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The last time they fought, they were on the same side. The time before, too. Charles felt him from Cerebro, the blunt impasse of blocked-off thoughts. Erik isn’t stupid, and Charles thinks it’s stubbornness alone allowing him to go on thinking that he’s none the wiser. The lines grow ever-blurred - X-Men, Brotherhood - as their enemies grow stronger. It echoes back to a chess game in the library half a lifetime ago, the chill clarity of Erik’s voice. Peace was never an option.
It’s Charles’s own stubbornness that won’t admit that he’s right, even still.
And yet, once in a flickering blue moon, Erik still comes to him in the night; he still falls bloodied at his feet, shallow breath and unspoken apologies. Cold beneath his armour, the limp wrist that’s been broken too many times to count cradled to his chest. Old, fragile - not yet frail, but not far from it. Charles will wonder how long it’s been since his hair had started to turn white; he’ll stir Hank out of bed to see to his injuries, and keep him like a secret tucked up in his room as he recuperates.
It used to be that Charles had to strip any memory of the night from Hank, falsify a bizarre dream and field off any questions. It used to be that he’d spend a week or two red-faced and twitchy, forever buried in the minds of children and tutors alike for any hint of suspicion.
But even now, after all their sins and forgiveness - when Hank needs no prompting, and Kurt asks after Erik with all the levity in the world, and even Ororo manages to turn a blind eye - he won’t stay. He never does.
He always comes back, and he always leaves again.
It happened the first time late in the seventies. Black and blue, brimming with a fury that Charles was too bitter to listen to. He'd somehow broken himself free from the Pentagon. Charles had no interest in knowing why or how. Still deep in a bottle, he turned him away.
When he appeared again months later, Raven’s fragile body limp in his arms, he’d had nothing but venom and blame, cursing Charles for his part in it. That his action and his blessed X-Men could’ve saved her, so much of his sister’s body and mind sacrificed to petri dish and microscope slide, if only he had listened. So ignorant and blind, to think that Erik was simply there for him.
So he summoned Hank. He tried to apologise with his words clinging thick and syrupy in his throat. And he tried to make sure Erik understood that, no matter what broken shards of ideology lay between them, he could always return. That Charles would offer him safety.
Erik scoffed, his spite sharp in his voice. Such a fucking saint, Professor. He turned his back for what he swore would be the final time.
And that held true until Erik next found himself bleeding. Charles took him, again and again through the transient years. A winter solstice, an autumn equinox. Even when his pain was inflicted by Charles’s own students, when they sat nauseous at odds - when Charles could not bring himself to be anything gentle or soft. After Ellis Island. After Alkali Lake.
But then there’s the kinder moments where he’s little more than a lover, the stolen glimpses of a long-buried dream. Where he holds him tight and presses their lined lips into one another, and urges him to stay; to relinquish his hold on the heavy cross of revolution, to try it his way this time. It seems that Erik’s methods only guarantee bloodshed, a great deal of it his own.
It’s a question he’s wasted so much breath on through the years. No matter how raw and vulnerable, how miserable the odds, Erik’s answer never changes.
He’ll stay for a moment. But at the end of it, he walks out of Westchester like Orpheus, chin to the sky under a blanket of night with that damned helmet tucked under his arm, not looking back until he’s out of sight. Charles still hears the doubt, the faint pulse of his own name repeated over and over, and each time he wonders if it would really be such a crime to keep him.
He knows it’s too great a cruelty to inflict. Charles has never wished to control him. The appeal is always lost in the moments before Erik dons his helmet and locks himself away again, and then he couldn’t make him obey even if he wanted to.
It would be a hundred times easier if they were young again. When their feelings for one another sat uncomplicated by gunpowder and lead, or by the patchwork of scars that litter Erik’s body, a hundred little atonements for the one to Charles’s back. But the world they live in is forever threatening to crumple under the threat of the X-gene. For all Charles’s impassioned best attempts, the Hail Mary in Washington back in ‘77 and the several that followed, nothing changes. Humanity still whiles away its time crafting means to destroy them, automaton and legislature alike, and peace feels more impossible day by frightening day.
Charles does what he can. He trains his children to survive, he fields off threats, he lives in spite of it all. And so does Erik - Magneto, famed and feared - in his own ways.
He sought him out for what Charles had started to suppose was the last time not long after Jean. When his powers healed with fragile instability, a sixth sense lost after a lifetime of honing its edge, and he was all but broken. Charles saw his own pain reflected, watching the man struggle to lift a chess piece from an inch away; he thinks of himself, alone, suffering through pointless rehabilitation after Cuba. Struggling to sit up, to move, to drag himself kicking and screaming from one day to the next, thinking only of Erik each time his grip trembled on a trapeze bar. And he could have let his sympathy be stretched to breaking, he could have pushed him away, out of his sight and mind for the remains of his days - but what good would that do?
Instead, Charles swallowed it all and held him through it, celebrated the minuscule victories and hoped this would be it as a month became two.
“Why forgive me?” He asked, once. “After all I’ve done to you?”
“Oh, my friend,” Charles shook his head. “I never have. And that’s just what maddens me.”
That was three years ago. To love is to be abandoned, time after time, and Charles is a perfect fool.
And so he keeps on living. He watches the blank spot where Erik ought to be on Cerebro, he asks Ororo at the end of every combat with diminishing impartiality if Erik - Magneto - was among the casualties. He protects his school, his children. He goes on.
And the fixed points of suffering grow larger and louder, no means to ignore what’s being done to their kind. The laboratories and the internment camps, the threat that mounts to a screech as humanity crafts its weapons and its so-called cures.
Charles loses sleep. Worrying for the day that seems to draw ever-nearer that they come for him, for his students. He awakens in a cold sweat, and he watches doggedly at the window.
He's awake when Erik returns to him.
He hovers six inches off the ground even once he’s over the threshold of the ledge, his thigh a crumpled parenthesis. Erik’s hand clamps over the shrapnel wound in his stomach, a faltering command over his own red blood cells, and he spends the night in the infirmary. Charles spends it with him, hand in cannula-spiked hand, sleepless as he studies the feeble rise and fall of Erik’s unconscious chest.
Old, fragile, not yet frail, and just as uniquely breakable as any of them. As Scott, or as Jean, the bodies beneath the lawn. Even now, beyond death and depowering, survival can’t be guaranteed.
His slate eyes addled with pain and opiates, his arms bare and confronting in his hospital gown. Erik thumbs nervously over his tattoo. There’s no need to speak of it. The talk of forced registration, the lauded invention of inhibitor collars, the awful camp at Guantanamo Bay and the dozens more like it that the powers that be refuse to acknowledge. He's seen it all before, flickering over and over behind his irises.
Erik is uncomfortable in Charles’s bed when he first speaks, leg immobilised from ankle to hip, flinching over the newspaper in borrowed pyjamas. Trask Industries on the front page, the fuzzy image of some biomechanical monstrosity wearing Raven’s scales.
“I’m afraid…” The start of a sentence that’s left to hang, Erik swallowing the remains of the statement. But it’s all Charles needs.
He's afraid. And that’s never said lightly.
He’s almost angelic, bathed in white; the creased sheets, his plaster cast, the silver splendour of his hair. Charles knits his brows, taking a sharp breath as his eyes flicker over the headline again.
“As am I.”
There’s no announcement, no great declaration of a buried hatchet. Heaven knows that Erik is fond of an impassioned speech, but it seems there’s no need for one. In times gone by, he’d be a mile away the moment he was mobile enough. But Charles watches him claw back his strength one tenuously peaceful day at a time; watches him fumble with a pair of crutches and plan for disaster. The students grow blithe to his presence, addressing Mr Lehnsherr with a smile through the old halls, and Charles cannot help but wish for a few dozen more years of this.
He fears - they both do, tangled up in one another in the restless night. Erik is bloodless and commanding in the Danger Room. Charles speaks, pointlessly, at one summit after another.
It would be a hundred times easier if they were young again. If the unspoken war was not as it is, if peace had been an option on that damned beach or long before.
But they are not young. They never will be again. Peace never truly was an option, and not so much as one year more is promised.
In six months’ time, the school will be taken. Children will perish; Charles will wish the same fate unto himself as he watches the east wing burn from the window of the jet. Students will be bundled three abreast onto the seats in their nightclothes, the frantic humming of dozens of panicked minds; Charles pressed against a bulkhead trying to soothe the shaking little boy in his lap. He will catch Erik’s teary eye, a torrent of jackboots and shattered glass blistering his thoughts as his powers keep the struggling blackbird on course. Their synapses will interweave, grasping with scrabbling fingers for some little comfort, as they fly over ash and terror to a safety that no longer exists.
But tonight, they are safe, and every one of Charles’s precious students are alive in their beds. Erik holds a white bishop in the palm of his hand and smiles into the dregs of his drink. For a moment things feel as they ought to. As though nothing is between them and nothing ever was.
“Why now?” Charles asks, in spite of himself. “After all these years?”
The same voice, annealed by time and spent rage.
“We want the same thing.”
And only now, under a gathering storm, is it true.