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The problem, Charles figures, is that he's out of everything but port, and port is a sipping drink and not nearly as easily slammed back as say, whiskey or gin; also, the bend of his left arm is swollen and bruised because Hank has been in the lab for a week trying to fix things the only way he knows how, and Charles feels just guilty enough to allow the repeated injections of some substance he should probably regard with slightly less apathy; also, he's been sitting in the bedroom of their last student, who was killed in Vietnam last week and whose parents want his belongings back, for several hours now because the thought of looking at biology notes for a test never taken and folding winter sweaters never worn makes him want to scream, or cry, or both.
Come to think of it, the problem is...everything, really. And it's been the problem for quite a while now.
"Buck up, old chap," he mutters—he's doing a lot of talking to himself these days, since it keeps him from talking to people who aren't there—and takes a fortifying sip of port, blanches at its too-sweet burn. Just drunk enough to numb himself, not enough to make him useless and sloppy; that’s the ticket, no matter how much he’d prefer the latter. The first two desk drawers go quickly, notes and books and graded reports that he piles into cardboard boxes without looking at them too closely; the third drawer requires more effort. A few Playboys, letters from a human girlfriend back home, a handful of baseball cards, a Swiss Army knife, some old joints, and, under everything, a small bag of white powder.
Charles picks it up gingerly and holds it up to the light. The crystals aren't uniform in size or shape, some fine like sugar, others in small chunks like sea salt or rock candy. He does know what this is—he's not quite the old fart Raven always thought—though he can't claim to know much about it, besides that Freud was quite fond of the stuff. Some half-remembered rumors about possible military applications, as alertness aid for sleep deprived soldiers or a component of some kind of biochemical weapon or some such thing.
He knows he should throw it away, or give it to Hank. Instead he puts it in his pocket and forgets about it for three weeks.
“Careful!” Hank yelps, which doesn’t stop Charles from careening into the nearest table as effectively as the gargantuan blue paw wrapped around his upper arm. With his help, Charles finds his feet—he finds his feet—and focuses on retaining his precarious balance.
It works. He’s standing up.
He looks up at Hank, whose wide eyes and slack jaw telegraph surprise more than anything else, and suddenly they’re both laughing with an edge that Charles hopes only sounds mildly hysterical.
“I never thought I’d do this again,” he admits, and his gasping laughter now sounds a bit more like he’s having trouble breathing. “I owe you an apology, my friend. Never should have doubted you. You’re an absolute genius.”
“I wasn’t sure it would work either.” Hank tentatively releases Charles’ shoulder, watching his awkward swaying with the critical focus and total confidence he still only demonstrates when matters scientific are involved. “My track record isn’t exactly stellar. I did have a feeling I was on the right track but I didn’t expect such a marked improvement from the last attempt.”
Neither did Charles, though the faint hope that blossomed the first time he moved his right foot a single centimeter never fully vanished. He tried so hard to cling to his apathy, to the conviction that Hank was wasting his time. The doctors were very clear: nonoperable, permanent damage to the spinal cord, resulting in irreversible paraplegia. To even consider anything else would be delusional. Which isn’t to say delusional isn’t in his future, and possibly not too far in his future at that, judging by the frequency with which he sees flashes of blue skin in the shadows or hears his name whispered with a distinctly German accent—but still, no need to hasten its arrival.
But then Hank—lovely, brilliant Hank, with hope enough for the both of them—created a series of serums, refining the formula so that each was more effective than the last: he could wiggle his toes, move his feet, then feel his calves, then a less-than-successful version that gave him stabbing pains in his thighs, then he could control the movement of his hips, and now this: listing sideways like the drunkard he’s fast becoming but standing.
“How’s your head?” Hank asks, reaching for a clipboard to take down his usual scrupulous notes. “Any pain? Can you hear my thoughts?”
Charles stretches out his telepathy, braced for the low, throbbing pain that now fills his skull every time he touches another mind. Nothing happens. A slight tightness in the back of his head, like the beginning of a headache, but barely detectable beneath the sudden shock of sensory input coming from below his waist. “Hardly any. And nothing concrete. I can tell you’re pleased, you’re wondering about unexpected side effects—none, before you ask—but those are vague impressions, more emotions than thoughts. I can’t make out anything clearly. Like white noise, or static on the radio. It’s not unpleasant, just…odd.”
“Excellent. Let’s try a few steps, see how close you are to walking. Try to take it easy.”
Charles exhales another breath of laughter. He can’t remember the last time he smiled this much. “I’ve been taking it easy for quite some time, Hank, and this is more than worth the effort.”
He revises that opinion several hours later when, exhausted from Hank’s careful scrutiny and bruised from repeated falls during a grand total of three circuits of the lab, he excuses himself to make a cup of tea. That seems like an excellent idea at the bottom of the stairs and far too much effort by the time he drags himself up them, so he lurches into the study and collapses onto the couch, too tired to do more than rub futilely at the atrophied muscles in his legs. The sensory input he still treasures—abstractly—is now shooting pain so bad that he’d cry, if it wouldn’t take more energy than he currently possesses.
He drifts for awhile, not quite asleep but not far off. The high of successfully walking dissipates into the high he’s coming to associate with the serum and the absence of telepathy; everything’s just a little softer, slower, and he can’t tell if it’s been minutes or hours, and he feels like coming unmoored and just spinning off into space is a real possibility, maybe even a good idea.
Downstairs, Hank’s thoughts hum so quietly they’re almost undetectable. He must be asleep, and god knows the poor boy deserves it after all late nights he’s pulled these past few weeks.
Charles, meanwhile, leaves a trail of empty bottles in his wake these days, is well on his way to creating a permanent fetal-position-shaped impression in his mattress, and has a stack of unread genetics journals spilling from the bedside table to the floor because he can’t bring himself to read them or cancel his subscriptions. Seems impossible that not too long ago he would have been at Hank’s side, bent over beakers and microscopes until dawn or Erik’s arrival to tell them both to knock it off, they’ll be useless tomorrow, Cerebro can wait and Charles, you know I don’t like that hunk of scrap metal—
“Oh, bite me, Erik. I’m tired,” Charles mumbles into the couch cushions. “Bastard,” he adds for good measure.
Erik, if he were here in the flesh and not just in every corner of Charles’s brain, would scoff at that, raise a disdainful eyebrow, and sweep out of the room in judgmental silence. His silences always were particularly eloquent. It’s so easy to imagine him sitting in his old armchair, chess pieces floating idly at his elbow, watching what Charles has become and shaking his head in disappointment.
And for once they agree: Charles is disappointed in himself too. And he is so very tired of being tired.
But he doesn’t have to be, he remembers suddenly.
Swept up on a wave of adrenaline and something like hope—god knows he has enough drugs in his system already, what’s one more, especially if it works?—Charles limp-lurches to the desk and tips the powder onto the smooth mahogany surface. He feels both ridiculous and reckless as he crushes the small pieces with a letter opener, then uses it to separate the pile into thin lines the length of two of his knuckles. That’s how people do this, right? It seems easiest, at least.
You have impaired judgment, warns half his brain; it’s just an alertness aid, soothes the other, but before either half has made much of an argument he leans down and takes a deep breath in through his nose.
A firecracker goes off in his brain. Without warning his mind explodes outward; his telepathy sweeps through the mansion, where Hank is dreaming of the lake outside filling with serum instead of water, across the miles to the nearest town—a couple fighting, a girl studying, a man meeting an old friend, and dreams so easily lifted from unconscious minds that they seem to be leaping out at him—and beyond, stretching to the Hudson River. What would have knocked him out cold with a three-day migraine when he woke up is now painless, effortless.
If his legs still hurt, he can’t feel them. Distantly he’s aware of a bitterness stuck in his nostrils and dripping down the back of his throat, a strange numbness in his lips, but they seem unimportant. His mind feels like it’s escaped the confines of his skull. What wastes of space bodies are! Especially broken, useless ones like his. Why would he ever subject himself to that—
Charles chokes, and not just because the numbness in his throat is triggering his gag reflex. He pulls his telepathic sweep up short, honing in on Sing Sing Correctional Facility, and finds it again: the most beautiful mind he’s ever felt.
Erik is less than ten miles away.
Charles almost misses him because Erik’s mind feels different. Muted, somehow, like all those sharp edges and shimmering metallic bright spots are wrapped in cotton. Erik’s thoughts were never this foggy, even asleep; his is the prickliest, most carefully compartmentalized mind Charles has ever touched. Now it feels wrong.
Curiosity, instinct, anger—something not rational—sends telepathic hooks into Erik’s brain and pulls Charles after them, though he flinches back before Erik can sense a foreign presence in his thoughts that, in its chemically altered state, would probably feel just as wrong to Erik as Erik does to him. Yanking himself away from Erik’s mind and into a basic projection of his physical body is like getting kicked in the head, and it takes him a few seconds to reorient himself and look around.
The only part of the cell that registers is the low bed holding a bearded, skinny form almost unrecognizable from the suave, immaculately-dressed man that Charles used to know. Charles would think he was asleep, except Erik never slept sprawled out like this and his muscles are too loose. There’s something strangely vulnerable about his hand as it dangles limply off the side of the bed.
Charles’s heart feels like it’s pounding hard enough to bruise his ribcage. He shouldn’t be here. He should go. He should leave Erik the way Erik left him. Serve him right, the bastard.
He should, but instead of backing away he comes forward and kneels next to the bed. The exhaustion from the serum has entirely vanished, swamped by a wave of adrenaline strong enough to restart several stopped hearts. He’s never felt more awake in his life, entirely dedicated to devouring the more prominent line of Erik’s collarbone, the livid bruises along his jaw, his scraped knuckles; looking away is unimaginable. Besides, better this than crawling back into Erik’s mind, so close and so open and so tempting even in its own chemically altered state. He might never make it back out.
“You stupid, stupid man,” Charles says. His voice is awkwardly loud in the cell’s total silence. “Even now, after everything you’ve done, you’re still—” insufferable insane beautiful “–fighting. It didn’t have to be this hard. Why did you have to make it so hard?”
Erik’s forehead creases in a frown that seems more confused than upset, and the hand hanging off the bed twitches, half-consciously reaching out for a body that isn’t there. Knowing he shouldn’t, Charles solidifies his projection and lets both of them feel Erik’s fingers tangle in his sweater, tugging weakly, trying to pull Charles closer. Erik’s eyes move behind closed lids but he seems unable—or unwilling—to open them.
“C’mere,” he slurs.
Charles scoffs, pulling back enough to convey his displeasure but not enough to dislodge Erik’s grip. “Absolutely not. If you think you can—”
“’S my dream. Be nice, this time. Forgive me.”
The commands sound more like pleas, soft and wistful, and Charles is fighting the urge to do something stupid, like reach out in return, when Erik blinks slowly. His eyes are dim and his pupils enormously dilated, but when he finally focuses on Charles’s face one corner of his mouth twitches up.
“’Llo.” Erik sweeps his unsteady gaze from Charles unkempt hair and beard to his frumpy sweater, and there goes that damn eyebrow, though it seems more quizzical than dismissive this time. “You look awful.”
“Oh, please. You need a haircut too and your bruises don’t match your prison uniform, so let’s not pretend that I’m the only one struggling, aesthetically,” Charles snaps, irritated that Erik’s only response is an exhausted huff of laughter and even more irritated that he still can’t seem to pull himself away, that he somehow wants to be on the other side of the cell and inside Erik’s skin at the same time. Peevishly, he adds, “You never used to find me lecturing you so bloody amusing, you know. I’m not sure I like it.”
“You always did like a…captive audience, professor,” Erik says. He’s breathing heavily and every word seems to take a monumental effort. “’Sides, no pressing engagements…shame I’m already asleep, but by all means, lecture away…”
“Look, there’s little point in shouting at you—which I’d very much like to do—if you think it’s your own brain doing it, psychological implications of that aside, so I’d like to state for the record that you’re not asleep, I am not a dream, and I find the fact that you’ve been practically in my back yard for god knows how long to be extremely—disconcerting. You’re supposed to be in Texas.”
“Escape attempt. Got tired…of waiting for you.”
The words come out distant and even without being in his mind Charles can feel Erik’s confusion, his natural skepticism trying to struggle free of the sedative that coats his thoughts like molasses, turning everything thick and slow. Part of him wants to pass out again, knowing that the more hope he allows himself, the more it will hurt when this turns out to be a dream after all. Erik hates not having his wits about him, hates being powerless, and from the faint tug on his belt buckle Charles gathers that his powers of cognition and his control over metal are equally crippled. Well. That seems only fair. Abstractly Charles recognizes that sentiment is unnecessarily cruel, but emotions like guilt and pity seem very far away, left in the dust behind his racing thoughts. All mind, no heart, that’s him, and he’s stronger for it; his heart always was his greatest weakness, especially when it came to Erik.
He feels a sudden wetness on his face and realizes that a suspicious amount of mucus is streaming from his nose. Before Erik can see he pulls away and retreats a few steps, hoping the distance will hide how his hands are trembling.
“Wait.” Erik shakes his head like he’s shaking off a punch, desperate to refocus, and it takes two attempts to raise himself on one elbow. “Wait, Charles, don’t go. Shout at me, tell me I was wrong, tell me you hate me, just—”
The penny drops for Erik just as Charles realizes what he’s given away, and each witnesses his own shock on the other’s face in a long moment of stunned silence. Finally Erik breathes, “You’re standing.”
Charles looks away, unable to bear the sudden openness in Erik’s face, the way his eyes have softened even if his mouth still looks like it’s forgotten how to smile. Truth is, he’s also stalling: he’s not sure where to begin, or if he wants to admit to the existence of the serum at all. He’s not fool enough to think Erik will be imprisoned forever and better not to give him any more ammunition than he’ll already have at his fingertips (which is, literally, all the ammunition).
“I looked,” Erik says, when a full minute passes in silence. “For a mutant who could heal. In every city until the day they caught me I made Emma scan for someone who could fix what happened to you.”
“It’s easier to say what you did to me.”
The bitterness makes Erik flinch. He says quietly, “No, it’s not.”
“More honest, then.”
“Yes. Those aren’t the same.”
“Well, they should be,” Charles shouts. To his horror, his voice breaks and angry tears blur his vision. As there had been nothing more important than absorbing the sight of Erik mere minutes ago, now there’s nothing in the world but rage. He can’t bear up under its weight, it’s too much, he’s going to drown in it or lash out at Erik—and oh, he’s dreamed of that more than once, he can admit that giving Erik a reason to distrust him would feel satisfying in a deeply unsettling way—and for all that simmering frustration has been his constant companion since Cuba, the chemically-enhanced fury of a telepath is an entirely different, more dangerous thing. For a moment he thinks he may actually faint and digs his fingers into his tangled hair, pulling hard. The pain is a relief, grounding him to the point that he can look at Erik without the compulsion to telepathically lobotomize him.
“What’s the matter with you?” Erik stands up shakily, holding onto the wall for balance. He once lifted a submarine from the ocean with less effort than it takes to remain upright, but his eyes are fixed on Charles like he’s never seen him before. “You’re different. You look—”
“Awful, yes, you’ve said,” Charles interrupts. “Thanks so much.”
Erik refuses to be sidetracked. “—sick. You don’t look well.”
“I’ve never felt better. I can walk again, and my head is finally clear. I can see now that I was wrong to trust you or care for you or think you could ever be more than what Shaw made you, and now that you’re where you belong I never have to worry about you or think about you ever again. So, you see, everything is right with the whole bloody world.”
Erik’s jaw clenches like he’s about to lash out or be sick, possibly at once. “Stop it, Charles. Stop. This isn’t you—you’re not like this, you’re never like this—”
“In your dreams, you mean? How am I, Erik, when you dream of me? I’m so curious.” Charles means it to be cutting, sharp-edged enough to stab between Erik’s clearly-visible ribs, but instead of taunting he simply sounds hysterical. And yet he can’t stop. Erik’s dreams are so clearly all he has left and Charles wants to drag them into the light and make Erik feel foolish for believing they were ever more than delusions. He didn’t get to keep his own delusions; why should Erik?
“You’re perfect. You’re you,” Erik says simply, like the answer is obvious and not devastating. He always did wield the truth as a weapon. “Not this.”
In two steps Charles crosses the distance between them and shoves Erik hard. Already unsteady, he catches himself on the wall at his back with a wince, but meets Charles’s manic, tear-filled gaze without fear when he shouts, “This is what you’ve made me, Erik. You always did think me naïve, didn’t you? Well, you fixed that. Are you proud of your work?”
“No,” Erik bites out. “No, don’t you dare put this on me. I haven’t been in the position to help or harm anyone, your government saw to that. But I did hurt you, I took away your legs and I am sorry for it. Tell me who gave them back.”
“Who do you think? There’s a war on, though not the one you wanted, and they’re all gone, everyone but Hank, he’s the only one I have left.” Charles laughs, shakes his head. “Christ—the beast, the cripple, and the criminal, it’s like a bad joke.”
Erik curses in German. “Hank. Of course. What has that furry bastard been cooking up in that lab of his this time?”
“To undo what you did? A fucking miracle.”
There’s an awful moment of silence while a visible wave of rage sweeps over Erik. It straightens his spine, brightens his eyes, bares his teeth; Magneto awakening in the body of an exhausted prisoner. A part of Charles rejoices. Erik sedated was sad and oddly sweet, but this is the Erik who left him, a man he can hate, who is predictable in his own way. Charles tenses against Erik’s automatic response when he feels threatened: backed into a corner, he strikes without thinking, like a wounded animal or a frightened child with a man’s strength. His lashing out is instinctive and vicious and Charles never understood it until now, with no intellectual prevarications left between gut instinct and immediate reaction. Then Erik blinks and Magneto is gone. The brightness in his eyes looks more like tears.
“Don’t talk to me about miracles, Charles,” he says softly. “I don’t believe in them. I thought I might, once. I know better now.”
Charles has no reply.
“Tell me what Hank has done to you,” Erik says again.
“A variation on his serum,” Charles admits after a moment of hesitation. The truth is the closest thing to an apology he can give, after saying exactly the wrong thing to Erik again. Raven always did say he was hopeless without telepathy and he’s proved it twice, once because he couldn’t sense Erik’s mind through the helmet and now because he’s holding himself apart from it only with immense, teeth-gritting effort. Knowing it’s right there and allowing himself to sense only the strongest of projected emotions is like nibbling stale bread while an enormous feast is laid out before him: tortuous, and barely enough to sustain him.
But he’s learned to make do with scraps, all these years.
“You little fool,” Erik hisses. “Still perfectly willing to play the lab rat, aren’t you? He could have killed you.”
“I can think of worse ways to die.”
Erik scoffs like Charles is the one being melodramatic. He can’t seem to sustain his rage for more than a few seconds, though whether that stems from the drugs or desperation to prolong the first human interaction he’s had in possibly years that hasn’t (yet) ended in violence isn’t entirely clear. His expression and body language tell different stories: the one fixed and hungry, the other leaning forward hesitantly and then shrinking away again. Now he reaches out and lifts a chunk of Charles’s hair. “Well, at the least the excessive hair growth is less pronounced, this time. And in your natural color.”
Charles swats his hand away irritably. “I’m hardly a professor anymore, and I certainly don’t need to look like one. Bugger off. Besides, you—”
“I don’t have access to a razor. What’s your excuse?”
“Not giving a fuck, how’s that for an excuse?”
“How poetic,” Erik drawls. “For all our grand dreams inaction seems to have taken us both—you by choice and me by force. Perhaps we should switch places. You might like it here.”
For the first time Charles really looks around. The room is painted gray, with a claustrophobically low ceiling and empty but for the toilet and sink in the corner, a bench bolted to the floor, and the bed. Plastic bars set mere inches apart block access into a long hallway. The nearest minds are several hundred feet away, watching the cell on a surveillance feed with no intention of approaching any time soon. How long has Erik been alone like this, either sedated or in solitary confinement? Does he even know where he is or how long he’s been here? Small wonder he conflates dreams with reality; for him there’s probably little difference.
Charles tries to shake away his sympathy for Erik and the headache creeping back into his awareness. His mind, which had been so perfectly focused and clear just a few minutes ago, is refragmenting into a cluttered kaleidoscope of sensory impressions and emotions. He suddenly feels unaccountably like Cinderella as midnight approaches.
“Charles?”
“I’m fine,” he says quickly, backing away as Erik reaches out. “Hank’s serum works perfectly.”
“You can’t expect me to believe that when you look like you haven’t bathed in five days. There must be side effects.”
He probably hasn’t bathed in five days, actually. “The only side effects are ones I welcome,” he says, only regretting the opening he’s left Erik when it’s too late.
“And what are those?”
“I get headaches, I can’t sleep. The serum helps.”
Intuitively Charles shies away from mentioning that the serum also mutes his telepathy. Erik always did vacillate wildly when it came to Charles’s powers, praising them as long as Charles used them in a way he approved of only to slam steel walls around his thoughts the second he even suspected Charles might be looking. Not that they would have kept him out, if Charles had been truly determined; it was the distrust, the revulsion at what Erik thought of as a violation, that pained Charles more, and made him hold himself apart. Feeling Erik’s rejection was like having a door slammed on his fingers, painful in the moment and an excellent deterrent against reaching out again.
Still, Charles can hardly imagine he’ll take the telepathic suppression any better. Mutant and proud includes telepaths in theory, if not in practice, and Erik always has been infuriatingly good at staying on-message.
“And your powers?” Erik says, like he’s the one who can read minds. “I can touch you but you’re not really here, are you? Why can’t I feel you in my mind?”
He looks almost…hurt. Charles inhales sharply through his nose, desperately chasing the lingering hints of that bitter taste and hoping to recapture the manic certainty that had come with it, when everything had seemed so easy and obvious, when his was the only pain that mattered. “I’m not in your mind at all. I was, but only to skim your perception of your surroundings so I knew where to send the projection. I thought we could skip the bit where you throw me out of your head and accuse me of—whatever nefarious motives you’ve ascribed to me to justify your paranoia this time. Get straight to the part where you distrust me for no reason and I hate you for it, yeah?”
“Charles.” Erik tries to reach for him again, succeeding only because Charles is frozen with horror at his own words. He lets Erik guide him carefully to sit down on the bed because Erik looks like he might break if he doesn’t do something—and also because truthfully he is feeling a little unsteady on his feet—and doesn’t even protest when Erik kneels and refuses to let go of his hands.
“You know it was never about that,” he says gently. “I trust you with my life. I trust you to always do what you believe is right. I wear the helmet not because I don’t trust you, but because I know you. As long as you believe that what I’m doing is wrong, you’ll try to stop me, because you’re a good man, Charles, and I’m not and you can’t bear that. Understand this—I trust the strength of your convictions and you must trust mine. I will not stop until the world is safe for us, and I cannot allow you to interfere.”
“Bullshit, Erik. You never wanted me in your head, even before you declared war on the human race.”
Erik shakes his head sadly. “Why do you keep saying things that aren’t true? Is it truly that bleak in your memories of me?”
Instead of answering, Charles bares his teeth in something close to Erik’s own animalistic snarl and projects the psychic pain he felt whenever Erik abruptly revoked permission to be in his head or rejected the lightest telepathic touch with suspicion coloring his thoughts. Despite the lack of pain sensors in the brain, Erik’s non-telepathic mind can only interpret the feeling as physical pain, a sharp sting in the tissue itself that shifts into a throbbing bruised sensation as it spreads through his skull. He curls in on himself with a choked gasp, clutching his head futilely until Charles projects a wave of soothing calm and the pain ebbs.
“No, no, I won’t let you do that,” Erik says, still gasping. There are tears in his eyes as he fits his palms against Charles’s temples and twists fingers into his messy hair, pressing their foreheads together. “I won’t let you forget that it wasn’t all like that. You can hate me if you only remember the bad but there was good, too, Charles, you can’t pretend there wasn’t.”
Erik is out of practice projecting—or possibly used to shouting unheard cries for help across longer distances—because all his memories come barreling into Charles like an avalanche, too loud and sharp. There’s a sense of well-wornness to them, as if he has lavished time and energy on them, honing every detail to perfect clarity. The exact weave of the cardigan Charles wore that day on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; the burn of the whiskey they drank straight from the bottle the night they first fell into bed together in Idaho; the warm firelight cast on the chess pieces as they played in the study—
As his telepathy unfolds to accept the memories, his headache goes from irritating to agonizing in the space of a second. Charles yanks himself away with a cry that catches in his throat. For a moment his entire field of vision is white. If he’d eaten recently he might have thrown up; as it is, he dry heaves until the nausea dissipates.
Erik’s voice sounds very far away. “Are you—I didn’t mean to—Charles, look at me—”
“God, my head, it hurts—”
Physical contact and loud thoughts make the pain worse and Erik won’t stop touching him and projecting frantic worryconfusionfearlove and there’s wetness on his face again, too much to be explained by a simple cold, Erik’s going to know—
But his shock is flavored with fear, not judgment, and the fingers he draws back are wet with something red instead.
“Charles, you’re bleeding.”
“Just stop, stop everything, get away from me, Erik, please—”
Erik scrambles backwards ungracefully, his worry making him obedient where no force of command would have done. Their harsh breathing echoes in the cell’s stale air for a long moment while Charles blots his bloody nose on his sleeve and tries to keep his telepathic agony from leaking into every mind in a five-mile radius.
“You get headaches,” Erik says flatly.
“Bad ones,” Charles admits.
“When you use your powers.”
“Yes.” He’s in too much pain to lie, and his nose won’t stop bleeding and he’s starting to feel stretched thin around the projection’s edges. “They’ve been…difficult to manage, recently.”
“And the serum helps control them.”
Charles can see from Erik’s expression that he’s beginning to put the pieces together. Not perfectly—he attributes the cocaine’s effects, the mania and hysterical shouting, the trembling hands, wide-blown eyes, and alarmingly elevated heart-rate, to the serum instead, with no way of knowing that its side effects are the precise opposite. But even with that missing piece, he takes in Charles’s uncharacteristic behavior, regained mobility, and mutation-triggered pain that responds only to the serum, and intuits the rest. Even if Charles couldn’t see the realization dawning in his narrowed eyes and sudden stillness, he would have known from the word choice: control was always Erik’s favorite euphemism for suppress.
“Hank’s put a lot of effort into this serum,” Charles says mildly. Shouting at Erik now, however much he’d like to defend himself, would only trigger another spike of pain in his head, which has only just faded to a manageable level. “It’s nothing to laugh at, mending a broken spine like that. The side effects were simply a…happy accident.”
“You can’t be serious,” Erik says.
Charles gestures briefly with the hand he’s been using to staunch his nosebleed, his fingers red and shiny and sticky. “How much of this looks like a joke, Erik?”
“Find another way,” Erik grits out, each word emphasized like its own sentence. His struggle to contain himself is admirable, and almost successful.
“I’ve tried the other way. It involves a wheelchair and enough painkillers to tranquilize a horse. It involves a schedule for staying hydrated, pissing, and turning over in my sleep because I can’t feel my bladder or bedsores, which could become infected. It involves hearing voices that aren’t mine, forgetting which voice is mine, and waking up screaming because a man in the village hit his wife and I felt it too. It’s unsustainable, Erik.”
“Then let me help you.” Erik clearly means to speak gently, but in his distress sounds closer to desperate, and something in Charles cringes to see Erik—always so beautiful and proud—reduced to begging, in part because of him. “You helped me once, when I didn’t have command of my powers. Between rage and serenity, you said. I’ve never forgotten it. Let me do the same for you now.”
“What are you talking about—”
“Get me out of here,” Erik says in a near-whisper, twining blood-covered fingers with his own before Charles can pull back. “I’ll come with you back to the mansion, I’ll make you a better chair than any rickety nonsense Hank could come up with, I’ll help you rebuild your shields and then we can protect our people, together, the way it was supposed to be. Just get me home, Charles.”
Charles feels hot tears spilling down his cheeks and wonders when he started crying again. He’s spent so long planning what he would say if Erik ever asked to come back. His responses have spanned the entire spectrum of emotions; he’s been cold, angry, magnanimous, welcoming; he’s slammed doors in Erik’s face and kissed him with more eloquence than his words have ever managed. Now he can’t think of any words at all.
“Please, Charles,” Erik murmurs, and leans up to press a kiss to the tear tracks on Charles’s face.
“Oh, God,” Charles chokes out. “I’ve had this dream so many times…”
“If I’m not dreaming, then neither are you.” Erik manages something like a smile; this close, Charles can see that the lines at the corners of his eyes are deeper and more numerous than they used to be. There’s a new, poorly healed scar near his temple, mostly hidden under ginger hair, but noticeable because it’s pink in contrast to his unhealthy pallor. He looks so much older. Then again, Charles imagines that he does too.
“Don’t ask me for this, Erik,” he says.
“Why not? It’s what we both want. A second chance.”
The worst part is that even without his telepathy, Charles knows that Erik is telling the truth—or at least doesn’t believe he’s lying, which might be worse. There’s a part of him that he buries deep and tries to forget exists at all that wants desperately to return to the mansion, to Charles, to the halcyon days before Cuba. Their small, unruly band of mutants was the closest thing to a family he’d known since his own was stolen from him. But Erik has trained himself to survive without family, to seal away his grief and fight alone, and the only thing he needs—and Erik needs with a soul-deep hunger that stems from complete, cruel deprivation—more than love for himself is safety for his entire people. Once he couldn’t save them; twice would destroy him completely, and there’s nothing in the world he wouldn’t sacrifice, including himself, including those he holds dearest, to protect mutantkind. And that’s the tragedy of it: if Charles agrees, Erik will return to the mansion. He will devote the entirety of his frankly terrifying, obsessive focus to Charles’s recovery and then he will ask Charles to do something unforgiveable—mind control anti-mutant activists, use Cerebro to locate only those mutants with easily-weaponized powers—and Charles will refuse, and Erik will leave. Again. They will only ever be together in a series of uneasy truces. Charles see it like it’s already happened.
“‘I will not stop until the world is safe for us, and I cannot allow you to interfere,’” he quotes, hating his voice for shaking. His legs are twitching too, those muscle tremors that precede the loss of sensation. “You forget I know you too, Erik. I know that your intentions will be noble and your actions abhorrent and that if you do come back it will only be for as long as I play along with your insane plans to start a war you can’t win.”
“Charles—”
“Am I wrong, Erik.”
Erik looks away, his jaw clenched tightly, and after a moment shakes his head, both an admission of the truth and a refusal to accept it. Charles can see the frustration building in him again, so briefly banked, as Erik thinks that he made himself vulnerable before Charles and found himself rebuffed, again. Only this time their positions are reversed: Erik won’t be the one walking away.
“So you’re going to leave me here to rot,” Erik says. “I left you out of ignorance, not cruelty.”
Charles tries to smother his self-loathing under a burst of resentment. “You forced me to deal with the consequences of your actions—your failures—while you went off to do whatever you damn well pleased once, and I will not do it again. I’m not your keeper. I’m not responsible for your mistakes.”
“So you’re taking the easy way out,” Erik says bitterly. “If you do this you’ll be abandoning me, abandoning all your brothers and sisters—you, the man who promised frightened mutant children that they were gifts, not freaks. We need you, Charles.”
“Nothing has been easy in a very long time.” Suddenly Charles can’t bear being in such close proximity to Erik, still kneeling at his feet, and stands to retreat to the other side of the cell. God, he wants a drink. “And I’m sorry, but I gave them—I gave you—everything I had, everything I was, and you’re still here and they’re still dead. Everything my students needed I gave them, and it didn’t make any difference at all. I have nothing left to—”
Of course his legs choose that second to give out and he goes down hard, too shocked to get a hand out in time to keep from knocking his head on the floor. The renewed flash of pain that ricochets around his skull seems to knock him out of his body for a long moment and he flashes back to the last time he fell with shooting pain in his spine and legs, knowing he was screaming but too surprised to comprehend why. When he comes back to himself he finds Erik already leaning over him, frantic in a way that betrays that the remembrance was mutual. Erik seizes his face with both hands and from the way his mouth moves is probably shouting, but the ringing in Charles’s ears is deafening and he can barely see Erik through the odd fog that drifts across his field of vision.
“I’m sorry,” Charles repeats mindlessly, because it seems right.
Even in his semi-conscious haze Charles knows the moment that he loses control of the projection, because Erik’s hands are suddenly grasping empty air, eyes filling with tears as he inhales a deep breath, maybe a sob, that shakes his entire body—
—and then Charles blinks, and the ceiling of his study spins above him in dizzy circles.
Before he sends a telepathic cry for help to Hank, before he does finally throw up from the pain, before he pulls a pillow from the nearest chair so he has a place to rest his head when he passes out, Charles drags himself over to the desk and sweeps the remaining cocaine to the ground, then brushes it around until the granules are indistinguishable from the dust that already coats the floor.
It’s the last time he resists temptation for a decade.