Archive of Our Own

Charles misses Raven, three years after the end of the world.

He thinks he and Hank must be the only two people left, sometimes. There is no way to power Cerebro, no way of knowing for sure, but Charles has not seen another person for two years and eleven months that isn’t Hank.

Erik was right about some things, Charles thinks sometimes, when he’s playing chess with Hank (who valiantly tries, but strategy was never his strong suit) or when he’s rolling through the grounds weekly to see if anything in the gardens is growing (it isn’t, it hasn’t for three years), or when he is moving through the halls as he has too many times to count, as though he will hear another sound beside his wheels on the floor. They were destructive, humanity. They brought about their own end, through a war with weapons they could never hope to control.

Charles remembers when they fostered the survivors in the mansion, who had come seeking food and shelter. He remembers as they slowly withered and died, begging him to find a way to save them, their parents, their children, everyone they ever loved. He remembers them becoming husks until there wasn’t enough energy in them to power even a battery, never mind a body.

He visits their graves every Sunday. He wishes he had flowers to lay down.

Charles doesn’t actually see much of Hank anymore. He spends all his time down in the lab, building things no one will ever use. Charles thinks it’s a coping strategy. Hank watched a lot of people he couldn’t save in the wake of the Terror (that is how Charles will forever think of it, think of the blinding flash he could see even from the mansion and the dust that rushed up afterwards) die, wasting away.

He wakes up exactly three years after the Terror (he marks every day on the calendar) from a dream about his sister. He can’t remember exactly, but he thinks they were children, playing in the garden until the flash, and the plants all withered around them until the flowers in Raven’s hair turned to ash.

He wishes he could know if she was alive.

Charles sees his first animal three years and two days after the end of the world, and it tries to kill him.

He’s patrolling the garden when he hears the growl. His heart rises to his throat and he wants to scream, finally, finally, another living creature survived the blast-

When he wheels around, he sees a gray shape lunging at him before something hits it and a tangle of blue fur and gray fur slam into the ground. Hank stands up, clothes ripped, panting slightly.

“I saw it on the radar,” he explains grimly. He kneels down to inspect it. “I think it was a dog once.”

Charles wheels up to look and thinks Hank is right. The large gray mass of fur, no longer breathing, is vaguely dog-shaped, although its teeth and claws are rather larger than a dog’s.

“How did it…” Charles trails off. Hank picks up a stick. Charles sort of wants to tell Hank to tell Hank to stop poking the corpse with a stick, but (although he knows Hank would listen to him immediately) he’s not sure there’s a point.

“Radiation from the blast.” Hank quits poking it. Charles absently wonders if he was projecting. He tends to have less control over his telepathy these days. “Mutated it.” Hank’s lips twist oddly in an expression that could only technically be called a smile. “It’s one of us.”

Charles wheels a little closer. “It must be hungry,” he murmurs. “Must be venturing out of the cities to find food.” He looks up at Hank. “I think I’d best learn how to use a gun, don’t you?”

Charles, it turns out, is quite proficient at firearms.

“I want to go into town,” Charles says without preamble, wheeling into Hank’s lab. Hank doesn’t even look up from his microscope when he answers.

“No.”

“People could be alive-“

“They’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I went into town.”

Charles blinks. “When?”

Hank looks up from his microscope but away from Charles’s eyes. “Bout six months after the blast.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Everyone was dead, Professor. Just bodies everywhere. There was nothing to tell.” Hank shrugs awkwardly. “There’s no point in going. It’ll just give you nightmares.”

“I want to go anyway,” he says resolutely. “I need to see it and we’re going to run out of food eventually.”

Charles can feel Hank’s thoughts more than he can hear them, knows that Hank is thinking that it doesn’t matter how much food they get, that eventually it will run out and they will starve. He also knows that Hank is probably right.

“Okay,” is what Hank says instead.

The bodies are mostly decomposed, bleached white bones in masses of what was once flesh. Hank’s right. They’re everywhere.

The store isn’t wheelchair accessible, and so while Hank gets food Charles looks around town, wheels crunching and sometimes sticking over rubble. He comes across a house, partially burned down. He can see the husk of a body hanging out one of the windows. Painted in red on the side of the house, mostly obscured by black ash but still readable, is we have already burned.

Hank and Charles return to the mansion in silence. Charles doesn’t go back to the town.

Charles can’t pinpoint when his mind branched out far enough to read the creatures that lurk in the woods. All he knows is he carries them with him all the time, a pit of fury and confusion and fear deep in his stomach.

He also knows that by the time he realizes where the feelings are coming from; he can no longer differentiate between theirs and his.

Charles realizes that he has missed the anniversary of Cuba by a week (he has stopped counting the days).

He wonders where Erik is often, almost as much as Raven. Even if Cerebro was functioning, he wouldn’t be able to find him, not if he’s still got that helmet.

In his darker moments, when he is methodically gunning down creatures that get too close to the mansion, he is certain that Erik must be dead.

Even despite all that has occurred between them, Erik would not abandon Charles in a time like this.

Charles drags a creature in one day from the outdoors. It takes a while, his chair protesting the weight, but he manages. Hank is in the hall, and looks vaguely surprised.

“Find out if we can eat them,” he says simply, dumping it in front of Hank before he returns to his room.

They can.

“I think I found a serum that would take away our powers,” Hank tells Charles one day while Charles is cooking one of the creatures in the fireplace. They used to rarely light fires, fearful of someday running out of Charles’s books to warm them. They light fires at least three times a week now.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Charles answers, turning the creature on the coals.

“I don’t know if it would kill us, seeing as our mutant gene is probably the only thing keeping us from succumbing to the radiation.”

Charles doesn’t even need the thoughts coming at him to know that Hank is offering a way out.

“A bullet will be faster, should we need it,” is all Charles says. Hank nods and Charles takes the meat out of the fire. It’s stringy and tastes like ash.

Everything tastes like ash, these days.

Snow is gray now.

Charles remembers looking the window with Raven when they were children, delighted by the sight of white covering the grounds, Raven transforming her arm into a larger one in an effort to throw snowballs harder at Charles.

Now Charles sits at the window, looking at the creature tracks in the ash colored world, and aims his gun as they get closer.

“Why do you still call me Professor?” Charles asks abruptly one night, when they are set up to sleep on the floor by the fireplace in order to keep warm. Hank’s thoughts, which have normally been aimless, lock down suddenly. The rejection is so sudden and unexpected Charles physically reels a little bit. Hank notices.

“Sorry,” he apologizes. “I just don’t think you’ll like my answer.” Charles smiles mirthlessly.

“I don’t like anything anymore, Hank.”

Hank hesitates and then sighs, letting his thoughts run free once more.

“Ah,” Charles says, more thoughtfully than anything.

“Sorry,” Hank says quickly. Charles absently waves him off.

“No, Hank, I think you’re quite right.” Charles lets out a hoarse noise that could be a laugh. “Why not?”

They don’t speak after that, and Charles muses on how Hank calls him the Professor because he’s not sure there’s anything of Charles left in him.

He stops shaving.

Hank doesn’t care, and it’s not like there’s anyone else to keep up appearances for anymore, anyway.

It is roughly four years after the Terror, and when the Professor wakes up, it’s to the sound of whining and shushing noises. He fumbles for his gun and rolls downstairs.

Hank is ushering a Creature into the lobby, talking to it quietly.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Hank.” Hank jumps and looks up at the Professor. “If you can’t kill it, I’ll do it.” The Creature whines and ducks behind Hank.

“No, don’t. I don’t think.” Hank’s thoughts are swirling and vague and the Professor can’t read them. The Professor wheels up to them.

“Can you read it?” Hank asks and the Professor blinks and then groans.

“They’ve started mutating to block my telepathy. Delightful.”

“No, I don’t think.” Hank kneels by the Creature, who whines again. “I think it might be Raven.”

The Professor stares at him. “Have you gone fucking mental?”

“Look at her eyes.”

The Professor sighs and looks in the eyes of the Creature. They are yellow, but not in the yellow he is accustomed to seeing in a Creature. They are so startlingly like his sister’s that he aches a little.

“How can this be Raven?” he says instead. “Why hasn’t she transformed back into herself?”

“I think she’s gone feral.” Hank’s face is earnest. “I think it’s Raven, Professor.”

The Professor looks back at those eyes.

“You’re the one who’s finding the fucking food for it.” He rolls back to his room to sleep.

Hank spends a lot of time talking to the Creature. The Professor doesn’t try and convince him it’s not Raven. If Hank can find hope through it, than let him. The Professor will shoot it when it inevitably tries to eat him.

“Is it cruel to feed her Creature?” Hank asks anxiously one night. The Professor shrugs.

“If it’s really Raven, it’s not cannibalism, is it?”

The Professor knows Hank is ignoring the snide edge to his words. The Creature ends up eating some of that day’s kill that night.

The Professor refuses to destroy his copy of The Once and Future King. A man whose name he has tried to burn out of his brain gave it to him, a long time ago. He reads it sometimes, and pretends he is somewhere far away and years back.

The Creature sidles up to him on one of these occasions, sitting in front of him and staring.

“I will not call you Raven,” he informs the Creature. “To call you that would suggest that I believe you are her, and you are not.” He turns a page. “Raven is dead. I know that now. It was foolish to ever believe otherwise.”

The Creature whines mournfully, and the Professor hesitates. He remembers a bright eyed girl in her blond form, pointing at the pair of them, giving them names.

“Mystique,” he says quietly. The Creature’s ears perk up slightly. The Professor points at her. “And that is as much as you will get from me.”

Mystique is vicious in attacking other Creatures, and docile when Hank tells her stories, anything he can think of. She seems to like Hank, often rubbing up against him when he’s working in the lab.

She likes it when the Professor reads to her. He has read The Once and Future King to her over and over again.

Six months after Mystique comes to live with them, the Professor opens up to the bathroom door to see a blue form curled up on the floor, vibrant red hair down to her waist and shaggy. The Professor stares until she looks up. Her eyes widen in shock and she pops back into her Creature form and snarls. The Professor closes the door quickly.

You were right, he thinks dazedly in Hank’s direction. I’ll be damned, you were right.

“I think she must have turned into one of them to survive,” Hank tells the Professor as they stare at Mystique, who is curled up on the Professor’s bed, asleep. “Now she’s buried herself so deep she doesn’t know what she is anymore. She’s-“

“Feral.”  The Professor reaches out to touch her hesitantly and then draws back.

“She knows us.” Hank has no such barriers, easily walking over to Mystique and running his fingers through her matted gray fur. She settles into his touch slightly in her sleep. “That might be all we can ever ask for.”

The Professor stares at the sleeping gray mass that houses, somewhere, his sister. “It’s enough.”

Mystique climbs into his lap the next day and curls up. She’s heavy, but it’s comforting.

“I’m still not going to call you Raven,” he tells her. She cracks an eye open at him and gives him a look that’s so painfully his sister his throat closes up for a moment.

“I’m not,” he insists. “Because you’re not. Not right now.” He hesitantly puts a hand on her back. She’s warm. “I’m not Charles anymore, either.” He runs his hand through her fur and remembers stroking her hair once upon a time. “The Professor and Mystique.”

Mystique makes a huffing noise and falls asleep.

The Professor can feel Hank’s spike of shock and alarm jolt through him like an electric current.

Hank?

There are people coming this way.

The Professor reaches out his mind and feels waves upon waves of different thoughts, emotions, feelings. It has been five years, and he can feel other people that are not Hank.

He loads up his gun. They don’t feel threatening, but he can’t be sure.

They wait outside the mansion. Mystique is on one side, looking as large and menacing as she can. Hank is on his other, also holding a gun, looking fierce. They wait.

They are a small crowd of ten and if the Professor did so anymore he might have cried. He points the gun at them anyway.

“We have no interest in conflict,” he tells them. “If you don’t try and take what’s ours, we won’t try and take what’s yours.” Mystique growls for effect.

The man in front who looks vaguely familiar smirks and takes his cigar out of his mouth. “Yeah, bub,” he says. “I think underneath the yeti face is your guy.”

The Professor narrows his eyes and raises his gun a little higher. “I beg your pardon?”

Someone pushes his way through to the front of the crowd and the gun drops into the Professor’s lap.

He has a scruffy beard, and his helmet is battered and bent. But there can be no doubt.

“I’ll be god damned,” Hank mutters. Mystique must recognize him too, because she growls and tenses to spring. The Professor tries to send a thought her way but it batters weakly off her shields.

“Mystique,” he hears himself say instead. “Enough.”

Erik Lehnsherr removes his helmet and stares at the Professor. “We hoped we might find shelter here,” he says hoarsely.

The Professor nods a little abruptly. “My name is the Professor,” he tells them. “This is Hank McCoy and Mystique. You may stay with us.”

The Professor leaves the escorting and dividing of the rooms to Hank. He retreats to his study, Mystique dogging his heels, seemingly unwilling to leave him alone with Erik.

“Doesn’t seem to trust you, Magneto,” Logan (as the Professor learns is the man’s name) smirks, still puffing on his cigar. The Professor absently wonders where he is finding them.

The Professor snorts. “Magneto,” he comments dryly. “Delightful.” He looks at Mystique. “It’s all right; he’s not going to bite. You bite larger than he does anyway, so I’m not sure what you’re worried about.”

Mystique looks at the Professor, and then balefully at Erik. Still glaring at him, she retreats to jump up into an armchair and curls up, watching them.

“Alex and Sean?” Erik asks, voice still stiff and awkward.

“Sean was at university when it happened, never heard from him. Alex left to find his brother Scott, never heard from him.” The Professor shrugs, pretending he doesn’t feel a twinge of pain at their names. “Assume they’re dead. Angel?”

“A Thing,” Erik replies. “How have you managed to tame one, by the way? They all seem rather… feral.”

“So’s she.”

Mystique growls as though to reassert this fact.

“Raven.” Erik’s voice turns pained. “We got separated one year after. I never found her again.”

The Professor looks speculatively at Mystique. He and Hank had assumed roughly four years had done this to her. “That sounds correct.”

“Sorry?”

Mystique raises her head, looks directly at Erik, and flashes her eyes red. Erik doesn’t move away like Logan does to his credit, but he does jump.

“She found her way home,” the Professor answers simply. “As did you, it would seem.”

Erik tenses. “This is our home, then?”

The Professor snorts again. “For God’s sake, Erik. You’re the only other people I’ve seen in nearly five years; I’m not going to turn you away.”

“You’re not… upset?”

The Professor immediately knows to what he’s referring and smirks. “You got your way in the end, Erik,” he replies. “There’s no humans left.” He shrugs. “I don’t see that there’s anything to be upset about anymore.”

There’s an awkward silence in which Mystique trots over to Erik looking as menacing as possible. The Professor can’t help a slightly fond look. Some things never change.

“What should we call you then?” Logan asks.

“The Professor will do just fine, I think.”

“On, and Raven,” Erik says without looking at her. “Should you regain your senses at any point there’s a small boy up there who would be thrilled to see you.”

Mystique freezes, then lifts her head and howls. It’s an unearthly sound that manages to make something primal in the Professor want to curl up in a ball and beg for mercy.

Bamf. A small blue cloud appears over Mystique, manifesting into a small boy with blue skin and a tail. Charles rears back. Logan and Erik seem unconcerned.

“Mama!” The little boy cries, burying his face in her fur. The Professor gapes. Mystique licks the boy’s face all over, making him giggle. “Mama. That’s wet.”

“Professor, Kurt Darkholme,” Logan introduces with a grin. “Kurt, Professor.”

Erik avoids the Professor for a week and in that time the Professor greatly regrets drinking the last of the scotch with Hank last month, when they thought it was only them and Mystique.

Logan corners him eventually in his study, Mystique playing with Kurt.

“Uncle Logan!” Kurt cries, bamfing onto Logan’s shoulders. Logan reacts with a twitch of a genuine smile.

“Hey, kid. How’s your mom?”

Mystique gives Logan a glare from her spot on Charles’s desk while Kurt answers “She’s good.”

“Still gray as opposed to blue, I see.”

“Did you want something, Logan?” The Professor snaps as Kurt bamfs off of Logan and back to curling up with Mystique. The Professor actually likes Logan. He’s a good man in a world where good men are hard to come by. But he always looks at the Professor a little too shrewdly, a little too aware, and the Professor doesn’t like that.

Logan ignores him, pulling an armchair next up to the Professor. “You sleep here, Prof?”

“My room can be used for others.”

“Aha.” Logan lights a cigar.

“Where do you keep finding those?”

“Gotta keep some secrets.”

“You keep all your secrets.” It’s true. Logan’s mind is shut down almost as firmly as Mystique’s.

Logan waves the match to put out the fire. “Missed you a shit ton, you know?”

The Professor makes an effort to appear just as casual as he has. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Logan rolls his eyes. “Thing ‘bout Magneto is, he’s an asshole. Nobody can deny that. When he found out Azazel knocked up Mystique, he reduced her to tears over raising a kid in this world.”

The Professor glances at Kurt to make sure he’s asleep not to hear Logan’s language. “This isn’t news to me, Logan.”

“Talked about you all the fucking time, though. Charles this, Charles that.” Logan waves his cigar around and the Professor has the bizarre urge to tell him not to get ash on the blood-stained carpet. “Drove me batshit.”

“Yes, I can’t imagine he was particularly thrilled with me.”

Logan snorts. “You’re an idiot. I mean, I guessed from this week, but you are truly stupid.”

The Professor returns to trying to do the maths on rationing the food. “I adore our talks, Logan.”

“We were in Japan. Stryker’d captured us both for experiments and shit. We were close enough to the Japan blast site that most everyone was dead in five minutes. Took us three weeks to get out of there. Had to make your boy eat and rest for ‘bout a week after that.”

“He’s not my anything,” the Professor snaps. Logan waves that aside with the hand lacking the cigar clenched in its fingers.

“Point is, I had to restrain him. Wasn’t hard, man had hardly any strength left in him. Reason was that he wanted to come straight here.”

The Professor… was not expecting that. He looks back up at Logan, who nods.

“Yep. Dragged us across the States for five years to get us here. There were plenty more places that mighta been safer too, let me tell you, ‘specially since the Things started moving out of the cities.” Logan shakes his head. “Nope. We had to get here.”

The Professor puts effort into a simple shrug. “He knows the entrances and exits. A good place to hide.”

“Everyone knew people, bub. I knew people. Didn’t like a whole lot of ‘em, but I knew ‘em. After a while, most everybody gave up on ever seeing anyone else alive. Not Magneto.” Logan taps ash onto the carpet. “We need to get to Charles. Heard it once a day. Need to get to Charles, Charles’ll know what to do.”

“Was he.” The Professor hesitates. “Did he.”

“Spit it out.”

“Did he have anything to do with. Well. What happened?”

The Professor thinks this may mark the first time he has seen Logan display an emotion that wasn’t sarcasm or laconic. He actually has to grab the cigar as it falls out of his mouth. “You. You actually think that. You. You fucking.” He points at the Professor with the cigar. “You fucking bub.”

“That’s a no then, I’ll take it?”

“No. Christ.”

The Professor allows Logan to recover from his very reasonable question.

“Assumin’ he’s the reason you’re in the chair?”

The Professor stiffens. “It was a long time ago.”

“Evidently not long enough that you don’t assume he blew up the entire fucking world.” Logan stands up. “I’m not a fucking marriage counselor or whatever, but you two need to sort out your shit cause I’m tired of watching the pair of you dance around each other like hurt fucking puppies.”

“We’re not married.”

Logan gives him a look. “Yeah, you are a little.” He pats Kurt on the head, who stirs slightly in his sleep. “Mystique agrees with me, by the way,” he adds. “She’s just too furry right now to admit it.”

Mystique gives a half-hearted growl as he leaves.

“Why do they call you the Professor?” Erik asks three days later from the doorway to the study. The Professor determinedly does not jump. Mystique looks up from her armchair, eyes Erik, and then settles back down.

“Why does Logan call you Magneto?” He counters. “We’re not the men we were, Erik. It makes sense that we don’t pretend to be.”

“And yet you call me Erik.”

“Would you prefer Magneto?”

“That was an accident, actually.” Erik sits in one of the Professor’s chairs. “It was Raven’s name for me in the field. It was what they heard when they captured me in Japan and what Logan heard. Since then it’s rather snowballed.”

“Do feel free to help yourself to a chair,” the Professor comments. “I’d offer you brandy, but Hank and I had the last of that when we were too cowardly to kill ourselves last time.”

Erik stills. “Ah. Did that happen a lot?”

“More than you’d think.” The Professor scritches out a number on his tally. He’s using one of the end pages from the back of one of the unburned books, this time calculating how many years he can keep them alive solely on Creature and canned goods.

The results are not thrilling.

“How often, would you say?”

“It doesn’t matter.” The Professor tries modifying the numbers slightly. “We’re here now.” He curses inwardly. He’s forgotten to add in the necessity of things with which to light fires.

“What?” Erik asks.

“What what?” He starts erasing his calculations.

“You’re wearing your ‘I’ve-made-a-mistake’ face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You certainly do.”

The Professor takes the high road and starts ignoring him. There’s a pause.

“You have fewer books than I remember,” Erik observes. “A fact or a trick of the mind?”

“We’ve been using them as fuel.” He starts scratching again. “They start the fires and then we take down some of the chairs. We’ll have to start pulling boards off the walls next.”

“You burnt your books?”

The Professor smirks at the surprise in Erik’s voice. “We had to live, Erik.”

“Your books were so important to you.”

“Yes, well, there’s not a lot outside of my life that is anymore.”

“Have a list?”

The Professor can hear the soft note in Erik’s voice. He pretends not to notice, pretends not to care. “Keeping all of you alive.”

“And how is that going?”

The Professor looks up. There is no malice in Erik’s voice, and no ill-intent in his face. He motions him over. Erik bends over the Professor’s shoulder, and for a moment it is as though nothing has changed.

“Look.” He points at the figures. “Going by this, I can keep you all fed for a year and a half going by the food we have in the house, what’s left in town, and what you brought with you. But that doesn’t matter, because within one year and one month, we will run out of ways to heat the building, and we will freeze to death.” The Professor looks up at him. “You came to me for a salvation that I cannot offer.” And I am sorry is on the tip of his tongue. But that is not something he says anymore.

Erik looks at the numbers in silence. “We can start dismantling the wood from the town,” he says finally. “Ration it out. And if you have a flat metal surface in the house, I can heat that to cook Creature, that way we only need the fire to warm ourselves.”

“That gives us…” The Professor scratches on the paper. “Roughly two years on the food front, a year and a half on heat. That’s not much, Erik.”

“It’s a start.” Erik’s eyes stray across the desk. He freezes. “The Once and Future King.”

“Hm?” He isn’t paying attention, focusing on perhaps edging the numbers in a way that means slightly less for him, more for Kurt. That is what being a good family member is these days, he supposes.

“I thought you burned your books.”

The Professor blinks and sees Erik delicately holding his copy of The Once and Future King, as though it might disintegrate in his hands. “Oh. Well.” He coughs. “Mystique enjoys it when I read to her.”

“But why did you keep this?”

The Professor shifts slightly in his chair. “Well.”

“Well?”

“It was a gift.”

They stare at each other for a moment, and Charles thinks he may see a hint of a surprised smile.

Logan sticks his head in. “It’s great that we’re doing the hugging and the learning thing,” he says. “But Kurt just threw up all over his bed and I ain’t the one cleaning it up.”

Four months later, they have stockpiled a great deal of wood and food from the town. Every once in a while, Logan will smirk at the Professor, and eventually he finally snaps “What?”

“You two got back into default leadership easy,” is all he says before swanning off.

The thing is, he’s right. Erik and the Professor have fallen into old habits, dividing the work simply. Neither of them have brought up Cuba yet, but they are gears turning together, and that may be the best they can ask for.

One day, Hank bursts into the study, where Erik and the Professor are studying a map to see if a run can be made to a neighboring town. They’ve bled the nearest town mostly dry.

“There’s two people coming,” he pants.

The Professor, Erik, and Mystique meet them in front of the mansion. Logan is lurking somewhere and Hank is in a tree with a gun, in case things go south.

The woman has shaggy brown hair and a yellow mask that covers her face. She is walking hand in hand with a little girl, at least ten years old, wearing gloves, a white streak standing out in auburn locks. The Professor reaches out to the woman’s mind and physically reels back. Her mind is a kaleidoscope of shifting events and possibilities, dizzying to observe.

“Charles?” Erik asks sharply. The Professor waves him off and shakes his head, noticing that Mystique is sitting straight up all of the sudden.

“Hello.” The woman has a soft English accent. “Forgive us, but we were looking for-“

“Irene.”

Everyone looks to see Raven. She is crouching on the ground, staring through wild red hair up at the woman.

“Ah.” The woman nods slightly. “So that’s the one.”

Raven slowly straightens and walks up to her. “I thought you were dead.”

“It was a very high probability.”

The little girl tugs on Irene’s hand. “Mama, is this her?” she whispers in a strong Southern accent. Irene nods again.

“Yes.”

The girl holds out her hand to shake. “I’m Anna-Marie,” she says importantly. “Mama says that’s how I’m supposed to introduce myself, but I don’t like that name.”

Raven slowly shakes the girl’s hand. “I’m Raven.”

“We need to talk, Ray,” Irene tells her.

Raven clears her throat. “It’s not my house.”

“It’s always your house, Raven.” The Professor rolls up. “I’m-“

“Charles.” Irene inclines her head. “Or are you- no. You’re the Professor, aren’t you?” She turns to Erik. “And little Erik Lehnsherr. It was a high probability that you were here.” Something in her voice suggests a smile. “I remember when you were running around South America.”

Erik frowns. “I know you?”

She reaches into her pocket and throws him something. He catches it easily.

“Five and three,” she tells him. Erik opens his hand to reveal a pair of dice. He stares at them and then back at her.

“Destiny.”

“It’s been a long time since you’ve seen me.” Irene puts her hands in threadbare pockets. “May we go inside? I’d like to feed little Anna-Marie.”

“Mama,” the little girl protests. “I want a new name.”

“And when you think of one, we’ll do something about it.”

Anna-Marie is playing with Kurt on the study floor. The Professor, Irene, Erik, and Logan are sitting around the desk. Raven is back in her Mystique form, curled up in her armchair, never taking her eyes off Irene. If Irene is troubled by this, she doesn’t show it.

“Destiny sees the future,” Erik tells them.

“In a manner of speaking.” She somehow got the dice back from Erik and is rolling them around in her hand, slipping them through slender fingers. “I see probabilities.”

The Professor hasn’t felt curiosity in longer than he can remember. He leans forwards. “Explain, if you please.”

Irene holds up the dice. “It’s like this. Six sides, six possible outcomes for one die, twelve possible outcomes for two. I see them all.” She looks up at the Professor. “The same goes for life. When I came to your door, I saw all the possibilities and probabilities that arose with my arrival. I have learned to divine the most likely outcomes. I narrowed down my arrival to two.”

“Which were?”

“The one that occurred. The second was that Raven had never found you, and that we would continue searching.”

“Why is Raven so important to you?” Erik is the one the question comes from, to Charles’s surprise.

“My business with Raven is my own, Erik.” Irene tilts her head. “If you don’t talk about it sooner rather than later, by the way, it’s only going to get worse.”

The Professor looks up at him, trying to divine meaning from what she’s saying. Erik just narrows his eyes at her. “When did you acquire the mask?”

“When Raven last saw me, she believed that I had died in a fire.” Irene adjusts the mask slightly. “I escaped with severe burns on my face and an emergency c-section for Anna-Marie.”

“I thought you both died.” Mystique is back to Raven, watching Anna-Marie now, hesitantly, as though if she blinked, perhaps she would disappear. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have-“

“I know, my dear.” Irene’s attention is now on Raven. “You can talk to her, you know. She knows who you are. She won’t be mad.”

“You can see that?”

“I know that.”

Raven shrinks into her chair slightly and turns back into her Mystique form. Irene nods. “That’s fine too.”

Mystique trots up to Anna-Marie hesitantly. Anna-Marie stares at her, eyes bright.

“That’s my Mama,” Kurt tells her. “She says that she’s relearning how to be a person so she’s one of the Creatures a lot.”

The Professor blinks. He hadn’t known that.

“She’s my mama, too,” Anna-Marie answers brightly. She kneels down and looks in Mystique’s eyes. “Hi.”

He hadn’t known that, either.

Mystique licks Anna-Marie’s face and she giggles.

“How. How did that.” The Professor swallows. “How?”

“I love her,” Irene answers simply. “She pretended to be something she wasn’t so people wouldn’t look at us twice. Things happened as a result. Your sister makes a very attractive man,” she adds as a second thought. Mystique raises her head to give Irene A Look.

“You have any more kids we don’t know about?” Logan asks Mystique, who shifts her Look to him. 

“Well.” The Professor clears his throat. “You are of course welcome. But.” He hesitates. “Erik and I are… unsure as to how long this arrangement is sustainable.”

Destiny is quiet for a moment. “Yes, I see.” She takes a long deep breath. “Curious.”

“Curious how?”

“It could go anywhere.” Destiny stands up. “There are alternatives to keep my daughter and Raven’s son alive, Professor. If the time comes, I will use them.”

Erik frowns, clearly perturbed at the notion of Destiny taking away some of their people. But the Professor is relieved. He had been concerned about how to get Kurt of the mansion when they inevitably began running out of ways to survive. To know that someone is willing to do so lightens the load slightly.

Mystique suddenly stands up and nods her head towards the door, pausing a moment before trotting out. Kurt bamfs onto her back. Destiny holds out her hand to Anna-Marie. “Come on, sweetie, Raven’s going to show us to our rooms.”

One day, a month after Destiny arrives, Raven is sitting on the Professor’s bed, cross-legged. Her hair is trimmed and she’s wearing a ratty pair of sweats and an undershirt that’s too big for her. She’s bent over a book.

“Glad to see you’re wearing clothes, at least,” he comments. She doesn’t look up from the book.

“She’s good for me.” Her voice is raspy from disuse.

“Good. Be useful.” The Professor motions towards the chair. She easily lifts him up and puts him on the bed next to her. “Now. To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“You need to talk to Erik.” Raven flips a page. “Logan and I are getting real tired of your bullshit.”

“You and Logan, hm?”

“I like Logan.” She snaps the book shut and leans back next to the Professor. “He acts like he’s tough, but he’s just a teddy bear.”

“How do you even talk to him?”

“I don’t, mostly. He talks to me and I nod when I agree with him. He’s pretty lonely.” She looks at the Professor. “You changed the subject.”

“Did I.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Charles.” The Professor frowns and Raven rolls her eyes. “Your whole insistence about not being called Charles anymore is also ridiculous, but we can tackle that later.”

“I’m not-“

“Yeah, yeah, you’re not Charles anymore.” Raven shakes her head. “You took everyone in this house under your wing even though we’re probably all going to die. If that’s not the most Charles thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.”

The Professor huffs a sigh. “Did you want something?”

“Irene makes me better. I’m starting to feel like a person again. From what Hank tells me, Erik’s slowly starting to do the same to you.” Raven leans her head back against the wall. “You need to talk about Cuba.”

“We don’t need to talk about anything.”

“Yeah, you kind of do. I don’t want to raise my children in your dysfunctional relationship with Erik Lehnsherr.” Raven looks at him again. “As long as I get to raise them, anyway.”

The Professor thinks for a moment. “Can I make you a deal?”

“Your deals are always troubling.”

“I will talk to him about Cuba. But when the time comes, and we cannot survive, you and Irene must take the children and run.”

Raven frowns. “Charles-“

“I will not add the blood of children to my soul, Raven. Especially not my niece and nephew, especially not your son and daughter. I won’t see them dead.”

“And you won’t take them?”

“The captain goes down with the ship, my dear.”

Raven groans. “This is why you and Erik need to talk to each other. You’re both assholes.” She nods. “Irene was originally going to take the kids. But. I can go too.”

“Excellent. Thank you.”

“Raven wants me to talk to you,” the Professor says abruptly when Erik is carefully drawing up a map of the surrounding area, Creature lairs and all.

Erik doesn’t look up. “Does she?”

“About Cuba.”

“Do you want to talk about Cuba?” Erik’s lines are neat and straight.

“Not particularly. But I promised Raven.” The Professor watches Erik’s pencil move. They’re running out of pencils. “Is this what you wanted?”

Erik’s pencil stills. “No.”

“I mean. No. That wasn’t fair.” The Professor looks out the window. “This is what Shaw wanted. Not you.”

Erik quietly puts the pencil down and sits down next to the Professor. “I don’t know what I wanted.”

“You were right about some things, you know.”

“Not all.”

“No.”

Erik finally looks at the Professor. “I never meant.” He doesn’t seem to be able to finish.

“I know. You wanted us to be safe. You just didn’t go about it the best way you could have, I think.”

“I thought you’d be mad at me.”

“I was. For a very long time.” He settles into his chair slightly. “We’re going to die here, Erik. Sometime in the next six to seven months. Maybe even in this very room. And all of it, the fighting, Cuba, everything, will have been for naught. In the face of destruction, you can either rage against everything that put you here, or you can reconcile and try to live out what little time you have left in peace. I’d rather do the latter.”

They’re quiet for a moment as they look out the Professor’s window at the gray landscape. Erik reaches over and clasps the Professor’s hand without looking at him. The Professor doesn’t pull away.

The Professor quietly reloads his gun from an upper story window when Logan trudges into his old room, the best vantage point.

“They’re getting cockier,” Logan says grimly, covered in Creature blood.

The Professor puts his gun aside, loaded, always ready. “I know.” He looks up at him. “You have to take them and go, when we’re about to die. Get them as far as you can. Raven and Irene have already agreed to take the children.”

“Thought for sure you’d ask Magneto.”

“I feel like he’s going to be a tougher nut to crack. Will you do it?”

Logan looks at him for a long minute. “Yeah. I’ll do it.” He claps the Professor on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Professor.”

The Professor can’t bring himself to believe him. But it’s a nice sentiment.

“Will you take them?” He asks Erik while they’re chopping up Creature. It’s a nasty business, and one they only trust themselves to do correctly. “Will you run with them, when we can’t make it anymore?”

“Will you be coming with us?”

The Professor drives the cleaver in with more force than before. “Of course not. I’d slow  you down.”

“Then no.”

“Erik-“

“I won’t leave you here to die alone.” Erik’s tone screams finality, and the Professor lets it drop, for now.

They attack on a day full of coincidences.

Coincidentally, the Professor is out of bullets for his rifle and needs a supply run for more that day. Coincidentally, Logan and Erik are outside with the children. Coincidentally, coincidentally, coincidentally.

Kurt bamfs him and Anna-Marie away, and Mystique comes roaring out of the mansion. The Professor grabs a handgun and does his best to take down as many Creatures as possible. But it’s not enough, and there are too many.

The Professor runs out of ammo just as a Creature takes Erik down. Erik struggles to hold the Creature off, but it’s jaws are perilously close to Erik’s face.

And something in the Professor snaps. And heals. And snaps again.

“RAVEN!” He roars, feeling like time is slowing down. “SHIFT BACK!”

Mystique twists into Raven in an elegant move, landing neatly on the ground and looking up at Charles, who holds out his arms and closes his eyes.

He slams into each Creature’s mind, working his way into their brains and shutting them down as effortlessly as flipping a switch. He lashes out until every Creature drops, lifeless.

He can feel Raven and Logan gaping at him. He ignores them and wheels over to Erik, who is staring at Charles like he had never seen him before.

He holds out his hand. Erik takes it and hauls himself up.

Charles is in his study, re-reading one of his books on genetics. He will never feel like himself again, the person he used to be. But he feels like he might be a little cleaner, a little healthier.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

Charles looks up to see Erik standing in the doorway.

“Neither did I. Well.” He closes his book. “I had my suspicions. I just never had cause before, I suppose.”

“Why did you do it?”

Charles puts the book on his desk. “Sorry?”

“You heard me, Charles.”

Charles clears his throat. “Well. I think I realized that I would rather spend what is rest of my life with you in it at whatever cost.”

Charles and Erik’s lives are defined by silence these days. The pause that goes on after Charles’s words hang in there stretches and twists into infinity, in which Charles cannot look at Erik and Erik cannot seem to do anything but look at Charles.

When Erik crosses the room and kisses Charles, it is as though the healthy feeling in his body intensifies, like it slips not just into his veins, but his bones.

“There’s no chance at all I can convince you to leave with them now, is there?” Charles asks later that day.

“You never had a chance in the first place.”

Charles doesn’t have much contact with the mutants that Erik brought with him other than Logan. They mostly keep to their own ends of the house. But soon they start coming to him. An older man with a grizzled face clasps him on the shoulder and says nothing. Charles wakes up to see a boy who blinks sideways polishing his wheelchair, making it seem almost new for the first time in years. A girl who can’t be much older than eighteen walks into the kitchen and cups her hands in front of him. A tiny flower head blooms in her hand and she quietly tucks it into Charles’s hair.

“I can’t make them grow in the ground,” she says softly. “But they last for a little while.”

Eventually, while he, Logan, and Erik are planning out the next expedition to a nearby town, Charles asks Logan if he knows why.

“They want to thank you.” Logan circles a mark on the map. “They know that we ain’t got long left, but you and Magneto have kept ‘em going as long you could, and they appreciate it.”

Charles blinks. “Oh. They don’t have to.”

“You can tell ‘em that if you want, Chuck, but they’re not gonna listen.”

Charles isn’t quite certain when he became Chuck but he’s not sure he minds. Erik looks unimpressed, which is almost worth it right there.

Charles eventually moves into Erik’s bedroom, which has less to do with their relationship arrangement and more to do with the fact that Erik has flat out stated he will have an apoplectic fit if he sees Charles sleeping on his desk in the study one more time.

When Erik and Logan leave on a scavenging mission, Charles pulls Hank aside.

“No,” Hank says before Charles can even open his mouth.

“You don’t even know-“

“Yeah, I do. I’m not leaving.” Hank’s jaw is set. “I was here when we thought we were going to die the first time around. I’m not leaving just because we got an extension.”

“What did I do to deserve such loyalty from you?” He doesn’t mean to say it.

Hank shrugs, face twisting into an odd smile. “You just were, Professor. All you needed to do.”

When Erik and Logan come back, Erik is beaming like Charles isn’t sure he even saw before all this. Charles is confused until he sees the two dented motorcycles that Erik’s levitating behind him.

“You’re ridiculous,” he informs Erik. “They’re going to attract Creatures with the noise, you know.”

“You’re not saying anything I haven’t already said, bub,” Logan says, lighting one of the new cigars he evidently found.

“I’m going to fix them,” Erik tells Charles. “Can I put them in the bunkers?”

Charles considers throwing up his hands in exasperation, but he thinks that his smile would betray him.

Charles actually likes sitting and talking with Erik while he’s working on the bikes. Erik reaches a level of peace he’s never seen in him when he is molding scraps of metal into the appropriate parts missing from the bikes.

“Hank won’t leave,” he tells Erik one day while Erik is lying on his back, rotating a motorcycle above him to try and see what’s wrong with it better.

“You’re going to have to fight all of them to do it.”

“I don’t deserve this. Any of it.” Charles watches the bike slowly turn through the air. “I haven’t done anything.”

“You and Hank could have lived off Creature for several more years. You had a good roof over your head. You didn’t need to share it. But you did.”

“I did what anyone else would have done.”

“No, you didn’t. And the fact that it doesn’t even occur to you that that’s not true means you deserve it.” Erik reaches out and pulls a piece from the motorcycle with his powers. It hovers in the air as he gently irons out its dent.

“Maybe you’re just a pessimist.”

“I’m the largest optimist in this room.” Erik carefully slides the piece back in. “I believed you’d take me back in.”

When the winter comes, it’s cold and brutal. Everyone curls up in the room with the best fireplace, Raven transformed into Mystique so she can wrap around the children and keep them warm. Charles is in the farthest corner so other people can get the warmer spots, and Erik is with him.

We won’t survive another winter, he tells Erik silently. I’m not even sure we’ll survive this one.

I know.

I’m glad you’re here.

Me too.

Their stockpiles of Creature start to dwindle. Charles starts to eat less, cutting his portions in half and sliding more onto Anna-Marie and Kurt’s plates. It takes him a week to notice Erik doing the same. Another two to see Logan, Irene, and Raven.

Charles honestly expected a bigger blowout when Erik found the gun in the study desk drawer.

Erik picks it up and seems to instantly know its purpose. He looks at Charles for a long moment.

“Do you have two bullets?” He asks.

Charles blinks. “Yes. Why?”

“Because I don’t know how you think you’re going anywhere without me.”

The winter passes. They are tireder, thinner, but alive.

Charles is wheeling through the garden with Anna-Marie in his lap. There’s still a slight chill, enough that Charles insists on Anna-Marie being wrapped in one of his old overcoats, the sleeves dangling long over the tips of her fingertips. But it’s warm enough that they can tour the old garden while Charles bounces names off Anna-Marie that she might like better.

“Aurelia?”

“No.”

“Ava?”

“No.”

“Horatio Hornblower?”

She giggles. “No, Uncle Charles.” She points at one of the patches of dirt in the garden. “What was there?”

“Tomato plants, I think.”

“Like grow in the cans?”

Charles feels a pang of sadness. “No, little one. They don’t grow in cans. They used to come from plants.”

“Oh.” She scoots off his lap and kneels in front of the dirt. She pokes at it with her mismatched gloves. “Where did they go?”

“Well, during the Flash-“

“No, I mean the plants themselves. Where did they go?”

“Well, they shriveled and rotted, I imagine.”

“Into the ground?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.” Anna-Marie pulls her gloves off and puts her hands on the dirt. She gently runs her fingers through the soil before flattening her palms to the ground. She closes her eyes and her hands start to glow slightly. Alarmed, Charles rolls forwards slightly but Anna-Marie shakes her head. “It’s okay, Uncle Charles.”

The entire soil glows slightly and Charles sees something wholly remarkable, something he thought he would never see again.

In the dirt, there are dozens of tiny green sprouts.

Anna-Marie yawns and pulls her gloves back on. “M’tired, Uncle Charles.” She crawls back into his lap and curls up. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

“Yes.” Charles dazedly strokes her hair. “Yes, why not? I’d rather say you’ve earned it.”

“It’s her mutation.” Irene tilts her head slightly at the sprouts in the ground. She, Logan, Raven, Hank, and Erik are all with Charles gazing at the green. “She can sap the strength from someone and she can return it. I just never imagined she could be this powerful.”

“Is this even returning the strength?” Hank asks, on his knees and peering with a scientist’s curiosity.

“I don’t know. It could be a rogue mutation.”

“That’s me.”

They all look down at Anna-Marie, who stirs in Charles’s lap. She blinks sleepily up at her mothers.

“I’m Rogue,” she says. “I like that. That’s my name now.” She yawns. “I’m hungry.”

Raven picks Anna-Marie up. “We’ll get you something to eat in a minute, sweetie. I think you deserve it.”

“Will they survive?” Logan asks. Irene shrugs.

“Possibly? I don’t know for sure. Time will tell, I suppose.”

“We might survive after all,” Charles murmurs, something in his chest flaring that feels dangerously like hope. Erik doesn’t say anything, but sits on the ground and leans his head into Charles’s shoulder.

The sprouts don’t go away. Rather, they grow and they grow and they grow until green plants stand before them, red tomatoes growing. The youngest members of their home run through the plants, picking them up and dumping them into rusty buckets Hank had scrounged up. Rogue (for she will be addressed as nothing else now) runs up to Charles and holds out a tomato in her gloved hands. “Uncle Charles, try it,” she says and it’s like the entire world holds it’s breath.

Aware of everyone’s eyes on him, he takes a bite out of the tomato like it was an apple. He swallows and is silent for a moment.

“Charles?” Raven prompts, voice hushed.

“It’s.” He clears his throat and wipes his eyes with his thumb. “It tastes like it’s supposed to. Like it used to.” He smiles tremulously. “It tastes like a ripe tomato.”

Rogue also brings around green beans and potatoes. Erik and Hank go into town and bring back books that survived, books on how to skin animals and make use of their pelts. The next Creatures they capture they successfully make blankets out of.

Irene and Hank learn how to can. They work on canning half the tomatoes and the beans. They teach Kurt and Rogue how and there’s something so warming about it, seeing children deep and studiously at work in something that’s not desperate or dangerous.

In the early summer months, Rogue and Kurt bamf up to Charles with, miracle upon miracles, a small bouquet of daffodils.

“Mama says it’s your birthday,” Kurt says. “And that these are your favorites, and that some of ‘em used to grow in the gardens, so Rogue brought ‘em back.”

“It’s my birthday,” Charles says faintly. “Goodness gracious.” He’d completely forgotten.

“Do you like them?”

“Yes, children. I like them very much. Thank you.”

Kurt climbs up onto Charles’s shoulders and Rogue sits on Charles’s lap. Kurt starts meticulously poking the daffodils into Charles’s recently trimmed hair.

“Happy birthday, Uncle Charles,” Rogue says contentedly. “It’s a happy birthday, right?”

Charles looks around. Soon they will be able to harvest the potatoes. Children are running around in the still brown grass playing games with the adults. Erik is scrubbing at the recently constructed motorbikes so that he and Logan will be able to go on a longer journey to retrieve more supplies. Logan is lounging by them, cigar in his mouth and making obnoxious comments to Erik, who is rolling his eyes but looks amused anyway. Hank is playing card games on the lawn with Raven, Irene asleep on her shoulder.

“Yes,” Charles says thoughtfully. “Yes, I think it’s a very happy everything.”