Chapter Text
Erik was hiding. His fists were clenched tightly at his sides, and it took nearly all his will power to not use his powers. He was carefully hidden in plain sight, in between two aisles in a somewhat empty library. From where he stood, he had a relatively good view of a boy.
The boy was young like him, almost an adult but not quite. He had a fringe of dark hair and had a sort of casual beauty about him. It was not that that made Erik stare. The boy was sitting at a table, reading a book. Erik craned his neck to see the title, sighing softly when he read the words between the boys fingers. He couldn’t quite make it out.
The boy glanced back, perhaps feeling the eyes of another person on him. He looked directly at Erik, and smirked slightly. He turned away, and tugged on the sleeves of his jacket. Erik tilted his head and then looked at the boy again. He was watching him for a reason.
There was a certain feeling of familiarity between them. He felt like they had much in common, even if they had never spoken before. Erik didn’t know how long that they sat there, one reading and the other crouched behind the shelves. He sighed and then stood up, his back cracking loudly. The noise made him cringe, and he hoped no one heard. He didn’t know how long it had been. It could have been hours later, he was certain it had not been this close to dark when the boy had caught his attention.
The boy glanced back and offered an awkward sort-of smile at Erik. Erik nodded back and turned sharply on his heel to leave. He was rubbing the back of his neck, embarrassed he had spent so much time there. He walked away, feeling the boy stand up and follow him out.
He was about ten feet ahead and started to walk faster, knowing the boy might want to bridge that gap between them. Once he was outside, he was running, the collar of his jacket turned up and his bag slamming against his body. His feet slammed against the pavement, and he was breathing quickly.
Erik kept running until he was in the dark tunnels of an underground station. He swallowed, hard, and caught his breath as best he could. His heartbeat still thundered in his ears, and he was leaning against a map pillar. He rubbed his neck and then shook his head.
Erik realized he was being stupid. There was no point in running away like that. There was no reason to run at all anymore, now that he thought about it. A woman muttered an excuse me, and he stepped away with an apologetic nod. He started walking through the darkness of the subway station.
It wasn’t like the boy knew who he was. It wasn’t even like the boy had posed a threat. He had been watching the boy, it was only logical he might want to talk. He had run because of that, and because of the familiarity he felt.
He had a card for the subway, and paid for a ticket to a station on the other side of the city. When he got to the station, he took a train to another station on another side of town. The trip was longer than it needed to be, but he had developed an abject paranoia in the last few years.
Within a moment he was walking into a dingy, dirty apartment. He switched on the light and tossed his jacket over the back of the chair. He swallowed hard and looked around. This was not his home, nor would it ever be. Someone else rented it out for him, a man he had met once.
Erik sat down on the couch and looked at the ceiling. There was one bedroom, but it had been seldom used. He liked to sleep on the couch, a habit he tried not to think too much about. He sighed and kicked an old take out box out of the way. He had been on his own for almost a year, but not long enough for it to sink in that he should really take better care of himself.
He sat there, glaring at his take out box. He yawned and looked at the ceiling. In the corner were his textbooks and brand new notebooks. He didn’t have an opinion on school, but found certain parts of it dull and useless. Especially classes that were federally required, like Physicals and some Mathematics. They were things he knew, and everyone knew, he wouldn’t need later.
He glared at the books, and they sat there. THey seemed to be reminding him that soon the summer would end, and he would get to go back to school. It didn’t exactly annoy him so much as serve as a grim reminder that he’d have to go back to hiding.
At least during the summer he could use his mutation without fear of being discovered. At least during the summer there was no one who would talk to him and try to learn more about him.
At least, during the summer, he was alone. Alone protected him.
Erik reached under the couch and pulled out a small box of cigarettes. He slid one out and lit it, humming between puffs of smoke. He yawned, the grey curling from his lips in a way that was almost beautiful. It reached its filter while he was still watching the smoke. It was put out into an ashtray that he had fashioned himself.
He flexed his fingers, watching as he willed the ashtray into a dull metal sphere. Erik found that his power really only worked when there was so much anger in him, anger that he really couldn't change. As a result, he chose to change the world around him, until his anger was spent and something was twisted and unrecognizable.
He closed his eyes for a second, and was subjected to memories he knew that no teen should ever have. The sight of his father’s body onto sidewalk, the dull shouts. The metal sphere flattened back into an ashtray. He tried to focus on the metal, and only the metal.
It didn't help.
The memories coming on too fast and too clear. Erik was yelling, his voice literally being ripped from his throat. There was a coin, flashing in front of his eyes. Then, he saw the coin and there was nothing but crimson.
He opened his eyes, cursing and wondering why he had to think about it constantly. He knew why, but he refused to truly consider it.
Erik yawned and fell into a dreamless sleep. He had stopped dreaming when he was 14. It was at that point he realized that there was no point in dreaming or even really thinking anymore. In spite of high resolution to never dream again, the boy flashed in his mind's eyes a few times in the twilight zone between sleeping and waking.
Erik had slept in his clothes again, on the couch. Half his body was wrapped in a blanket, he must have gotten somehow between moments of sleep. He stripped off his clothes and took an icy shower. He got dressed in a plain white t-shirt and dark jeans. The teen slipped on a leather jacket before going outside to make it to the subway station
He took the same trip back to the library. That was his safe haven. It was his place. He went there nearly everyday, until school started and that was his principal focus.
Erik went to school for a month and a half.
He rarely thought about the boy from the library in the sense that he would never not think about the boy. He thought about how familiar he had seemed, and the strange fact that he was drawn to him by some inexplicable drive. The only thing he didn’t think about was how he had tried to run away.
He went to the library weekly, hoping that maybe he would see the boy again. He realized that this was probably a sign he was losing his mind. He had no reason to go, except that there was something about the boy that made Erik feel like he wasn’t all alone.
That was during the last few weeks of August, and the early days of September.
Eventually Erik stopped seeing him, so he stopped looking. He went to school, got passing grades and almost forgot about the boy. He no longer wondered about why he thought the boy was special. September passed. His classes started taking more time, and he had to start thinking about university. He was still a year away from graduating, and yet the thought of the future was being constantly shoved in his face. At one point he was certain he was going to lose his mind.
The week passed, and then it was October. The classes suddenly got a little harder, for no reason at all. He found himself starting to fall behind in math, through no fault of his own. It had just stopped making sense.His grades started to slip. And then he was back at the library studying. He was trying to keep track of the numbers, although he may have been hoping for a glimpse of the blue eyed boy.
Then, there was the matter of his job, or lack thereof. Most of his expenses were paid for by Caliban and his people. He had no need to pay a phone bill, or rent, and his food was paid for by a prepaid credit card. It had all come with his trip to America. He would live in relative comfort so long as no one ever found out he was a mutant.
And yet, he realized, he needed a job, even if he needed to just keep up appearances. A week into October, he was bussing tables on the weekend. It was frustrating, and barely worth the pay. But now he had a little money, and his grades were slipping. It was all just perfect, really.
It went on like this, day after day after day. It made him almost sick with boredom.
The only classes he had perfect grades in were physics and history. Everything else was hovering at a steady, barely passing grade. He spent his nights studying concepts he didn’t understand. At one point, he tossed his math book out the window just to see if it would break. It didn’t, and the cover seemed to taunt him. After he pulled the book from the trash bin it landed in, he fell asleep on his couch.
He woke up early, around four in the morning. He had been avoiding going to school for three days now, pretending to be ill.
In reality, he was just moping about. He figured he may as well go today, and leave the apartment. Erik thought he was going to lose his mind if he stayed in his apartment the other day. There was another part of him that want to just drop out. But he couldn't because he knew his mother would have wanted him to at least finish high school. He sighed and rubbed his head.
There was no real way to win.
He wondered if he could try calling someone for tutoring. The problem was he didn’t know anyone’s number, because he hadn’t asked.
He had been going to school in the city for almost two years. Erik had transferred in the middle of sophomore year, and he had no one to ask for help. That wasn’t to say he didn’t know anyone. Through his time there, he realized he had classes with basically the same ten people. He hadn’t wanted to talk to them, but they had enfolded him into their group nonetheless. He wouldn’t call them his friends, but he knew them and talked to them.
That was also annoying.
How pathetic is it to go to a school for a year and not actually know anyone well enough to ask for help?
He decided it would be easiest to just go to school.
The subway ride felt too short, and he felt even more tired when he crossed the threshold into the actual campus. No one in the world took notice of him, except for the lockers. They always seemed to call out and hum to him. They were practically yelling at him to rip them apart in rage.
Then he found his book and walked to his first period: Physics. He rather enjoyed it. He asat towards the back, but was generally an attentive student. It was a small class, with maybe nine people total. There was him, Hank McCoy, Alex Summers, a girl named Moira, and a few other people he wasn’t sure he knew the names of. It was a quiet class,and as a result, Erik quite liked it.
It was one of the few classes he was still doing well at.
He liked it. He was good at math, something that always made his teachers question his grades. How could one student fail math but pass a conceptual physics class?
Erik would slouch in the back. It was only seventy minutes, and then the bell would ring. In a robotic stupor, he would go to his next five classes. In physics, he was a bright, shining, top of the class student. Once the bell rang, he knew how the rest of the day would go. His life was that predictable.
For the rest of the day he would be disinterested and zombie-like. He would eat lunch with Hank and a few other teenagers from the physics class. He would brighten up in his history class. He would manage to be alive for one class and then he would shut down again. After his final class of the day, he would go home and the cycle would be complete.
That is, until a boy plopped into a seat behind him five minutes before the bell rang.
“Sorry I’m late''
“ ‘S fine. Pick a seat, we're just about to leave. You are?”
The boy said his name, and Erik couldn’t hear it over the sounds of teenagers getting ready for a bell to ring.
New students were not uncommon, but they usually showed up after the first semester. They showed up in January. That was what happened to Erik. He had shown up in January; a boy with passable English and post-traumatic stress disorder. His story was that he had been kicked out of his previous school for having too many detentions. No one knew anything.
New students were usually like Erik: people who showed up late, but timed right.
They rarely showed up late one morning in the middle of October. Erik was surprised when the new kid sat in the seat behind him, and was even more surprised when he glanced back and saw it was the boy from the library.
Erik hummed a non committal greeting, the boy humming back. When Erik looked at him, he felt the same sort of familiarity. He also felt a dull buzzing, not unlike the lockers. When he tried to use his powers to figure out what it was, he was pushed back. It was like two similar magnets, and he was weaker. His powers, and by extent him, were pushed away.
The bell rang.
Erik left the class, feeling as though there was something else circulation inside his head that no one would ever hear.
He glanced at the boy, but didn’t see him. He swore he could feel him nearby, like some sort of projection.
It didn’t matter.