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Alex was in solitary most of the time he was in jail but he did spend some time with his fellow prisoners. There’d been thieves and drug dealers and guys in for assault. There had also been rapists and gang members and murderers. Guys in for doing scarcely imaginable things to other people. Guys who would shank you for looking at them wrong. There had been some intimidating men in there and Alex had been in some frightening situations at times.
But he’d never been as scared in there as he is when Erik Lehnsherr smiles at him, all teeth and cold, cold eyes. Alex sees his smile and thinks ‘Still waters…’ and fuck, but the waters in Erik are deep and dark: cold steel grey and swimming with dangers and no current of warmth in them anywhere.
* * *
She tries not to be alone with him if she can possibly help it. Angel doesn’t mind the professor, he’s sweet in an old-fashioned way, but something about Erik makes her wings tremble under her skin like they’re aching to burst out and carry her away to safety.
There had been a boy in the barrio where she’d grown up who’d had a bug collection. He’d been a little older than the rest of them, kept his self apart. The adults had all said how smart and polite he was – ‘Tonio’s such a good boy!’ – but the other kids knew what he did to cats in the waste ground behind the church and they all avoided him.
Erik smiles at her and she thinks of Tonio and feels like a butterfly pinned to a card and she shivers; metal pins through her wings, which are making her skin crawl with their need to be free and she doesn’t know if Erik would pull the pins out or push them in further.
* * *
Sean knows what a Banshee is. He’s not stupid, even if he doesn’t have Hank’s textbook smarts. And he’s American and never thinks of himself as anything else but his Nana was Irish born and bred and she’d loved to tell him tales of the old country when he was little so he knows his ghosts and spirits, the things that go bump in the night.
The idea of Erik wailing or crying is so ridiculous it’s laughable – the dude doesn’t even talk that much, actually, except to the professor – but something about him does scream to Sean, and it screams ‘death omen’. He watches Erik where he’s standing at the window, looking at something only he can see out there in the gathering dusk. He sees Erik’s teeth flash suddenly in the gloom and he thinks ‘he’s more like a Black Dog’ and under that he thinks ‘someone’s going to die’ and over both he thinks ‘I wish he wouldn’t smile’ and he has to stop his hand from creeping up to cross himself.
* * *
Erik Lehnsherr makes Hank nervous. It’s true, admittedly, that nearly everyone makes Hank nervous – especially Raven – but the shiver he gets when Raven looks at him or brushes a hand against his or smiles at him is not at all like the creeping sensation he gets near Erik.
Hank likes metals. He knows how to work them, how to cast and shape them into the designs he comes up with. But metal should need tools and heat to be formed. It shouldn’t bend and flow and weave toward someone like a living thing. The only metal Hank knows of that does that is Mercury, which he always takes care of when he’s using it. It’s a treacherous metal, poisonous and difficult to contain. It can drive you mad if it gets in your system.
Hank sees Erik and Raven talking at the other end of the lab while he’s discussing something with Charles and the light from the window catches Erik’s eyes and the angle makes them gleam for a moment like a cats. Hank thinks ‘Quicksilver’ and he sees the lifting corner of Erik’s mouth and he hastily turns back to Charles, trying to shrug off the way the hairs on his arms are lifting up, the way his hands want to curl up till his nails bite into his palms.
Hank hates it when Erik smiles at Raven.
* * *
Raven can’t do animals, only people. She doesn’t know why. Charles tried to explain it to her once, speculating about genetic coding and difference in chromosome numbers and conservation of mass but she’d tuned him out. All she knew was that when she’d tried her skin and bones rippled painfully and she got a real bitch of a headache that was more like an all-over-body-ache, so she stuck with people now.
She’s getting even better at that, though, and she practices sitting in front of the mirror in her bedroom in the evenings; letting her face flicker like a film reel through actors and famous people seen on TV and in magazines, through strangers glimpsed in the street, through friends and acquaintances, family.
She performs that little mental flick that’s as easy as a wink now and there’s Charles blinking at her from the glass, blue eyes brimming with that soft concern she always sees in them when they look at her. She makes Charles puff out his cheeks and stick his tongue out and giggles at his sudden lack of dignity. Then she winks again and now it’s Erik staring out at her: large eyes hooded and calculating, mouth a thin line that lets nothing out, and her heart starts beating a little harder, a little faster because the game has turned dangerous all of a sudden. If he ever caught her doing this…
She tries to shrug off the feeling that something is lurking behind her and she decides she’s going to make Erik smile. She wants to know what a happy smile would look like on that face and her lips pull up and out and she flashes her teeth and looks in the mirror –
And she shudders all over and then it’s just her again, yellow eyes wide and scared looking back at her and her old familiar bedroom showing behind her and no angry, wild menace to be seen. No Big Bad Wolf. The room is very quiet and her voice is shockingly loud when she murmurs to herself “’Why Grandmamma – what big teeth you have’…”
It never occurred to her that she could do animals. So long as they were people too.
* * *
There are many things about Erik that Charles admires. Is in awe of, even. His quick, marvellously sharp mind; his power; his determination, even if Charles doesn’t agree with his end goals.
He approves of Erik’s sardonic humour and the skill he shows at so many things, including chess. He’s in wonder at the enthusiasm Erik shows in training; giddy almost with the feeling that here is someone finally, finally, who can understand what it is Charles is trying to do.
There’s a larger part of him than he wants to show that likes the look of Erik as well; the tall, slim lines of him, his sharp cheekbones, the intensity of his eyes, the way his eyebrows go up and his lips quirk at the corner as he teases Charles about something.
And here, now, as Erik turns toward Charles with amazement and joy in his face after he managed to move the satellite dish and he’s laughing out loud with elation and excitement and he’s grinning clear and wide and bright and God!
Oh god, Charles loves Erik’s smile.