Chapter Text
It’s not destiny. It’s luck. A billion voices screaming out all at once. Sometimes less. Usually more. A world of pain and anger and it’s not fair and why me and oh god not them let it be me please. A world people looking for someone to help them. A world of hands thrust out, grasping.
It’s luck that Charles, that night, head pounding, eyes scrunched up against the wall of noise, against the sea of want, reached out and grabbed his hand. Grabbed Erik’s hand a quarter of the world away as he screamed mama mama no. It could have been anyone. It turned out to be Erik. It’s not a miracle. It's just the luck of the draw.
But oh, Charles would think if Charles ever knew—doesn’t that make this all the more miraculous?
Sometimes, when he’s lucky, Schmidt can’t hurt him. It’s like there’s a room inside of Erik’s head that’s he’s usually locked out of, that won’t open no matter if he beats himself bloody against it. On those days, he endures. But sometimes—and Erik doesn’t know why, whether it’s that the stars align or some higher power takes pity or Erik screams loud enough to earn his reward—the door opens. Erik can duck inside and slam it behind him and watches himself through the windows as Schmidt slowly, methodically tortures him to strength.
These days, this past week, there’s a boy in the room with him and he tells Erik, “That’s horrible,” like that means something. He’s a soft, pale child with wide brown eyes and a British accent. The boy speaks English and Erik hears German because this is Erik’s head and here, at least, the world shapes to his needs. “That’s horrible,” the boy says again like he’s numb with disbelief.
Erik shrugs. “It is what it is,” he says because he leaves his pain behind as well, and in this room, he can’t give a damn, he really can’t. It’s a nightmare that’s happening to someone else, and that’s terrible for the person going through it, but Erik isn’t that person, not right now, and he would very much like to finish the draughts game he started with the boy last time.
The boy sighs, but not at Erik. The boy doesn’t understand. His pain is too different. Not so much empty stomachs and empty hope as empty rooms and empty love. A warm house filled with cold people. It’s a pain Erik never thought he’d have sympathy before, but he supposes you can’t create an imaginary friend without sympathizing with them at least a little. “I wish I could save you, my friend,” the boy says sadly.
“I wish you could too,” Erik says.
They laugh. It’s funny.
Then the boy moves his piece and the game is on.
“You were twitching,” is the only explanation Raven offers for dousing him awake with water.
Charles shakes the water out of his eyes, shakes the dream out of his mind. “Revenge for yesterday, I take it?” Raven just laughs as she runs away. Charles shouts after her, “It’s not my fault you didn’t know what cayenne pepper tastes like.” She blows a raspberry in response and ducks out of his bedroom. Charles falls back with a groan into his bed before he remembers it’s soaked.
“Fantastic,” he says to himself. He wondered if compelling Raven to clean it up would be an abuse of his powers or perfectly, perfectly justified. But the anger is already gone, and all that’s left is the damp. There are worse things he could endure, says a part of his brain with more perspective than it should have. There are more terrible fates than this.
Besides, he could always slip some mud into her shoes if he still felt sore.
He changes, leaving his damp sleep clothes in a pile for the maid to deal with. As he runs a comb through his matted hair, he tries to remember just what he had been dreaming about. There had been a boy (there was always a boy, always, with his blue, blue eyes the color of the spring sky) and there had been so much blood. He couldn’t remember how the one connected with the other. He decided they didn’t. It was a dream, after all.
“I don’t want to go back,” the boy had whispered.
Charles had grabbed his hand, gripped it tight. “You won’t. I’ll stay, I promise, I’ll stay.”
And then he’d woke.
Charles feels sick and he doesn’t know why. It was just a dream.
And anyway, that strange part of his brain whispers, Charles will see him later.
“I’d kill him if I could,” Erik says. From a world away, from a scant six inches, he watches Schmidt pick up the pliers. “I would make it hurt.” He closes his eyes. Pain nudges at the edge of his consciousness like waves on a far-off beach. He’ll be there soon, and the thought makes him numb. He’s been there for two months. He’ll be there until he dies.
The boy grabs his hand. He does that often now, emboldened by Erik’s lack of protest. Erik should say something, say no, say back off, boys don’t, and the usual rhetoric, but that would be the Nazis speaking, and the fact that they are in his head at all makes Erik want to thrust up and stick Schmidt’s scalpel into his brain completely. If they think it is wrong then Erik will run headlong into it. If he could, Erik rip from the rags of his fellow inmates every triangle, every star, every scrap of fabric that declared them subhuman and sew them all to his chest so every guard would hate him all the more.
This he has learned, this Schmidt has taught him: It is good and honorable to be hated by the people you hate. It means you are right.
“Don’t,” the boy says quietly. Erik looks down at their hands, at their fingers entwined, and something tugs him back. The boy’s hand is warm. So is his voice. “Don’t be like them.”
Erik tightens his grip. “Never,” he says. And to his credit, he thinks many years later, at the time he believes it.
“The only good German,” John says loud enough for the whole room to hear, “is a dead German.”
The boys in the back row laugh. Mr. Henderson ignores them, and it’s hard to think he disagrees with them, not when the walls of the school are stickered with posters with looming Huns and the dark shadow of the swastika falling over the continent. Whether in England or here in America, Charles’ country tells him that the Germans are brutes. Savages. Rapists. Murderers. And there’s some truth to it, perhaps. Charles has heard the news, the kind that gets broadcast to everyone and the kind that only gets broadcast to him. But some truth is not all truth and Charles is almost certain that believing the worst of every member of a group is why the Nazis are doing what they do.
So he says, “Stop that,” and no one is more surprised than Charles.
John breaks the silence first, a snort and then, “Didn’t peg you as a Nazi sympathizer, Charlie.”
“I’m not,” Charles says. If his speaking surprised him, his coldness, his conviction stuns him. He’d thought, maybe egotistically, that his power gave him perspective, that it put him above the blind hatred of war. But he hates the Nazis. He hates them, and he knows this hatred as well as his own name. As well as (king me) he knows (I’ll kill them all someday) his own dreams (don’t go don’t leave please don’t leave me alone with him).
Charles speaks, and something happens in that class’s brains that make them listen. Charles happens. “There are good Germans,” he says slowly and surely. “They have been betrayed by their country, but they are still German. If there is good in one person of a race then there is the potential for good in all of them.” Even Mr. Henderson has turned from the board to listen. Their eyes point at him, but they are blank. This is wrong, a part of him thinks. It’s a very quiet part. But his head throbs like someone’s stuck a knife in and the longer he holds them, the more the knife twists. “Evil isn’t our nature. We’re better than it. There can be peace,” he manages to say. “When the war is done, we can have peace.”
For a moment, for one shining, glorious, beautiful moment, he can see they believe him.
Then the spell is gone.
“You’ve never even met a Jerry,” John says. “Have you?”
Charles looks down to hide how his eyes won’t stop twitching. He stares at his hands, entwined on the desk. “No. I can’t say I have.”
And the class continues.
They don’t play anything today. Erik can’t. Can’t.
Breathing. Hurts. Even here. In the room. Supposed to be safe here. It’s not. Schmidt’s here. Banging. At the door. On Erik’s skull. It hurts to breathe. Hurts. To think.
Then. Erik. Won’t.
“Please.” The boy. “What’s wrong? How can I help? Please, tell me how I can help?”
Kill me. Erik thinks. Kill me. Please. God. Please. Kill me
“I can’t.” The boy. Wide eyes. Pale face. Cold hands. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
Useless.
He can. The boy. He can. Kill. They all can. Kill. Even the good. A monster. Inside all of them. Erik. The boy. The guards. Schmidt. A monster waiting.
One man. Can shoot an unarmed woman. Can lead his people to the showers. Can burn their bodies. Can spread the ashes. Can send a million boys to die. In the mud. So the death continues.
Monsters.
All of us.
Monstrous.
“No,” the boy whispers. The boy is a monster. No. The boy is a dream. Is an escape. Is a delusion. Is a lie. The boy is good. Is kind. Is an angel. Is not real.
The boy shakes his head. Erik can’t look. It blinds him. His goodness. His faith. Erik closes his eyes. He looks at nothing.
Then. Lips.
Lips.
It’s a graze. A blessing. An anchor.
Schmidt is at the door. He wants to come in. Erik is on the floor. He wants to stay in. The boy lies next to him. He wants Erik.
The world isn’t very fair.
Lips. Erik doesn’t want to delude himself. But. It feels like a promise.
And that. For now. Is enough. To meet Schmidt head-on instead of being dragged on.
It’s not a victory. No. Not at all. But it doesn’t. Quite feel. Like. A loss.
Charles’ thoughts upon waking are thus:
Oh. Oh.
He strips as he runs the water, and shoves his sleep clothes into a tightly packed ball at the very bottom of the hamper. He’s sticky and shaky as he scrubs himself clean, hoping, wishing, praying that Raven doesn’t burst into his room this morning. He needs to hide his sheets, needs to explain away the wetness before anyone finds out, before his mother can fix him with another one of those cold really how could you looks that make Charles’ stomach heave.
The water helps. It washes away the adrenaline of waking. Charles’ hands stop quivering as he lathers the soap over him and he thinks, a bit foolishly, that he knows what this is. No one has told him—heavens, no—but he’s heard about it before, from the well-thumbed anatomy textbook in the school library and the broadcasted shame of his peers.
He laughs, just once, an excited burst of glee and excess energy, and it echoes through the bathroom in the silent early hours of the morning. Well, he thinks, this is new. He’s felt desire before, coming off of strangers in waves. He’s never sought it out. It causes, it seems from the outside, more trouble than it’s worth. It seems like that from the inside as well, but, damn it, he can’t fight it. He doesn’t want to fight it. He wants it. He wants everything. Charles wants hands and mouths and tongues and all the rest of the ridiculous affair that he’d thought he could fence off behind a wall of intellect. Good lord, he can feel, like a phantom touch, the way a lover’s hand should move its way down his body. It feels like a memory of a night that has not yet happened.
Charles rinses. He resolutely doesn’t think. This hardly seems like the kind of thing that will benefit from deep analysis. Sure, the dream he’d been having (you, you’re back) had been an (stay, please, just a while longer, I need you) odd one even by Charles’ (you can touch me if you like) standards, but (I don’t mind, touch me) that didn’t mean anything beyond (you said you wanted to help me) a few quirks of the subconscious (I want to help you) and an upset (it’s been so long since anyone wanted me for something good) stomach before (yes) he (perfect) had (I’ve never tried before either) gone (you don’t make me afraid to try) to (the one good thing I have left and you aren't even real) bed (this time please kiss me like you love me).
Just a dream.
When he steps out of the bath, Charles can’t resist wiping the fog off the mirror and checking his lips. If they are pink, it is no more so than usual. The only person who has been biting them is himself. Any memories that Charles has that might tell him otherwise
(two boys on the floor, their arms around each other, they don’t have enough time to do what they need, they don’t have the experience to know how to rush, but they kiss like they breathe the air from each other’s lungs and that is enough, for now, to satisfy the formless, lumbering beast that is their newly born lust for a touch closer than touch, birthed in the dark, birthed in terror)
are just another dream.
(you’re far too clothed, one says to the other, and they wonder how did they get here already, from kissing to criminal behavior in less time than it took to fall to the floor. True, the second says to the first, but we have time, my friend, all the time in the world.
and the first boy began crying and they kissed through his tears and it turned out that really they had less than a heartbeat together before the screaming began once more.)
It was a dream. Dreams mean nothing.
Maybe if he chants it enough, he’ll believe it.
“Shit. James, get over here now. This one’s alive.”
Six months. Six months on the table and Erik doesn’t hurt anymore. Hurt is something that exists only in the body, and Erik is so much more than that now. He floats above the useless scraps and flesh shuddering on the ground. If he’s very, very careful, maybe he never has to come down.
“Get the captain. Kid, do you hear me?”
A thousand different voices clang around him.
“What the hell are these? Why would—”
All shouting to be heard.
“He’s out of it.”
Something tugs at him from a million miles away. Go. Go. You have to go.
“Victor, where the hell is the medic?”
Why? Erik thinks. There’s nothing down there for me.
My friend, there’s hope.
Liar.
Someone pries open his eyes. The light blinds him. God, I am done. Let me die. Please just let me die.
“We’re getting you out of here, kid.”
Erik doesn’t want to go. Erik isn’t allowed to go. If he goes, Schmidt will just find him once more and drag him back here, back to the table and the light and the tools. Darkness bites at the edges of his vision, and Erik lets it gnaw.
Live, my friend. You have to live.
“You’re nothing.” The words slip out as easily as breath (so, not easily at all, but as involuntary as a gasp from the prick of a needle). “You’re a dream.”
Someone grabs him, shakes him. Erik sees nothing, understands nothing. Then someone shakes again, and Erik feels the dream-world slipping away like (like gas in the showers, like ash on the winds) sand between his fingers. “We’re real, bub. We’re soldiers, and we’re getting you out of here.” Reality is bright and sharp and painful.
Someone else’s happiness fills Erik’s chest. Yes. Someone else’s laughter bubbles up through Erik’s mouth. My friend, you will live.
It doesn't sound like a promise. It sounds like a threat. No. Please, no.
“You’re going to be alright, kid. Let’s get you out of here.”
“Liar,” Erik says once more. And once again, no one listens.
Charles sleeps more now than he used to. His mother even notices, remarks on it airily at dinner. “Oh, Charles, you’re so sleepy nowadays. We can hardly get you out of bed at all.” Charles nods and smiles and decides to forget she ever said anything. It’s been a long time since Charles cared what she said.
But Raven, she notices too. Sometimes, he thinks he didn’t know what he was getting into, adopting a baby sister. “Wake up,” she says, as she jumps on his bed. “Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.”
Maybe if he ignores her, she’ll go away.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake—”
“Fine!” Charles kicks off his sheets, kicks them onto his giggling little alarm clock, and stomps to the bathroom, resigned to facing the morning.
Six months he dreamed the same boy. Six months of nights he can only barely remember, and Charles doesn’t know if it was real or not. He searches for the boy in his sleep as best as he knows how. He doesn’t know much. All he can do is return to the room in his mind where they met, and that placed is shuttered and dark. There’s a half-played board of draughts on the floor. Charles had been winning. The boy would disagree. Charles spends the nights sitting on his side of the board and waiting for the door to open, the boy to spring in, freed and healed and finally happy.
Charles waits and waits until his legs grow so cramped he can barely walk. Mind over matter, he thinks to himself, but hadn’t the boy writhed in pain even in here? It’s Charles’ turn, then. It's not the same, he knows that, it's nowhere close to the same. But suffering in any small way make him feel better, makes him feel like he's committing some small act of penance for the crime of having security in a world where he's beginning to realize that that's a luxury.
Charles wakes, he sleeps, he wakes, he sleeps, he waits. And all the while, the world churns on. The war is over, and his nanny drives Charles and Raven into Times Square so they can dance in the streets. Hitler is dead, killed by his own hand on his honeymoon and turned to ash. Part of Charles mourns the lack of justice, that Hitler will never stand trial for his atrocities. A voice in Charles’ head that doesn’t sound like his own rages at the peace of his death, the quietness of his passing, that he willingly made the choice that he thrust down on others, that he did not bleed for hours, for justice, before he died.
(And a voice sounds too much like his own appreciates the quiet simplicity of this solution. Charles buries this voice as deeply as he can and pretends he doesn’t listen to it.)
Slowly, the pictures start coming in, slowly, then faster and faster and faster until the starved, tortured eyes stare up at Charles from everywhere. They grip him with a sense of horror so colossal it borders on numbness. The numbers come rolling in, one million, two million, three, four, five, more and more and more, the body count growing so high it scrapes against the stars and pushes through. The death toll breaks the sky open, and no one can ever sew it shut again.
He tries, once, to reach his mind into the heart of Europe, to feel what the survivors must feel. He locks himself in his closet, charges Raven with keeping people out, shoves a towel under the door to block any sliver of light, and sits in the darkness and the silence. His body goes numb first. He cannot tell when he loses his sight and hearing, but he realizes at one point that they have shut off as well. He probes forward with his mind and finds the world a nebulous, shifting ball of hate you don’t fucking touch me I’m getting married wait this is my daughter hello how are you I can’t live kiss me the Japs are coming no this is how you shoot which way to get to Park Street I think I know your wife can you believe this I’m so happy right now what is going on no I like the blue one better never going to love me should just kill myself now oh god I’m so happy with you—
He gasps back. His face is covered in blood. Charles raises a hand to his nose and realizes it’s his. His teeth ache. He must have been clenching them. His throat throbs. He must have been screaming. This he thinks with an almost clinical train of thought as Raven shakes above him and asks again and again if he is okay, is he okay, for God’s sake, is he okay.
He couldn’t get to Europe. He couldn’t even get his mind out of Westchester. It does, he thinks, raise the question of how in the world he reached all the way to Poland. And he believes, more than he ever wanted to, that maybe the boy had a point about this just being a dream.
“I’m fine,” he tells Raven numbly. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Charles stops eating. Not completely at first, just eats less at meals than he normally would. He can’t reach into thoughts of Holocaust survivors, fine. He can still understand as best he can. He looks at their emaciated frames, counts their ribs and their dulled eyes. This, he can try to understand.
His mother would never notice, with or without his powers. Raven does instantly.
“What the hell are you doing?” Raven asks after the third meal in a row where Charles makes everyone but her think he’d eaten. Perhaps, he thinks, he should reconsider his consent to her blanket ban on all interference with her mind.
There’s no point trying to lie so Charles doesn’t bother. “I’m trying to see what it’s like to go hungry. I want to understand.”
Raven laughs. “Charles, your silverware costs more than most people’s cars. You’ll never know what it’s like to go hungry.” At the sight of his face, she laughs again. “Don’t look so sad about that.” Then she looks at him again, harder this time, and he doesn’t need to read her mind to feel the wave of anger that passes over her. “Charles. Do not look sad about that.”
Charles ducks his head, chastised for something he doesn’t quite comprehend. “I’m sorry,” he says anyway. She shrugs and looks away.
They sit side by side on Charles’ too-high bed, their toes just bumping the floor. He forgets sometimes that his sister is so much younger than him (well, two years younger, but when you don’t have that many years too spare, it matters). It’s been a few months since he has seen her true form, but he knows it’s shorter than the body she’s built for herself. What happened in those years before that night in the kitchen, he wonders, that she would run so far away from her own childhood?
He could ask.
(Would you like to talk about it, my friend? About what happens when I’m gone? When you wake?)
He should ask.
(No. Never ask.)
But he’s not used to not automatically knowing. When it comes down to it, he’s not sure how to learn about someone any other way. And somewhere, in the back of his mind where so many of his baseless hunches seem to originate from nowadays, he suspects that people like her don’t know how to communicate their pain either. So Charles and Raven sit in silence and try to say through their bumping shoulders, their kicking feet all the things they should say.
“What’s wrong with you?” Raven finally asks. Charles raises an eyebrow at her. She rolls her eyes at him, annoyed by his faked ignorance. “You’re not yourself lately.”
“I’m always myself,” Charles says. He flops backwards on the bed, trying to fall out of the conversation, but Raven falls backward with him and stares at him with determination that should look out-of-place on such a young face. “You don’t know what I am. You’ve barely known me half a year.”
Raven waves that off. Charles concedes the point. Time is irrelevant when you’ve finally met the person who made you realize that you are not alone. Raven is his sister, and they are bound by something deeper than mother or marriage. “What’s going on?” his sister asks.
(What’s your name, he asks, but the other boy is silent, curled on his side as if he is trying to collapse in on himself. What’s your name, he asks again.
I don’t have one, the boy says. They took it.
Charles touches his back and feels his friend shiver at the touch. Everybody has a name.
Wrong, the boy whispers, but he rolls over and presses his face against Charles’ thigh. There they stay, they touch, they breathe in time. Charles runs his fingers through the shivering boy’s hair and tries to push hope into him through his fingers. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, he whispers. Please stay with me.
The boy does not respond and too soon, always too soon, it is time to go.)
“I don’t know,” Charles says. “I don’t understand the world nearly as well as I thought I did.”
It’s not a full answer, not even close, but it’s the truth and it’s the best that he can offer her. There’s a dream boy, and he might be real, but he’s probably not. Charles thinks he loves him, but he probably doesn’t. Charles isn’t sure he knows what love is, and the thought should make him sadder, but it’s just a statement of fact.
He can’t give Raven a better answer if he doesn’t know it himself. He can’t tell her what’s wrong because if he could, he would have already fixed it.
So he smiles at her, a little more wanly than usual, and if she feels disappointed, she hides it. Instead, she just sighs and rests her forehead against his. “You do what you need to do, Charles. Just eat your dinner while you’re doing it and stop pretending you’re poor. Okay, stupid?”
He presses a quick kiss to her forehead, something he’s never done before and probably never will again after Raven scrunches up her face in sisterly disgust and retaliates by pushing him off of the bed. Perhaps, he thinks, love feels quite a lot like falling. The landing’s a bit rough and in the end, it doesn’t change anything. But it helps. In spite of everything, it helps.
Erik almost looks like a normal boy now, and he almost acts like one, so that means it’s time to go. And most importantly, he can’t stay here. The displaced persons camp isn’t Auschwitz; death was more efficient at Auschwitz. There’s not enough food, never enough food, and Erik is gun-shy about eating now anyway after his stomach spent three days rejecting what rations the Soviet soldiers could spare. If starvation doesn't get you, typhus will. He’s gained weight in spite of circumstances. Erik sees his future in his body, full of broad shoulders and filled out muscles. He stands without hunching, walks without limping, speaks without whimpering. Slam a door too loudly in his vicinity and he’ll piss himself as he dives for cover, but no matter, the doctors say, children are resilient and men are tough. Erik’s neither so they call him both. It’s time for Erik to go.
He has only walked a few blocks away from the camp when he has to stop to catch his breath. He catches it and moves on. There’s nothing left for him waiting back there, but the dying and the dead.
(What happened to your father?
He is dead.
What about your mother?
Yes. Her too.
I am so sorry, my friend. Do you have any family left?
I don’t know. No.
Where will you go when you get out?
I’m never going to get out.
Don’t say that.
Don’t tell me what to do.)
“Get out of Poland,” an old woman numbered 140501 had told Erik as he’d healed. “It’s not safe here.” Erik had dismissed her, another survivor trapped in the past (and who was he to judge?) until the news of pograms rolled in. Pograms. Just like before. Humans never change, and history is just the same tragedies on endless cycle so now Erik agrees, yes, it is time to get out of Poland. The synagogues are empty here, of man and God. And while Erik isn’t looking for either—he has had enough of those who would seek to mould him in their own image—he’s developing a keen sense for when he’s not wanted.
(You can come live with me. When you finally get out, you can come live with me.
Delusion, I live with you too much.)
He has only two choices: east or west. And make your decision quick, the world tells him. The iron curtain is dropping down, and Erik doesn’t control metal so much that he can’t be trapped by it. West, he decides. Either direction is as good as any. Every place hates him. He might as well suffer in a country where he’s allowed to buy a radio if he pleases.
Erik walks with what’s left of his people. No one will take them, these wanderers. Their saviors, the same men who sent in their armies to pull them out of the concentration camps, lock out the survivors with immigration quotas and bureaucratic chain link fences. They lost their homes and then they lost their prisons and now there is nothing. Erik passes through what feels like all of Europe just looking for a place to spend the night. His German serves him well, as does his Polish. His pigeon English doesn’t hurt either, although he can’t remember where he learned it or why it feels like a half-forgotten dream—
(don’t think about the boy, don’t think about him, don’t think about him, don’t think)
It doesn’t matter.
He learns to sleep in barns and ditches. He’s poor but rarely penniless (See what greatness you’ve taught me, Schmidt, he thinks the first time he pulls a coin from a man’s pocket from ten feet back) and this allows him some luxuries. Coffee from a small café. A night in a hostel. A small, battered book bought from a vendor who needs the sale. These indulgences he allows himself. The bigger ones, he does not.
Erik does not, for example, allow himself to dream at night. It happens anyway, as the mind demands it must, but he can't help himself from being furious that it does. He can't even control his mind nowadays. He dreams of the camp, of Schmidt, of the grain of the desk and the silver of the coin and the smell of gunpowder as his mother hit the ground with a thud. He dreams of dark clouds in the sky and the skeleton in the mirror and way he sobbed when the soldier picked him up and carried him out.
He does not dream of boys with freckles and floppy brown hair and blue, blue eyes the color of summer sky. This small thing, he can keep himself from. Because delusions are fine and good when reality is the sharp edge of a scalpel, but Erik's heart cannot bear the false hope, the insanity. Not anymore. He cannot listen to a soft rich boy's sermons that life gets better. He cannot listen to another promise that tomorrow will be brighter. And he cannot possibly believe it.
The boy is not real. The boy is dream. Erik does not know many things that are true, but he knows this. And to fall in love with a figment of your own imagination—
Erik is not crazy. He is not quite well, but he is not that far gone.
It doesn't matter. He doesn't think about the boy. Not often, at least. He's found new thoughts to entertain himself with. New toys. Knives are easy to steal. They float right into his hands. Erik keeps one under his pillow and listens to the communal radio in the hostel he's begged his way into. "We were just following orders," a man blubbers. "We just did what we were told."
Yes, Erik thinks as he runs his thumb over the blade. He has found something new to think about.
Raven slips into his bed sometimes when dreams thrash her from her sleep. They lay, not touching, not looking at each other, just breathing together in the dark until someone speaks. Tonight, Raven breaks the silence.
“How can you have such faith in the world?”
Charles stares at his ceiling, lit by moonlight from his open window. “I know people. I know what they are capable of.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her turn to him. “So do I. Which is why I want to know, how can you believe that something good can come of any of this?”
He looks back at her. In the darkness, her yellow eyes are brighter than the stars. He tries not to shudder. “How can you not?” Charles asks, and he knows without needing any powers that both of them are being utterly sincere when they ask.
Raven is his sister, and Raven is his friend, and if he is truthful with himself, Raven is his only friend (the only solid one he can count), but that night she feels like a stranger to him. Lying beside her, his vision stretched and he can see the future—they will grow up together, come of age together, suffer through the embarrassments of puberty and the teenage years together, in this mansion together, but never once will he bridge this gap.
That night he takes her hand and holds it while they sleep and in the morning, he is not surprised to find himself alone.
The man gurgles as he dies, and Erik realizes, with a quiet whisper in the back of his head, that this is the third man he’s killed. The third Nazi. The first in cold blood. He feels like he should feel something, or maybe he just feels like he should feel like he should feel. But he is completely numb as he vomits into the grass. Some of his sick splatters onto the corpse (a furnace operator, escaped from his crimes by stripping of his uniform and pretending to be a refugee, adept at faking the proper amount of outrage when someone questioned him about his past). Erik moves to wipe the body clean before he stops himself, hand frozen in the air.
There is blood on his palm and it is not his. This should not be a shock. Yet it is.
Erik wipes his hands on the grass. He wipes his blade. He sheathes it. The shock is over. The work begins. And the official records, he realizes now, were wrong. Erik Lensherr never did make it out of the camp. Thank God, at least, there was no one left to mourn him.
The stranger the boy became stretches. He stands. Without one downward look, he runs.
How far can you run from your problems before they stop chasing? In Charles' case, Oxford will do. An ocean should be enough space to leave this mansion, and the people who haunted it, in the past. Raven sits on his bed as he packs, sits in the same spot she's favored since that night seven years ago when he brought her to his room and told her she could stay here for the night. He can't read her face as she watches him. He can never quite read her. It doesn't matter. They understand each other well enough.
"You could come with me," Charles says. "I'd like it if you came with me."
Raven still sits the way she did seven years ago. Still smiles the same way too. When she tosses herself into his arms with a giant grin, he feels the same he did seven years ago. He feels, for one shining moment, like he’s not alone.
Erik doesn't like Mossad, and he has no intentions of staying with Mossad, but they will train him and that's what he needs. They teach him how to make himself unnoticeable, how to fit in where he shouldn’t be. They teach him where to hit, how to hit, when to hit. This and more he learns. He’s eager, and his handlers like that. He owns his own Beretta .22 now, and the weight of the gun comforts him in a way that it shouldn’t. Soon it’s just another part of him, an extension of the weapon that is his body. His handlers end up skipping the shooting lessons. Erik’s bullets always hit their target. He doesn’t tell them why, of course. He’s learned to keep his secrets.
Even in a city of outcasts, he is an outcast. But he likes Tel Aviv in spite of himself. The city is stifling in the summer, but it’s cool at night. In a city that never sleeps, Erik follows suit. He becomes nocturnal, wandering the streets at two in the morning until he finds something that compels him to stop. A shop. Some greenery. The sunrise. Anything he can lose himself in. Some nights, when all else fails, he picks up sad-eyed girls in sad old bars and fucks them in on beat-up couches in sad little homes. These women do not fear his scars; they’re too busy with their own. Together, they find primal solace in the feel of broken skin.
He stays away from bright-eyed boys. They feel dangerous, in ways bullets never do. When they touch him, something shatters. So Erik stays away.
Erik is learning.
“What did you say you were studying?” a friend of a friend asks at a party.
Charles smiles. “Theoretical genetics, a focus of my own creation. The wild potential within us has long been a fascination of mine.”
His conversation partner laughs. “You Oxford types. Never anything practical.”
Raven giggles and Charles smiles. No one else understands. Oh well. The world may be one long inside joke that only Raven and Charles understand, but they can still find it funny.
That restless part of him that can never just be, that always has to look to the future and plan castles where the world holds shacks, this part wonders what it would be like if he could share the joke with more than just his sister. If he could find them, find people like them, if that’s possible. He could show them that they are not alone. He could help guide them through their powers. And then, and then—
But then someone presses a shot of vodka into his hands and, well, priorities.
Charles wakes the next morning with a pounding headache and the vague idea that sometime in the night he solved all of the world’s problems.
“That’s just the Smirnoff talking,” Raven groans from somewhere in the bathroom when he shouts his good news to her. “You spent two hours last night talking about how cool freckles were and then you tried to make out with that biology undergrad.”
“I still solved something!” Charles shouted back.
“You solved your penis. Congratulations.”
That doesn’t seem quite right, but Charles will examine his drunken epiphanies later when he’s done throwing up on his own loafers.
Erik sleeps on the flight to Argentina. He didn’t intend to, didn’t think it was possible for him to doze off in such a public, compromised place, but run on adrenaline long enough and even the superman crashes. Fitfully, he dreams of nothing in particular, shifting between reality and his subconscious every time the plane bumps.
Once he thinks he almost sees his mother, lit by candlelight. But it’s been sixteen years and he forgot her face long ago.
Once he dreams of a door. It’s locked tight, and after a few half-hearted pushes, he can’t remember why he wanted to open it at all.
(You’re safe here. I’ll keep you safe.)
He’s forgotten that too.
Once he dreams of blue, just the color blue, wide and warm and waiting for him to dive inside. He opens his eyes to the sky above the clouds and for a moment, quick as a breath, he’s humbled by the beauty.
Then the plane descends and the clouds are back. Erik disembarks to kills three men over beer. C’est la vie.
“Those mutations you talked about. Could they have already happened?”
That's not the usual reaction to a chat-up line. Curious, Charles sobers just enough to peek inside her mind and then—
diamond lady hellfire he wasn’t here before how did he get here oh god did she see me what the hell is this what the hell is going did she see me diamond skin how is this possible the devil is here how did he did they see me oh god I need to tell them they need to know what’s going on
Moira—Agent MacTaggert—sighs, starts to leave. Charles is amazed he can stop her. His throat is stopped up with hope. He says something to her, doesn’t hear it as he says it, doesn’t remember it when he’s done, but it must have been convincing because he can feel her relief. Is that her feeling or his? No, no, this feeling must be hers because it is a drop in a bucket compared to what he’s feeling right now. Suddenly he is a child again and he has just found a blue girl in his kitchen and he has just heard a voice answer back in his dream.
He’s too drunk. He’s never felt more sober.
“When can you leave for Virginia?” Agent MacTaggert asks. Across the room, Raven looks over and rolls her eyes at him.
Charles tries to stop the hysterical laughing bubbling up. Oh, well. He’ll blame it on the drink. “Now,” he says. “Let’s go now.”
Here. Schmidt is here and he's not alone. Foolish. Stupid, weak, idiotic. To think that monsters couldn't have friends. Schmidt's drops Erik to his knees and suddenly it's the camp again, it's the office, it's the oh god the vice too tight can't breathe his face smiling down his knife pressing forward one more fucking time.
When Schmidt flings him off the boat (so damn easily, half a life of training wasted) Erik is almost grateful.
The water slaps sense back into him. The lights help too, the military plowing pointlessly towards them. These humans will die. They stand no chance against their betters. But they give him the opportunity he needs to send the anchor flying. He's vaguely aware of some hurricane happening to his left, but Erik sees nothing but Schmidt. He follows the delicate gear of Schmidt's watch through the boat, when he feels the bottom drop out of the yacht. No, Erik thinks desperately. Not after all this time. He reaches out, grabs the submarine with his mind, with the muscles Schmidt built. It's too big, too fast, but he can do this. He has to. Schmidt's woman put the smell of gunpowder and chocolate in the forefront of Erik's mind and it tightens his grip on the boat.
Who are you? a voice is his head asks. Stop this. You'll kill yourself. But Erik's gotten good at ignoring voices like this.
He's not so good at ignoring bodies as they slam into him. Suddenly there is a man clinging to him and this, the always cool part of his brain notes, is strange even by Erik's standards. Ignore him, his bloodlust cries, and Erik listens, reaches out once more for the metal speeding away like a bullet.
I know what he did to you, Erik, but you have to let him go.
It's Erik's voice of reason, coming from this stranger. Who are you? Erik thinks.
The man tightens his grip on Erik, and Erik lets the sub go. Lets it slip away into the black ocean. Lets Schmidt slip away.
Darkness nips at Erik’s vision. The man starts kicking. They burst through the surface, breathing the sweet air and ocean spray. And Schmidt, Schmidt is gone. “Erik,” the man says like the word astounds him. “Erik.”
Erik’s about to respond by throttling this man for his logic and his calm. He’ll drown him right here in the fucking Gulf of Mexico because he convinced Erik to let go. How dare he. How could he. The rage is there, clawing inside of him, when he looks at the man for the first time, really looks at him. Erik has seen ghosts of men before. In the camps after liberation, he would see the brow of his father, the eyes of his mother, the hands of his grandfather on the bodies of strangers, and he would think for one cruel moment that they were here once more.
This man is a ghost of someone Erik never knew. His face is familiar as the face in the mirror. It shouldn’t be. It is. The man’s face has a look of wonder. Erik suspects he might be mirroring it. “My name is Charles Xavier,” the ghost shouts over the waves. Erik has never heard that name before. He opens his mouth to say something that will banish this misplaced memory. The words won’t come, though. The US Navy, however, does. Any chance for conversation dies as sailors scoop Erik and this Charles onboard the ship. And Erik, a shivering, wet failure, reaches out with his mind and follows Schmidt’s submarine until it’s lost in the dark.
When he opens his eyes, Charles is watching him, his pale blue eyes fixed on Erik like he’s a meal before a starved man. Erik, try hard as he like, cannot bring himself to look away either. Boys like you are always trouble, he thinks. Charles goes red, and Erik, in spite of himself, laughs. “I thought I was alone,” he says before he can stop himself.
Charles smiles wider than a man should smile. “Oh, my good fellow, we are not. Not at all.”
Erik looks at the naked hope spread across Charles’ face and he knows: This stranger is dangerous. Do not trust him. And for no good reason, he already does.