Chapter Text
A few years ago, when the news broke out that the Mutant Act had been approved by the senate, Magneto went ballistic and practically brought the building he was standing in to the ground. He could not believe his eyes or ears. His Brotherhood had spent the last year protesting the bill and its discriminatory clauses.
Its mutantphobic roots and its blatant unfairness towards struggling mutants were barely hidden behind a veil of "common interest". The scale of so-called "mutation visibility" it proposed was absurd and the way it handled special mutant education was flirting with full-out registration.
The building stayed standing, thanks to Magneto's hard earned control, but in his anger, he grilled his phone and its sims card with it.
Days later, when forced to choose a new number between the few given by the teenager handling the telecom booth, he went for one that was ridiculously easy to remember. That way at least, his buddy Logan, who had the bad habit of taking on violent mutantphobic gangs alone and coming back in literal pieces, would have to find a better excuse as to why he didn't call for back-ups than "I forgot your number", which he had used liberally in the past.
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Charles loved his job at Columbia; teaching young students about mutant evolution and genetics was thrilling. But his favorite classes, far above any course he could teach at the university, were the ones he organized at the local community centers with mutants who were learning to control their gifts. He had acquired quite the reputation as being the person to go to when everything else had failed and thus regularly met charming children with extraordinary mutations.
But even his idealist ass had to admit that the political climate had become less than ideal for young mutants in the past decade. It was something he was working incredibly hard to fight back against. To him, Erik's Brotherhood and his own activism (through research and, yeah, sometimes money) were truly two sides of the same pro-mutant coin. With tension escalating between the government, the mutant voices, and the police, Erik and him were both very busy doing all they could to empower and defend the interests of their fellow mutants.
And while he reaaaally wants to believe his students could learn his number as an emergency contact, he also knew he couldn't always expect a panicked mutant tween to remember his number in a crisis. Which is why he always gave them Erik's number on top of his. It was ridiculously easy to remember and he was confident it would get the message to him almost as quickly as calling his own phone. He made it clear that they should only use it if they couldn't join him first. He never really got around telling them it was the number of the head of the infamous Brotherhood though... or notifying Erik about the arrangement for what it mattered.
Technically, only his sister knew about Charles and Erik, but Charles spent too many years hiding who he was and didn't ever want to go down that road again. Which meant that their relationship was only a loosely kept secret waiting to unravel. He couldn't care less. Too bad for his already unsteady political career.