik staring back at him but Magneto.
“You will not hurt me Erik,” Charles says, and he means it without even having to look inside of Erik’s funhouse mind. “Please, calm your mind.”
“Or what?” Erik challenges, “You’ll fuck up my mind? You’ll make me freeze in place, or—or forget—“
And just like that, Charles watches shock replace the rage. Everything stops rattling and Charles’ wheelchair stops floating, and in the stillness everything is suddenly too quiet. Charles is afraid to take a breath.
Erik is staring at him with such wide eyes, hurt and liquid and fractured. A mind seeing through a mind. You know this face, this voice, this mind and this heart. But most of all you know this trick. How could you have forgotten, when he is right there?
“Old friend,” Charles says, and it sounds like a sob and a gasp, like a prayer and damnation. Erik is backing away from him, eyes wild and bright as his chest heaves. “You…” Erik stops, pauses, lips his cracked lips. “You…made me forget…?”
Charles eyes are burning with tears but they are dry like the vast space inside his wounded chest, and the tears cannot fall. “I had to, Erik, you must know—“
“I know nothing!” Erik snarls, a beast of emotions as he stalks forward and grabs the sides of Charles’ chair, towering over him as the metal bends and shakes beneath his hands. “I know nothing now! Do you know what that feels like, Professor X? You’ve taken everything from me!”
“I did what I had too!” Charles fights back like a caged animal, because Erik is so close and so familiar and so full of hate. “You—what you were—I couldn’t let it go on! It should have never come to this—“
“But it did, didn’t it?” Erik yells, chest heaving and eyes wild, pinning Charles down more than his body, his powers. “It came to this and now—who the hell is Erik Lehnsherr? Who the fuck am I? Am I supposed to live the rest of my life without my past? Without knowing what happened between us?”
“Nothing happened between us,” Charles says, desperately trying to believe it himself. “Erik, there is nothing between us and your past—“
“Bullshit! You would have just killed me if there had been nothing between us!” Erik growls, hands twisting the metal of the wheelchair up and around his knuckles. “I was your enemy, wasn’t I? And yet you brought me here to, what, attempt to reform me? Keep an eye on me?”
“I did what I thought was right,” Charles whispers and if his eyes are filling with tears, he cannot feel ashamed. Here is the breaking point that these months have led up to. Here is the moment where everything becomes unraveled and the lies burn up; because there was no way they could ever exist forever. There was no way that there could not be anything broken between them, as lost as the feeling in Charles’ legs.
Erik’s subconscious, the place where everything has been pushed, is pulsating, memories desperate to come through. Erik cannot hate Charles any more than he does right now. Charles cannot love Erik any more than he does right now.
Underneath Erik’s towering form Charles is a broken man, eyes so blue and brimming with tears as he exhales, shaking hand rising towards Erik’s head. Erik jerks back, hissing and alarmed to glare at Charles with mistrustful, narrowed eyes. “What are you going to do to me now?” Erik demands, “Make me forget again?”
No, Charles harsh whisper races through his mind, I’m going to make you remember because I love you, so desperately, and I cannot bear to see you suffering. I am weak---I cannot bear to see the hate towards me in your eyes. So, old friend, I want you to remember and please, I did what I thought was right. I thought it was right.
And then there it is, everything that he has been forgetting—everything that Charles made him forget. He sees his mother’s starving face, hears the sound of metal twisting and turning, sees the glint of ice and death in the eyes of a madman. He hears the sounds of screams and sees a man with a cruel twisted smile and a woman covered in diamonds, a woman falling back behind the gates of death.
It all rushes back to him—to him, Erik Lensherr—like a punch to the midsection, causing his body to bend over the strain of his memories and the knowledge that this—that he—
He sees a man with bright blue eyes telling him he is worth more than he thought imaginable. That same man smiling at him despite seeing his thoughts; that same man who had an adorable way of wrinkling up his nose when he laughed, an orphan like him with a grand idea—
The same man that had taken from him, had shunned his ideals, had looked at him with the saddest eyes on a beach as blood pooled around his back, had fought him for years now, viciously and sadly, who couldn’t read his thoughts from a helmet, a helmet, a curse inflicted, a curse received—
“How could…” Erik gasps and scrambles, still reeling from the onslaught. Still he manages to look at Charles, always at Charles, at his too bright eyes that are spilling over with tears. And he should cry, Erik thinks and hopes Charles can hear him, knows Charles can hear him. He should cry from his, because I—Charles I will never forgive you for this, for this—
I am sorry, Charles familiar voice echoes in the flooded and bloodied corridors of his mind. Old friend I had to I didn’t have a—
“You did!” Erik snarls aloud ad the wheelchair Charles is confined to twists and collapses, making the telepath fall to the floor where he is splayed out, helpless against the man above him. But he’s not really helpless because Erik doesn’t have his helmet on and Charles can see—
“Oh Erik,” Charles says in a voice that is rough and destroyed, as destroyed as Erik feels, and Erik takes one look at him, his once time friend and more, his mind and heart scream and Charles knows, so much more, before he is turning on his heel and running.
Charles does not call out his name after him; no one chases him. He leaves the Xavier manor in silence and in the night, panting for breath and feeling Charles still sitting in his mind, slight and unbearable, and Erik wants to crack his head open like he had with Shaw’s so that it will be gone. But no that isn’t right either because if he does that than Charles—he won’t—
I love you too, Charles tells him as he stumbles away, back to his plans, back to his life. That isn’t right because his life is behind him…
I love you Erik.
And then Charles is gone from his mind and Erik is left alone, bruised and whole, and it is a good thing there is no metal out here, in the woods by the manor, because it would be twisted beyond repair.
Everything is twisted beyond repair. Charles’s sickness is explainable now, the sickness that had made him let his guard down, and it twists inside of him now, something bright and hot like the nuclear bombs that had exploded in the sky at that beach, all those years ago.
“No,” Erik says to himself, to no one. “No.”
--
Erik Lensherr is a mutant. He has a mission, given to him by death and by despair, given to him by the destruction of all things good. He puts the helmet back on and closes his eyes, faces he mirror. He remembers and he is himself again and even if—
Even if it remains, the heaviness, the old friend, the sickness, the forever and ever and death burning love—
Well, Erik Lensherr is a mutant first and a man…a man never.
He is Magneto. He is metal, unbreakable and strong and violent enough to crush a man’s skull.
But he wishes—he wishes for different things wishes some nights alone and surrounded by his metal that, in the heart that has always been broken—
He wishes he had never remembered because he knew—he knows—he would have been happy, incandescently, a stranger to himself and someone that could look into those eternal summer eyes and not break apart—
But his point of serenity has always been formed and broken and repaired and dismantled by Charles, only Charles and he cannot, he cannot--
He is Magneto. The helmet never comes off.
--
I love you so much Charles says and he is standing and smiling. There are no missiles going off behind him. His eyes are the color the sky wishes it could be. Erik I love you.
I love you too Erik says and there is no helmet on his head and there is a looseness in his chest and he can’t stop smiling. I love you too.
He is burning inside and out and Charles is with him so it will be okay, it will be okay, won’t it?
--
Charles sits alone in a dark room and stares out at nothing. The wheelchair is repaired but that is the only thing that is fixed; everything else is shattered around in his mind like debris and he can’t bear to sweep it away.
He thinks for a while that it would be a wonderful thing to forget and wonders, with all the powers to see into the mind, if he can achieve such a thing for himself. But that is not how it works—he is to know others but never entirely know himself.
And the things he does know about himself are embodied in a broken vengeful man with the most tragically beautiful mind Charles will ever see and ever know. He almost hates Erik some days for it but the emotion never sticks around long. The war will start up again inevitably as dawn coming as soon as Erik regains his feet, regains the anger that encases his heart.
He is already wearing the helmet again; Charles has, already, again and again and again, lost him, hasn’t he?
It shouldn’t hurt anymore. It shouldn’t matter.
But he has never been good at lying, especially to himself.
--
Weave me new memories, he asks of him, his most beloved foe, his most beloved. Make me forget again.
It doesn’t work that way, Erik.
Why doesn’t it? Why can’t it?
I can’t make you new memories because then you wouldn’t be Erik.
No, he shakes his head and the dream rattles around him. But we could be together, couldn’t we?
Oh Erik, Charles tells him, young and spine shot. Don’t be a fool.
--
The subconscious is everything.
Erik cries in his sleep. He dies. He loves.
But when he wakes up he remembers none of it and the things he does remember, placed there from another continent, another mind…
He doesn’t remember. He can’t remember.
The subconscious is nothing, no nothing, nothing.
--