Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

i.

 

On a Cuban beach, Erik held Charles in his arms and asked his help in building a future dominated by the next stage of evolution.

Charles refused him.

The pain was distracting; even weeks later, the things Charles remembered best were sporadic and irrelevant. The cutting taste of sea salt in the corner of his mouth. The quiet absence of Erik’s mind. Grains of sand caught beneath his ear, and the way he felt only half of a man—the loss far more than merely his legs. The rest of the memory was repaired through a careful screening of how it appeared through the eyes of his students, and with that came a more perfect clarity. On bleak nights, Charles thought of Erik as a casualty of war. Though he’d been the one on his back, bleeding into his suit, it was Erik that died in the submarine and was buried with his creator.

And yet, Charles knew better. The vengeful self-preservation that molded Erik’s life philosophies had always existed in him, had been touched by Charles’ telepathy and forgiven wholeheartedly the evening they surfaced from rancid waters, alive and together. It was a part of Erik—it shaped him into the friend that Charles treasured—and Charles saw that violence and tried to gentle it and failed Erik in this. It was a bitter realization to come to terms with. He’d promised to help Erik. Instead, he’d given him something that could only be taken away.

On better nights, Charles reached out for Erik with his mind, trying to call him home. Missing him. Starved for the connection they’d woven in such a short amount of time. Only once was he able to touch Erik’s thoughts, and he was so startled by his success that Erik felt him and responded, Go to sleep, Charles.

No, please listen to—

There’s nothing to be said. For a second time, Charles felt the helmet as it slipped over Erik’s ears, nudging him from a place he no longer had any right to be.

 

ii.

 

Finding other mutants and organizing an entire school from scratch took effort. It was time well-spent, however, to hear the echoes of laughter in the hallways of what was once an empty, near-barren home. Charles taught them history. He taught them literature. He taught them to accept the extraordinary qualities they hid away, both mutation and simply individual. He hoped he’d learned from some of his past mistakes, but only the seasons would tell.

For the first few years, the focus in everyone’s mind was on recruitment. Strength in numbers. Safety. The recruitment missions took a turn for the worse more often than not, because Charles and Erik both had the best of taste and recognized potential when they saw it. Frost, the telepath—Charles could no more keep her from gleaning information from the minds of his students than he could stop himself from reaching out to Erik and, on lonelier moments, Raven. They always seemed to know where he was. Charles was too respectful to return the favor.

Some students, Charles lost to Erik’s charismatic presence and displays of power. He knew he didn’t cut quite so impressive a figure in his wheelchair; his smiles were a little too kindly, his mutation an invisible companion. Other times, though, mutants lost would return to Charles and he didn’t turn their wary, jaded thoughts away. They were Erik’s people. They were Charles’ people. What was Erik’s became Charles’ became Erik’s became the future.

When they clashed over the growth of their armies, there were no words spoken. Charles protected his own and Erik (he called himself Magneto now) looked straight through him. They played the parts they’d auditioned for flawlessly.

Like this, four years passed before Charles had the dream.

 

iii.

 

Charles dreamt of stairs.

He knew he was dreaming, but this was no ordinary dream. He did not know these stairs—twisted, gnarled as oak, descending into an utter blackness that came closer with every step. As he went down them, Charles held onto a railing made of glass bottles and his mother’s hair. The walls only existed for as long as he could look at them. Sometimes he heard someone walking behind him, but it was only hindsight, heavy-footed.

At the bottom, there was an ivory-hued bed. Charles sank down into the mattress and waited, and all the light faded around him until it was just that: the bed, the rumpled sheet, and Charles, who could always walk in his dreams. Somewhere, he heard garden-gloved hands ripping cattails out of the lakeside. You have no idea what you’ve done, he wanted to say. The cattails would spin out into the gutters and swell, becoming cats.

“Good men do not always follow orders,” said Erik. He sat behind Charles, their shoulder blades and spines pressing lightly together as if bridging ships; without looking, Charles knew that he was wearing the jacket that smelled like his aftershave. He was warm, and solid, and impressed in Charles’ heart like an ache.

Charles listened to the hisses of strays and Erik’s breathing to guide his thoughts. They never made it very far. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Somewhere you can’t go. You must not follow me.”

“I thought you wanted me.” It came out regretful, soft-spoken.

“I did. I do.”

“Then—”

“You’re dreaming. Go to sleep, Charles.”

 

iv.

 

When he woke, the pillow was damp and his muscles were sore, save for his legs, which had not moved in the night. He recalled the dream and its obvious warning perfectly. You must not follow me.

Had he some idea of what was to come, Charles would (might) have listened. As it was, the dream stayed with him; it was a bauble to examine and turn over in his hands, yet he never found the manufacturer’s mark.

 

v.

 

A few months later, a mutant held nearly forty men hostage in a coal mine in central California.

Charles was playing a game of chess with himself when the matter was brought to him, quite out of blind chance. Without knocking, Alex came into the study and crouched before the television set that Charles was only half watching. “You’ll want to see this,” he said, adjusting the channel until the black-and-white face of Theodore Granik dissolved and the American Forum of the Air made a clumsy transition to the news program.

“What is it, Alex?”

“Just watch.” Alex balanced back on his haunches, rapt on the screen.

They had grown so far. Charles rested the tips of two fingers on the man’s shoulder and felt his affection swell. He watched, because Alex was someone who only ever came to Charles with a purpose or question.

“… don’t yet know whether the miners are all alive. It has been impossible to get near the main entrance to the mine. Half an hour ago, officials attempted to deliver food and water for the hostages, but as soon as they neared, the elevator shaft spewed black clouds of dissolved coal so thick that they had to withdraw. Their attempts continue as…”

Charles rubbed at his pensive frown, tugging it out of shape. He let the words fade from his consciousness, even Alex’s eager, “It has to be one of us. They’ve been trying to get close for over a day now and the same thing happens, every single time. I’ve been watching, but I wasn’t sure if—”

Shh, Charles hushed. He reached. Hank? I need Cerebro to confirm something.

 

vi.

 

In less than an hour, they were in the Blackbird. “He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy we’d be interested in,” Sean said, curls pillowing his head as he rested back against the seat. “I mean, what with the threats to kill all the men down there if anyone gets near them. You know what I think when I hear that?”

It was Alex that answered at last, resigned. “What?”

“Psychopath killer.”

“But he hasn’t killed them,” said Charles. He looked out the window at the spider-work of clouds. “He can’t let them go because he will be exposed. He can’t keep them because if he were out for their blood, he’d have taken it by now. The situation’s grown beyond his control. Instead, he’s locked in. Trapped. Panicking.”

Hank adjusted their flight path. “Are you sure, Professor?”

Charles gave him a faint smile. “A man who can draw combustible rock, even anthracite, from its coal bed or seam. How simply extraordinary. I’m sure that must be it—perhaps some variant—it will be worth reviving the boiler in the kitchen.”

 

vii.

 

They could see the crowd surrounding the mine shaft entrance as they flew in low over the town—families hovering on the outskirts, kept back by a line of miners and police officials. Small camps had been erected on the perimeter, and in the center of the chaos of the colliery, a mine rescue communications system had been stationed. Charles traced the communication line, coiled together beside the table like a snake, all the way to the mine shaft entrance where it disappeared into the gaping yawn of black. He wondered, and then knew, they weren’t having much luck.

He understood little of coal mines, beyond what information he’d gleaned from books and Hank’s offered knowledge on the way to California. The structure itself was impressive: a long column that rose to a turbulent sky, a series of brick-and-wood buildings haphazardly scattered, the entrance a single square set into the hillside and fixed with wood pillars. Charles attempted to dip into that dark space, searching with his mind. He found nothing but emptiness. The mine itself reminded him abruptly of diamond walls (whatever you’re doing, it’s working), but he forced the idea away before it could draw him into melancholy.

He had to hope that Erik didn’t draw the same conclusions that they did about the hostage situation. This was no place for a standoff.

“Should I set her down in the trees, Professor?”

“No, Hank. A moment, if you will.”

Charles pressed his fingers to his temple. He closed his eyes. Down below them, mere pinpricks of color and movement, the crowd began to slow, shudder, halt. He drifted through them, touching a myriad of ragged thoughts—why haven’t we heard anything what is going on my husband my brother eating eggs together only this morning will I have to bury another knew we should’ve moved to the city this place will be the death of us my baby my darling what is happening oh Lord Almighty like the entrance to Hell and the hounds won’t let him go my darling darling—and quieting them, soothing them to a dull ache. He gave them a moment of peace and froze them in it.

Soon, nothing moved below.

“You can set us down now,” Charles said.

 

viii.

 

Over time, he’d grown accustomed to the limitations of the chair. At first, Charles accepted the aid he knew he needed—before the school could be rebuilt to adjust to his needs, before he’d grown confident of wielding the sleek contraption that moved him. He could remember Moira pushing him through the garden. Alex swinging him around a corner. Feeling as though, even if he were trapped, his mind was still free to travel as it pleased.

It only took until the first spill to realize his full helplessness. Staring up at the ceiling, the sound of the wheels spinning next to his ear, Charles asked himself, And what do you do now?

The humiliation writhed like a worm inside of him, finding home in the rot he’d been ignoring. He was reliant. A cripple. He’d never know the simple pleasure of jogging, the ease that stairs once were—and worse, Charles could hear that minute hesitation that others had when they saw him. What they thought of him. The chair diminished him in their gaze; when they looked at him, what they saw first was never his smile, his bright and keen eyes, his health. Charles forgave them that, but he felt frustrated with his inability to overcome their perceptions. Professor Charles Xavier had to become something more than this, something that could still be looked up to even when he was—obviously below their line of sight, as it were.

Since then, he refused to let anyone push him. He trained himself to get stronger, to function without an aide. He explored and memorized his boundaries, and told himself that it wasn’t about keeping his pride intact, but keeping their faith.

(And it was why, when he wheeled the chair out of the Blackbird and hit pebbled gravel, when Charles gripped hard and pushed the contraption through the terrain inch by agonizing inch, not a single member of his beloved team saw it was so—in their eyes, he gave them something flawless, let them forget his efforts, delivered them the dream. To his X-Men, he barely touched ground.)

 

ix.

 

The closer they came to the mine shaft, the more ill-defined shapes Charles could sense in its depths. Thoughts, scattered and fragmented. The formations of hysteria from men who had no idea what was happening. He fished around for a while, but couldn’t find anything solid to grasp.

Instead, Charles turned to the mine rescue communication system. Sound-powered, he noted, and while the radio would hardly be sufficient with the layers between them, it was obviously doing the trick as well as it could. “Hank, if I could borrow you a moment,” he murmured.

Hank pushed his glasses up nervously and crouched down to the coils. He examined them, then the radio box, and picked up the transmitter. “It’s a little crude,” he said, almost in apology, as if he’d been the one to design it. Charles smiled at him.

“But it will suffice. Alex, Sean—if you could, let’s keep an eye on the skies.”

“You don’t think they’d come here,” Sean said, nervous, after a long moment. He didn’t bother to specify who they were and he didn’t have to.

Charles took the transmitter from Hank and shook his head. “I only wish I was that type of psychic, Sean.”`

(Oh, how many times he’d wished that. If Charles could have known—if he had seen in Erik the things that would bleed between them—what would he have done? Perhaps it was better he didn’t have the gift of foresight, because then Charles would have no excuse for not changing a thing.)

 

x.

 

“Gregory,” spoke Charles into the transmitter. He waited, hearing only spits of static. Then, “Gregory, my name is Charles Xavier. I’m here to help you get out.”

Silence. Then, amongst the uneven bursts of noise, a desperate and torn breathing. “Come near an’ I’ll blow this place sky high, I swear to God.”

“Oh, I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t think you’re that kind of man, really, though I’d believe you were frightened enough to try. You don’t have to be frightened anymore, my friend. Believe it or not, I’m here to get you out of this mess.”

There was nothing. Charles exchanged a glance with Hank.

He tried again. “What happened, Gregory? Did you already know of your unique talents? Or did you just now come upon them, but it was too late to hide them? Are you afraid of the men you’ve kept trapped down there telling the world about you?” Charles projected as much warmth and gentle care as he could through the transmitter alone. “Was there an accident? It wasn’t your fault—”

An angry, wild cry—the radio screeched in his hand. “Who are you how do you KNOW you can’t know—”

“I know better than you think,” Charles interrupted, firm, in control, kindly. “My power manifested when I was little more than a babe, and I’m afraid I nearly damaged a maid that was working for my family. She was quite lovely, too, it was a shame to scare her away. It’s never easy the first time. Gregory. Gregory,” he implored, “you aren’t alone. There are others like you and we want to get you out of that hole and to somewhere safe.”

But there was no answer, not for a while.

 

xi.

 

Charles waited. We have all the time in the world, he told himself, though he knew it wasn’t exactly true. Every so often, he spoke again to Gregory, telling him about Charles Xavier, about telepathy, about the school, about mutation and the beauty of evolution. Then he waited again.

It was a very long time before the radio crackled.

“I’ve ruined everything,” whispered Gregory.

Charles felt his heart skip in empathy. “Not at all,” he replied. “Let me come down into the shaft. I’ll show you what I can do. I’ll fix everything.”

“… You can do that?”

“I can.”

Above them, the clouds roiled and started to blacken.

 

xii.

 

“Coastal weather,” Sean said, staring straight up. “It’ll come in fierce.”

Charles paid him no heed—they’d be done and out before the rain. “Hank, you and Alex stay up top and be ready to pick us up. Sean, I’ll take you down with me.” He couldn’t take the risk of Hank’s appearance setting Gregory off, nor trapping Alex in a cavern filled with explosives and dangerous metals. It was a pity, as they worked best together. “I wish that I could guarantee I can keep these people orderly and quiet, but with the mine’s interference—”

“We’ll take the Blackbird and stay out of sight,” Hank finished. He really was terribly bright and Charles, in the back of his mind, thought wistfully of his sister pressed against a boy in a lab coat, the both of them so young and lost. He cast the image down deep.

“Excellent.”

“Professor,” hedged Alex, “what if they do come?”

“Don’t engage,” Charles ordered. God, the two of them alone against Erik’s favorites, it didn’t bear thinking about. “Stay out of sight until I call for you or we come up the shaft. We’ll give him the same choice they all have—and even Erik wouldn’t be brash enough to cause trouble in a coal mine.”

He hid his smile at Alex’s passing, I wouldn’t count on it.

 

xiii.

 

It had taken him more than a year before he could smile when he thought about Erik. Some part of Charles wondered if he was grieving. He compared it to the long hours spent at his mother’s funeral, staring at the way the coffin gleamed under the cloying summer sun, trying to fathom her silence. He understood that she wasn’t there anymore; he felt nothing when he reached for her.

Only a profound, hollow void.

The first morning Charles woke in the hospital, he fumbled for the bedside rail and the subtle complexity of Erik’s mind. When the nurse came to see to him, his face was wet with tears.

 

xiv.

 

“You’re sure about this?” called Alex, as Sean and Charles approached the mine shaft entrance. The low drone of the elevator grew closer; at least, Charles mused, it meant that Gregory was going to give them the benefit of the doubt and let them down. Or it could mean they’d be trapped several hundred feet underground with an unstable mutant. Well, he preferred to think about the positive end of things.

Still, so as not to make himself a liar, Charles opted not to answer Alex.

The hoisting cage—he’d been thinking of it as an elevator, but now Charles could see its more simplistic mechanisms—rose out of the earth and came to a shuddering halt. It was once painted yellow; erosion had turned it into a mottled brown birdcage, unloved and unkempt. It hovered at ground level for a moment before Sean turned to Charles with a rueful expression. “Who first?”

“By all means.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Careful,” Charles cautioned him, wheeling forward. It was more difficult now, the ground firmly stamped by work boots but bumpy, uneven. The cage was a foreboding structure, hanging precariously in space, and Charles paused at its door. There was a six-inch gap between his feet and solid ground again.

Sean noticed it almost as hindsight. “Oh! Here, I’ll take your one end, huh?” was what he said.

(But what he thought was: Not sure the professor should be here. And not down there with all that—mess.)

Charles let it wash over him and away. He said nothing when Sean reached down and hauled up his wheelchair, coaxing him into the cage and pretending not to notice their proximity, nor what it meant. His thank you, my friend was distant, if earnest, and they didn’t speak again as the compartment quivered on its wires and started down into the black.

 

xv.

 

Charles had the strangest flash of something—stairs and soda pop bottles—as they passed layer after layer of rock face, dust-cloaked pipes, and a long set of twin ladders that followed them down. He played with the image and discarded it.

“How deep does it go?” Sean finally asked, and there was something approaching unease in him. He squeezed his hands together over and over, his cheeks the same pallid-flush-red they’d been on his first mission.

Charles knew the answer, gleaned from the men below. “It stops at 407 feet. The mine itself goes farther and deeper, but we won’t have to go far past the first room. There’s another shaft a few miles away—it’s as deep as 900 feet. Astounding, isn’t it? That our government could be so preoccupied with building rockets to explore a rock in outer space when we still have so much rock to explore beneath our very feet.”

“If you say so,” groaned Sean.

 

xvi.

 

The first time Charles met a mutant, it was in his kitchen. He had nothing but a baseball bat and his telepathy, though at the time he wasn’t entirely sure he’d defined it correctly. Still, he’d made a friend.

The second times Charles met a mutant, he dropped on his back under the water and slid his arms around him (finding fistfuls and grips in his sweater, feeling hair float against his cheek). They were in the middle of something bigger than they could name. He told him, You’re not alone. You’re not alone.

Charles often remembered those meetings and was forced to examine how neither relationship had ended particularly well. And yet, he’d never replace them. Whatever mistakes they made between them, they had a measurable impact on each others’ lives. Even now, it was Erik’s caution that gave Charles pause when he once blundered on. It was Raven’s frankness that gave him the push needed to take charge in a situation that called for it.

Sometimes he worried what gifts he’d given them in return.

(Had he only taught Raven to hide? Had he only given Erik the power to reshape the world into something less cutting? Charles felt as though his failures had become imprints in their genetic makeup, that by touching them, he’d left garish fingerprints.)

Now when Charles met a mutant, he didn’t say, I know everything about you. It was obviously untrue.

 

xvii.

 

Instead, what Charles told Gregory McHolden was, “You don’t have to be afraid.” It was an untruth in an entirely different way. Gregory had many things to be frightened of: the iron grip of the law, losing his family (a pretty pig-tailed girl and his wife, her chuckle and smoke-stained nails), the once-friends that now reviled him, a mutation that seeped through his fingers without control, without reason. His face was dirty and terrified. He looked much younger than his mind felt. Younger than Charles, who knew what that was like.

Every so often, his big hands would twitch and the mine coughed, quaked, and stilled again. Oh yes, this one was powerful. Running entirely by instinct. They had to get him out.

“Did you do that?” Gregory asked, hoarse. “Is that you? You done that?” He gestured to the group of thirty-eight miners, frozen as if in a picture and huddled together in a clutch around a pillar. It was dark in the mine, but Sean had picked up a safety lantern lying off to the side of an abandoned tub and a crumpled brown lunch bag. The light flickered on in sickly yellow patches, and Charles studied the mine as far as he could see, marveling at its crude ingenuity (oh, oh, I hope this room isn’t really held up just by these pillars, that seems a little… awful).

No, no, he had to focus. Charles smiled at Gregory and ignored the very probable insanity of his actions in bringing them down here. “Yes. It’s also possible for me to wipe their memories clean. They never need to know what happened here, Gregory.”

“You’d do that?” Pathetic, sweet hope.

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean I can make them all forget,” Charles cautioned, hearing the want in the man, the idea that Charles could make the world keep turning as planned and the events of the last few days disappear. If only he were that good. “You can’t stay here. Least of all because you have no idea how to control your mutation. Otherwise, this will happen again.”

Gregory covered his face. He kept his hands there a long time. He asked, in a small voice, “Can you fix me?”

Charles, for one moment, wished he could say yes. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I actually believe your mutation is a wonderful thing. I think you could use it to great benefit, that it’s a part of you to be treasured. But, if it’s a cure you want, I can at least offer you a safe place to stay until it’s found.”

He leaned forward, touching Gregory’s arm as if it might break. “You see, I run a school—”

The hoisting cage shook once.

Then again.

 

xviii.

 

“I don’t understand,” said Gregory. “I didn’t push nothin’ and it, it shouldn’t be movin’ like that.”

“Ah, yes,” Charles said. “But it’s made of metal.”

 

xix.

 

Erik.

If you gave Charles a millennia to explain how he felt about Erik, he’d still need to be stopped in mid-sentence at the sound of the timer. It was nothing as concrete and well-structured as his thesis; in his very atoms, he felt him, through pain and joy and the kind of tentative hesitation that gave birth to a breath. If there was a switch to shut it off, Charles hadn’t found it yet. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Often, Charles questioned whether he was made entirely of metal. He seemed bent to Erik’s will, twisted at a glance. Then discarded.

 

xx.

 

“I think you should stand back,” Charles told the others, very polite considering the situation. Sean took initiative to urge Gregory back toward the slack-faced miners, which was well-timed, because the hoisting cage groaned and began to lift itself up the passage not a moment after. Charles worried it was going to snag on its coils, but he shouldn’t have—Erik had grace as well as strength, and it moved as if of its own volition, as if he’d simply pressed the lift button instead of manipulating each intricate part with his mutation. It was that deftness that made Erik masterful, rather than sheer power.

Charles wished he didn’t admire it quite so much.

“What’s going on?” Gregory demanded, and Charles groaned internally at the thought that he’d have to condense this conversation very, very quickly.

“No cause for alarm. I did tell you we weren’t the only mutants in the world. There are other bands of friends that—”

“I didn’t say they could come down! Make them go away!” The angry vein throbbing on Gregory’s forehead was—ah, it was glowing red, Charles realized with some trepidation. Why did the ones with explosive tempers always have explosive mutations?

“Gregory, please. We mean you no harm.”

Sediment fell in clumps from the low ceiling. Sean put a hand on Charles’ shoulder, but a quick and fleeting brush against his mind told Charles he only meant to regain his own balance as the mine quaked. Once, Charles could’ve spoken to Erik even 400 feet beneath him and warned him that this wasn’t the best timing, but—

Black fumes unfurled from the floor, gathering in wisps around Gregory’s ankles. Charles sighed and pressed his fingertips to his temple. He told him, Rest.

 

xxi.

 

“Professor,” said Sean, and nothing more.

“Steady on, Banshee. We aren’t here to fight.”

“What if they’ve hurt the people up there? What about the miners?”

“Excellent questions. I hope to soon have answers.”

The hoisting cage grew closer.

 

xxii.

 

It settled. The door swept open. There were three, far more than necessary and yet a small display of power on Erik’s—Magneto’s—part. Azazel was the first, the fierce red of his face lit up against the safety lanterns, and Emma walked on his heels as if a shadow, albeit one dressed out of place in her fur boots and pristine white jumpsuit. Charles felt his stomach drop in disappointment (even now, he hoped to see Raven’s childish smirk and the proud tilt to her chin), but he gave away nothing, not even when Erik stepped out of the cage with the poise of a dictator.

Sean’s heart was beating frantically in his ear. Charles projected calm: calm, flight over a timid sea, a pretty girl’s laughter. The walls seemed so much closer; for the first time, Charles realized how small the first mining chamber was. And how out of place he must look.

Erik would have said, We all look out of place, Charles. But Erik didn’t share his head anymore. Instead, Erik’s gaze traveled across them to the huddled miners that remained caught in a pocket of their perceptions. There was a flicker of scorn that Charles expected. When he examined Gregory’s frozen expression, there was a flicker of a smile that Charles expected, too. He said, soft, “Really, Charles.”

“I’m afraid you gave him a startle. I wasn’t enamored by the idea of being enveloped in coal dust or entombed.”

“In that suit, I can imagine why.”

It indirectly, of course, brought attention to Erik’s peculiar outfit. Charles’ gaze flitted across the deep reds and purples before returning to meet the line of Erik’s sight. He didn’t say, I miss your leather jacket. I miss the neutrals you wore that brought out the intensity of your eyes instead of swallowing them. I feel as if you’ve reinvented yourself, but I miss most of all the fact that I can’t tease you about it, my friend.

“They just got here,” Emma said, studying Gregory’s nose in seeming boredom. Charles often wondered if anything fazed her. “You were right. He’s been keeping the miners here under the threat of his mutation. They saw it manifest. He panicked.”

“Erik,” murmured Charles. It was enough to draw his complete attention once again. “The people above ground?”

“Fleeing,” Erik said. “The storm, it seems, has touched down early.”

 

xxiii.

 

The storm? No, Riptide. Charles’ hand twitched against his thigh, then remained still. He hoped that Alex and Hank had obeyed him and didn’t engage—and at the same time, when he thought about the mass panic that must have lit under the crowd’s feet, he wished otherwise. Regardless, their window of opportunity was shrinking with every second. Erik’s brand of chaos inevitably brought the local law enforcement and military running, not always in that order. They had to get the miners to safety and secure Gregory, and while the fastest way would be to release Gregory to Erik’s clutches, the Brotherhood was no place for the man. Charles had seen into his heart.

“This one’s not like you,” he said firmly. “He’s not proud.”

“Only because he doesn’t yet understand.”

He had to concede to that possibility, however difficult. “We don’t have the time to educate him. I suggest that we move this discussion elsewhere to secure that time.”

Erik observed him from beneath the hooked curves of the helmet, expressionless, resolute, unforgiving. “Always so sure that conflict can be resolved by simply sitting down together to tea. I often wonder what it’s like in that head of yours, Charles.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, You could find out, if you took off that tacky piece of headwear. He didn’t.

Instead, Charles briefly rested his palm against Sean’s back. You must protect the innocent lives at risk here, he told him. Please trust that everything will be all right. I will be all right.

Sean bit his lip hard but didn’t indicate he heard him. His training and familiarity with Charles’ gentle asides had served him well. Charles twisted in his chair and closed his eyes a half-beat, gathering a mental net and casting it out. The thirty-eight miners slowly uncramped from their crouched positions, foreheads streaked with sweat and grime, and stood at silent attention. Their mining cap lights were still alight and against the blankness of their features, the effect was slightly disturbing.

“I don’t think we need these gentlemen any longer,” stated Charles. “They’ll be out of our way if they’re topside. Sean, will you take the first group? Five a trip at most—that cage looks close to retirement.” He ignored Sean’s immediate reaction, naked to anyone who cared to see it, as he realized he’d be leaving Charles behind underground. They had no choice; at Riptide’s mercy, their efforts to procure the miners’ safety would be useless.

“I think it would be more prudent to leave them here while we take leave,” Erik interjected. It wasn’t a suggestion. The screws holding the coal conveyor together against the wall vibrated.

“May I have your word then that you won’t bring down the mine once we’re on safe ground?”

Erik smiled, just so.

The miners went first.

 

xxiv.

 

The sixth time they met after the beach, they clashed in Minnesota at a logging ground. White-flecked trees and snowy dunes that rose higher than Charles’ head (if he could stand). Crisp air that burned in his lungs. There were two park rangers—mostly ignorant, quivering like rabbits out in the open—and a young girl that could grow quills out of her skin as a defense mechanism.

Charles remembered meeting Erik’s gaze. “Go,” he told the park rangers.

They ran.

So focused was Charles on searching for something in Erik that he didn’t see the logging chain curve up through the sky like a snake. He only saw the hot splatter of blood across an aged trunk, and then death in their glassy eyes, peeking from the swells of snow. The rotation of the planet stuttered and failed in him.

“They would have bashed her head open and killed her,” Erik said. “Even though they’ve known her since she was a baby. Are those the people that you want to protect, Charles?”

Charles learned quickly.

 

xxv.

 

The hoisting cage disappeared with the fourth group of miners. Charles cast an eye over the remaining eighteen, counting the many ways in which this wasn’t happening fast enough for his comfort. Nor, it seemed, for Erik’s.

“Release him,” he commanded.

“He’ll bring the roof down on us.”

“Tell him not to. You don’t have much of a choice in the matter, so I don’t know why you’re acting as if you have control. You gave that up when you took on these worthless lives as baggage. You’re outnumbered and, if I’m not mistaken, at our complete mercy.” Erik cocked his head. “Or should I have Azazel remove you from the equation entirely? The world doesn’t have to play by your rules, Charles, so why should I? Don’t waste my indulging mood.”

Charles frowned, but he loosened his grip on Gregory. The man heaved a giant breath and let it out again, wavering on his feet. He’d forgotten his earlier rage, and now took in all of the people standing around him in the room as if he hadn’t been listening the entire time. He very carefully didn’t move, not even to wipe away the moisture above his lip. Not even to blink.

In fact, he was so poised that Charles didn’t catch the flutter of intent before it was too late.

“Did they turn on you when they saw what you could do?” Erik asked, the question hovering in the air between them for a long moment. He went ‘ah’ in artful sympathy. “I can see the answer for myself. I understand your sense of betrayal, your cold-sweat fear. They have the power to take everything from you in their prejudice, and they will if you don’t—”

Wait, thought Charles at the pulse of red. He said it to himself, he said it to everyone in the room, but there wasn’t enough power behind it to make a difference. He was unprepared.

The ceiling split open above them.

“You can’t let them go,” said Gregory, right before he disappeared into a soot-gray funnel that swept aside everything in its wake.

 

xxvi.

 

The smell of earth and coal, the taste of it thick in Charles’ throat—he covered his mouth even as the ground rose up beneath him, a crack separating half of the room from its brother. He couldn’t tell exactly where the fracture was because his vision was a curtain of grainy black, debris falling from above in thick sheets. It happened so quickly, he thought that the entire chamber was going to cave in that very second.

Then the violent shiver that ran through the layers of sandstone and shale ceased, though the formation that surrounded Gregory only picked up more substance. Charles reached out to stop him, only to run abruptly into a second influence trying to do the same thing.

He swiped at the diamond wall. Get out of my way!

(And god, the noise, men shouting and crying out in fear, Erik’s commanding voice—what was he saying, what was he—)

 

xxvii.

 

The second quake came as Gregory ripped into a coal seam far beneath them and pulled it through the floor.

Charles scrambled for his wheels as the chair began to slide back.

He put on the break, but it didn’t stop him from skidding straight into the coal conveyor, his back cracking in pain. A roar of sound. A flash-puff of scarlet. Azazel disappeared with Gregory, the source of the devastation, but the damage was done. Charles didn’t have to read any minds to tell that the pillars were cracked and falling apart. He had sixty seconds, maybe less.

The miners—

No, he couldn’t do anything for them. There was a gaping hole between them now that would not be crossed by, well, by the likes of him. Charles saw in that shift between dread and resignation that he had two choices—stay where he was and die or move further into the mine in hope that he could escape the cave-in radius. If he could get that far. If that wasn’t certain death in itself.

He wrenched at his wheels and threw all of his weight into forward movement. Nothing. His muscles screamed. Something was stuck, he could feel the catch that thwarted his efforts. Gravity was against him, it—

 

xxviii.

 

“Charles,” said Erik.

He was there. He was beside him. That ridiculous helmet still on, his mouth set and grim, and something wild in him; it lashed just beneath the surface. Charles stared at him in incomprehension.

Erik grimaced as if in pain. He reached out his hand and Charles heard the metal of his wheelchair stretch and strain and warp. The room was beginning to collapse around them. What was he—didn’t Erik understand?

“You have to get out,” he gasped. “Quickly, the mine shaft—”

“Infernal piece of junk,” cursed Erik. The squeal of metal cut off. He shoved his arm roughly beneath Charles’ knees, the other cramming down between Charles’ back and the chair. Charles scrambled to regain some of his wits and to grab a fistful of—of that silly cape, that overdramatic cape—and Erik’s shoulder, warm skin beneath fabric, before Erik lifted him free entirely.

Dirt was getting in his hair, his eyes. Charles pushed his forehead into Erik’s neck and hunched inward to shield himself, and then they were moving, moving fast, straight into a pitch black that became absolute as the way shut off behind them.

Chapter Text

xxix.

 

In the corner pocket of Charles’ brain, men were dying. He could feel them, bright flashes of synapses derailing and snapping out of existence, like a string pulled too hard out of his grasp. Their terror, then harsh silence. Their panic, then the slow burn of agony as they were buried alive, half of their body crushed and the other still aware of tiny, fragmented details: blood clumping in pebbles beneath a palm, breathing little more than wet splinters and a bubble of black, the click and stutter of the safety lantern. The man who didn’t move at all, but clutched the note his daughter wrote and left in his lunch sack (papa—please bring a pretty rock for my necklace i love you, your alice).

Of the eighteen, Charles lost all but seven in less than four minutes. He clung to the fragments of consciousness until they disappeared, as if he could convince their bodies to keep going beyond the limits of mortality. He could not.

Erik continued running in a jagged line through the dark even when the deafening rumble faded and his steps became less certain, blind. The air was thick and dry. He didn’t seem to notice Charles’ weight. He slowed, breathed hard in Charles’ ear, and walked again until they hit an uneven wall.

There, he slid down to his knees and pushed Charles against its protection. They huddled together, pressed into the sandstone, listening. Unmoving. Straining to hear the supports that might crumple around them, the muffled groan of the room they left as it settled and became still again.

Eventually, they heard nothing but each other.

 

xxx.

 

He felt Erik's damp exhale brush against his forehead like a touch. He hadn’t realized they were so close to each other, but of course, Charles couldn’t see his hand in front of his face either. The mine was utterly devoid of light and without it, reality seemed distant. Like perhaps this was only a daydream spun at his desk in the school (pretending to ignore the toffee in a dish meant for the students, not himself). Or perhaps the daydream went back further, when he used to buy Raven colas at the pubs and only had faint hopes for meeting others who were different.

It was Erik that broke the momentary spell. “That,” he said, “could have gone better.”

The bubble of laughter was strangled before it could come into existence; it was entirely inappropriate, though perhaps five years ago, Charles would’ve let it come to fruition nevertheless. Instead, Charles rubbed his face and gathered his faculties. “Mm. Yes, well.”

“You’re unharmed.” It wasn’t a question.

Charles answered, anyway. “Yes. Yes, and—in no small part thanks to you, my friend. I’m not altogether certain I could have escaped a rather grim fate on my own. Though, I’m afraid I’ve gotten you in a terrible mess as a result.” He tried to look around him, but it was impossible.

“Your chair was partly plastic.”

“Hank’s design. He made one entirely of polypropylene, but I found it uncomfortable to use. We compromised.”

“It made things difficult,” was all Erik said about it. He shifted, then went motionless again. “There’s a small, compact piece of metal and glass the next room down. I think it might be a light. Wait here.”

Charles leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. “I’m afraid I can do little else,” he murmured, well after Erik disappeared into the void beyond.

 

xxxi.

 

It was a safety lantern. “Looks like we’re completely cut off,” Erik observed, holding the weak light at eye level as he gazed down the mining rooms toward where they came from. He was smudged and filthy, and it made Charles wonder what he looked like, too. “Nothing but rock and rubble. Though, there could be a small opening or a thin point we can punch through. Can you contact Emma or am I down a second telepath?”

Charles wrinkled his nose and reached out, tentative, unwilling to have the connection slam down on his fingers. Fortunately, Emma Frost was alive, conscious, and receptive to hearing from someone that wasn’t dying or desperate for an escape from the hell pit that had become the entrance to the mine. So you’ve survived, she said, mostly indifferent. That’s nice.

Yes, I have—and I’m with Erik. We made it beyond the cave-in radius, but the way seems shut. What do you see from your end?

Let’s just say you won’t be digging your way out any time soon. Hm. I’ll see what I can do.

“She’s going to try cutting us out,” Charles told Erik. “She must have gone into her other form to avoid being crushed. That or used the mine shaft, I think it’s clear. Some of the miners are attempting to get to the surface by climbing up the emergency ladders. I’m afraid it’s slow going.”

“It’s fascinating how you seem to think I care.”

After that, they were silent.

 

xxxii.

 

It was another twenty minutes before Emma spoke to Charles, and by that time, he was exceptionally glad to hear from her. He had the feeling that if he spoke to Erik again, it wouldn’t end well. This alone was more direct contact than they’d had in years. It made Charles… no, he wouldn’t think about it.

I can’t do it, Emma said. She sounded tired and frustrated, tone a shade lower than normal. Every time I get an opening wide enough, another part of the mine collapses. It could bring down the next room if I’m not careful.

Charles cursed.

“What?” demanded Erik. “What is it?”

“It’s too unstable. She can’t dig us out.”

“Tell her to get Azazel. We’ll teleport to the surface.”

Charles relayed the message, but Emma’s response was immediate. I can’t contact him from this level. Something in the ground’s blocking me. I’ll have to climb up the mine shaft, and that’s going to take a long time.

How long?

Sugar, in this outfit?

Charles looked at Eric in chagrin. “We’re going to be here a while.”

 

xxxiii.

 

When Charles was at Oxford, he’d finish his exams quickly so that he could listen to the thoughts of his fellow students. There was something about their focus on the clock—the way they followed the minute hands, how their concentration was upset at a single tock—that intrigued him. Even when they understood that there was plenty of time, there was an ongoing awareness that there was never enough time, not to satisfy the margin of error. It was a simple metaphor for the human lifetime.

Charles couldn’t stop time, but he could pause a man’s perception of it. Once, on a particularly awful day in which Charles had been late to class and ill-prepared to boot, he wondered what would happen if he froze his classmates during an exam. If he let their precious minutes slip away, until the bell rang and woke them from their stasis, and they looked around to discover that their most buried, internalized nightmare had come true: for all of their paranoia and careful planning, there hadn’t been enough time. Their very existence, made unfinished. Their hopes, all unraveled, the frayed twine left to drag along the floor.

It was a horrible thought. Charles was ashamed of himself for entertaining it, even in brief. Of course, a little reflection never hurt anyone, he reminded himself.

In the days after the Cuban missile crisis, Charles stared at the clock often. Trapped in his hospital bed, watching the slow curve of the black plastic hands, his nails digging into his thigh but feeling nothing, nothing at all.

 

xxxiv.

 

“How is Raven?” Charles murmured at last, unwilling to let the unwieldy quiet continue to shape the space between them. He used to enjoy quiet with Erik; they could spend hours in a room and never say a word. Every so often, a raised eyebrow at a risky chess move would say all that needed to be said.

(That was a long time ago. Long enough.)

Erik made a strange noise. “Her name is Mystique.”

“If you think I’m going to call either of you by your ridiculous code names, let me reiterate that they are, in fact, ridiculous.”

“She’s fine,” was Erik’s measured, flat response. “Currently putting a great deal of effort into gathering classified information through subterfuge. You’d be very proud.”

Oh. Well, it was a sensible use of her talents, though her recklessness didn’t make for a very good spy. Charles tried to imagine her putting on new faces and walking the halls of government buildings, infiltrating without suspicion, and it made him weary. She was no longer a little girl sneaking into kitchens. “I am,” he agreed after a pause, for it remained true.

“She’s a magnificent creature.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t call my sister that.”

“It’s her favorite thing to hear.”

To that, Charles had nothing to say. He found himself unable to look away from Erik’s visage, hoping that maybe he hadn’t imagined the trace of fondness in his voice, hoping that maybe he had. The line of Erik’s jaw was resolute, and he stared down the tunnel as if he didn’t want to turn and see Charles, as if he was pretending to be alone. That hurt a bit, so Charles decided to do the same.

 

xxxv.

 

He received a few messily penned letters from Raven, but they began to flag as the distance between their causes became more pronounced. With the first of the human deaths hanging between them, the letters stopped altogether. Charles wondered if it was really so easy to forget about their unusual childhood. He couldn’t go down a corridor of the school without recalling Raven’s girlish laughter, the lavender-dusted vase they accidentally broke on a day swollen with rain, or the first time they’d stolen into his mother’s room and borrowed her make-up case. Charles remembered sitting on his mattress and unfolding the delicate brushes, the tubes of paint and dust and ink for his ever-curious foster sister.

Could I try it? Could you make me look like her? was all Raven asked. He would have given her the moon so long as she stayed at his side.

How very, very carefully he’d painted her that day. Charles was eleven and hardly adept at applying make-up, but he treated the act as something sacred, putting all of his concentration into her rite of passage. The pastels and pinks weren’t made for blue-toned skin, yet he smiled when he was done, handed Raven a mirror, and said, There you are. I daresay you wear it more gracefully than Mother does.

Charles wished he knew where he stepped over the line and made her believe anything otherwise. Sometimes he looked through his mother’s old things, locked away in a dresser that remained untouched save for the yellow stain of time; he’d turn a tube of lipstick in between his fingers and lose himself in memory, in the whispers of children huddled beneath a pillow fort, hoping they were special.

He’d still give her the moon if she asked.

 

xxxvi.

 

“Was it the news report?”

Erik cut a scornful glance in Charles’ general direction. He’d been doing his best to bore a hole in the cavern wall with his moodiest stare, an attempt that Charles thought was going rather poorly despite his greatest efforts. Of course, that was the slight bitterness in Charles speaking; it was far more likely Erik was searching for metals in the earth and room beyond, hoping to find a vulnerability to exploit. A smart plan, and one he ought to allow Erik some time to explore.

Nevertheless, Charles persisted. “Is that why you’re here? Alex caught onto the idea from watching the news reports. Did you do the same?”

“You have your ways, I have mine.”

“Ah, that would be a yes.”

“Charles,” Erik said in warning. He didn’t put a name to his ire, though Charles could deduce the fine print. He’d always had a problem with holding his tongue, but Erik brought out the worst of it. Erik brought out a lot of things in Charles that he wasn’t particularly proud of, or perhaps, no, that wasn’t fair—it was more accurate to say that Erik identified the things in Charles that he wasn’t particularly proud of. He read Charles like a manual and promptly mocked its instructions.

This didn’t deter him. “No, please don’t. I’m sorry, but you persist in thinking I’m as much an enemy as you perceive mankind to be. That doesn’t need to be the case. We have our disagreements, yes, but when it comes down to—”

“We do not have disagreements, Charles.” Erik tightened his jaw into something unyielding.

“Do tell.”

And perhaps he would have, but at that moment, Charles’ mind was distracted from him by a burst of frustrated speech. The words were garbled; he held up a hand to stall anything that Erik might say, closed his eyes, and focused on those dulcet complaints. She must be in the mine shaft, Charles realized, if I can barely make her out. He called out for Emma to keep going and get into range, but didn’t receive a response.

“It’s about time,” Erik sighed. He put the safety lantern down and dusted some of the grit from his shoulder.

 

xxxvii.

 

Feeling cozy? Emma asked.

Charles glanced at Erik and felt the corner of his mouth quirk up. My dear, he chided through their tenuous connection, would you relish being trapped behind a wall of rock with him while he’s in this kind of mood?

I’ll take your word as to his mood. Unfortunately, neither of you have a lot of choices at the moment.

Oh. That didn’t bode well. Charles sucked in part of his lip and bit down, worrying at it—the gesture was obviously telling enough that Erik read his displeasure, because he picked up the safety lantern again and crossed to Charles’ side. Because Charles remained sitting where he’d been left (as if he could have done little else), Erik dropped down into a low crouch, watching his face intently as though he could read the conversation for himself from it. Perhaps he could.

Charles tried to ignore him. What happened to your teleportation friend, Azazel?

Gone. He does that sometimes.

Charles lifted his fingertips from his temple and frowned at Erik. “Do your companions normally make a habit of disappearing from a potentially harrowing situation?”

It was like watching a thundercloud darken his brow. Erik snarled, looked away, and bit out something that Charles couldn’t translate (the grating syllables were familiar, perhaps left over from a projected dream or a memory Charles once shared with Erik over a tumbler of amber scotch, like a still-pink scar exposed to air). After a moment, Erik said with some restraint, “Azazel is a creature that prefers to remain unbound. He often… takes a leave when it pleases him, to traverse places I can only imagine. Some greater purpose, as I’ve been made to understand.”

“Oh?”

“His timing is consistently unfortunate.” Erik rubbed his forehead with grubby fingers. He added sourly, “Perhaps I need to keep him busier.”

The foreboding undertone in those words sent Charles’ stomach tumbling. He wondered if he should ask, then decided it would be in his best interests not to. “Our options appear limited,” he said, noncommittal.

“If options exist at all, please, enlighten me.”

“Very well. If you’ll excuse me a moment.”

 

xxxviii.

 

He put his fingertips back to his temple and inhaled the hot, stuffy air of the mine. Exhaled. Inhaled. Exhaled. Let the back of his skull rest against the wall, sediment trickling down his neck and getting lost in his collar. Closed his eyes.

Everyone had a particular organization to their subconscious, often manifesting in a familiar way—a file cabinet, photo album, messy kitchen utensil drawer—when Charles touched it. He rarely did this. Charles preferred the noninvasiveness and ease of surface thoughts unless absolutely imperative; it was safer, respectful, discreet. Less chance of snapping a thread, planting an accidental command, or unlocking a childhood monster. The mind had its ghosts, as well. Some of them scratched.

Charles’ subconscious was a library, and it was all the larger for the other thoughts it contained. Perhaps not terribly imaginative, but Charles always found comfort in libraries (the vast corridors and smell of paper and wide-eyed windows that ushered in sunshine, its exhaustive guest). He’d built it painstakingly from his youth, adapting as he grew and catalogued the information gleaned from others. So much was discarded, but he hated to waste anything. All thoughts were… precious, and unique.

Perfectly extraordinary.

The dead miners’ minds were fresh in his memory, so they were easier to find. He pushed open the doors and went directly to the returned books rack, littered with upended tomes and journals. Charles was gentle with them; he petted a spine before opening the first book across his palm, scanning the half-filled pages, and considering what he found. He did this with each, went back to reread a green picture book, and scratched his head. He put the books back on the rack in proper order.

“Charles?”

Charles murmured, “When I say a moment, I often mean approximately five minutes, my friend.” He then stroked the books once more before turning on his heels and walking back into a light that only lasted as long as it took to open his eyes.

 

xxxix.

 

Erik was pacing.

Charles watched him, aware for the first time of the weariness that crept into his bones and made his chest sore. He felt as if he’d been through two days instead of one, and despite now having a plan, its uncertainty rested heavy on his shoulders. But there was a certain pleasure in seeing Erik prowl like some impatient predator stuck behind bars, because Erik was someone who needed to remain in motion, ever-moving forward, set on his purpose. Not for the first time, Charles felt a spark of subdued, conflicted relief that he’d been the one caught in a chair. He didn’t imagine Erik would have endured it nearly as well—but then, Erik was a survivor and Charles little more than a teacher.

And he’d certainly been wrong before.

As if sensing his reflections, Erik came to an immediate stop. He half-turned and stared at Charles, embraced by shadows cast from the lantern. He said nothing. He didn’t have to.

Charles gave him a rueful smile, rubbing a crick in his neck. “I’m afraid you’ll simply have to move on, Erik.”

There was a flicker of something strange in those eyes, but little more. It was gone before Charles could examine it further. “Explain.”

“Gladly.”

He gave Emma a gentle push; there was no need for her to remain and he rather suspected her outfit was ruined. From here, they were on their own.

 

xl.

 

There was a way out.

“You see, this mine is widespread enough to be connected by more than one mine shaft. There are two others in relative vicinity, one of which is still in use. The other has remained in disuse, but it may still be accessible.” Charles briefly pressed his knuckles to his mouth, then leaned over and drew in the dirt with his thumb. He tried to create an approximate map from their general location, though his art skills had always been somewhat lacking. “The way goes straight for a while, but there’s a major fork about a mile away—from there, to the left and keeping to the main rooms, it’s only four miles to the nearest shaft. It’s just under 900 feet deep. I think that would be your best option, as the third shaft is deeper, farther, and very likely in decay.”

Erik circled his makeshift design, scanning the blueprint as if committing its flaws to memory. He crouched once more, cape dragging in the grime. “Here,” he said, putting his finger into the first mine shaft and blotting out half of its formation. “And the way is safe?”

“That, I can’t tell you. I have to imagine it’s not impossible.”

“If it were possible, I would have thought the authorities would make use of it during the hostage situation.”

“Not everyone is as surefooted and fearless as you,” Charles told him. “Possible, yes. Dangerous, equally so. In such an unstable place? I can’t imagine many that’d want to take the risk, even if they had the knowledge to travel it.”

“Yet you’d set us on it.”

“You asked for choices.” Charles shrugged. “I see few others. If you can ascend from there, I do hope you’ll feel charitable enough to send for my team so they can come get me. I don’t enjoy the idea of spending the night here. Bit ghastly, actually.” He grimaced.

Erik looked at him sharply. “You expect me to leave you.”

That gave Charles pause. “Of course.”

“I don’t see the sense in leaving behind the only person who can guide me.”

Charles said, each word somewhat slow, “I can’t walk, Erik.”

“I know that!” Erik snapped, shoulders folding back indignantly. He recoiled as if Charles had accused him of—something—and glowered. “I’ll have to carry you. I brought you in here, I can take you out.”

(Of course, Erik would think of that so—easily, as if it were a simple decision, as if he were choosing what pair of boots to lace in the morning. But easy and simple it was not, and Charles would be damned if he let him continue on that assumption, none-the-wiser when he should have known the best of all.)

 

xli.

 

Two weeks after being released from the hospital, Charles manhandled himself into the bathtub and remained in there for hours, well after the hot water cooled and fussed goosebumps from his arms. With the loss of steam, Charles stared up at the ceiling tiles and counted them four times over. He wondered why everything always came in even numbers—what mindset, what genetic imbalance, had created such uneasiness with the odds. He wished for a ceiling that had eighty-one tiles.

As for his legs, they remained numb. He shook them, clawed them, traced the bony countenance of his knee, but it was as if he were handling someone else’s limbs. He felt nothing, and yet they were his own.

“Come on, you,” he whispered. Though he knew better. Of course—how stupid of him all of this was. This talking to his legs, this expectation that lingered despite all logic and advice to the contrary.

Charles put his head against the rim of the bathtub, wet hair slick against the nape of his neck, and breathed. Sometimes that was harder than it seemed. Oddly enough, in that space of time, he thought of Erik: I don’t know how you survived. Living in such hardship.

Against the ceramic walls, Charles’ laughter bounced and fragmented. He wasn’t sure why it was funny, but really, nothing else did the trick.

 

xlii.

 

“Absolutely not,” Charles said, firm in a way he more often was with his students. His hands remained folded in his lap like a lock to a box.

“Then I’ll just leave you here. Alone. In the dark. In an unstable room where the pillars could crack and collapse at any given moment. Yes, Charles, I think that’s a very well-constructed plan. I thought you’d graduated Oxford?”

“I know the risks. I just think they’re outweighed by the ones we’d take if you insisted on dragging me along with you.” Charles lifted his chin, trying to level himself with Erik’s. “You’ll go twice—no, at least three times—as fast without me. Not to mention, you’ll have your hands free in case you need to respond to any threats. I have full faith in my team. They’ll be able to find me. It’s not your problem.”

Erik narrowed his eyes. He stood, reaching for his shoulders and dismantling his cape. It billowed to the ground.

Charles waited, skin crawling with anticipation.

“I won’t argue with you,” Erik said. “You can come or I’ll knock you out and bring you, anyway.”

“I dare you to come close enough and try it,” Charles warned. He’d knock the helmet off and send Erik skipping through the mine if he had to. Even imagining being concussed and—no, he couldn’t think of it without shuddering. “Go on, you should have no problem finding the way.”

Erik calmly kicked his cape to the side. He gestured, and the safety lantern tilted over before hovering in the air. “Last chance, Charles.”

“I said no! Forget it!”

The lantern swung at him, and he raised his arm to—

 

xliii.

 

A hushed, uneven clicking sound.

Warmth, not his own.

Charles’ vision swam. He tried not to be ill. When he closed his eyes, it was better. Against his cheek, someone’s heartbeat was a trifle fast. He tried to say something, but the heartbeat said, like gravel that vibrated through his skeletal structure, “Try to sleep, Charles.”

He did, against better judgment.

 

xliv.

 

Rocks, under his back and shoulders. Charles stirred, ear scratching against them as he turned his head. Someone stepped over him—he could feel the current of air—and walked a bit away. “Where now?” Erik said, sounding frustrated.

There, Charles told him sleepily, pointing out the way. He forgot for a second that Erik couldn’t listen to him like that, not anymore.

He struggled to open his eyes, but then someone was lifting him, and he lost his grasp on consciousness. The side of his temple felt damp and sticky; it smelt of copper, much like the hand that folded over it, like a cover to a book or—

 

xlv.

 

The next time Charles woke up, he realized four things in quick succession. He wasn’t at his best for the moment or he’d have made it to at least eight more.

First, someone had brained him quite harshly. He was bleeding, sore, and the edges of his sight kept blurring (though it may have been the wavering light that bobbed in and out of his vision, lighting up a frightening black tunnel before them).

Second, it was Erik that brained him.

Third, he was being carried. Erik must have had his knees, because Charles could feel his other arm beneath his back, and his nose was mashed up against Erik’s shirt, which smelled like sweat and coal and rain. The muscles in Erik’s arm were tense, a sure sign he’d been doing this for quite some time.

Four, Charles was extremely upset at this violation.

He lifted his head, reached for the helmet, and snatched it off.

 

xlvi.

 

Erik froze. It wasn’t of his own volition.

Charles’ breathing was shaky. He held the helmet as far away from them as he could, feeling the cool metal and also the warmth left behind from Erik’s hair in its interior. Like this, his face was inches from Erik’s, but the safety lantern that had been floating beside them now crashed to the ground, shrouding them in a greater darkness. He could hear Erik’s breath as it passed between his lips, though. He could hear his thoughts, turbulent and angry, pushing against Charles as if to try and keep him out.

Charles struggled to save himself from being overwhelmed. After so long, this complex mind, this beautifully fractured—

No.

“Put me down,” he whispered, in all the ways there were to whisper.

Erik shuddered.

Put me down, Erik!

The support under him gave way a little and Charles crashed to a heap on the floor. He gasped, wind knocked out of him. There was a sharp pain in his lungs and his injury pulsed; he fumbled for it and felt the swollen bump, the shallow cut. Minor. He’d be fine. Certainly not ideal, but he’d be fine. The helmet’s edges and contours felt hard against his chest, so he put it down and fought to sit up.

He couldn’t see Erik anymore, but the lantern was in reach. Charles reached out and spun it against the wall, bringing them both back into view. He looked down at himself, then at Erik. Too close. Putting his palms flat on the ground, Charles pushed himself back—a few inches, then an entire foot, legs dragging uselessly. Further. Away. He needed to be further away for this, away from Erik.

When it was far enough, he stalled and panted.

Erik stared at him, eyes black in the lack of contrast afforded by the light. His hands were still outstretched, as if to cradle something that wasn’t there. His thoughts were… untouchable.

Charles tried to find words. His chest heaved for air; he was sweating, dirty, trembling. When he found the words, he had no time to review them before they spilled out, furious and raw, scraped from his underbelly. “You do not… ever do that! You don’t ever do that! Not without my permission. Never, ever without my permission. Do you understand?”

Each syllable hung in the air, vibrating wildly. Charles could hear himself echo down the mine and it was like listening to a stranger. He let something loosen in him, released some of his control.

Erik bared his teeth.

Charles slashed his hand at him. “No! No. You listen to me, my friend, and you listen good. Paralyzed, yes, I am that and perhaps a little more, but the day I lose my right to judge for myself what I can and can’t do, that’s the day you cripple me. Not on that beach; that was an accident. But like this. In robbing me of my choices. If I say no, I mean no. If I say that it—demeans me to be carried like a child, then that is where the line is drawn. If I would rather wait in the bloody cave in the dark than feel a burden on you, that’s my choice, my right, mine.”

He felt his voice catch. “And you—can’t take that from me, Erik. Especially—not you, especially you.”

Silence gaped in the wake of his awkward culmination. Charles wiped his forehead with his wrist. It came away streaked with filth. He looked at the safety lantern, then at Erik, then at the helmet, then at his hand again. He very carefully shifted back on his hips and reached for the helmet. Though he wasn’t certain he could do it (until the moment he did), Charles gripped the helmet and offered it back to his friend. He let him go.

It turned out to be a mistake. Erik wrenched the helmet from his grip, threw it against the wall, and slammed Charles back to the floor.

 

xlvii.

 

“I noticed the satellite had been moved again,” Charles said, leaning in from the doorway of the kitchen. “Those poor scientists. You’ll have them ripping their hair out.”

He felt warm when Erik responded by pulling out another glass from the cupboard. He poured them each full of milk and capped the jug. Though he was dressed for sleep, there was still restlessness in him, submerged just beyond Charles’ standard range of reading. He wanted to pluck at it like an instrument, but resisted.

“Not something stronger?” he instead teased, entering. He took the offered glass nevertheless and clinked it against Erik’s.

“Just before bed? It’d be wasted.” Erik studied the milk. “I had to try again. To see that it wasn’t—a fluke.”

“And?”

“I perhaps need more serenity in my life,” Erik said wryly. Something in Charles buoyed at that, lit from within like a hot air balloon, living and billowing and coaxing him higher. He drank, but he didn’t take his eyes from Erik, feeling as though he were watching an evolution of its very own.

 

xlviii.

 

Rock and dirt were in his mouth. Charles coughed, twisting against Erik’s heavy weight, kept still by the arm tight across his neck and the knee digging into his side. He pushed at him, but it was futile. Erik was as unbendable as his metal. And right now, touching his mind was like plunging his fist into a grease fire.

Erik glared down at him, half of his features hidden in black, the other side keeping all of the lantern’s glow. His rage was nearly tangible—it felt like being dragged over broken glass, like every movement was caught, ripped, and bled out. Charles stared up at him, palm pushing at his chest without success, and grappled for a thought that wasn’t a broken wire.

“Don’t,” snarled Erik.

“Erik—”

It was as if every word was a thought, a thought that was a word, a word and thought and emotion, so strong that it bored into Charles and dug holes, gaping craters where all that was Erik left scars and blisters. “Do you think I care about your pride? Your unchanging arrogance?”

Charles’ lips parted. He said nothing.

Erik gripped his chin, livid, unchecked. “If I leave you down here, Charles, make no mistake, there’s a chance I’d come back and find your proud, independent corpse making its bed in this miserable, ill-created hole of Hell, and whatever you are to me, whatever we have become—though I may not be the better man, there are still lines I draw, and had wrongly assumed you recognized. I will not be lectured like one of your students!”

Charles felt like he was sinking down into the earth. Oh, he thought, distant, beneath the chaotic, tangled press and something, something elusive—

“If you die, it won’t be today,” said Erik.

Then he was gone. Charles heard the clink of the helmet (like a quiet-night toast) and so was the answer he sought.

Chapter Text

xlix.

 

They were playing chess by firelight and the strains of Ode to Joy, which was, Erik insisted, unbearably forthright when compared to the more understated classics he preferred. In response, Charles told him to open his mind and fetch another Scotch. It was only after he glanced up and saw Erik’s eyebrow lift that he realized the irony of that statement when issued by a telepath. Nevertheless, Erik did get up and go to the study liquor cabinet. He had an elegant way of pouring that Charles self-admittedly lacked.

“I’ll never understand how you can trust them so blindly,” Erik stated as he filled their glasses. They were talking about the CIA. Most nights, they spent talking about the CIA.

Charles studied the chess board. “I’d like to say that I’ll never understand how you can distrust them so severely, but in your case, I must acknowledge that it’s justified. Every morning, your continued presence surprises me, my friend.” He glanced up with a smile. “Pleasantly.”

“They’ll get you killed, you know.”

“Hm?”

Erik set a glass by his elbow before sinking back into one of the arched leather chairs. He regarded Charles over the lip of his own, the mead-hue of the Scotch lit richly by the fire’s glow. “At the end of the day, no matter what favors you do for them, you’re little more than a threat. Expendable, dangerous—like the match to light a fire, used rashly and then stubbed out. You’re ash, Charles.”

Clammy hands digging through greasy black remains, something catching between his knuckles: a root-twisted tooth. He stilled and wondered who he would wash from beneath his fingernails tonight. Charles shook away the memory, not his own. He felt ill, but determinedly reached out and shifted one of his pawns forward. “That’s a risk I’ll gladly take, to do the right thing.”

He thought Erik was considering his next move, but as the quiet dragged its feet, Charles looked up to find Erik staring at him, motionless. His cheek rested against the glass, but he took no sip. His mind was placid, but the waters beneath it not. The things he saw there were not things that had happened yet.

“Erik,” Charles said softly.

“I was only thinking, what a terrible waste.”

 

l.

 

Often, Charles wondered what particular kind of waste Erik meant. That of a talented mutant? A good man? A friend? Despite his ability to read the reflections of others, sometimes Charles couldn’t decipher the things Erik said. He was a man of layers; beneath his words and intentions were slumbering dragons, conclusions unharnessed by others. Charles used to love peeling away those layers to view the glimmer of scales beneath.

But in this case, Charles hoped he meant that he didn’t want Charles to die. Regardless of the reasons, that was somehow flattering. That Erik should want Charles in his life for the time to come. That Erik should think he was worth the risk.

Later, Charles berated his arrogance in being so full of himself. He meant nothing to Erik in face of his friend’s master goals. He was only a stupid dreamer, a dreamer who dived off of boats in the middle of the night to chase men who chased submarines.

 

li.

 

Erik slapped at his clothes, ridding himself of the mine’s debris. He knelt beside the safety lantern and lowered his hand over a dent in the rim, no doubt created when he’d dropped it at Charles’ mental command. The metal whined and popped out again in a perfect curve to match that of his palm. He very deliberately ignored Charles. His forehead and cheekbone were still mottled red from dissipating fury, though, and Charles wished he knew what happened to his own—it felt like his anger had been yanked clear out of his grasp.

Now, Charles was simply tired.

He finally found the strength to sit up again, though his bones shook, caught up in the remnant turbulence of Erik’s mind clashing against his own. Charles looked at his hand, fingers splayed. There were little bits of shale caught in the creases. It reminded him of the beach in Cuba, sand trickling down his wrist. He tried to re-imagine the stillness of that moment (trapped between one future and the next, the slow rocking of the sea twined with his pulse, the expression on Erik’s face, the realization, the breath before a plummet) until at last, Charles regained his balance in the soft foothold between rage and serenity.

Erik stood, the safety lantern floating at his side. He set his jaw and glared mulishly at Charles. “Now. Will I have to knock you out again?”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“You didn’t leave me a choice.”

“I gave you a perfectly satisfactory one.” To stall for time, Charles surveyed their location by the lantern’s light. The tunnel of rooms was one without doors, creating a corridor supported by pillars that went for several feet in each direction. Each end was swallowed by the encompassing black. He was eerily reminded of the gaping, toothless mouths of animals. The air was stuffy, his body hot. No ventilation, he thought. That doesn’t bode well.

“How far have we gone?” he asked, taking a pinch of dirt between his fingers and rubbing them together. The particles were hard and stale; they didn’t crumble at pressure.

Erik turned his head, gazing down the far end of the tunnel to his left. “We walked for half an hour or so. I can’t judge the distance, but I haven’t found the fork we were supposed to take. A mile isn’t that far, but you’re heavy. And there’s the possibility—no, we have to be close.”

Charles frowned at him. “You’re sure you didn’t miss it?”

“You would know best. Why don’t you take a look around and tell me?”

“I’m not sure,” Charles snipped, unable to help himself. “You see, someone concussed me.”

“Charles.”

“Give me a minute, then.” His fingers drifted up, resting above his ear, as he searched the scattered memories of their lost miners. He tried to put the nondescript image of their surroundings to something they left him, anything, a single clue. There was a sinking sensation in his belly; something told Charles the way wasn’t as easy as he’d first claimed.

Erik groused behind him, “I didn’t concuss you.”

 

lii.

 

He didn’t recognize anything. There was nothing familiar in the miners’ thoughts, and he’d gleaned so little that Charles wasn’t sure of their reliability. Even so, of the many rooms they’d hallowed out, the few that stuck in their minds didn’t look remotely similar to those Erik and Charles found themselves in—and while that didn’t mean this wasn’t the way, it was ominous. Charles drummed his fingers against his head in apprehension.

“What is it?” Erik demanded. “What did you learn?”

“Nothing.” Charles made himself appear calm. He folded his hands over his lap, though Raven used to insist it was his ‘give away’ sign for trouble. “Just that. Nothing. I have to assume you took the right way. You didn’t see any deviations from this route?”

“It’s a mine. Of course there were deviations. Half-filled rooms, a dead end, other paths clustered together and heading off from the main—but not a fork. I assumed,” Erik added in thinly veiled irritation, “that when you said fork, it meant one path that diverged into only two.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Then we haven’t come to it.”

“You could’ve missed it in the dark,” Charles suggested, but the look Erik gave him denied any possibility of that. He sighed, shoulders slumping. “We could always go back to the cave in and wait. They know we’re trapped here. Sean will have met up with the others by now.”

“Sean? Not Banshee?” Erik’s voice was faintly mocking.

Charles suppressed a smile. “I only call him Banshee in the field. And while I maintain that it’s a ridiculous code name, it seems to give him—and the others—some outlet for their creativity.”

“We’ll continue,” Erik decided.

“I’m not sure that’s wise.”

“It was your first instinct and your plan, Charles. You insisted it was a viable option. I won’t be deterred because you have a complex about your legs.”

“It’s not a complex,” Charles said, the lost anger pulsing in a knot up through his throat. He struggled to control his frustration, the injustice of being so belittled. This was not a complex. This was his life. This was Erik’s mistake and—no, he shrunk back from that immediately, as soon as he thought it. No, it was not Erik’s mistake. It was no one’s mistake. It was an accident borne of many variables, unaided by intention, and it didn’t control him. That’s what this was about: choices, control, human dignity.

(his life)

And no one had the right to take it from him again.

 

liii.

 

And yet—

 

liv.

 

The sun searing the marble tiles in the garden, the iron-hammered bench hot beneath his thighs. Laughter, easy and free. They were allowed to laugh some days. It felt like summer could last for an eternity and keep them cloaked, safe, hidden from threat.

“What I wouldn’t give,” Erik said in that moment, “to do the things that you can do.”

Charles nearly touched him (the late shadow lingering at his jaw). He said, “But you can do so much more if you try.”

 

lv.

 

Charles rubbed his face vigorously. He took a deep breath, let it fill his lungs.

When he could speak, he said, “Come here. I’ll tell you how we’re going to do this.”

 

lvi.

 

He had to promise not to pull the helmet off again. It wasn’t a difficult promise to make, although Charles found the barrier more disquieting than ever after its momentary absence. He wanted to read Erik’s mind. Not knowing made him feel uncomfortable, unawares—sometimes Charles couldn’t fathom what it must be like, not understanding someone so completely. In many ways, Charles was granted an easy way out of social pragmatics. To glance at a person’s heart, he merely had to brush aside the curtain. To realize their intentions and needs, he simply looked.

And yet, as he assured Erik, they had a symbiotic relationship at the moment. Charles needed Erik to get to the exit; likewise, Erik needed Charles to glean the way. The helmet would remain untouched.

That Erik believed in his word still was… interesting. That wasn’t exactly the right term for it, but Charles felt uneasy looking at his own heart. It was a pity one couldn’t read one’s own mind. He suspected it would explain a great deal of things if he could, though he couldn’t say whether it’d make him feel better or worse about himself. Perhaps a little of both. As it was, wishes were not horses and he’d certainly never made an acquaintance of a mermaid, so the issue was moot.

In return for Charles’ promise to keep his fingers from straying to Erik’s helmet again, Erik had to make a few concessions of his own. One of these was an oath not to crack open Charles’ skull when he felt Charles was being “arrogant.” This made a great deal of sense to Charles, who maintained that his skull wasn’t quite as hardheaded as Erik’s and was more useful to them in one piece. The other involved Charles’ mode of, ah, transportation.

Charles suspected that Erik wouldn’t hesitate to break those oaths if given a reasonable opportunity, but he opted not to call Erik out on it. He’d give a little faith if Erik could. He also didn’t believe his requests were too troublesome, honestly. Men faced with possible death had made stranger appeals, to be certain.

 

lvii.

 

“I still think this is ridiculous,” was what Erik had to say about it.

Charles stifled a sigh. “Come on, sit down in front of me—no, between my legs. How else are you going to get a hold of my legs if you’re three feet from them? For heaven’s sake, Erik. Now who’s being a child?”

“You’re the one that wants a ride on my shoulders.”

It wasn’t his shoulders, but Charles knew what arguments to fight and what ones weren’t worth his time. He kept his face neutral, palms flat against the ground. Sitting up with his legs sprawled out as wide as he could get them, he certainly felt as ridiculous as Erik claimed—but it was, he reminded himself, for the greater good of his pride. Being carried in Erik’s arms was not only going to wear down his friend faster, but it made every inch of Charles bristle. It reeked of—helplessness.

And this way, he could see where they were going.

Erik rubbed his forehead and eventually crouched in the dirt. He glanced at Charles in the lantern light once, another two times—assessing, irate—and turned his back to him. The helmet glinted. That helmet, how Charles itched to rip it away again. But no, his promise. Charles had broken so many promises in his life; he didn’t want to risk even a fraction of another.

“That’s it,” he encouraged, as Erik grappled beside him for Charles’ legs. Despite the exercises Charles performed weekly to keep in shape, his legs had still grown thinner and weaker in muscle tone. When Erik hooked his hands beneath Charles’ knees, it took considerable control not to flinch. He didn’t want Erik to touch his legs. There was no illusion that could bury beneath that helmet and give Erik the same ignorance he gifted to his students. Charles’ knees were bony, his skin full of sinkholes. It was what it was.

Erik said, “I’ve got you. Can you reach me?”

Charles closed his eyes a moment, unseen. He refused to succumb to shame. This was not shameful. He would remain serene, indifferent. Five years ago, he would have had no hesitation in allowing Erik to assist him—but five years ago, Charles had been clinging to his back in another way, dragging him by his soaked shirt up to the surface of the water, away from Shaw. Five years ago, Charles saved Erik.

This gave him the strength to open his eyes and crook a smile. “If you lean back a little more, yes.”

Erik’s shoulder blades shifted. He leaned back.

Charles wrapped his arms around Erik’s shoulders and locked his hands together beneath Erik’s collarbone. It was an awkward stretch. His nose grazed the back of the helmet; he pressed himself against Erik’s spine, his own contorting, changing shape to match its fellow. Charles tried not to linger on thoughts of how he held his breath, just barely, or the imperceptible tumble in his stomach at Erik’s body heat. They were both sweating, filthy, tired.

“On three,” said Erik, but he was already lifting.

 

lviii.

 

Charles’ stepfather was a reckless man. Perhaps careless was an equally appropriate word—he treated money and emotions with the same degree of impassion, cutting away at them both. Whatever Charles’ mother saw in him, it was only the reflection of her own desperation, a keen demand not to feel anymore. And so, there were other things that Charles found disagreeable with him.

All of that aside, there was one thing that frightened Charles’ stepfather into caution: nuclear war. The threat of a chemical winter kept the man up at night, pacing the hallways. Charles had seen his dreams. They were dark things that flared up into petals of red and orange, entire cities burnt, the screams of millions as they clawed at walls for safety and found none. In those dreams, Charles’ stepfather stood at the pit of civilization and watched it crumble beneath his shoes, but he could not take a step back, and soon the nuclear fallout swallowed him.

He was so terrified that he built a shelter deep within the house, in its roots and graves. It was a shelter Charles scoffed at, but later found to his use. Charles of course never told Alex that many years ago, he spent hours down in the shelter, tucked in the corner as he tried to read books by emergency light. It was his stepfather’s place, and therefore the one place his stepfather wouldn’t look for him.

There was a time Charles hadn’t understood the true nature of his stepfather’s fear. He was not so lucky anymore. In time, all men were consumed by something. They were devoured, engulfed, and stripped of everything but the bone.

 

lix.

 

“There—if I’m not mistaken, that’s our way out,” Charles said, reaching out to tilt the safety lantern that hovered in the air beside him more to the left. Its beam caught the fork that split the mine into two larger corridors, each heading steadily into the black. He felt relief split him just as easily. “If we keep going left, we should reach the mine shaft by sundown. Not that down here that seems to matter.”

“Well,” said Erik, “good job, Charles. Your navigational skills have redeemed themselves.”

The safety lantern spun briefly in the air, held suspended at Erik’s will. Charles resisted the urge to redirect it again, knowing the shift was Erik’s unspoken admonishment to keep his hands away from it. He instead folded his arm under Erik’s neck again, stretching across to his other shoulder. It was an awkward intimacy. So close to breath, to pulse, to the prickling of shadow at Erik’s jaw.

Charles hated to admit it, but he was having second thoughts about being carried on Erik’s back. He’d never had such rides as a child, and as it happened, the entire experience was very uncomfortable. Erik kept each of his hands hooked under Charles’ knees, and though Charles couldn’t feel them, he certainly could feel how his body wanted to slip backward. It was only his—embrace, there was no other word for it—of Erik that kept him from doing so. But it was that embrace that made his skin crawl. Pressed against Erik’s spine, he could feel every flex of muscle and vertebrae, each deep huff, the impact of his boots on the floor as the shake traveled up his bones and into his chest and against Charles, who couldn’t help but think, If I swayed only an inch over, my ear would be against his ear, except for the helmet—

No. Awkward it may be, but it was still better than being carried like before. Charles buried a sigh deep before it could escape him. Only a few more hours.

“Left it is,” Erik said, jostling Charles up a bit and taking the fork’s second hand. The safety lantern made a gentle circle around them as they went, bobbing as if to some invisible music.

 

lx.

 

“Tell me the truth,” said Charles. “How is Raven?”

Erik didn’t pause in his trek through the mine’s corridor, though he did lift his chin a little, nearly knocking into Charles’ nose. “Define the truth and why it deviates from what I told you before.”

“Does she ever talk about me? Is she honestly happy where she is?”

“If you were unsure of those answers, you shouldn’t have told her to join me,” said Erik. “You knew she would be happy. She’s where she belongs. She’s with others of her kind. A people who don’t ridicule or fear her, who don’t try to obliterate her on beaches. She has purpose. Freedom.”

“That only answers one of my questions.”

Erik swung the safety lantern dangerously close to Charles’ head. Charles batted at it with an indignant noise. “Now you’re either insecure or fishing for gossip,” Erik told him. “I can’t say either is an endearing quality in you, Charles.”

Rather than admit to the former, Charles laughed. “You know I love to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. But in this case, call it the perpetual concern of a big brother.” In an entirely different voice, he added, “She used to look up to me, you know.”

“That’s why you shouldn’t take in pets. They always grow up.” He never divulged anything more, and from that silence, Charles realized perhaps he would not like the answer. However, he wasn’t sure which answer would be more upsetting.

 

lxi.

 

They walked down, down, down into the earth. The gentle slope of the floor became steeper with time, and the ceiling lower, and the walls closer together. Every so often, Charles searched his mind of memories for some familiarity but could find none. There were no signs of turmoil in the dirt, no tools resting against walls. Just the black, descending before them.

After a while, Charles asked, “And you, Erik?”

“What?”

“Do you ever talk about me?”

“No,” said Erik. His breathing was growing rougher, his grip more perilous. “I have nothing to say about you.”

“Do you think about any of them at all?”

“Any of who?”

“The people you’ve hurt. The humans you’ve killed for your cause, in your anger.”

“Do you include yourself as one of them?” Erik grated. His voice was thickening, his accent becoming a curled tail about his words. He moved faster. “I didn’t put you that far into your denial, Charles.”

“Denial?” Charles rubbed the hook that had held up Erik’s cape, feeling its metal glean beneath the oils of his fingers. He wanted the answer to his original question, but he had the feeling if he pushed harder, Erik would drop him and maybe leave him in the tunnel to damn himself. Instead, he took the philosophical ground and left the personal to rest. “No, my friend, I do not think of myself as one of them. But I don’t presume that we’re all that different, either.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

“Tell me,” said Charles.

 

lxii.

 

“Our atoms,” said Erik. “No, smaller. It’s written into the fabric of our genetics. We are their superiors. The next stage of evolution. It’s inevitable that the rest of mankind either adapts to join us or attempts to destroy us and curb progress. Considering our history, adaptation is an unlikely impulse.”

Oh, this. Charles resisted his smile. This was—if only they were in his study, the fire roaring and the chessboard catching its embers in its polish. He’d recognize those measured, educated tones anywhere. They were a rich timbre to match his own. “But given time,” he said, “they will all evolve to match. They could see that, if only we cared enough to show them.”

“And how many times have you shown them, Charles? How many times have they seen and not cared enough to listen? You’re an idealist.”

“None of this is ideal.”

“They’ll wipe us out,” said Erik. “Starting with your school. You haven’t given its location yet, have you? Why is that?”

Charles didn’t answer.

“It’s because you know what they’ll do with that information. You remember the beach. You learn quickly, Charles.”

“They don’t deserve extinction, Erik.”

Erik twisted to avoid walking into an outcropping of stone in the corridor. In doing so, Charles felt the back of his head brush against the other wall. “Neither do we. When faced with that choice, I’ll gladly choose to fight the war they put on our doorstep. You’re siding with your own executioners, Charles, and worse, you put that school directly in their line of sight. Your need to be normal and to stand as one of them will get you and your children destroyed.”

Charles clutched at him to avoid falling. He toyed briefly with the image of his school—now beloved, its walls filled with young cheer—broken and burned. He spun it away into some corner of his mind. “You’re wrong,” he said simply.

“About which part?”

“About all of it.”

“When they send it up in flames,” Erik said quietly, “I wonder if you’ll be as blind.”

Charles shook his head, and now his ear did brush against metal. “I have to hope,” he said, though he knew it wouldn’t be enough. “I have to believe that they’re better than they seem. Non-mutant, mutant, it doesn’t matter. Our history is the same. Our blood is the same. Who we love makes no distinction between mutation and lack thereof. If we can love them, who’s to say they can’t love us? And if they can love us, how can we save them?”

 

lxiii.

 

When the silence became heavy, Charles said, “Perhaps we should avoid discourse on which we can’t find agreement.”

“That makes the list of topics for discussion fairly low.”

“Well, what about other matters of morality and philosophy?”

Erik’s back shifted beneath him. Whenever he spoke, Charles could feel his voice vibrating against his chest, which was at once both discomforting and soothing. “We never did finish our discussion of the precise definition of the Übermensch.”

Charles smiled. He waited until Erik began to speak, filling in the gaps between them, and was surprised by how much his friend remembered of a conversation many years ago. More surprising was how much he remembered; he recognized, in certain statements, a matured change in Erik’s perspective when compared to the past.

They spoke of Nietzsche and then the disagreements between Plato and Aristotle school of thought for some time, words echoing behind them like bread crumbs left in a trail. But no one would find them.

 

lxix.

 

Shaw’s got friends. You could do with some. In the privacy of his room, Charles turned his own words over in his hands, considering them from every angle. He scratched at their flaky surface and worried about whether Erik would translate their meaning with any accuracy. Sleep was long in its coming. He did not, though he wanted to, reach out with his mind to find the flick of ember that was Erik’s.

And so, Charles had truly anticipated that Erik would leave in the night, much as he’d intended to do, regardless of their exchange. So it was a surprise—and he’d forgotten how pleasurable such surprises could be—when Erik appeared in the doorway of the office and told the FBI that it would be him and Charles, no exceptions, who would locate and befriend the mutants. Charles would have agreed to any clause that kept Erik with them: that small curve of the corner of his mouth, the aloof posture, his insistence that all mutants be given a choice, as if Charles had intended anything different!

In the taxi to the airport, Erik said, “Don’t mistake me, Charles. I intend to remain only so long as you and the FBI’s assistance benefit me.”

“You’re very Aristotelian in your view of friendship,” Charles remarked.

“Ah,” said Erik. Charles could hear his mind stirring as he drew from its corners a memorization of words, but they were still shocking to hear released into the air, in that taxi, the clip of Erik’s accent tempering them. “But the friendship of utility is full of complaints, for as they use each other for their own interests, they always want to get the better of the bargain … and those who do well by others cannot help them as much as those whom they benefit want.” He chuckled then. “I hadn’t made the connection. I thought I was a Platonist.”

“In what way?”

“That someone—tainted by evil—can’t befriend those who are equally tainted, and neither those who are good. Harmony with others can never be achieved once it’s lost. But maybe that gives us both too much credit.” Erik canted his head toward the window, watching the buildings pass them in a sunny haze. “We’re solitary creatures. The relationships we cultivate are the product of some need, some advantage. But when the sick man is mended, the medicine he coveted returns to the cabinet; when we’re finished with things, we always throw them away.”

Charles watched him. He watched the breadth of Erik’s shoulders and remembered how it felt to try and contain them, pulling a stone out of the water and away from death. He said, “Aristotle also wrote about the friendship of virtue and reciprocation of goodwill. When each man desires what is good and in each other, they—”

“That’s not what this is,” Erik told him.

“We want the same thing,” said Charles, as the taxi drifted to a stop beside the curb of the airport entrance. He reached for the door handle to let himself out.

 

lxx.

 

It wasn’t until nearly a year after the Cuban missile crisis that Charles remembered the exact nature of that taxi ride and their conversation. And when he made the connection between his words and Erik’s, he felt shuddery, as if his heart had become like water and flooded through his body.

He wheeled himself to his writing desk and gripped its grooved edges. He experienced regret so strong it nearly made him sick. What he regretted, Charles couldn’t exactly say. It seemed, so often now, that he felt little else.

The reading lamp was too bright to bear. He took a quivering breath, found the wetness of his mouth and eyes to be too much, and covered both with his hand. He reached for the absence of Erik’s mind without any idea of what he would say. He reached, and called, and wanted to die.

(In the morning, he found his overreaction embarrassing. Steady on, he told himself, but it was still hard to push back the blankets and fumble for his chair beside the bed. It was a hardness that never fully went away.)

 

lxxi.

 

“You need to rest,” Charles insisted. “Just for a moment, mind. It’s important to pace yourself. Otherwise you’ll become dehydrated and we don’t have any water.”

“We must be nearly there.”

“It’s too difficult to say,” said Charles. He didn’t point out how Erik’s footsteps had begun to lag, or the discomfort with which he shifted his grip on Charles’ legs. His breathing had been labored for well over fifteen minutes. “I don’t want to take any chances. Besides, I would appreciate a chance to stretch my spine, thank you.”

Erik said nothing. However, he soon slowed and the safety lantern hovered in one place beside them. He crouched awkwardly and Charles, fighting his relief, thrust one arm out beneath him to find ground. When his palm was anchored in the dirt, he let himself slide from Erik’s back and to the mine’s floor. He did not, of course, feel the impact in anything but his elbows.

Immediately, Erik straightened. He hissed and pushed his shoulder blades out, rolling them back and forth. “God,” he breathed. “You’ve gotten fat, Charles.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Like a well-fed goose. Or maybe a turkey.”

“Right,” said Charles. “I’m going to direct you to the nearest sinkhole for that.”

Erik laughed at him, which was shocking enough that Charles felt his indignation burn away as easily as a matchstick. It helped that Erik was obviously in need of a drink—his lips were chapped and dry, and he bit at them until they shone. He paced the small stretch of corridor that the light touched, sometimes pausing to push his hands against the walls and bow his head.

Crumpled on the floor, Charles ruefully envied him that pleasure. But it was still nice, too, simply to lean back and let his spine realign. He closed his eyes and stretched his arms up, up, until dirt rained on him from where his nails brushed the wall. And still he left them there, thinking about small pleasures and virtue, the act of wanting something another wants, something good and pure.

 

lxxii.

 

Erik sat after a while. He looked at Charles and suppressed a noise, but didn’t bother to hide his brief smile—it bunched up at the corners of his mouth as if afraid to go too far. It was, perhaps, a little cruel but a little of something else, too.

“What?” Charles asked. “What is it?”

“Your face,” said Erik. “You’re a mess. Black, everywhere.”

Charles wiped his cheek and brought his hand away. The tips of his fingers were layered in a dark soot, an ash-smeared softness. He smiled, too.

“But I’m no better,” Erik continued, wiping at his chin. It only succeeded in smearing the grime further and this time, it was Charles who tried (and mostly failed) in suppressing a laugh.

“No, my friend, I fear you aren’t.”

The brief flicker of humor nearly sparked, but that made its death even more disappointing. Erik gazed at the coming darkness of the corridor, his countenance troubled. His eyes were all the more green for his dirtied face. “The air is spoiled,” he said. “It’s getting more difficult to breathe, the further down we go. Can we even hope to make it to the mineshaft?”

“The miners were able to do it.”

“The miners had equipment and training. We have neither.”

We have the gifts given to us, thought Charles, but of course his words never made it past Erik’s helmet. He reached up and gently tipped the safety lantern where it hovered between them, watching it spin lazily in the air. He wondered if it was his momentum that made such a thing possible or if Erik, in some fit of kindness or whimsy, let him believe it was so.

They said nothing else for a while; they only rested.

 

lxxiii.

 

“There’s no use in waiting anymore,” Erik said at length. He bent down as he had before, neck curved forward, and Charles for one instant wanted to rest his palm against Erik’s vertebrae and feel their questions. He didn’t, of course.

“You’re too hard to reach,” he reproached him instead. “Lean back, not away.”

So Erik did.

 

lxxiv.

 

They traveled deeper into the mine, past the point where the miner’s touch was as noticeable. Rock was left to its natural gyrations; the protrusions of the wall were uncomfortable to fit through for two grown men, much less one with the other on his back. There were times Erik had to bend nearly all the way over to avoid taking Charles’ head off, and other times when Charles yelped because of a rough dig to his side as they squeezed through a space.

“I’m going to be black and blue,” he said breathlessly. “Bloody ridiculous idea, isn’t it, having only columns to hold up thousands of pounds of soil—”

“Shut up,” Erik told him. “You’re heavy enough without all that—moving, just stop moving—”

“You should have left me in the first room! I did tell you so.”

“Don’t,” he said shortly.

“If you need to rest again, we should stop.”

“Do you never stop talking?” Erik demanded. The safety lantern shook in front of them, like it was maybe coming apart screw by screw. It steadied with an irate wave of Erik’s hand, but that very gesture sent Charles sloping out of his hold.

“Whoa!” He grappled for the wall and slid.

He heard Erik curse, but Charles was more preoccupied with not smashing his head on the rock. He slammed into dirt on his shoulder blades, head bent at an uncomfortable but safe angle. The world went gray a bit. He felt a pulse of agony at the gash where Erik had assaulted him earlier, and when he covered it with his wrist, the clotted blood tore some. The scent of copper filled his lungs.

“Charles! Charles, let me see.” There was a hand cupping the back of his neck, lifting him. Charles shuddered and batted at Erik’s concern, stilling only when his grip found the fabric of his shirt. He coughed. Ah. His concern, really, that was—

“Fine,” he told him, but coughed again. “Just a slip. I’m fine, amen’t I? Look, just pick me back up and we’ll, we’ll just…” He stopped and colored, disliking his own words.

Erik didn’t remark on them. He gave a grating sigh. “You’re stubborn.”

“Yes.”

Erik helped him to sit up before reaching for his legs. He added, “And a fool.”

Charles decided against pointing out that it was Erik’s fault he’d fallen in the first place. He did ask him to keep a better grip, though, and was not surprised that Erik told him he should take his own advice.

 

lxxv.

 

In the Blackbird, watching Erik lift a submarine from the waters before an astonished audience, Charles couldn’t see his friend’s face. He could see none of his rapture, nor his craft, nor his anticipation of blood. The joy was something Charles could only tease in Erik’s mind, though he was shy to touch it, afraid of distracting.

But he did feel it. He knew right then that they would change history.

The water began to stir and roil beneath them. The winds began to change. Charles gauged the distance between where his fingertips would stretch to and where Erik was situated, and realized it was too far to breach.

 

lxxvi.

 

They heard the water; it made them careless.

“Listen,” Charles said, but Erik had already made a sound of satisfaction. Against the silence afforded to them, there was a distant echo: a trickle of water against stone, and with it, steady dripping. The safety lantern swept forward with a jolt, illuminating their way further down the tunnel.

“The mineshaft,” said Charles excitedly. “It must be raining—can you hear?”

“I can hear,” Erik said. He quickened his pace.

Charles felt jostled by his hurry, but he didn’t mind. Relief curled around his empty stomach and aching head, pillowing his aches and cares. He reached out in hope that maybe he could find some semblance of thought from above ground, but of course, the way was too far. He was so distracted, and Erik so focused, that neither sensed the shift in ground until it gave way beneath them.

Chapter Text

lxxvii.

 

Shock, curdled like milk.

Charles clawed at the air as he was tore from Erik’s back by gravity, and the safety lantern was gone and all was black, and he was falling, his own shout in his ears—

He felt the impact this time. It knocked all sense of breath and pulse from his chest. It nearly yanked his soul out of its roots. He thought of his mother, and Raven. He thought oddly enough about a stopwatch he’d been gifted when he was eleven.

From this suspension, Charles came back to himself. He gasped in air, gulping it in ragged scoops to tortured lungs, cradled it inside where the oxygen could burn, and then he searched out for some light in the black. Nothing. Not above him, not around him. “Erik?” he called out. “My friend, are you all right? Erik?”

No answer.

Charles forced himself to his elbows and made a quick assessment. He felt his way down his hips to his knees and shins and even his toes, trapped in his shoes. All felt normal. No broken bones. Aches and bruises were plentiful, yes—but this was a tumble he could, again, walk away from. Figuratively, of course. Oh—god, he was tired. He felt his face with shaking hands. “Erik?” he asked once more.

The dirt was softer, grainier. He scooped away big handfuls of it and turned on his stomach. He crawled, one arm folded beneath his chest, the other reaching for fabric, some cotton, the warmth of a cheek, anything, anything at all. When he finally found it—the scarred round of Erik’s shoe—he said words fervently beneath his breath.

Charles pulled himself up along Erik and shook him, albeit gently. Erik groaned. He turned his head—Charles could feel his exhale against his wrist—but didn’t move. “Erik,” Charles said again. “Can you hear me? Erik?”

He nearly reached to remove the helmet, knowing that he was breaking his own promise but frantic in his need to assure himself of Erik’s safety, when Erik sucked in air tightly and said, “Fuck.” It was a very small word.

“Yes,” Charles said, dizzy with relief. “I think that applies.”

“I didn’t think you were serious,” Erik said after some time, and with great difficulty, “about the sinkhole.”

It took several struggles before the comment bridged Charles’ memory with its origin, and when it did, he heard himself begin to laugh—something disbelieving and desperate, something impossibly glad. In the dark, Erik gripped his shoulder and even though there was no light to see him by, Charles knew his face.

 

lxxviii.

 

Charles was a mess of pain, and every so often he felt a wave of nausea leftover from his concussion, now aggravated; his head wasn’t bleeding by some miracle, but it throbbed. Despite this, he felt relatively all right after the fall. Erik wasn’t nearly as lucky—after he made a cursory review of his body, he growled, affixing the noise deep in his belly, and said that a few of his ribs were possibly bruised. Possibly bruised, in Erik’s stifled language, meant most certainly one was broken—likely more.

Charles said, “Let’s wrap them. You can use my shirt.” In retrospect, he added, “I wish you’d brought the cape.”

“Use your head, Charles. I’ve had much worse under the hands of others.”

That wasn’t something Charles cared to think about. “I’m not sure you can carry me now. You’ll do injury to yourself. More injury, to be specific.”

Erik didn’t bother answering him. He stood carefully. The safety lantern drifted down to them, its light interrupting the black in dashes as it fought to remain lit—in the staccato, Charles finally saw their sorry states of being. They looked like victims of war. Erik twisted his neck until it cracked, his strained expression telling Charles that the helmet, in this case, had done more knocking his brain about than protecting it. A thin trickle of black was making its way down his ear.

Their intended grave was shallow. Charles had thought it would be a large gulf, stretching up around them on either side—but actually, when Erik stood, he could almost reach its edge. Though shallow, the hole in the mine was quite wide. A pack of abandoned tools was slumped at the far end, the canvas holding them together filled with holes and decay. Erik went to it and held his palm out. The metal contained there reshaped, rust flaking away and showering down, and became a softball-shaped sphere in his hand. Just as quickly, however, the metal twisted and fell apart.

“Corroded too far,” said Erik. “It’s become weak. Damn.”

Charles looked at him, then the wall.

“We are close,” Erik decided, as if he could sense his thoughts as easily as Charles could sense the thoughts of others. “I’ll boost you up and you can pull yourself back onto our path. It shouldn’t be hard to scale this on my own.”

With a sinking heart, Charles thought about how much ‘fun’ that was going to be. He didn’t say anything. But he did begin the slow crawl across the hole to its other side. Erik made sure to look away.

 

lxxix.

 

In the end, it took Charles pulling him up with fistfuls of his shirt, straining without the benefit of much mobility to get them both on high ground. Erik’s teeth were gritted as if he could graft enamel together by sheer pressure. The veins in his neck stood out, and his face was mottled red in the glow of the safety lantern, and when he finally forced himself back onto the upper level, he made a muffled sound of agony. He laid in the dirt and caught his breath. Charles, who was doing much the same, put a hand on his back and closed his eyes.

“We’re close,” he echoed, sweat drenching his face.

It was this sentiment that brought Erik back to his feet, and that also gave Charles the strength to grapple for his shoulders again. When Erik lifted Charles onto his back, the catch in his breathing was tell-tale sign enough. Charles felt stricken.

“Don’t—just put me down.”

“Charles.”

“You can come back for me.”

“Charles,” said Erik, “I need to hear the water. Now stop talking.”

At first, Erik’s steps were clumsy and wavering; he couldn’t walk in a straight line. But he soon found his rhythm again and as they drew closer to the source of the sound, and the mine began to take on a dampness that darkened it, gave its gaping maw the appearance of crying, they moved quickly. The corridor widened and its pillars grew more numerous.

When they burst into the final room, Charles’ heart was in his throat. He said, “Look, there—” and stopped.

Erik came to a halt. The safety lantern whirled in the air, as if confused. They looked on the mineshaft together and then Charles let his forehead rest against Erik's helmet. It felt, quite suddenly, very heavy.

 

lxxx.

 

They drank the rainwater that managed to squeeze through the debris. The water came streaming down the cavern walls, caught on the broken rigging of the elevator, dripping from tiny crevices far above them. They caught the water in their palms and Erik lifted flecks of steel from it, though he couldn’t exactly make it clean—still, it tasted cold and wonderful and perfect. Every so often, Charles caught a rumble of distant thunder as the sound traveled down the mineshaft—or what was left of it—and got caught in nooks and crannies. They licked their hands of the moisture and rubbed it against chapped mouths.

“We should go back,” Erik said. “Hank’s smart. He may have found a way to get through the collapse.”

It was odd and fulfilling to hear Erik say that name. Charles filled his palm again and ran the water through his hair. He tried to wash his head wound. “In less than a day? I have nothing but confidence in Hank’s abilities, but even brilliance has to take its time, Erik. But yes. We could go back.”

Erik craned his head up, staring at the cave-in that had claimed the second mineshaft. The debris pooled wide at their feet, then sloped upward to fill the shaft entirely with rock and topsoil. The skeleton of the elevator rigging was twisted and marred in its grasp, poking through like bone escaping skin.

Charles tried to wash the dirt off of his neck and arms. It only made a muddy lather that was drying and crusting faster than he could wet it.

Erik touched the rigging in deep thought. He said, “We could find the third mineshaft. Go back and take the other path.”

“And what if it’s just like this one? That’s a long way to go, my friend. Deeper. Deeper than maybe we can risk. And the lantern is already weakening. We could get lost in the mine.”

“I’m not sure we have a choice.”

Charles rifled through what was left of the dead miners’ memories. He licked his lips uneasily. He cupped his hand for more water. Finally, he asked, “Is that what you want to do?”

Erik nodded assent. He took off the helmet with a dreadful normalcy and let the water drip onto his hair. Tilted his head, letting the blood leak from a cut behind his ear. It made a red-brown trail of water down his chin. Unable to speak, Charles kept his mental faculties in check until the helmet was nestled back down around Erik’s skull, and even then, he very carefully thought nothing at all.

 

lxxxi.

 

There were times when Charles looked out from the windows of the school and caught sight of the sun as it cradled its fist in the satellite dish. He watched, fingertips resting against the glass, and imagined what it would be like to have the power to draw such things nearer. He remembered the soft press of dark in between candlelight. A woman’s crevassed face—her sturdy touch and the eyelashes that were pretty in a body overly worn by hardship. The way she put her hand to her son’s cheek for only a half-breath, as if afraid to mar something so perfect.

More than that, he thought about satisfaction found in simple things. Like, how it felt to ease some of the frenzy from Erik’s soul, to dredge joy from its belly. Building a perfect moment for him. Giving him reason to believe there would be more yet to come. If he could move a satellite, what next? What limits could he possibly have if they were together?

Charles loved to enchant people. It was a skill born from his own weaknesses.

If there was any minute in Charles’ life that he wanted to return to, it was that one. He’d change it. He’d change it all. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know why. But there was something there, lingering on the fringe, biting at him, a scab bubbled and tender even as he recognized it as the most beautiful minute of his life: that elation, Erik’s smile, that magic, the long creak of metal as it spun, the drop, though Charles could not identify what he’d let go of and where it had fallen. In his dreams, everything—metal or not—turned to Erik’s beckon. But dreams were not letters; their handwritten constructs functioned without reason or hope. Charles inevitably woke with more questions than when he’d gone to sleep.

 

lxxxii.

 

Erik tugged at the elevator rigging a little more, but Charles read his intent easily. “I wouldn’t,” he said, shaking the damp from his fingers. “If you try to pull any of the metal out, you might bring it down on us. It’s not worth the risk. Who knows how stable the ground above us is, after what Gregory did. That coal seam may have twined throughout the entire countryside. It’s the—you remember, the assertion about a butterfly that beats its wings and causes a hurricane half the world away. Chaos theory.”

“Gregory? Was that his name?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know that I have ever believed in Lorentz’s butterfly effect,” Erik said.

“But you’ll believe in nonlinear equations? No, maybe you wouldn’t—you’ve always preferred to ignore the things that don’t fit into your plans.” Or to remove them from the equation, Charles remarked, a thought that brushed against the edges of Erik’s helmet and became lost in the rebound.

“You may as well be talking about yourself,” Erik remarked before he stepped away from the rigging and approached Charles. He knelt with well-disguised difficulty. “Are you ready?”

“I wish we could take some of the water. Do you think…?”

“There’s already not much holding the lantern together. It can’t spare the metal. A little dehydration won’t kill us, Charles.” He turned his back to him, the curve of his fingers too intimate under Charles’ knees as he gathered them. He now smelled of rain as well as earth. Metallic in nature, like a simple alloy.

 

lxxxiii.

 

They were more wary of the hole on their way back through the mine corridor. This time, Erik lowered Charles down into it by his arms, warning him to be careful of the unevenness of the floor and its protrusions—which had been the guilty breeders of his own bruised ribs—as well as asking him to stay clear of Erik’s decent. Charles gave him the space by starting to crawl over to the other side. The wetness on his limbs from where he’d washed only ensured he caught more dirt on his way over.

Lovely.

Despite the discomfort, and a good fifteen minutes of struggle to pass through, they did make it to the other side to continue their journey. This time, they at least had some forewarning of what the passages were like, having traveled them not an hour ago. “I hate this mine,” Erik grated.

“It isn’t very pleasant,” Charles agreed.

“Azazel will not earn my forgiveness easily.”

“He seems a mite unreliable.”

“He’s an ass,” Erik huffed. “Though we share excellent taste in German composers. His tastes are more refined than his manners.”

“Hm,” said Charles. “I wish I could say the same of anyone back at the school. I suppose it makes sense. They are young, after all. Sean in particular has developed a fixed interest in—what are they, the Beach Men? The Beach Born?”

“The Beach Boys?”

“Yes, that’s the band. They are rather groovy, I suppose.”

“They’re brainless and repetitive.” When Charles squeezed Erik’s shoulders in inquiry, he sighed. “Angel listens to them. At great length.”

“Ah.” He wanted to smile, but the loss remained ever-sharp. But then, Angel had been their success and his failure—they found her together in that gauche lounge of fake diamonds and men and smoke, and Charles, he had lost her to another lounge of much the same. Erik was better than Shaw in that respect; she was at last more than a pretty pawn. “She never had the chance to be young, did she?”

“There is nothing young about her,” said Erik. “They are adults far before I take them from you, Charles.”

 

lxxxiv.

 

After the mine widened again, its pillars growing thicker and more numerous, Erik stopped to take a break. He sat beside Charles, their backs against the wall. To save the lantern’s remaining power, Erik shut it down. They said nothing. Charles kept his eyes open and counted the duration of his inhales and exhales. The data was distressingly erratic. He attempted to create balance. Perhaps Erik had given him an actual concussion, after all.

At last, Erik shifted his weight, signaling a change in his thoughts. Charles had seen him do it often enough in a game of chess that he recognized the sound regardless of where they were. “What do you feel,” he asked, “when you’re in their minds as they die? What do they think about?”

In the pitch black, Charles touched the center of his forehead. He felt a phantom stab of agony that, even years later, made him screw up his face. He wondered if this was a question about Shaw, the miners, or all of those people whose thoughts Charles may have been inhabiting when Erik took their lives. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an answer he felt would satisfy Erik’s curiosity. It was always different, except for the fear and pain.

His lips were dry as dust. He wetted them and said, “It’s like being in a snowstorm.”

“A snow—is it really?”

“Yes. Suddenly, the brain erupts in activity and there’s a flurry of thoughts, rarely connecting with each other, no two alike. It’s impossible to rein them. I can barely track them. Death is blinding. And cold.”

Erik switched on the safety lantern. “Poetic.”

“It’s worse if the death isn’t sudden. They have time to regain control—and regret.”

“And what do you say to them, Charles, in their last moments?”

“Whatever they want to hear,” Charles admitted. Giving the dying a minor degree of comfort wasn’t something he was proud of, exactly. The white lies rarely bothered him—he was perhaps too good at them—but he had no guarantee that beyond the curtain they passed through was anything but a complete darkness, a death of soul, if there was such a thing, if the body could house it. Death was a mystery even Charles couldn’t unravel.

He did not convey his discomfort to Erik, but his friend seemed to grasp it nevertheless. He looked at Charles thoughtfully and squeezed his shoulder. His fingers were warm. The subject was dropped.

 

lxxxv.

 

Shaw’s last thoughts were painful burns. It felt as though Shaw could see into Charles’ mind as clearly as Charles saw into his—the bridge was shocking and short, a two-way zap of static electricity. There was no room for shielding. It took everything in Charles to contain the man and keep him still.

As the coin began to float toward them, Shaw said, You’ll let him murder me.

Charles beat against the helmet encasing Erik’s mind from him. He had no answer to give, but Shaw found it regardless. Would he? Could he? Yes. For Erik? Yes. Yes. But not like this, please, not—

How hypocritical of you! laughed Shaw.

When the coin split the epidermis and burrowed into the skull, Shaw marveled at the sensations and explained what would happen next. He was still talking when the pain traveled from Charles’ head to his toes, piercing and indescribable, but Charles could not hear him above the din of his own screaming. When sound came back to him, Shaw was already gone. So was Erik.

 

lxxxvi.

 

“We should carry on,” Erik said, standing.

Charles rubbed his face. He felt oddly dizzy. “We must be getting closer to the fork. Should we head back to the cave-in site in case the others are at work there, or are we going to continue on to the mine shaft?”

“What do you think is best?”

Well, that was new. What would Magneto’s Brotherhood think if they saw him asking for Charles’ opinion? Charles smiled. “I don’t think it’s wise to waste what light we have.”

“Agreed. I don’t relish the idea of stumbling around in the dark with you on my back.” Erik nudged Charles’ knee with his boot, and though Charles didn’t feel it, he appreciated the mischief in the gesture. “You used to carry a penlight with you. In your pocket.”

“Years ago, and I’m surprised you remember.”

“Perhaps you should start again.”

“I notice that you aren’t volunteering to carry the penlight,” Charles said. He reached out and moved his legs apart to get them into position. “Besides, you cannot possibly intend to have my company every time you’re trapped in a coal mine, my friend. I’m a busy professor. Perhaps on the weekends.”

Erik scoffed. “If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Well, that will teach you, won’t it?” But as he said it, Charles felt a twinge of remorse. He couldn’t deny the truth of Erik’s statement. The dirt made small spirals beneath his thumb, and he glanced up in the weak safety beam, searching Erik’s countenance. “I haven’t thanked you properly for saving me, either.”

“Don’t be maudlin, Charles,” said Erik. He crouched down to pick up Charles’ knees, back turned, dismissive. “I did not save you because I wanted your gratitude.”

 

lxxxvii.

 

They reached the fork and, without asking again, Erik took the second turn into the dark. Charles could feel the floor already begin to slope downward, urging them to a deeper bed of coal seams and mining prospects, less traveled, most certainly in disuse. Charles felt a thrill of unease. Their gamble was not advisable, but the other odds of success were so slim that it was their best hand.

“We’ll go slow,” said Erik. “So that we can watch out for pitfalls.”

Charles felt his head spin again. He felt Erik stiffen beneath him and pause—only an instant, a misstep—and Charles realized, with some distant shock, that he had rested his cheek against Erik’s helmet. That he was still resting his cheek against Erik’s helmet. He wanted very badly to close his eyes.

“Charles?” Erik asked.

Something’s wrong, Charles thought. He clutched at Erik’s shirt and fought a root of nausea burying itself in his gut. Out loud, he said, “I think I am unwell.”

“The concussion?”

“No. Something else. It feels like…” And the likely answer came out of nowhere, like a train that pulled late into the station. Charles let a curse slip out of his mouth before he could stop it. He then said, “Quick, put me down.”

 

lxxxviii.

 

“It must have happened when we fell into the hole,” Charles said, sawing his trouser leg up his shin. Closer inspection next to the safety lantern had revealed a stiff blot a touch darker than the black of his trousers, located at the back swell of his calf: blood, old and new. “Some—protrusion, something caught on it. I didn’t notice. I was thinking about—broken bones, fractures. We couldn’t have seen it in this dark.”

Erik’s face was expressionless. He said, “You’ve been bleeding out for about half an hour.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic. It’s just a cut. It only hasn’t clotted because we’ve been ignoring it.” Charles huffed in triumph as he forced the pants leg up to his knee. A slick river of red was trickling slow and sure down to his ankle, framed by crusted black. He peered at the wound. What could have snagged on him in the fall? Perhaps he landed on discarded equipment, half-buried. Perhaps a sharp rock. (There was a small part of Charles that worried the cut had been made even sooner and he simply hadn’t noticed—as soon as the first cave-in, when he was slammed into the coal conveyor. The disappointing part of blood loss was that one rarely tended to notice until a great deal of blood was, in fact, lost.)

The gash was clumsy, somewhere between shallow and deep; however, it was much closer to deep than Charles had anticipated or wanted. He frowned at it. I can withstand an infection provided we are able to get out of the mine through the third mineshaft. But if we end up waiting for Hank and the others, this little cut may become a very big problem.

“Don’t touch it. You’re filthy,” said Erik.

“Yes, I’m quite aware of that. Thank you.”

“We’ll go back.”

“There’s no point in—”

“My cape, I left it in the first room of the mine. It may be slightly dirty but nothing like the rest of our clothes. We can use it to bind your leg.” Erik grimaced. “We will lose time and light, but it needs to be tied, Charles. I won’t listen to your dogged lack of self-preservation on this.”

Charles acknowledged his resolve with a dip of his chin. He resisted the urge to wipe away the blood flow and instead tugged his trouser leg back down to his ankle. “We’d better hurry,” he said.

 

lxxxix.

 

It was a curiosity to many of the X-men that Charles Xavier had rarely been harmed in a skirmish between the school and the Brotherhood. It was attributed to the fact that Charles was so powerful. The children whispered legends about him: did you know haven’t you heard the professor he’s amazing he’s so powerful that not even magneto can touch him isn’t that crazy the brotherhood they’re afraid of him afraid of the professor isn’t that silly isn’t he amazing can you imagine all of that power.

Charles never discussed such things with his students. He left them to the privacy of their gossip and beliefs, however untrue they might be. He knew Sean, once, had thought to himself, It’s gotta be ‘cause Erik doesn’t want to hurt him.

Charles knew better. It wasn’t about protection. There were many times during missions when Charles was bested by one of the Brotherhood—other times when Charles was incapacitated, though rarely harmed, by their talents. The fact he wasn’t killed wasn’t a mercy to his character but a mercy to his abilities. Erik did not want to harm any mutants. Charles was not special.

Of course, Erik respected him. Erik’s respect meant that Erik would cut Charles no slack. It meant he met him as an equal, with all the dangers that entailed. If Charles ever felt the urge to speculate anything further, he resisted it.

 

xc.

 

By the time they reached the first room of the cave-in, Charles was most certainly exhausted and feeling the alarming effects of blood loss. He didn’t mean to, but he often found his cheek pressed to Erik’s helmet, or worse, his forehead resting in the cradle between Erik’s neck and his shoulder. He was getting Erik quite sooty, actually. He tried not to laugh about that; it wasn’t actually that funny. Erik, for his part, had said nothing since they started back to their origin point.

The cape was as Erik had left it, crumpled in the dust in an unhappy maroon pile. Erik made sure Charles was settled—Charles leaned against the cavern wall and closed his eyes, giving his body a stern talk-to as he waited—and proceeded to rip his cape into long shreds of fabric. Charles could hear the methodical drag and tear. It was oddly calming.

After Erik finished, he made a bundle of leftover fabric and tied it to the bottom of the safety lantern. The last of the strips, he brought over to Charles. He kneeled down before him and reached for Charles’ leg.

“I can bind it properly,” Charles said, reaching for the end of a strip as it dragged in the dirt. “I’ve done it plenty of times before.”

“At that angle? Sit back.”

“No, I can.”

“Sit back, Charles.” The frostiness in Erik’s voice was belied by the gentleness with which he cupped Charles’ shin, holding his leg aloft. He peeled away the trouser leg and wrapped the strip of fabric tightly around Charles’ shin, careful not to touch the lesion with his dirty fingers. After the first few wraps, he folded the strip in half and wound it around Charles’ leg three more times in neat rows. There was nothing tentative about his touch; even in his caution, Erik was unflinching in doing what he had to do. Beneath the shadow of the helmet, his gaze remained fixed—he looked upon his hands, and Charles’ wound, as if they were some intricate pattern he was unraveling.

Charles felt like the blood was reaching his heart at a crawl. When Erik knotted the makeshift bandage at his ankle, he wanted, with a hunger that didn’t surprise him, nothing more than to feel it. He wanted to know how warm Erik’s hands were, and how callused, and how impersonal.

“You look ridiculous in that helmet,” he said.

Erik dragged his pants back down over the binding and his sock. He smiled, a little. “It’s a small price to pay to keep my thoughts my own.”

Charles studied his face. “You can’t believe I’d hurt you.”

Erik looked at him.

“There are other telepaths besides you, Charles,” he said at last.

“Not here.”

“No,” said Erik. “Not here.”

He took one of Charles’ hands and pressed it, his thumb folded down over Charles’ knuckles. They were both men; they had wide hands. For an absurd half-beat, Charles believed Erik would stand and pull him to his feet, that he would find strength in his legs to follow, that grace could be transferable. His fingers twitched in the cradle of Erik’s palm. It wasn’t until Erik let go that Charles realized he didn’t want him to.

Chapter Text

xci.

 

When Moira kissed him, Charles took no pleasure in her perfume, the soft press of her mouth, or the flicker of protectiveness she felt kindling in her breast. For Charles, the kiss was the wax seal. For Charles, it was already the last kiss. He reached into her mind with a deft touch and untangled all of the pale roots that tied her to him. He asked her to forget, in the same apologetic earnestness that he’d first pledged his services to her and the United States’ government. The memories were like bird bones, difficult to isolate and pluck out of the mire, tiny slivers imbedded deep into her hopes for the future. He snapped them in half. He buried them.

Moira had been kind to them. For that, Charles left her only gentle reminders: the sea, the sky, the scent of wisteria, the warmth of his palm on her knee as they watched the television, a kiss. Charles hoped that these fragments would be enough to weaken any hatred of mutants that might spur from his betrayal.

After Moira, there was no one. Moira herself had indeed only been a possibility, and after the incident on the beach, Charles was consumed by a variety of other tasks related to fitting into his own skin and building the school that’d become their safe haven. There was no time for a relationship. Even if he had wanted to return to the days of pub hopping and projecting his rubbish flirting on pretty girls with harmless mutations, it was impossible. Within the school, Charles was the Professor: the adult, the father figure, the teacher, the leader. Away from the school, Charles was a man in a wheelchair: a clumsy burst of uncertainty in others’ thoughts, a quiet panic when they realized they didn’t know how to react to his presence.

No, that wasn’t fair. There were others who saw beyond the chair, past the kind tones of a professor with a beloved subject—but Charles didn’t want them. Their minds were also like animal bones. They had a predictable pattern; if boiled, their thoughts would become a translucent soft white, a fleshy cartilage he could pierce with a thumbnail. Charles decided he would want nothing. He would be serene.

Nearly a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sean—downcast, worrying at his bottom lip—asked, “D’you ever miss her?”

Charles had to read his mind to figure out whom Sean was talking about, only half-certain he spoke of Raven. He felt disappointed in himself afterward. Surely he should have known? But no, Charles did not miss Moira. When he let go of Moira, when he freed her, he had kissed her goodbye. She would have fought for him. Died for him. Killed for him.

Charles told her, in that moment between the kiss and her first breath, I want so much more for you. He meant it.

 

xcii.

 

Erik glanced at his hand as if he wasn’t assured of its control. He wiped his fingers against his thigh and stood, nudging the safety lantern out of his personal space. “That will do until we get to the mineshaft—if the shaft remains intact. I can only hope this journey finds us more fortunate. Check your leg every time we break for a rest. The wrap may loosen and we need your wits about you to lead the way.”

Charles held his tongue, tempering an upset that had little to do with the condescending tone and more to do with how his throat had grown knotted, his palms hot, his stomach unsettled. He looked down at his hands in his lap. There was a dirty imprint of Erik’s thumb over his knuckles, half-formed. Proof, somehow, he hadn’t imagined the intimacy. He rubbed the mark away, a thin tendril of panic sending his thoughts off in every direction, only to be rebounded by sediment and rock and helmet and loneliness. Calm yourself, Charles whispered in that empty corridor, from one ear to the other. It was unthinking, without meaning. Be still. He wasn’t sure what he was commanding, if not the entirety of him, body and mind.

Caught in the light, Erik was staring down the corridor, his profile stark and unreadable. When he turned again to Charles, the helmet made his expression one built of fragments and shadows. “Can you make it?” he asked.

“It’s only a little gash,” said Charles. “I’m quite sure I can handle it. I should be asking you that. Your ribs?”

“Tolerable. Do you need to sit here longer?”

“No. Better to be off.”

By the time they had resituated themselves and pressed on again into the dark, heading toward the fork with a wearied familiarity, Charles had opted to keep the memory of Erik’s hand curled around his own a question mark. He would ply the moment apart later, examining it from every direction, and much like all things with Erik, never garner a definition to file it under. But he knew from experience that a lack of understanding wouldn’t deteriorate its value; whatever the reason for Erik’s gesture, whatever its underlying seed, a gentle touch was a gentle touch.

 

xciii.

 

Four months after the beach, Charles bolted upright in bed at the cusp of dawn. Before he crossed the line fully into waking, he clawed at his cheeks and begged Raven to help him get it off. He was sure that, somewhere beneath this foreign growth, his face was still the same. It wasn’t until Charles calmed and forced his thoughts to align that he realized he was picking up the threadbare traces of Hank’s dream, two floors beneath him. He gripped the bedpost and leaned over the side of the mattress, heaving for air, every inch of his skin crawling.

They each had their phantoms to withstand, but Charles couldn’t in good conscience leave Hank to the ones he saw in the mirror. You mustn’t, he soothed, quieting his student—and dear friend—with a sweet, childlike memory of building a model airplane. In Hank’s dream, Charles let the airplane grow feathered wings and fly away, bearing Hank on its back.

Left behind, Charles flicked on the bedside lamp and looked upon his empty room. The wheelchair was within reach, but not for the first time, he felt trapped. He rested back against the pillows, regretful that birds did not whistle in the night. He would have to wait for the sun to finish coming up.

 

xciv.

 

They walked the first mile in a dead lull of speech. Charles used that time to quell the effects of his blood loss, counting readily in his head until the vertigo passed. Every so often, he closed his eyes and allowed the illusion of actual rest. Earlier, he’d been so sure they would make it to the surface before nightfall, but Charles no longer held that hope. He wondered when to propose a few hours of sleep; Erik would scoff, but their exhaustion was undeniable. Erik’s steps weren’t following a straight line.

When the divide came, Charles stirred and said, “Right at the fork.” He was listening to Erik’s breathing: a harsh rasp that climbed and lowered in registers. It made Charles want to demand that Erik remove the helmet and let him borrow some of that pain, the sensation of ribs clenching inward against vulnerable internal pockets. He could take away from it, share the torture—he could make things better for them.

He didn’t bother asking. Erik had once shared his agonies and joys with Charles without hesitation, but it'd been years since he’d been afforded that honor. What Erik had left, he kept for himself. He had an unbearable burden of pride now, for all that he mocked Charles’.

There’s good in you, too. I’ve seen it, Charles had told him, before all their plans splintered into opposing directions. If he plucked at the memory, Charles wasn’t sure what color of coat he’d been wearing, what he'd had for lunch that day. Of Erik, he recalled everything. Erik had been wearing a gray, nondescript sweatshirt, one of the many Charles supplied their team without much thought beyond the necessity for comfortable training garments. For over a year, Charles kept that same sweatshirt folded in a trunk at the foot of his bed. It was a tangible, bittersweet reminder of his loss. There had been a day—some Tuesday, some normal day—when he was searching for an old textbook and caught sight of the cotton blend. He thought, What does this say about you, that you’ve kept a shirt that didn’t even belong to him? He’d thrown it away.

“You’re sure you know the way,” Erik said, and oh, it was so difficult to think of him as a loss when his back was an ever-shifting map of muscle and vertebrae against Charles’ chest. He seemed real and within reach.

“No,” said Charles, "I can't make any promises. Most of the miners hadn’t been that way for over a year. I’ve pieced together some idea of where we need to be going, but there are no certainties here.” He ran his tongue over his teeth and added, “Let’s watch for large pits in the ground this time.”

“You’ve become less reassuring than I remember you,” Erik remarked.

“And I’ve never known you to need much reassurance.”

“I’ve never known you to care that I didn’t need it.”

“I have always cared,” Charles said with a vehemence that was unexpected and violent, like a burst blood blister. He clutched Erik around his shoulders too hard, shocked at himself. The words were—too loud.

Erik came to a standstill. In the limited visibility of the mine, Charles could see something of his pallor in a cheek, the set line of his mouth. It was impossible to read his expression from this angle, but Charles didn’t need to; Erik was tightly wound against him and his spine had gone ramrod straight. He said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” said Charles, searching for something better. “I’m sorry, Erik. I’m really—I’m very sorry.”

“You’re always sorry, aren’t you, Charles?” Erik said bitterly. He shifted his grip on Charles’ legs, and Charles imagined he must be digging bruises in between the bones. “Even when you’re not wrong, you’re sorry. You’re the sorriest mutant I know.” He began to walk again, faster.

“I get angry, too, Erik. I don’t even know what I was angry about, right then. I’m sorry. It’s only—”

“What?”

“I miss you,” said Charles. “I miss you so much sometimes. It’s terrible, being blocked in down here with you. I’d almost forgotten. It would be easier—” He stopped before he could betray himself any worse.

“Don’t, Charles.”

“What? Don’t miss you? Don’t say things so plainly?” Charles tried to cram the misery low in his belly where the acid would burn it clean. Now that he’d voiced it, given it name, the ache was crippling. “Don’t say anything if I can help myself?”

“Yes,” said Erik, to all of it.

 

xcv.

 

He wanted to be far away from Erik. It was excruciating, being this close to him: fingers stretched over his heartbeat, nose clipping the helmet. He couldn’t be so near to Erik while Erik had any idea of what Charles had lost, what Charles mourned for, every morning after waking up in the hospital without sensation in his legs. He didn’t want Erik to know the truth, that it’d taken Charles so long to release his expectations that Erik would return to his senses—that Erik would return at all. There was always some tiny ember, ever-singed, convinced that tomorrow was the day. He blew carefully on the ember whenever it was in danger of growing cold, forcing life back into ash, unwary of being burnt. Charles would pull Erik out of fire if taken to task. He’d pull him out with his bare hands.

And that was only the shell of the truth, perhaps. Really, what Charles wanted of Erik—what Charles wanted, now that was a laugh. His selfish motives, his weaknesses, were always so transparent to Erik. It was mortifying when Charles himself didn’t know what he wanted. It was awful. And being here, on Erik’s back, told to shut his mouth: awful.

“You should leave me here and go ahead,” Charles said. “I can tell you the way. More or less. You could reconvene with Hank and Sean, then tell them where to find me.”

Erik exhaled loudly. The safety lantern’s beam glanced across the sheen of sweat on his neck. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m hardly being good company—”

“Please shut up.”

“Yes, I’m starting to think that would be for the best.”

“You’ve never known when to stop talking,” said Erik. “That’s why you say unadvisable things at the worst possible moment.” He grunted and ducked a low outcropping of rock, hitching an extra foot lower to clear Charles’ head.

Charles pressed his cheek to Erik’s back just in case, waiting until he straightened again to lift his face. “Erik. If I’d said the right thing, back on the beach—”

“No,” said Erik.

“Are you so sure?”

“It was their blood or ours. It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“That shouldn’t make me feel better,” Charles admitted, “but it does. You don’t know how many times I’ve replayed that moment in my head and hated myself a little. I’m not socially graceful naturally, you know—my gift spoils me. I said all the wrong things to Raven. I said the wrong thing to you.”

Erik sucked in a lungful of air, leaning against the corridor wall. He let the helmet rest on stone so Charles couldn’t see his face, and they didn’t move from there for a long time. Underneath his forearms, Charles could feel the rapid pull and push of Erik’s chest and the pounding of his heart as it exerted itself. “We should sleep,” he said. “You’ve been pushing yourself too hard and there’s a lot more ground to cover.”

The safety lantern dimmed. It was as good an answer as any.

 

xcvi.

 

Charles tucked his body against the wall of the mine, a few feet across from where Erik had sat as the light went out. He listened to Erik cough into the dirt before subsiding. What an absolute dark, he thought, resisting the urge to reach out and measure the distance between them. Instead, Charles worked on making himself as small a target for falling rocks as possible. He didn’t trust this unstable earth.

Sleep didn’t come right away, though his head hurt and his eyes wanted to close. The edge over which he needed to tip loomed, and Charles was desperate to reach it, but for some reason he clung to the waking world as long as possible. It might have been minutes. It might have been half an hour. But in that absolute dark, Erik said, almost too low to hear, “You have no idea how many times I’ve replayed the moment she fired the gun in my head and hated myself.”

Charles flattened his palm against the ground. He tried very hard this time to choose the right words. “I forgave you,” he said. “You didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“I was careless.”

“Sometimes we are very careless indeed,” whispered Charles. He meant to say more, but found there was no more strength in him. He slept, dreamless.

 

xcvii.

 

It had only ever been Alex, for all his undirected rage and frustration with a system that never played fair, who never blamed Erik for Charles’ paralysis. Even in Sean’s heart, thickly padded and laced with cheerful echoes as it was, there was a corner saved for Cuba, and in that corner Erik’s name festered like an open sore. Hank unabashedly voiced his opinion, until Charles wearily asked him not to, that it was Erik’s fault. Hank was very angry the months of Charles’ recovery; part of him would always, Charles suspected, be very angry. It was nearly a year before he could speak Raven’s name without clenching his fists. It was two before he stopped making bitter, spiked barbs about his appearance.

But when Hank looked at Charles’ wheelchair, he always thought of Erik. That never changed. It was second only to the underlying grief: If I’d designed the suits differently… It was a thought Charles struggled not to erase from his mind, knowing better than to mettle with something natural, private, necessary. In time, Hank would heal. They all would.

Alex was a maelstrom of emotion, but for Erik, there was a reluctant overcoat of understanding. Alex knew about loss of control. He knew about guilt.

They were sitting in Charles’ study some evening, pouring through Cerebro’s latest data—Alex had a little brother out there somewhere, and while there was no guarantee he possessed the mutant gene, Charles had not the heart to mention it—and matching coordinates to Charles’ recollection of the mutants he’d seen when hooked up. The fire was dying in its bed. “No luck, Professor,” Alex said, poorly hiding his disappointment as he finished his stack of paper.

“Then we’ll try again tomorrow,” Charles reassured him.

Alex stared at the firelight. “You don’t have to do this. I know it’s a needle in a haystack.” He barked a laugh, raking fingers through the short crop of his hair. “I used to wish there were a lot more of us, but now I’ve kinda changed my mind.”

Charles pushed his wheelchair closer. He touched Alex an inch beneath his shirt collar, where the knot of his spine began—two fingertips, scarcely a touch at all. “We’ll find him. I could never stop looking for Scott, Alex. He’s important to you, and what is important to you is important to me.”

“It’s rough,” Alex said. “All this waiting.”

(Alex, too, understood what it meant to miss somebody so fiercely that they appeared in every corner, in every dream. And worse yet, he was listening for footsteps much lighter than that of Charles’ ghost.)

 

xcviii.

 

“Charles,” he was saying. “Charles, wake up. We should keep going. Charles?”

I can hear you, Charles thought, for an instant forgetting the drowsy remark wouldn’t reach its target. One of the shining gems of being a telepath: speech was no longer a requirement after waking. But then Erik shook him by the shoulder and he accidentally inhaled a mouthful of dirt. He curled in on himself, coughing hard through a bone-dry throat, so hard he thought his lungs might crack and bleed into each other. It hurt and everything was dark.

“Easy,” Erik said. “Did you sleep on your stomach? That was unwise of you.” The safety lantern clicked and illuminated the corridor from where it had been left, propped against one of the pillars holding back the earth. Charles wiped at his mouth and squinted up at Erik.

“What time is it?”

Erik raised an eyebrow. “I have no idea.”

Oh. Of course. God, but Charles felt even worse for the nap; his head was one massive knot a child had pulled too tight. He wondered if he ought to mention the discussion they’d nearly had before sleep, but one look at Erik’s face told him it wouldn’t be welcome. “Are we—are we off, then?”

“Check your bindings first.”

“I’ve never particularly enjoyed getting up in the morning,” Charles said, each syllable clumsy. He stretched his neck from side to side and rolled onto his back. As he situated himself, Erik called the safety lantern to their side with nothing more than a flick of his fingertips. “How long do you believe the light will last?” Charles asked, rolling up his trousers and unwinding the makeshift bandages. “There, shine it here, if you will.”

The safety lantern bowed shortly in acquiescence. “Not long,” said Erik. “The bulb was already weak. Flickering. We’ve been fortunate it’s lasted this far.”

“We’ll need to keep an eye out for discarded equipment. We’re venturing into parts of the mine that are in disuse, but we may be lucky.” Charles paused, picking at the crust of blood surrounding his gash. He made a sound of disgust. “Oh, that’s lovely.”

“At least it’s coagulated.”

“But swollen.” Charles squeezed his calf, brow furrowing at the heat stitched beneath the skin. The gash was puffy and discolored, though not yet to an alarming degree.

“Then we’d better hurry,” stated Erik mildly. “If it becomes infected, Hank may have my head.”

Charles began to rewrap the wound. “Now you see, that is proper motivation for wearing a helmet, my friend.”

 

xcix.

 

If sleep had been unkind to Charles’ head and joints, it was murder on Erik’s ribs. The hiss that escaped between Erik’s teeth was telltale enough; the shudder and halt as Erik attempted to lift himself from his crouch, Charles secured on his back, was the lock on the box. “Put me down,” Charles said in equally measured worry and anger. “I’ll throw myself off if you don’t, Erik. Don’t test me because you know I’m bloody well stubborn enough to do it. You can’t afford to do further injury to yourself.”

“No,” gritted Erik. He shoved his shoulder into the mine wall, using it as leverage. “Once I’m… straightened out, it won’t…”

“And you want to talk to me about proud, independent-minded corpses? In this… what did you call it?”

“Miserable,” Erik huffed, locking his knees, “ill-created hole of hell.” He made a strangled, awful noise and finally put himself squarely on his feet, swaying but upright. The battle had cost him dearly; he sweated and panted in the cloying warmth of the corridor.

“Your ribs—”

“Damn my ribs,” said Erik, heaving for air between the words. “Charles, I didn’t go to the trouble of saving you only to leave you to rot down here. Considering how we met, it’s a sentiment I believe you ought to appreciate.”

Charles remembered: the water in his mouth, metallic and dirty, and the retreating glow of the submarine into the deep. He had felt Erik’s grip on the machine, a doggedness that translated in every vise-tight muscle and clamped bone, and plying him from its bulk seemed impossible. But he’d tried; he’d entreated Erik to let go. And once he’d had him safe, he did his best to stop Erik from submerging alone into his vengeance again. It was only five years ago, but they seemed so young at that time, discovering a new species and each other’s minute details. Charles wondered if any of the Brotherhood knew how Erik liked his coffee—if they had seen him curl a bishop inside his fist while thinking. None of them knew the face of his mother, its kindness, and how Erik inherited her eyes.

“I wish I’d tried as hard as you are,” Charles said quietly.

“You would have drowned before releasing me,” said Erik, as if he knew beyond any certainty. It wasn’t what Charles was talking about, but he was taken aback by the blunt assessment.

“There are things I would have changed, regardless.”

Erik began to walk. He told Charles, “I understand that you have lingering doubts and self-recriminations. That’s become increasingly apparent. But unless you intend to drive me mad, don’t voice them. I don’t regret the path I’ve chosen and I’ve reason to believe you don’t, either. Unless you have changed your mind about which side you’re on?”

Is that what I’m doing? Charles wondered. Am I clinging to the past? There had been questions and thoughts he’d wanted to share the past few years with Erik, so many, but perhaps he wasn’t sharing the right ones. Of course, Erik had always been forward-thinking: he knew the curveball of his future and followed it resolutely. Charles wished he could have the same steadfastness of character, the same confidence.

But that wasn’t entirely true. Charles, too, had moved on past his regrets. He had the school, his children. He released his losses because the gain had been so much more. Hadn’t he?

 

c.

 

The first of the new students: a girl, snow in her hair and storm in her eyes. Charles could engulf one of her tiny hands inside both of his own. While her face was impassive, her mind was not, and each of her thoughts was like a sapling unfurling to an ardent sun. He saw the cruelties that had been visited upon her by fate’s designs, nightmares of tight dark spaces and burning rubble, and took the liberty of touching that white, white, white hair with his fingertip. How beautiful you are, he told her, earnest. He had learned, since Raven, and he thought he might understand a little.

Her chin lifted.

“I am Professor Charles Xavier,” he said. “I would very much like to teach you to control your gift. You have the most splendid talent. Why, you could bring Christmas in July. You could water all the gardens in a city on a day when no one thought to water them at all. Wind chimes must hark at your call, my dear.”

Something in the dark of her eyes: a flicker, a wanting. She had never thought of her strangeness like this before. She was strong, but not yet a dreamer. With training, she would be a leader but also a shaker, never blind to the painful reality of doing the right thing even when it was wrong. At heart, she was a turbulence.

Charles showed her the school, projecting its mighty halls and the expanse of the grounds. There will be other children like you, he said, smiling as she leaned forward as if to chase the last of the vision to its source. We’ll take care of each other. Is this something you would want, Ororo?

The breeze that ruffled his hair and shirt sleeves was cool, a breath of relief against an otherwise arid atmosphere. She chose her own room, preferring to remain close to Charles so that she might hear his wheelchair roll across the floorboards before she slept. He loved her very much for this.

 

ci.

 

Charles asked, “Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Changed your mind about the side you’re on,” said Charles. “Have you ever had any doubt whatsoever? Or did you always intend for this?”

Erik let out a loud exhale. “Doubt is a luxury for the unfaithful, Charles.” He was silent for a few footfalls. Eventually, he said, “I imagined you’d realize the error of your ways when they set the missiles upon us. And many times since then, I thought surely you’d cease to be blind.” I want you by my side, he had said, so long ago, when the sand was in Charles mouth and he couldn’t feel his legs and the sky was made up of blossoms of fire in the blue.

“Raven has stopped hoping to see your face amongst ours,” Erik added. “I can tell because she is more herself than she has ever been.”

“She was herself when she was my sister,” said Charles, and he heard the steel underlying his voice but made no motion to temper it. “You may have helped Raven to accept her true physical form, Erik, but our lives together were neither a lie nor a burden to her. I hope when she is older, she can look back on our childhood with the same fondness I have. She was not my pet. She was my sister, and we shared our secrets and leaned on each other more times than I can count.” He took a deep breath. “I miss her very much. Siblings are flawed… but I tried to do right by her, in the end.”

Erik said, “Now you sound like yourself again.”

“She could write,” Charles said with some petulance. “It’s not hard, is it? You pick up a pen and you scribble a few lines about the weather.”

“And the weather would interest you.”

“From her? Yes.” He crossed his arm over Erik’s chest, adjusting his grip. His self-consciousness about his body was wearing thin after hours of being held to Erik’s back, and he found he no longer worried as much about where his hands were, how close he pressed, or what Erik must be thinking about his legs and how poorly he must smell. Funnily enough, Charles couldn’t remember the last time he’d cared so little about making a good impression.

He already had Erik’s—regard, perhaps, or something like it. If the collapse of the cave had shown him anything, it’d shown him that. And Erik’s helmet granted him nothing but the truth of who Charles Xavier was, and he still wanted to carry him out of the bloody mine on his back.

 

cii.

 

Knowing this made Charles’ grip somewhat tighter, somewhat possessive. The beat of Erik’s lifeblood was strong and tireless beneath his palm. He wanted very much to—

Calm your mind, he thought, alarmed. For an instant, it was like being in the mind of someone about to die: a flurry of intention and desperation, blinding, overwhelming, ready.

He imagined putting a heavy iron lid on a bubbling pot. Quiet descended with a sharp start, then gentled. Later, Charles promised himself, he would open it again and examine its contents in the privacy of the dark.

 

ciii.

 

For most of the journey, the mine had afforded little room to maneuver. Its multiple corridors were numerous but small in width, allowing for safe passage but relatively condensed space. Charles had seen in the miners’ minds much bigger rooms, wherein the mining work was ongoing, but he was still surprised when their own corridor began to widen and then opened into such a place.

The mine was suddenly sprawling and vast before them. The safety lantern couldn’t illuminate to the far end of the room, giving the illusion of monstrous pillars of earth holding up a cavern that extended into a black mouth. The ceiling far above their heads seemed to move the more Charles stared up at it. The floor was uneven beneath their feet and down the center of the mine, the rock was punctured, fissures opened and left unburied. Piles of natural rubble dotted the way.

“Extraordinary,” Charles said. He craned his neck, searching the ceiling.

Erik had halted. He spun the safety lantern around the mining room slowly, lighting its corners. He said nothing.

“There’s a coal seam in the floor here,” Charles told him, scanning the miner’s memories quickly. “That’s what they were digging for, and found, I might add. The mine is like this almost the entire way to the mineshaft. The smaller corridors, they’re for traveling—there are other places, too, like this. We’re lucky. I was feeling claustrophobic.”

“I think I preferred it,” said Erik. “This seems infinitely more dangerous.”

“If there was coal here, and they may have been mining in this vicinity sometime in the last year, we might become even luckier. Look for equipment—conveyor belts, drills. There might be other lanterns, as well. Can you sense any metal nearby?”

Erik canted his head. He surveyed the long stretch of open space, turning in each direction. At last, he said, “Nothing. You said parts of the mine were in disuse. Chances are, they’ve already removed the equipment and abandoned this sector.”

“We’ll keep a weather eye open. Only—watch your step.”

“How much farther to the shaft?”

“I can’t be certain. However, anywhere between four and seven miles would be my guess. Take a deep breath of the air, Erik—it’s not as stuffy here.”

Erik did so; Charles could feel his chest move beneath his arm. “It’s going to get worse as we go deeper,” he said. “And where they’ve mined, there will be coal dust. Do you understand what that means?”

Charles made a noise of assent. “But I don’t think breathing it in only a day or two will cause us irreparable damage or—”

“No,” Erik said, “it means the possibility of a dust explosion. Spontaneous combustion. The danger’s even greater when there’s only a little of it to go around. Friction, even heat, can be enough—and you can imagine what fire would do.”

Of course he’d thought of that, but only as a remote possibility. “Neither of us are exactly carrying pockets full of matches,” he reminded Erik. “And I daresay if the miners were able to operate heavy machinery down here without the coal dust imploding around them, we can make a steady trek through the mess. They’ve put in safety precautions, Erik, I’m sure I have a memory of them diluting the coal dust on the floor with stone dust. Regulations and all that.”

“But they’ve abandoned this mine,” said Erik grimly. “Do you know recognize the name Luisenthal? It was a mine in Germany.”

“No.”

Erik regained his stride, leading them past the closest giant pillars. “I read about the explosion in the papers as I was leaving Europe. Five hundred lost. My father used to talk about the mining trade in Germany. He said we were feeding souls to the dead, so that we might run our trains.”

Chapter Text

civ.

 

Here was what Charles remembered about trains: gazing outside the window at a yellow fall of forest down the mountainside, holding his mother’s make-up case as she adjusted her rouge with the aid of a small handheld mirror engraved with the family crest. “I hate traveling by rail,” she said. “I always feel ill. There's so much lurching about. Come now, close that and put it back in my bag.”

"Would you like me to get you a glass of water?"

"If I had, I would have asked."

Charles nodded. Her thoughts were waterlogged enough, sluggish and uninterested in the journey. She thought briefly of Charles' father, but the thought surprised her, and so she let it go to sink back into oblivion. She did not like to daydream at all, but particularly not about him, because what little love she'd carried in her breast flatlined along with his pulse and not even his memory warmed her. His loss was a stone that had sunk a ship already losing buoyancy. That she had met someone new, someone who plied her with compliments and martinis, was only a convenience. Now she would not spend her nights alone.

How quickly everything passes, Charles thought to himself. He looked at his mother’s face but she cared not to look back.

Within the week, his mother was engaged a second time. Charles dreamt of fire consuming the autumn-gold trees, lighting the lake water up and evaporating it to a crust. The trains kept running long past the point there was anyone to take them.

 

cv.

 

The way was time-consuming as they took wide, cautious berths around the holes in the cavern floor, avoiding possible collapses in the earth or unsteady rock bearings. Erik would take no risks and Charles fell silent, keeping a careful watch on the safety lantern’s light as it pooled across the pockmarked ground, seeking to warn Erik of invisible dangers. It soon appeared Erik was correct in his grim assessment: the journey would be slower, more laborious in the giant mining rooms. Erik’s back was slick with sweat, dampening the front of Charles’ shirt.

The danger of becoming further lost was growing, as well. Every open space connected to smaller tunnels, some of which had collapsed into each other. While Charles was reasonably sure they were going the right way, he couldn't know for certain. Memories were unreliable narrators. Underground, there were no signs to point them the correct direction. If they took a wrong turn, or missed a tunnel that would connect them to their salvation, they might never find the exit shaft.

Every so often, Erik paused to concentrate, reaching out for any traces of metal that might make their travel less daunting. Thus far, he'd found only the remnants of a broken wheel from a mining cart and a lantern missing its bulb. Other successes were hidden behind collapsed walls and impenetrable tunnels. He had crumpled the scrap metal into a gritty, bumpy ball of material that Charles carried. Every so often, Charles put a hand in his pocket to feel its contours.

"It's not reliable," Erik said, regarding its use, but he let Charles keep it, anyway.

He was so thirsty. He couldn't imagine how thirsty Erik was in comparison, and thought again about the trickling water in the collapsed mine shaft. Perhaps we should have stayed there, Charles brooded. Or never went anywhere at all. We could have stayed at the cave-in site, and waited until Emma found Azazel. Or we might have searched for equipment in the open tunnels, tried to find something to make this easier on us.

Charles knew there were no good answers, and they'd made the decision based on a limited timeframe and no solid information, but the mine was so silent. It was unnatural and unmoving, far down here. He didn't want Erik to become a victim on his behalf, but he was grateful, more than he'd been before, that he wasn't trapped alone. Another human presence—even Erik's—made it bearable.

Although this particular presence was no doubt affecting him, as well. Charles considered the day from all angles now that he had ample time do so, and as Erik's breathing faded out from his immediate awareness, he was coming to disquieting conclusions. As they were cut off from anyone else, the only two who mattered in a subterranean labyrinth, his judgment was becoming compromised. It was harder to recollect that Erik was a murderer. He had killed, would kill again, had no intentions of stopping. His dedication to a violent and absolute cause brooked no hesitation. He would hurt their students. He would hurt innocent non-mutants.

He would inevitably hurt Charles.

It was difficult to reconcile that knowledge with the person Charles clung to in the encroaching gloom, the same man who risked his life to save him from being buried alive. This entire time, Charles had been reaching out to that man—to Erik, who could not be so wholly consumed, so completely gone beneath Magneto's mask—but he'd forgotten, in his desperation, his own selfish hope, the reason for his search. Even if he found goodness in him left, what would be gained?

The blood on Erik's hands would always be there. It had been there before, but Charles had pretended it could be washed away. He shrugged off the deaths of the child killers, the war criminals. But he no longer had the luxury of believing redemption to be so simplistic. The deaths would always be between them, and Charles could never again touch Erik's mind without knowing what it felt like to drive steel into a man's chest (sink a coin into his brain matter as if it were dough).

Redemption was not what Erik wanted. As soon as they made it to the surface, their lives would go on. Raven wouldn't write. Erik would continue on his path resolutely and Charles would do everything he could to stop him.

Their futures stretched as long as the endless tunnels before them, as empty and unchanging. As Charles' thoughts deepened, he wanted so much to say something—anything—to break their silence again. He wanted, out of his own self-interest, to continue feeling as if they were the only two people in the world, which would mean nothing had to change and they could be as much themselves as possible. What did the past matter when there was no light to illuminate it? What use was discussing a war that required more than two bodies to burn?

For a moment, Charles yearned to stay in the dark. Let their causes wither without them. Let the world be so simple as this: two great powers left to slumber beneath the earth's surface, curling around each other as snakes do to keep warm.

 

cvi.

 

There was a shaft in the floor: an unfathomably deep hole that stretched farther than the lantern could discern. They had already seen a few similar shafts, going to a lower level still, some of them with the reflection of motionless water at the bottom. But this shaft had a ladder attached to its side, slimed soft green yet serviceable.

Charles frowned down at it.

"The metal is good," Erik said thoughtfully. "There's minor decomposition down below where it hits water, but the rest is strong."

"Is there a lot? I can't tell how deep the shaft is."

"Enough." Erik took a step to the left, away from the cavernous gap. He seemed as wary as Charles about the possibility of tripping into it. "But the ladder is grafted into the side of the shaft. You see the fastenings? There at the top, again a few feet down. I can feel the base and it's been drilled in with iron rods."

Charles rubbed his dry-cracked mouth, considering.

"If I pull it loose, best case scenario is that the shaft itself collapses," Erik added.

"And the worst case is we trigger a collapse on our level," Charles said.

"It's worth the risk."

There were many benefits to having metal in their hands. Erik could use it to create tools, shelter—even perhaps a better way to transport themselves. Their stamina was a weak, dying flame and the mine was dangerous. But Charles hesitated, unwilling to bring down a grimmer fate on their heads, quite literally.

Erik swept the lantern along the circumference of the immense room. "There," he said, "look ahead. If we stay out of this work area, and move on to where the tunnel shrinks again, we ought to be out of radius. And if I'm wrong, we at least have room to run."

"I don't think anywhere is out of radius," observed Charles.

Erik ignored him and hefted his weight with a grunt. It was only the obvious strain in his neck that bade Charles to be silent, and to let him at least try his idea. They passed the giant pillars and high, serrated walls of the mine, taking shelter in the far end where the man-sized tunnel began again. Erik turned, putting their backs to it, and reached out toward the shaft.

"Let's hope you're wrong," he said, and pulled.

The ladder shrieked and bent, its metal splitting from the rods fastening it. For an instant, Charles was hopeful. He'd seen Erik work wonders before—aluminum dragons spiraling in midair, steel dancers that did not touch ground.

Then the earth around the shaft split with an ominous crackling.

"Erik!" Charles shouted, yanking on his shirt. "Stop!"

A billowing cloud of dust enveloped them, blinding them to what was happening in the mine. Erik jerked back from it and turned. There was a mammoth, hollowed groan from the subterranean levels beneath them, seizing Charles' bones in its grip as if they were dice to shake and spin, and behind it the sound of rock breaking away and falling. Charles couldn't place where and didn't have time, because Erik was already moving them, hurrying down the tunnel as fast as he could with the bobbing safety lantern a faint beacon in the filth.

They didn't make it far before Erik's knee suddenly gave out. He lurched and crumpled to his hands and knees. Charles clung to his back, but his grip wasn't enough—he slid down to the side, coughing, wracked by the pulse of earth beneath them that drummed and shook the deep.

He felt Erik's arm wrap over him. Felt warmth and weight over his shoulders. Fingers splayed over his ear.

Charles closed his eyes and weathered the storm.

 

cvii.

 

There was a fine film of gray over their bodies when Charles could open his eyes again. He coughed, and everything that had been desiccated was now twice as dry, as if all of his saliva was clay. The coughing hurt in his chest. He wiped his face, dragged fingers through his hair and watched the ghost-powder flow free from it. The very air was still permeated with the cloud of debris, and he could only recognize Erik because the lantern had returned to their sides, its bulb caked but glowing dimly.

Erik rubbed the bulb with his sleeve, but it was hardly better. "Stay here," he said, getting to his feet with some difficulty. He walked back the way they came.

"Gladly," wheezed Charles. He forced himself up into a sitting position and beat down his dress shirt. It could no longer resemble anything called white; however, he was alive, and that was something for which to be grateful.

We might have died over a ladder, he thought and was very tired.

Erik returned with the lantern. He knelt next to Charles and ran his hand down his face, taking a deep breath. Beneath the helmet, his hair was as bone-white as ash. "It seems to be over. The room itself only lost a partial wall, but the shaft is completely buried."

"There's something else," said Charles, because he didn't need to be a mind reader to see it.

"The way we came," Erik said. "I can't even see it anymore."

Silence filled the space around them, relearning what it could claim, as they contemplated that admission. So there's no way back, Charles thought. He squeezed his hands together and exhaled.

"Let's hope your mine shaft is in better condition than the other two," Erik finally said, getting into position for Charles to reclaim his shoulders.

"At this point," Charles said, "hope is all we have to rely on."

 

cviii.

 

They walked for what seemed like hours. It could not have been hours, but that was how it felt. After a while, the tunnel opened again into a mining chamber, where the air was easier to breathe and Charles could stave off the beginning of a panic attack. He pondered how many nights he would have to sleep with his bedroom lights on, for fear of waking to so much barren nothingness, waking to the mine again.

It was here that Erik gave out, as well. "I need to rest," he said, the fracture in his voice thin and unstable. He staggered against an outcropping in the middle of the mining cavern, and Charles realized his bobbing movements were Erik's attempts to drop Charles without hurting him.

Charles squeezed his shoulders and reached back. Once he found a solid surface, he slid down his back in an ungainly heap. It was a relief to sit, though, and to be separated.

Panting, Erik swayed on his feet. His face was pale and drawn beneath the dust, which had covered him in a speckled shroud, finding even those hidden places behind his ears and down his collar. He drew in deep breaths, a fist pushed into his stomach, until they no longer grated.

He was as far from Magneto as he could be, and Charles struggled to maintain his earlier distance. But the lantern dimmed abruptly, containing them in a visible radius of only a few feet in either direction, and they were alone in all this vastness, so alone. Despite himself, he reached out and took Erik's elbow.

"Sit, my friend," he said, urging him down beside him. "You won't rest on your feet. Lay down if you need to. I wouldn't begrudge you the chance to rest your eyes, either. You're going to need it."

Erik dragged his hand down his face. "Not yet," he said. "We've got to keep going. If we can go another hour, we can sleep a while. We may be closer than we realize."

"Not if some of your ribs are broken, Erik. Your stamina won't be what it was above ground, between that and the ventilation."

Erik rolled his shoulders back and cracked his neck. He glanced at Charles' leg, and Charles knew he was pensive about the wound, no longer bleeding but inflamed. "I'm going to save us the light," he said, and the lantern went out with a dying glow, the aftershock of red on Charles' eyelids the shape and color of wounds.

Somehow, being blind made everything easier. Charles murmured, "Imagine this. Two of the most powerful mutants on the planet and we're going to be done in by a substantial amount of rock."

Erik scoffed. "I've outlived far worse. As I recall, so have you."

"But you see, that's the irony."

"Your sense of humor is as inappropriate as always. I hope you leave it out of the classroom, Charles."

"Where else am I supposed to use it?" asked Charles lightly. He was afraid he rather outed himself with that one, though, uncovering his loneliness in a flourish. He hunched down and was glad for the pitch black. Fortunately, Erik either didn't notice or pretended not to in order to save what was left of his dignity.

"How young have you found them?" Erik asked instead.

Charles shifted toward him, careful not to bump elbows. "I've seen them as young as three when I use Cerebro," he said. "I leave the youngest children with their parents if it's possible. Until we're set up with a better support system, I'm only equipped for the care of school-aged children. Even so, our smallest is barely seven." He smiled, the scent of ozone curling around his memory in comfort, all of that white, white hair and the childlike reach of her mind before she slipped into dreamless sleep. "You wouldn't know, from her brain."

"She's powerful."

"She's lovely," said Charles. "She makes me understand why men aspire to fatherhood."

Erik was surprised. Without visibility, without a noise, Charles could sense it even with the helmet blocking his telepathy.

"Is that something you would have wanted?" Erik asked stiffly.

He believes it's impossible for me, thought Charles, a sharp roiling emotion stabbing through him and seeking other bleeding targets. The insult dug deeper than any he'd withstood before. He sucked in a breath, but his fury was aborted when a second insight came upon the first's heels, the cold of salt water quenching fire, an ice bath clutching a fever.

In that instant, he realized, No. That isn't the root of his discomfort. For Erik, there's never been a question of anything more to life than vengeance. He's ruled by his purpose, and he has always believed we were the same. Years later, as separated as they were in principle and dogma, Erik continued to have faith in a reflection Charles had always known to be disparate.

Surely, surely Erik had always known.

(He must have seen the newborn longing? The empty rooms of the school, each prepared for footsteps? The many ways Charles reached out at the bars with his mind, finding those most understanding, those most sweet of smile and clever of thought? He'd nearly raised Raven. He wanted to invite children into his home when he had a bloody doctorate in genetics, surely, surely—)

Charles swallowed. Carefully, he said, "I would be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it, from time to time. I have dreams besides the education and protection of mutant-kind, Erik. Some of those dreams are personal in nature. I'm not—like you—I can't set myself up to be a distant figurehead of a revolutionary cause. I would like a family. It doesn't even have to be a large or typical family, so long as it's mine."

I'm not built to be lonely, he wanted to say. He didn't.

"Moira," said Erik, the name so ground up between his teeth that it was nearly incomprehensible.

"That future is far behind me," Charles said in all honesty. "Even if I wanted to resurrect it, I've closed every door I might have used to do so."

"You made her forget."

"I saved her life. I removed her choice, because I already knew what she was going to choose and I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. She was a good woman, Erik. She was our friend."

"Does it mean nothing, then," said Erik bitterly, "that her bullet was the one to lodge itself in your spine? That it was her steel, her stupidity? Or am I always going to harbor the lion's share of the blame?"

Groping down between them, Charles found the safety lantern and picked it up. He set the heavy thing on his lap and searched its frame for the switch that, up until now, Erik had manipulated with his power. Between them, the light woke again and clasped them in its weak cadence.

Charles looked at his friend in the meager visibility. Erik's expression was at struggle with the same wild lashing that had shown itself beneath his skin when he rescued Charles. It burned in him, agony and rage without hope of relief. Oh, thought Charles, his heart beating faster as he saw. I'm the submarine now. He wasn't sure where the idea had sprung from, but it brought equal measures of pleasure and pain.

And one more time, he could pry Erik's fingers from his albatross. He couldn't wash all of the blood from Erik's hands, but he could wash his own.

"I'm not angry," he said. "Erik, I can't be angry at you, at Moira, not even at Shaw. Evolution is the process of recognizing what must be changed to attain survival. I wouldn't be able to move on if I couldn't forgive you both. Of course it means something, but it also means something that you're here, like this, regardless of our differences. You haven't taken as much away from me as you think. I only need to work a little harder for it."

Erik looked at him.

"I'm up to the task," said Charles, and he smiled.

There was something in the set of Erik's mouth—the weight of a breath untaken—and a change, bleeding through him like ink on paper. His eyes were dark save for a single pinprick of light reflecting the lantern, and looking at him, Charles couldn’t help but remember a table covered in candles, a hoarse, I didn't know I still had that.

For once, Charles had found the right words.

 

cix.

 

The bullet was a hail Mary in disguise, ripping not only into Charles' vertebrae but also into all of his misconceptions. It brought him lower than he'd known he could go. What a difference one thimble of lead could make.

More than once, Charles wondered how it had come to this. How could both the unique individuals whom he’d come to share a deep, tangible connection with leave him to fight for an urgently necessary peace alone? He missed his sister. He’d forgotten what it meant to be lonely because she’d stayed and eaten the apples he cut into uneven triangles for her. He missed Erik. Although the time they spent together had been brief, a mere hand span in comparison to Raven’s companionship, Charles felt his absence keenly. It was the first friendship he’d cultivated that had meaning as well as a wretched honesty.

He told Erik that he knew everything about him. He wanted to say, In time, I want you to know everything about me, too. Now, Charles could see his own selfishness. He’d been waiting for Erik to ask him the questions he’d so wanted to answer, like a young boy with his first best friend. Charles wanted to tell Erik about his childhood: the loneliness, the bitter cold, a woman powdering her face in a mirror. He wanted to carve those private admissions, hopes, frustrations out of his chest and lay them out for Erik to admire.

In the weeks following his hospitalization, Charles recalled such longings and felt like a horrific idiot. Erik had no need of that—clutter. Erik hunted. Erik thought Charles was naïve, ineffectual, spoiled; if given access to Charles’ mind, he would have found nothing to dispute his initial impression.

Those were black days. Charles threw himself into physical therapy with the desperation of a man who wanted to sleep without dreaming. They taught him how to manage his own limbs again. They said nothing if he cried.

 

cx.

 

Everything was changed.

Charles had never missed his telepathy more. His power had no outlet down in the mines, Erik's helmet keeping him at bay, and without its use he couldn't discern the exact mechanisms of those changes. But he knew they were there. The air tasted different, an electric current that tingled in the corners of his lips. The silence was weightless and easy. Even the way Erik held himself was unusual, his shoulders relaxed despite his labored breathing and what must have been significant pain. He had picked up Charles' legs without complaint or comment, and leaned back so far that he'd bumped Charles' nose.

And Charles wasn't unaffected, either. He felt as if he were staring down at a jigsaw puzzle's strewn pieces, witnessing the picture come together but not comprehending its final form. But he was beginning to. He recognized the colors, this shape or that, the way Erik turned his head every so often to check on him. It hadn't only been what he said. This was older, long-reaching.

"We'll go a little longer," said Erik. "Then we'll stop and sleep, if we don't come to the shaft. The second you become dizzy, you have to tell me, Charles. Sleep isn't worth the dangers an infection would bring. We'll keep going, if that's the case."

The problem was, Charles already felt disoriented. But he wasn't certain he could blame the blood loss and didn't want to start an unnecessary panic, besides. He made an agreeable noise and tried not to rest too much against Erik.

The mine's larger, hollowed out places began to contract again. It wasn't long until they cleared what, according to Charles' stolen memories, would be the final work space. The tunnel became skinny and winding once more, the oxygen difficult to force through his lungs. It was worse for Erik.

Charles reached into his pocket and grasped the ball of metal they'd collected along the way. He pulled it out and shoved it in Erik's face. "Please, use this. You have to use this. Carry me on a dish of it or by the bloody belt, Erik, I don't even care."

Erik sighed. "I told you, it's unreliable. Maneuvering you through these tunnels would take more concentration and strength out of me than this. I'm not unconvinced it won't fall apart because of all the corrosion, either." He nudged the ball out of the way with his helmet. "I've already given you one concussion today. Yesterday? Today."

"I trust you. It will be fine."

"Stop making me talk."

His words were rasping and splintered. Charles bit his lip in guilt. He shoved the ball of metal back into his pocket, pinkie pricked on one of its sharp edges. He sucked the bead of blood off, and hoped for light at the end of the tunnel.

 

cxi.

 

When Erik stopped walking and leaned against the mine wall to heave, his whole body shuddering beneath Charles, enough was enough. They couldn't keep on like this. Charles worried he was doing Erik real, irreversible damage on an internal level, that bruised and broken ribs were doing more than shifting against each other. They had no way of knowing. Ten minutes from here, ten hours—it meant nothing if Erik stopped being able to move before they reached the exit.

Charles reached down, prying at Erik's hands where they clasped under his legs. "No more," he ordered. "We're going to rest. Put me down and breathe, Erik."

The fact Erik didn't argue, but instead did exactly as Charles asked, set off the last remaining alarm bells.

The safety lantern twirled erratically down to the ground. Its bulb had been flickering for a while now, but the intervals were stretching longer, leaving them in obscurity for a few steps at a time. Charles pushed it out of his way once he was settled, and then he clasped Erik behind his knee. He squeezed.

"Easy," he said. "Take small but full breaths. When you feel steady, we're going to sit you down."

Erik gestured at him irritably, but he was complying, some color returning to his face in blotches. After a few minutes, his sickly pallor had gone and he lowered himself to the tunnel's blanket of grit. He sat next to Charles, back to the wall, and rubbed his chest as he inhaled and exhaled. It all sounded torturous and Charles' throat constricted in sympathy.

"All right," said Charles finally, "let's get some sleep. Are you going to be comfortable if you lie down?"

"I don't think I can reach comfortable even if this mine came prepared with feather mattresses around every corner, Charles."

He laughed, expecting the terseness. "You'll have to make do with my shoulder, I'm afraid."

"That's worse than the rock," said Erik. "You've become very bony."

"First I'm well-fed, now I'm bony. You can't have it all ways."

Erik made a noise that sounded like a chuckle too weary to reach fruition. It was barely gravel, but Charles felt it catch onto something inside of him, hook, and hold fast.

"Maybe I just have to work a little harder for it," said Erik, and then he slept.

 

cxii.

 

Charles slept, too, and he dreamt.

He recognized the burnished oak stairs and hastened down them. Oh, this dream. He had not forgotten this dream, not in all the months since it'd first come to him, haunted and bittersweet. The utter dark did not frighten him, especially as he'd spent the last day bathed in it. The railing was still made of glass bottles but his mother's hair had rotted around them, leaving silver scars behind, patterns that resembled those on old china.

"I'm sorry, but I don't need you anymore," he said.

The ivory bed at the bottom was empty. Charles paced the room even as light began to fail, even as he heard the waters pulling up along the walls and immersing him. The world was overtaken, and cats were dying, but he waited past final hopes and into rebirth. He was not a cat. He was not a world.

"I told you not to follow me," said Erik, from behind him. His palm rested flat over Charles' shoulder blades, as if testing what he was made of.

He was warm, and solid, and impressed in Charles’ heart like an ache. It was enough.

"I think you've misunderstood something," Charles said, relishing what it was to stand, what it was to stand like this with Erik. "You've followed me."

"Ah," said Erik.

They stood there and watched the paint dampen as the water soaked through wood and insulation. The damp spot grew, changing the composition of things, reigniting cells, becoming as all ruined things did a new language. Inside of the interlocking code, Charles discovered the answers to his questions and achieved perfect self-awareness; but he knew upon waking, he would forget.

There was time enough, though, to show Erik up the stairs.

 

cxiii.

 

He woke in peace, blinking grit from his eyelashes. Some dirt was trickling down into his hair. Nearby, Erik was breathing, but he was no more asleep than Charles.

"It was a long time," Charles noted, unsure of how precisely he knew.

"Yes."

"The light?"

Erik shifted and the safety lantern clicked on in front of them, its bulb wobbling. "Your leg?"

Charles checked beneath his trousers, pinching the makeshift bandage for seepage. It was dry and stiff. He yawned, jaw cracking. The sleep seemed to have done him equal parts good and damage; he felt rested, but at the same time top-heavy, woozy. "I'd like to sleep for a week," he said.

"Get out of here and treat yourself," said Erik.

Charles raised an eyebrow at him. "I'd like your guarantee you'll stay low to ground that entire week. You, your brotherhood, and even my sister. I think I've earned a week after this mess. We both have."

"Do you think humanity will take a vacation from its crimes?"

"Crimes," echoed Charles, yawning again.

"They can't be trusted," Erik said firmly.

"Your mother was a human," said Charles, not awake enough to bite his tongue. He rubbed his eye and, damning himself, said, "Your parents, Erik."

Erik looked at him. The lantern stuttered and lapsed.

His head was altogether too sore for panic. Charles waited, and with the light at last came Erik's quiet response.

"She was human," he said. "She loved her mutant son."

"Yes," said Charles.

"I suppose you're calling this a victory," he said, with all the acidity of decades-old grief gone sour.

"It's not a victory. She's your mother, for goodness sake."

Erik studied him and a thinly veiled tension eased, leaving him languid. He sounded as weary as Charles felt when he said, "She was."

"You never told me her name."

There was no reason he should, but Erik didn't hesitate to reach out between them and draw a set of letters in the powder-fine dirt. They were each one cherished, and each one smeared away with the swipe of his hand after Charles had eaten his fill of them. Erik held the fistful of earth up and let it trickle free, and Charles thanked him by not saying anything at all.

 

cxiv.

 

They ought to have kept moving. They didn't.

"You know more about me than anybody, mutant or human," Erik said, tipping his head back against the rock cropping. He seemed at rest, watching Charles as he chafed his fingers together, perhaps bothered by the remnants of his mother's name. "I admit that you have me at a disadvantage. It hardly seems fair."

Charles twisted on his side to better look at him. "How would you have me level the playing field?"

Erik thought it over. The lantern began to give out, its telltale sputter swallowing them in nothingness and hiccuping some measure of light again every other breath. Neither of them moved to turn it off completely. Finally, he said in a pulse of the dark, “Tell me something about yourself, Charles.”

"Something?"

"Something no one else knows about you. Something you hide in plain sight, and something you've buried."

Charles thought many things in the span of a second, none of them useful. He couldn’t think of what to say. His body ached. Several times, he started to speak and then fell silent again.

Erik sighed and made as if to stopper the lantern. He knew, then, that he'd taken too long to collect his thoughts, that he'd instinctively began to shuffle through what was safe and what was raw. That wasn't what Erik had asked for—he'd asked for something gutting, and Charles was already prepared to deny him. Perhaps he had every reason to, but Charles panicked at the idea of losing their connection, tremulous as it was.

"My stepfather was a cruel man," he said, without intention, and Erik went very still beside him. The lantern remained on, flickering between them in its own melody.

Charles wanted to look away, but he couldn't rend his gaze from Erik's, feeling the inches between them as if he'd sewn each stitch. "I'm not the only one to know that," he said. "But the only one to know its manifestations intimately is myself. He was never a brute, you see. He never laid a hand on me, nor my mother or Raven. His mind was uglier than his actions. His thoughts were—invasive, heavy with intention. Even if he never acted on them, the capacity to do so remained beneath the veneer of every gesture, every word. And I was afraid of him. I was always afraid of him."

Erik said nothing.

Charles smiled, but it settled false, on brittle precipices. "There aren't many places to run when the boogeyman has his own bedroom in your house. I stayed as far away as I could from his mind. Years later, even now that he's passed, I remember what it is to be afraid like that. Like your heart is thin as paper."

"Yes," said Erik after a long while, the single syllable loaded. Yes, he would understand.

"What else," Charles said. He searched again, fingertips bleeding as they dug into glassworks left in small boxes, pieces of himself that had broken but he couldn't bear to throw away. He caught on one and bit his lip. "I've done the physical therapy. I've installed all the comforts imaginable in the house, for the ease of mobility. The children think—I hear them always—how strong Professor Xavier is. How much he's overcome and how comfortable he looks in his chair. At ease, you know."

"Charles," said Erik.

"But it's easy to make them think that," Charles told him, quickly, less he stop talking altogether. "In truth, my friend, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's the very hardest."

He pressed his hands together in his lap. They shook, and then they didn't. He forced himself to gaze at Erik again, and whatever abrasive knot held him together sagged when he found no pity, no misdirected guilt. There was only steadfast calm in him like a stone.

"There you have it," Charles said. "Something buried, and something hidden in plain sight. What else. What else."

Erik tilted his head.

Charles closed his eyes and rested his cheek against the rock. “I dip chocolate biscuits in my tea," he murmured.

(How would he survive this, once they were topside? He cut the stories from himself with a scalpel, neatly and deep. It had been so clean a separation that he hardly bled. He loved the soggy, sugary mush and how crumbs dissolved in the bottom of his tea cup in the shapes of good fortune.)

He felt Erik's thumb sweep beneath his eye. Everything in Charles' mind seared white, emptying out for the edge of a fingernail, for the brush of a callus. He opened his eyes. Erik gazed on him, fixed in his course, intent in the same way he was when he called metal to his palms. He traced some unidentifiable pattern that spanned cheekbones and jaw, as if committing it to memory for reproduction, as if blessing.

The lantern blinked in and out, in and out.

Charles could say nothing. He couldn't even breathe.

Erik's thumb pressed into the corner of Charles' mouth. His skin tasted like shale and sweat. Was he—

The lantern fizzled and plunged them into the pitch black. This time, it didn't come back. The light was gone.

Chapter Text

cxv.

 

"Erik," said Charles, when the dark became long and stifling around them, settling its skeleton over their heads like a cathedral, "the lantern—can you—"

"It was never going to take us the entire way," said Erik. "We knew that."

"I don't think I knew anything," Charles said. If he turned his head just so, he would breathe into Erik's palm, filling its lifeline with knowledge of him. He very carefully did not move.

He remembered the way Erik of some five years before had called to the satellite: the curl of his fingers in supplication, the way he had opened his hands and hearkened it to turn. Hooked into his mind, Charles had been caught between a glass shelf, trapped inside the exhilarating howl of his thoughts and the sight of Erik's facade breaking away as ice flow. His wet, wild baring of teeth was the only expression Charles had seen him make free of bitterness. It changed his whole face. It changed something in Charles, too.

Charles was not a satellite. But he felt the pull, nevertheless.

All of his confusion—the stirring ideas that he'd set aside for "later," the impressions beneath damp sand that took form in sudden and sickening shapes—was illuminated, given sight at the taking of his own. He had been so stupid. Raven must have known; everyone must have known. Erik and Charles had made no secret of it to anyone but themselves. And even Erik had fostered some understanding of its workings, betrayed by the tenderness with which he touched Charles’ face. It was not how an old friend touched another. It was not even how a lover touched another, based on Charles’ flirtations of the past.

Erik’s fingertip traced the curvature of his mouth in a way that bordered on spiritual—not worship, not reverence, but an enduring familiarity that lived inside lonely, grave song and reparations. I have carved out a place for you, it said. In my daily hours, in my quiet fortresses, you dwell.

Or was Charles assigning more meaning than was deserved? He couldn’t know. The helmet made Erik as opaque as ever.

“Charles,” said Erik, the soft inflection of his accent taking apart the name.

I’ve been so stupid, Charles thought. The most stupid, the worst.

“I can hear you thinking.”

“How ironic,” Charles said, “considering that’s normally my line.” He pulled away from Erik and covered his face, and marveled that he didn’t have the energy to panic. He named all the bones in him that were hurting, rather than counting to ten.

Erik shuffled near him, and he heard the safety lantern click and clatter as it was shaken. “Dead,” Erik reported.

“Wonderful.”

“The corridors have been narrow for some time again,” said Erik. “We’ll have to feel our way for the rest of the journey.”

Neither of them mentioned the obvious: they were buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface, the way back collapsed, the way forward uncertain, and without a spark to guide them. It was an impossible task. Their injuries were weakening them, limiting the time they could spend wandering in a black maw.

If he died here, at least he would not be alone. But Charles thought it was a poor way to go, all in all. Perhaps too similar to his stepfather—only a trap with less fire. Surely he merited more than that.

“I can’t think about this right now,” he whispered, feeling the phantom heat of Erik’s caress. His skin glorified its memory.

“A mantra I am familiar with,” said Erik. “Come, Charles. We’ve rested long enough.”

 

cxvi.

 

A weary evening, the kind that pulled hard at Charles’ heels and sunk him low, and a clock that was too loud—these were the hurdles he found oddly as difficult as his recovery. He encased himself in his personal study, but Alex found him not long before dinner. “You should at least have a drink,” Charles told him. “Sit a spell.”

“And miss Hank’s meatloaf? I’m game,” said Alex. He poured them whiskey, which at least had the virtue of being old and mean.

They clinked their glasses and toasted the school, which was still in its initial construction. The chess board was out—frozen in post-game laziness, pieces strewn—and Alex studied it with his brow furrowed. The drink made him braver than usual, because he looked at Charles and said, “It seems so long ago, and also like yesterday?”

Charles savored his liquor. “That’s time for you.”

"All that effort to stop Shaw," said Alex, his cradled hands pinkened by the fire, "and I have to wonder, Professor, if we just gave the world another version of him."

Charles considered his profile, banked by the rosy glow that half-illuminated the room. The world outside the windows of his study was in twilight, stars making their slow climb back into the sky and the moon waning. The wind battered against the walls, and he knew they would all feel very alone indeed tonight. He'd felt that way often enough in this house, on these nights. The loneliness bred dreams constructed out of big empty shapes: oceans barren of fish, where Sean might never find rippled sunshine, and for Alex, prisons perched on mountains that never discovered voice. These were the dreams of normal children whose minds redesigned their sleeping world to mimic their waking one.

(Hank was not afraid of people or places. His nightmares only harnessed one monster, and it was blue.)

"I'm sorry," said Alex. "I know you don't wanna hear that. But I can't help what I think."

"No, you can't," Charles said. "I wouldn't ask you to change your thoughts, not even those I can't find accord with." He wheeled himself closer to the fire, as well. "We have no way of knowing what Erik will do next, what shape he may yet take."

"I can hazard a pretty good guess."

"Let me tell you a story," Charles suggested. "It's about a horse trainer who lived with his son and owned a beautiful stallion. One day, that stallion escaped its pen and disappeared into the wild. The trainer's neighbor said, oh, that's so terrible! How unfortunate! But the trainer simply said, 'We'll see.'"

Alex raised an eyebrow.

"It's not that kind of comparison," said Charles, laughing. "Erik is no horse. Bear with me. The next day, the stallion returned to the pen with another wild stallion in tow. The trainer's neighbor exclaimed over his good fortune. How lucky! But the trainer simply said, 'We'll see.'”

“I thought Erik wasn’t the horse in this story.”

Charles ignored him. He pressed his thumbprints into the glass, wistful. “The next day, the new stallion kicked the trainer’s son and broke his leg in two places. How miserable, the neighbor said. Only, the following morning, the militia came through town to recruit able-bodied boys for their war. They could not take the son, who remained safely with his father. The neighbor told them how wonderful the whole business was. ‘We’ll see,’ said the trainer.”

Alex hung his head low, as if all the weight of the world was on his shoulders.

“The next day, both stallions were bitten by a roaming snake and had to be slaughtered. The water was fouled with blood. The bovine drunk it deeply and were suddenly clear of sight. The trainer opened all of his fences and doors and windows, and magpies brought him gold and riches.”

“We’ll see,” said Alex.

“Just so.” Charles shrugged. “The day after, the world ended and the soil cloaked itself in ruin.”

“But did it?”

“I think that’s the horrible part of it all,” Charles said, “and also the hopeful part of it all. How is anything known? Write it in a book. Calculate the odds. Allow for nothing else, and still you may end up surprised. Maybe in that bleak earth, a seed sprouted. But there’s no telling how any story ends until you’ve finished it, or what side of history you may end up on.”

Alex pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Maybe if Erik prescribed to your philosophies, Professor.”

“Now guess who told me that story?”

 

cxvii.

 

It took Erik a long time and a great deal of straining to lift himself with Charles on his back. Once in the air, the pervading black made Charles’ head spin more than before, and he wondered at the heat and tautness of his cheeks and neck. Infection? Embarrassment? Dehydration? All three would make a rope he could strangle himself with.

And even then, his thoughts were drawn to Erik. The press of his back against Charles’ belly, the solid plane of his sternum around which Charles hooked his arm. Charles could feel his exertion, the way his body struggled. He could feel, too, how easily Erik accepted him there, and for the first time recognized the trust implied in full.

Charles wanted to cup his throat and grind his pulse into smaller intervals. He wanted—what Erik had done, to remap those features that had given so little away.

The world hasn’t ended, he thought, but this is certainly some form of ruin. How did I miss it? How badly did I want to ignore my own mind?

“You’re burning up,” rasped Erik.

“I don’t know how you can tell,” said Charles, because Erik had soaked through both of their shirts and saturated him with a grimy sweat. Or maybe that was Charles’ doing; he wasn’t sure anymore. “I imagine my wound’s decided it’s had enough of all this mess.” He daubed his forehead with his sleeve.

“Don’t give it the pleasure. I still need you. Feel out with your hand. See if you can’t keep us steered away from the wall.”

“I’ll try my best.”

Charles grappled for something solid and startled a little when he found it. The craggy rock crumbled away, but he let his palm slide lightly over the surface. For earth buried so deep, it was clammy and weak. He tried to guide Erik from the wall, but they still stumbled more than they made headway, bumping into outcroppings blindly. The walk was slow, arduous. Erik’s footing was unsure.

Every hesitation, every jostle, Charles’ heart lodged high against his teeth. Anything could be in front of us. Any threat, any escape route, and we wouldn’t recognize it in time.

He was beginning to realize—and had always known, as if some limping animal paced restlessly behind his optimism, lean and hungry, eyes like green glass held to stars—that their travels would likely only find a fell, resigned tomb.

It made for a grim trek.

(And those few instances there were noises off in the pitch—gnarled by the silence, reverberating until they lost articulation—Erik and Charles both froze. They waited until the quiet came again. Charles tried to give name to the noises, but somehow that made them more frightening. Things with names weren’t buried this deep and left, like them, to atrophy.)

 

cxviii.

 

Time slunk by them in a surreal, otherworldly disguise. Charles could barely recognize its passing. There were entire pockets when he would come to himself, starting on Erik’s back and realizing he’d rested his temple to Erik’s and faded out of being. His vertigo increased, and he clung to Erik as an anchor as much as his only mode of transport. Charles wanted to speak—if only to distract himself from the danger, and from his new revelations—but his throat dried up and became like sour paste, and he had to be silent.

The air, he thought, after a long while. There’s no ventilation. It’s suffocating us minute by minute. We’re going deeper.

He gripped each cropping of rock like he could help bolster Erik, keep him on his feet with what strength remained. But they lurched. They halted. They only kept going because the inevitable was on their backs now, riding along.

“If I put us in a hole,” Erik said.

Charles squeezed him and rested his chin briefly against the helmet. He had given Erik enough forgiveness in this hellhole; a pinch more couldn’t hurt.

After all, in some parallel universe, in some other place and time, perhaps Erik had seen him across the crumbling cavern and met his eyes. And there, he stepped back, and lived.

 

cxix.

 

Anger was not something that Charles wore with any grace. When he couldn't control his temper, he turned to the bottle—an unfortunate side effect of many pub crawls and the way alcohol made thoughts difficult to catch, like soap bubbles beneath his thumb—or worse, he clamped down on the black mass of convoluted emotion until it escaped his reason. When Charles was angry, he embodied self-righteousness. He listened to no tongue speaking against his current. The alcohol and the priggishness, Charles had come to expose to light. He knew his failings. Patching himself up so that he was fit to teach children had been... trying.

But he loved them, and his school, and Charles believed in practicing what he preached. Be the better man indeed.

He was learning, one bad day at a time. He was evolving.

But Erik—every bloody time, Charles forgot himself and fought down to a common level, beneath layers of filth and regard. It never seemed to matter. Erik didn't bleed in the same manner as Charles. He’d been fleeced a long time ago of softness, of woundable places.

The first time Erik saw him in the wheelchair was burned into Charles' core memories. They came face to face at an underground bunker in Kansas, where children had been crying beneath the topsoil and waiting to be freed. Charles hadn’t assumed Erik and his brotherhood would care to rescue anyone who couldn’t fight, which was his own mistaken ego at work again. Of course Erik would. Erik, with children—there was something there, a foreign and yet impassioned fervor.

With the alarms blaring around them, and Sean flying past his wheelchair to slam into Angel before she could spit, Charles looked up at Erik for the first time since the beach.

It was the worst of Erik: closed off, single-minded, and cold.

Erik looked at him, then through him. It was as if Charles wasn't there at all, much less the contraption. Maybe he should have expected that. He hadn’t.

Charles felt locked in place. His chest closed in tight, his face felt hot, he knew he was going to cry if he stopped to think about it, so he didn't. He dug into embers and yanked out the ashen, delicate bones of his fury and flung them back into the fray.

Alex, he thought, reaching out. Do you remember how I made you practice with mannequins?

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Alex.

(Erik stopped ignoring him after that. It was not necessarily any better, and over the years Charles’ temper brittled like spindly roots until at last he learned to tread with care. That was not for Erik’s sake. It was for Charles, so that he might sleep.)

 

cxix.

 

They reached an edge where the ground gave way. Erik tentatively toed the ground and stepped back. “Sinkhole,” he said.

“Let me down. You’ll be able to feel it out easier that way.”

Erik couldn’t crouch—it pained him too terribly. But with some effort, Charles slid between his back and the wall until he was more or less in a sitting position on the ground, his spine rubbed raw. Above him, Erik coughed, hacking and rattled.

Charles gave him his pride and pretended not to notice. He groped in the darkness until he found a rock, and then he threw it gamely in the direction they’d been trying to go.

They each listened.

“Twenty-five feet?” Charles guessed, after the rock struck something hard.

“Thirty,” said Erik. “It bounced. Uneven terrain.”

He shuffled further from Charles, feeling his way carefully with each footfall. Every so often, he stopped, presumably coming to an edge, and continued on. Charles listened to him and tried to track his movements, afraid of losing his only tether. “Here’s the other side,” Erik said at last, and came back.

There was no inflection in the timber of his voice, no bent to read—but Charles knew Erik.

“There’s no way around it, is there,” said Charles.

Erik slid against the wall in much the same way Charles had, excruciating and slow. He sounded like a broken thing. “Where are we going, Charles?” he grated.

“Trying to get out,” Charles whispered, so tired. He had slept for so long, earlier on, and he was still tired and in pain.

“And if we can’t move forward?”

“There is always a way to move forward. But if you need to rest, let’s rest. Then we’ll backtrack and try to find another way.”

Erik didn’t say anything, but he remained perfectly still until his breathing began to sound less as something that had been shredded into mulch. He was close to Charles, perhaps closer than Charles even realized. He couldn’t feel whether they pressed together thigh to thigh, or whether Erik had tipped his toes against Charles’, but there was a sense of nearness that both put him at ease and on the wire.

And if there wasn’t a way out, would this be how they spent the last starved moments? How strange, to think that he may have already seen his last sight.

Charles closed his eyes against the fearsome unknown. “I’m very sick of looking at nothing,” he admitted. “If it’s all the same to you, I’m going inside for a little while. If you need me, give me a shake.”

"Inside?" asked Erik.

Charles tapped his temple, then remembered Erik couldn't see him. "In my mind," he explained. "There is no end to the creature comforts I'm sorely missing right now. You can call me pathetic if it pleases you, but never underestimate the power of a day dream. I fancy," and he thought about it, "an expensive drink and takeout from that chippy on the corner of Burdock and North Park. Oh, and a record. I never seem to have the time to listen to them anymore."

"Ah," Erik said, "so you're going to get drunk while I'm stuck here with manifest death looming.”

"You could come," said Charles, before rational got the better of him. It wasn't that he didn't want to relieve Erik of his current surroundings; they both were suffering from the crushing weight of the rock above them and the stiff, dried crust across their lips. Rather, Charles had never tried something like that before. He went into other people's minds, but he never brought them into his own. He had the ability—the knowledge and its potential gleamed like unpolished silver in the clutter of his headspace, underlain with isn't it the best magic trick—but Raven would have been afraid to try and there was no one else, really. Never had been.

"You could," he said again, quieter.

There was no way for Erik to know what he was offering. In a way, that made the invitation easier to give. The intimacy implied in the act—the control it would take to draw a consciousness into his own but keep it apart from everything he was, everything he felt and thought—was staggering. It was a two-way door of impossible trust. It was an equation with no solution. No matter how clearly Charles delineated the space, it would give his desires away in an instant. No matter how cleanly he separated their consciousness, some remnant of Erik would be left behind, like a half-eaten apple on the counter, like the scent of another man's detergent.

He expected to regret saying anything at all. He didn't.

There was a noise, the scratch of skull against stone. Erik was rubbing the back of his head against the cavern wall. "I itch all over," he said. Good god, he had taken off the damned helmet.

Charles felt flushed hot and cold at the same time. He swallowed. "Any particular cravings?" he asked, lifting his fingertips to his temple.

"Something with class," said Erik. "What's the use of playing a record if it's the same drivel that's on the radio now?”

“Then come out of the cold,” Charles said, and took his hand.

 

cxx.

 

Frost clung in lacy whorls to the window panes, but the apartment was warm and abstract, something perfect if not given too much thought. Charles sunk low in his armchair, closest to the fire, and gluttoned on the paisley wallpaper and crooked keystone over the door. It was three rooms, barely: the living area crammed with straining bookshelves, the bedroom door lazing open to shadow, and the kitchen a lime green oasis. On the coffee table, next to heaped empty tea cups and an unorganized set of sample slides, the record player clicked softly over vinyl.

"Billie Holiday," said Erik, with something very much like a smile from the second armchair. He was wearing a turtleneck but there was dirt in his hair, and Charles cursed his unfortunate unconsciousness. But Erik didn’t seem to notice, so he decided to leave it unchanged for now. “Extraordinary.”

“Is that enough class for you, old friend?”

“You’ve outdone yourself.” Erik looked around them with a peculiar expression. He leaned over and stroked the record player’s polished casing.

It was a tactility that Charles could feel and he knew, immediately, this was a terrible idea.

"It was our first apartment after I started Oxford," he said, swallowing, running his palms over the torn velvet of the armchair—like a Velveteen Rabbit, long old, long loved. "It was only a shoe box, of course, even with my inheritance footing the bill. Everything near the university was built like that. But it was the first time we'd struck out by ourselves, and I was never happier, I think."

Erik tilted his head. He was looking at the dresser only just visible through the bedroom door, and Raven’s things collected on top of it. Her hairbrush, her paperbacks with their dogged corners and limp covers. A half-used tube of lipstick, the wrong color.

"Is she always five minutes from home?" he asked.

Of course he knows, thought Charles, despairing and glad, too, that he had no need to explain himself. “It helps,” he said.

“It does,” agreed Erik.

"Do you want something to quench your thirst, if only in mind and not body? You have your pick of poisons. I have a Scotch I'm particularly fond of." He stood and crossed to the mini bar by the fireplace. There hadn't been a fireplace in the apartment, but he had wanted one. There hadn't been a mini bar, either.

When he didn't get an answer, Charles looked over his shoulder at Erik, uncapping the Scotch. "Erik?"

Erik stared at him, and although he would have seemed made of stone to the stranger's eye, Charles could see how shaken he was. He didn't appear to be breathing.

You're an idiot, Charles thought as he figured it out. He gave Erik an uncomfortable smile. "I hope you'll forgive me. I'm sure it ruins the illusion, but I can't bear to shackle myself in my own head."

"No," said Erik, hoarsely. "That's all right, Charles."

"It's been so long," Charles said, "but I still walk in my dreams." He poured two fingers of liquor in his glass, admittedly generous in the measurements. "Do you still like that foul stuff?"

"Doppelbock? Yes, but give me what you're having."

“And fish and chips? That will sit all right with you?”

“This is ridiculous,” said Erik, and then, “Yes. Malt vinegar, please.”

“You’ll feel much better for it,” Charles assured him, and brought him the drink. “A game while we wait, for the sake of realism?”

(They played chess. The hot foggy smell of fish and chips wafted in from the kitchen, leftovers crusted with salt. They ate out of newspaper, smeared with grease, and Charles was relieved because it was a better way to die, all in all.)

 

cxxi.

 

When they were full, and the music had begun to grow quiet and blotted, and the snow fixed itself to the windows and the Scotch had put a glow in Charles’ belly, and Erik was languid in the armchair and creating a blurred imprint in Charles’ mind, Charles knew it was time to separate. He had lost track of time in the reality around them. They would need to keep moving. He needed to remove Erik, too, before his mind sweetened those scars and kept them.

At least, he decided, if they were trapped—if they would dehydrate—he knew what to do in those last agonizing hours. Neither of them need suffer. And then an idea, the bare bones of one, began to take shape in the book titles on the shelves around them. The letters rearranged and gleamed as thread.

Erik, as if he knew his thoughts, watched him across the chess board. His half-lidded eyes were the same color as the water Charles had found him in. “That you can do this,” he said, low, “is astonishing.”

Charles hid a smile behind his palm. “It is, isn’t it?”

“May I have another drink?” Erik asked, and Charles knew it was only to see him walk again.

He wanted to. He wanted to give Erik that, and to stay.

“I’ve been a poor host,” he said instead, and gently lifted the record player needle. The vinyl spun on. “I’ve kept you too long.”

“Charles, do you know another way out?”

“I do,” said Charles, and let the darkness seep back into the windows until the universe hollowed out around them and rebuilt itself into something unforgiving. He was not sure where the border had been crossed; they traversed it with a grace Charles hadn’t practiced. The fire submerged. The foundation fell from beneath them into ghostly, shriveling lines.

He said, still newborn into the black, “You have to leave me behind, Erik.”