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The school was flourishing, more students arriving every month, and it was unquestionably the greatest joy in Charles's life. But every new arrival seemed to magnify the chaos exponentially, and every now and then Charles simply couldn't take it anymore. He had to get some distance from the noise—physical and mental—before he cracked.
It had taken some time to modify the grounds where he could traverse them in his chair; Charles likely wouldn't have bothered except that there was no telling what sorts of special needs the school would encounter as it continued collecting its Gifted Youngsters. Right now he was certainly glad he'd done it; only after maneuvering all the way out of the gardens and past the pond did he feel the pressure in his head begin to ease. Eventually the entire school, so long as he didn't focus on it, was only a faint background hum.
Which made it that much easier to spot the all-too-familiar mind approaching swiftly from the opposite direction.
Charles did not straighten his collar as Erik drew closer overhead, and he certainly did not adjust his hair. It was windy, that was all; he needed it out of his eyes.
By the time Erik dropped gently onto the grass in front of him, Charles was ready to deal with whatever nonsense this man was about to bring back into his life. And if his palms were a little sweaty, it was nobody's business but his own.
For a long moment they just looked at each other. Charles knew he, for one, looked very different than he had the last time they saw each other, over a year ago. He was cleanshaven and short-haired, now, and probably lacked only the cardigan to look very much like he had in 1962—and that only because it was much too warm a day for layering.
Erik, on the other hand, could almost have stepped from the dropped stadium to the school grounds, still wearing the same ridiculous armor and cape. His hair was a little longer, the outfit a bit more battered—what had he been up to? Not that Charles cared, except for the sake of Erik's victims.
"Hello, old friend," Erik said after a long moment, and curse the man for having always that soft intensity in his voice when he spoke to Charles, that wounded sincerity that made Charles want to—never mind what he wanted to do.
"Hello, Erik," he said, proud that his voice came out evenly. "What are you doing here?"
"I see you've reopened the school," Erik said, instead of answering the bloody question. "And you have your powers back."
I had a promise to keep, Charles said. And we melted down that stupid helmet, if that's what you're here for.
Erik's expression became a bit… pinched, and his mind roiled with something oddly close to revulsion. "No. That's not what I'm here for."
"Then what…" Charles trailed off, because suddenly Erik's cape was snapping violently in a breeze that cut through Charles's thin button-up like a cold razor. Frowning, he and Erik both glanced up at the sky—cloudless blue only moments ago, and now crowded with heavy gray clouds. Charles swore under his breath.
"What's happening?" Erik said.
"Ororo," Charles muttered. "Her power is control over weather, except it's… not so much control, at present."
"We should get you back to the mansion, before it gets worse."
"I'm sure she'll calm down presently. You and I are not nearly done talking, and I'm not letting you into my school until we are."
That was when it began to snow.
Just set us down here, Charles called to Erik's mind, not bothering with a shout that the wind would howl right over.
I am not lost, Erik replied. Charles had not even suspected that he might be; now he was convinced of it.
Doesn't matter, Charles said. I'm numb all over; we're both going to freeze to death if we don't find shelter. There's a gardening shed below us, take us down.
He was quite sure the only thing that looked sillier than Erik flying through a snowstorm with the power of magnetism was his own hovering wheelchair trailing behind, but at least the exercise had gotten them to shelter of some kind.
Not by any means the best kind, Charles saw as they settled to the snow-piled ground and Erik pulled the door open. "Shed" was almost too generous a word for what was essentially an outdoor closet with wind wailing through the cracks in the walls. Erik beckoned to the wheelchair, only for it to be halted by the narrow doorway. Before Charles could say a word, Erik lifted him from the seat and carried him inside, the chair folding itself docilely to follow.
Every metal object inside the shed—rusty tools, a broken wheelbarrow—was moving before the door even closed behind them, melting and coating the walls. Within moments, the wind was reduced to a mere noise rather than a demon driving needles into Charles's skin. The sudden hush—comparatively speaking—left Charles's head spinning.
Or, Charles admitted very quietly to himself, as Erik continued cradling him tightly against his chest, there might be another reason for that feeling.
"I suppose furniture was too much to ask for," Erik muttered as a penlight rose from his pocket and cast feeble light across the shed. With the tools dissolved, all that remained was a scattering of half-rotten lumber, some odd bits of plastic and a tattered gardening glove.
Charles tried to form a snotty reply about the substandard accommodations, but found his teeth were chattering too hard for him to speak.
"Right then. Hold on to me, Charles." Erik kicked a board against the wall—putting a layer between himself and the cold metal—and sat down on it, moving carefully so as not to dislodge Charles's shaky grip around his neck. Which, when had that happened precisely?
"Don't be silly, Erik, put me down," Charles bit out between his chattering teeth.
"The only warmth we have in here is body heat," Erik said flatly. "Trust me, Charles, hypothermia's no fun."
The words came on a dim wave of memory—nearly freezing to death in the camps, people on either side of him who were less lucky. Charles stopped complaining, even if he did feel a bit like a toddler, held in Erik's lap like this.
That was a lie. The feelings he was having were anything but childlike, but they also had absolutely no place in this situation or in his life at all.
"There's a blanket in my chair, if it didn't blow away," Charles said, instead of feeling things. "I keep it over my legs, since my circulation's not what it was."
Erik extended a hand, dragging the folded chair over, and pulled the snow-spattered blanket free.
"My cape will help, too."
"I suppose it has to be good for something." The jab had no real heat to it, but Charles was still surprised when it got a smile out of Erik.
For a few minutes they worked together in busy silence, arranging blanket and cape in a sort of tent around them in the dim illumination of the penlight, now stuck magnetically to the floor. They were almost settled when Charles realized Erik had unbuckled his hard breastplate as well as the cape; the soft shirt beneath was much kinder to Charles's cheek and temple when he leaned against it.
"Taking off your armor for me, Erik?"
I always have, Erik thought but did not say aloud, and Charles could have screamed because it was so blatantly untrue—but that would take too much energy, and it was… it was nice to hear, true or not.
"Warming up now?" Erik asked.
"You can lay off the Knight Errant bit, Erik, you were in the cold just as long as I was." As he spoke, Charles was burrowing his face into Erik's chest—heaven help him, the man still smelled as good as he had in 1962, in that hotel room in Tennessee where they finally, finally kissed for the first time, where Erik had held him like he was doing right now… No one else had ever held him this way, as if he were precious and amazing, as if he wanted to keep him safe.
In the hotel in Paris, too, Erik had touched him with such trembling gentleness, his mind murmuring things he couldn't say aloud, things like Love and Miss you and You are more beautiful than I can bear.
If Charles's eyes stung suddenly, it was easy to blame on the cold.
"Why did you come here, Erik?" he asked finally, his voice soft and muffled against Erik's shirt. When Erik didn't respond, he wondered if he'd even heard him, over the moaning wind.
"I hear great things of the school," Erik said finally. "Word is spreading, in the… circles in which I move, that mutant children finally have a safe place to go. How many students do you have now?"
"Over two hundred. Including Peter Maximoff—you remember him, the boy who helped us break you out?"
Erik huffed, an amused sound. "Obnoxious sprout."
Charles grinned, unable to disagree. "And that's just the children—we have adults, staff of course, but others just needing sanctuary for a while. Emma stayed a surprisingly long time."
"Emma?" Erik looked floored. "She's alive?"
Charles felt his eyebrows raise. "I truly thought you knew—in fact I thought she was headed your way when she left. It turns out she stumbled across our old friend Moira while she was in Stryker's hands, managed to restore her memory and enlist her help. Moira got Emma, Sean, and several others out, it was quite dramatic. Oh! You probably don't know about Darwin, either! I always knew it seemed dodgy that Shaw could kill him so easily—turns out it just took time for him to pull himself back together. He and Alex share a room in the teachers' quarters now."
"A fairytale ending." Erik shifted, adjusting Charles's weight in his lap—pulling him closer. "Not many mutants seem to get those."
We certainly didn't. Charles closed his eyes and tried not to shiver; the shed was still far from warm. "You haven't answered my question. Why are you here, Erik?"
"You're lucky I am. You would have frozen to death out there, without me."
"I would have called Hank or someone to come help me," Charles said irritably, all the more annoyed because he still could, but he didn't actually want to, and that wasn't sensible of him at all. He never had been sensible, when it came to Erik.
"How is Hank?" Erik asked. "Is he finally embracing his true self, like you, or still hiding in his drugs?"
"What do you care?" The anger was sudden and hot, a relief from the other things he didn't want to feel. "The last time you saw Hank—Hank, who we trained together, our first recruit—you sicced a Sentinel on him. And what you did to Logan, whose sum total of crimes against you equalled breaking you out of prison—"
The wave of emotion from Erik swamped Charles into stunned silence—a degree of sorrow and shame he'd never felt from Erik before. The Great Magneto, ashamed?
"Charles," he said very quietly. "Did you never wonder why I made no attempt to take the helmet with me, that day?"
"Well," Charles said icily, "I supposed you knew I'd lobotomize you if you did."
"There was that, too." Erik sounded almost amused, the prat, but the levity died quickly. "Did you ever notice that most of the things you really hate me for doing were done while I was wearing that thing?"
"It's occurred to me to wonder if it functions as an off-switch to the brain," Charles said, meaning it as something of a joke—but Erik wasn't laughing.
"Not off," he said thoughtfully. "Almost the opposite, thinking more, more loudly, more certainly but with less control, less… In Israel, once, the brakes went out on my car, going downhill. It felt like that."
"Erik, what are you saying?"
"That that helmet does things to me that I don't like. Maybe Shaw tainted it somehow. Maybe there are just side effects to keeping my brain waves echoing off each other inside my own skull, unable to escape." He scraped fingers through his hair, wincing as if in remembered pain. "I'm glad you melted it down."
Charles could not think of a single thing to say, but he found that it wasn't possible anymore to keep his body from melting completely against Erik's, greedy for any warmth but especially his. Always his.
Erik clung to him, in the cold loud dimness of the garden shed, seeming to expect no further forgiveness than this—Charles not drawing away when he held him close and brushed a thumb slowly, absently, back and forth across the very edge of Charles's cheek.
"I've been thinking a lot about the future Logan told us about," Erik said at last. "Obviously a lot went wrong, in that version of events, but evidently we did both manage to get out of the trouble we were in last year—me in prison, you in a sinkhole of depression and drink. I wonder how it happened, without Logan to speed us along." With an unmistakable tinge of hope, he said, "I wonder if you still broke me out. Found out I was innocent, perhaps."
"Mmm." Charles shifted uncomfortably. "Actually, I—picked up a bit, about that, from my future self. That part's a long story," he said, waving it off when Erik, startled, would have inquired further. "But no, you broke out on your own, eventually, and I… bestirred myself to put a stop to the mad spree of violence you immediately embarked on." He couldn't help huffing a laugh. "Some things never change."
He could distinctly feel that Erik wanted to protest, but with the Stadium Incident looming large in both their memories, Erik had no leg to stand on.
"We were both right, you know," Charles murmured. "In that terrible future. You were right about the humans turning on us, rounding us up for experimentation and death. But I was right, too. There were humans, millions of them, who helped us, defended us. That's partly why the situation was so very dire—the Sentinels killed them, too, until there was almost no one left on the entire planet."
"You have that backwards," Erik said. "They joined forces with us because the Sentinels were killing them. That's what Logan said—not just mutants but parents of mutants, carriers of latent mutation, all of them were targeted too. They were saving themselves, not us."
"I suppose there were some who wouldn't have lifted a finger otherwise," Charles admitted. "But you're missing the point. They joined us because they realized they were us. The divide between us is not so vast as you imagine, even in the worst of times. Honestly, it barely exists at all, and only because so many want it to." He had looked up from Erik's chest as his argument grew more animated; when Erik glanced down to meet his eyes, he was startled to realized exactly how close their faces were.
They stayed that way for a very long moment. Outside the shed, the blizzard ceased as suddenly as it had begun, the wind's wail trailing off into nothing.
"Do you think we've really prevented that future?" Erik whispered at last, into the ringing silence.
"Maybe." Somehow Charles was unable to raise his voice above a whisper himself. "But things could still go wrong, so wrong. I think we were hardly able to do more, in that future, than cancel each other out, with our constant fighting. The only way to find our best future is to work together."
He regretted the words as soon as he'd spoken them. They were the plea of an abandoned lover, desperate and needy, and he'd sworn never to be that man again.
But Erik… whatever he'd expected from Erik in response, it wasn't this softening of his eyes, this crooked half-smile, full of sheepish nerves and hope. "Charles," he said, lips brushing Charles's as they moved, "why do you think I came back?"