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When Erik leans against the edge of a building, eyes on the presidential motorcade, he feels – if not happy, then at least at home. The metal around Erik sings to him: the warm weight of his pistol; the gentle tapping, like raindrops, of the studs in the shoes of passerby, and further away, but coming closer now, the unmistakable movement of cars. Large, fancy cars, for only the fanciest of people. Erik curls his lip. He much prefers the cars.
The cars are top-of-the-line – Erik can feel the way the motors run cleanly, the engine humming smoothly and powerfully. But his job today is more important, and so he focuses on the enormous crowd, with both his eyes and his power. Looking for someone who was, by the police report, utterly unremarkable to see – slight, with dark hair, a bit shorter than average. Carrying a rifle.
Not for the first time, Erik thanks his luck for having the idea to tap into police radio; it's altogether more like an idea Charles would have had. He has always preferred force in his previous endeavors, but today’s kind of work is all about subtlety.
Suddenly, there – the song of a large piece of metal, carefully shaped to hold the bullets poised inside. Erik swivels his gaze towards the window of the Book Depository, but the first of the presidential cars was already passing, and now he must act. In the commotion he could not hear the crack of the first gunshot, but instinctively his power seizes upon the bullet, tunes to its high-pitched wail - beautiful, in its own way - when it clears the barrel of the gun. He pushes it upwards and twists its trajectory, making it harmlessly curve above the limousine and into the face of the building behind it. A second bullet slices through the edge of his senses, and he reaches for it – and is suddenly, painfully elbowed in the face. Someone is screaming at him, but he can’t focus on the words, because it is taking all of his concentration to hold onto that bullet in the haze of metal of the crowds – but when he follows the pointing finger of the man, he sees his own pistol. Fallen out of its holster, god knows how, and in plain sight on the ground.
Scheiße.
He goes to pick it up and is abruptly shoved in the sternum by the man - police, he can now see - and the sudden flash of pain obscures his vision. The bullet – he fumbles in the air, but it's nowhere to be found, and he can only hope he had curved it enough, but the screaming that begins in the distance assures him that he has already failed. He barely notices when the third bullet is fired, but when it buries itself in Kennedy's head his mind flares with anger. He has the policeman’s belt wrapped around his neck with a single thought, snarling in his face, and is on the verge of pulling it taut when a dart catches him in the neck, and his vision fades.
His first week in solitary, it isn't so bad. After a lifetime of being around metal, its memory is soothing, even if there is none of it as far as it can reach. During the trial, it was hearing the metal around him that kept him sane, that kept him from bringing the building down around his accusers. He doesn't know why he didn't do it, maybe a badly mistimed recollection of the kindness of some humans he has known (Moira: though he didn't like her, he respected her; Magda, stubborn and beautiful, Avner and Levi, back when he was a preteen scrounging for food in German streets; his mother.) And God knows why he's thinking of his mother now. One week in solitary – he can't go insane yet.
One week becomes one month, one month becomes two and three and twelve. Erik meditates, the way Charles taught him – but he mustn't think of Charles. Recollections of him came often, in the first few months, when the lack of companionship, of brotherhood, of speech and touch blossomed from a want into a hurt, into a physical need. But just as he had, a long, long time ago, managed to push away his hunger for days at a time, so he did this. And if, sometimes, he found his own thumb stroking back and forth along his arm, or the back of his neck, in a parody of the way someone else had done long ago, well, what of it? Childish habits, that's all.
Two years in, or maybe three, Erik feels something stir at his power in the midst of meditation. It's faint, a baseline murmur, not coming from anywhere in particular that Erik can feel, so he dismisses it as hallucination. Born of sensory deprivation, no doubt, though he didn't know the theory applied to mutant senses as well. That would be interesting to tell -
No. And it no longer takes much effort to turn his mind away, steer it back into counting as high as he can in every language he knows, doing push-ups to match. (He is still in decent physical shape; bodyweight exercises can do wonders, and the endorphins were helpful in the beginning, when he had nightmares. Now he rarely dreams.) He smiles, slow; he thinks it's a smirk. Eins, zwei, drei...
Five-and-a-half years in, the murmur at his power has become stronger. As he turns, standing in the center of his cement-and-glass cell, it varies slightly, a fact that had confused him until, one night, dreaming, it had come to him: north. Magnetic north, and that morning he had stood up and paced around his cell, feeling the murmur – magnetic fields, he knows now – change and twist and flex. He closes his hands, grips them with his power (but doesn't dare to so much as pluck them), feels as if a part of him that had slowly been cut away has suddenly been replaced. He doesn't smile; his happiness is deeper than that.
Eight years in, when an elderly guard who makes it a habit to spit on his cell's glass ceiling comes to give him his daily ration, Erik throws the fields at him. They say, later, that he died of a stroke.
Nine years, ten months, and twenty-three days in, a new guard comes, a bit later than usual, with hair stridently non-regulation silver. Erik doesn't care – has stopped caring a long time ago – but has enough sense to shield his head from the glass when the ceiling of his cell shatters. He is not quite sure what is going on, still, but his body has enough sense to hoist itself out of the cell when the “guard” beckons, impatiently.
The first thing he hears – he doesn't know if it's with his ears or not – is the elevator, like a giant bell. Metal. The boy next to him says something, and he hears himself answering, but can't quite make out what he is saying. His ears are ringing.
Then guards arrive, and he is blurring through the air, and is surrounded by metal. As the elevator ticks upwards, he sways, and slowly, slowly, rests his forehead against the steel of its wall. He breathes in its tang, and the feeling of metal all around – like the magnetic fields, only stronger, a scream to their hum – steadies him a bit. He answers the boy's questions. He doesn't think he can stand.
But he does, of course, back ramrod-straight (“posture,” he hears someone say, long ago), and the doors slide open, and the scream of the elevator's metal doubles, and doubles again, but before his vision goes completely fuzzy he recognizes someone. Different, surely, though he himself feels the same, and his brain blurts “Charles” before he can even consider what the combination of “Charles” and “here” means. His vision wavers.
Charles punches him. The pain centers him, oddly, and he stumbles back against the wall but his eyes focus, and by gritting his teeth he is able to blot out some of the metal. He wants to laugh, but he doesn't quite remember how.
He touches a stubbornly trembling hand to his mouth, looking for blood, and lifts his eyes to Charles' once again. Some of the old snark surfaces, years buried, and the corner of his lip twitches upwards.
“Good to see you too, old friend.”