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She found him in Toronto, the teleporter with ink colored hair.
In front of a crowd of thousands, she watched as he stood next to a trembling mother, clutching a photo of her children. Two boys, eight and nine, smiling wide enough to expose the youngest’s fangs. “He had scales too,” the mother said, voice narrowly missing the microphone, “and he liked to swim. That’s all, Mr. Magneto. I promise that’s all he was doing.”
She noticed his arm as it curved around the woman’s shoulders, her wet face tucked against his chest. She heard him condemn the policemen, present to shield the humans from a perceived mob of mutants, but deaf to a young boy’s screams; blind to the blood soaking through his shirt as four sets of knees pinned his brother under water.
They locked eyes as his voice boomed over the human’s discontent, pouring from the cluster of protestors in the back. Animals, he called them, sticking to their herd.
“Make no mistake,” he said, “humans will grab you by the throat, cutting your air supply off at the lungs. Your children are not safe. We are not safe.”
She did not see the mother grab his hand as they retreated from the stage, the tan line on her ring finger matching Erik’s own. With a careful smile she asked, “Do you — do you have any children?”
He thought of his little girl, clutching his wife’s thigh in the woods by their home, the pair of them dwarfed by the humans and their weapons. He remembered every nanosecond, from Magda’s hand drawing Nina behind her, to the tilt of her chin as the ravens flocked threateningly above. His movements toward them were slow and measured, no need to further rile up the humans, but he could taste their panic, swamped in their mouths and drawn out through their fingertips.
It was inevitable, the arrow. He heard it on the wind before the policeman positioned his fingers. This he understood, but with the future so firmly fixed in his mind he thought he could save them, his wife and child. He dove forward, one foot craned between their bodies. He pinned Nina to his front and reached for Magda’s waist. His fingers grazed her sweater, curling to grab, but Magda had flung forward, impaling herself on the wooden arrow, shielding him and their daughter from the blow.
The rest of the story has been stretched across newspapers and underground mutant publications, events exaggerated depending on the authorship. Either he provoked the humans, luring them into the woods with promise of bloodshed, or the humans burned him out of their home; his wife and daughter turned to ash.
Awaiting an answer, the woman squeezed his hand.
He told her, “I had a wife once.”
The mutant publications use her name. “Magda Lehnsherr” printed beneath the same photo taken at a town fair, age seventeen. He had never seen the photo before, her brown hair cut short and curled around her ears, her arms extended across the railing behind her. In the grain of black and white he made out the scar along her neck, darker than the line he once traced with his fingertips and mouth.
“From the war,” she said their first night together, nails dragging along the inside of his arm. “You have your scars and I have mine.”
He cut the photograph from a Polish zine and carried it in his pocket, from San Francisco to Beirut to Westchester County, where he presented it to his daughter, kneeling at her feet.
Her small hands turned the photo around before, “Oh, Papa,” Nina said, running off.
She left him in the corridor of the east wing, surrounded by toys and overpacked bookshelves — The Giving Tree and The Hobbit and prominent mutant children’s books with Professor Charles Xavier, PhD, or Magneto thanked in their acknowledgements — until Nina returned, a photographic print in hand.
“Charles gave it to me,” her smile showcased two missing teeth, “for my birthday.”
The corners were curled and stained brown with age. Scribbled in pencil on the back was the date, location, Magda's maiden name, and a brief description: ‘Roma girl after the war’.
They had spoken about the war in snatches, drinking through long silences and gripping one another in the dark. Few nightmares plagued her, but they were present in her empty, far off stare. “You’re here with me,” he whispered against her temple, pulling her into him. “You’re alive, you’re breathing, you’re safe here with me.”
His thumb stained the matte paper, a trail of touch against the curve of her cheek and the sweep of hair across her forehead. Only she could manage to captivate him through printed ink.
Charles’s wheels were silent as he rolled down the hall and parked next to Nina, lifting her onto his lap. “Your mother was a very beautiful woman,” he said, and then to Erik, She looks just like her.
His attention snapped up, eyes blinking away thin tears. Charles was gracious enough to look away, busying himself with Nina and her fascination with his cufflinks. Erik cleared his throat, gathered himself, I always thought she looked like my mother.
Charles laughed, warm and fond and with a hint of mischief. That’s very telling.
How did you find this, he wanted to ask, but instead, You know what they say about Jewish boys and their mothers.
Charles’s smile turned a bit sharper, carrying an undercurrent of ancient familiarity, born in the evenings when Charles could run his foot along Erik’s ankle before crossing the study and locking the door. He feigned innocence, I have no idea what you mean, and with a finger pressed to the corner of his eye, Erik laughed.
Nina whipped her head between the two of them, eyebrows knitted in the middle. “What are you saying, Papa?” She tugged on Charles's shirt. “Charles, I want to know.”
Charles laughed and ruffled her hair. She's getting better at that. “I’m trying to convince your father to stay for the weekend, but I might have better luck if we ask together. What do you think?”
Erik knew his answer before Nina hopped from Charles’s lap. Before she threw her arms around his neck, bouncing excitedly as she said, “Papa, you have to stay. You have to.”
He did not speak of his daughter to crowds of strangers who could use her against him. She was his weakness, his external heart, worn with only the protection of Charles and his school.
“I’ll keep her safe,” Charles promised. “Above everything else, you know that I will.”
The teleporter began to follow him, across country and state lines, hovering on the fringes of his movement (“Our movement,” he told her, “all of ours.”) until Dallas.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. Twenty-six years after the government hunted, tasered, and detained him — a poor show of gratitude for an attempt to save their president — a mob of humans, naked of belt buckles or wedding rings and wielding glass bottles, encircled him in the parking lot of a Dallas kosher deli.
How ingenious they must have felt, hiding behind the plastic ghosts of Kennedy and Nixon, disciples of dead and spoiled presidents, wholly ignorant of the rusted steel vehicles and metal husks of the light poles lining the street.
A small audience of patrons gathered inside the diner, haggard men and women fogging the windows with their whiskey-and-coffee breath. To them they were a distraction, another excuse to keep from their homes despite the late hour.
Were they entertained by the destructive odds? Seven men against one mutant, who fought off the first with a metal pole smacked against his back? Did they cringe as two men fell atop the other, a pole clipping them at the ankles? Did they look away as a pole wrapped around the fourth’s waist, pinning him against the asphalt? Was there a hint of elation as the fifth knocked his fist against Erik's mouth, splitting open his bottom lip; and disappointment when Erik flung him across the parking lot? Did they hold their breath as one by one his attackers fell mercilessly, until the seventh man’s mask fell from his head?
His blond hair was slick with sweat, blue eyes glassy with drink, cheeks pinched with the fat of youth. Not a man but an intoxicated child, fifteen at the most. He had waited in the wings, poised as a shallow threat with his feet glued to the ground. Erik thought him a coward but the boy was frozen by inexperience. He had not lived enough to know his principles were drawn in blood.
But Erik is not Charles.
He knew human children grew up with their tongues dipped in hate, enacting laws banning mutants from restaurants and schools, spawning a new generation who swallowed their poison from birth. But that boy, with his trembling hand wrapped around the neck of a glass bottle, was someone’s son.
Erik wiped the blood from his mouth. “Go home,” he told him. “To your mother, or she won’t see you again.”
The boy sneered. Erik almost felt the acidic retort forming behind his lips, but the boy swallowed it in favor of a grin, cutting sharp along his mouth.
Panic crawled up Erik’s spine. He swung around, fast enough to catch the man’s left arm, but he missed his right. His hand slammed into Erik’s torso, a punch wrapped around a shard of glass, shoved deep into Erik’s side. He sucked in a breath as the man twisted the glass with a cackle. Erik could nearly taste the blood running loose inside him. An organ split open.
His knees buckled and the boy joined in, laughing hard enough to bend at the waist.
The night grew quiet beneath the blood in his ears.
Erik twisted the man’s left arm until his bone audibly snapped. Beneath his mask, his mouth grew wide, shifting the plastic. The boy ran but Erik reached for a van, lifting it in the air to catch him, before he disappeared down the street.
At least once a month he went to see her. In the morning or dead of night, Nina found him on the rocking chair in her bedroom, blood on his cheek and caked in his hair. He winced when she crawled onto his lap but Erik kept his arm around her, her head on his shoulder, her fingers against his bruised knuckles.
She hummed to him, songs learned from the other children. Lullabies in English, French, German, and Russian, peppered with the lyrics, “You’ll be alright, Papa, with me, and Mama, and Charles.”
He drifted off to the sound of her voice. When he woke Nina was tucked in her bed and Charles, beside him.
“Is it worth saying you’re going to get yourself killed?” Charles said, damp cloth dabbing at Erik’s wounds.
Erik’s head lolled slightly to the right, limbs weighed down. He pushed past the pressure, wrapping a hand around Charles’s wrist. “You would never let me.”
Charles snorted, but the cloth dropped to Erik’s lap as he knitted their fingers together. “It isn’t always up to me.”
Erik collapsed onto the asphalt.
Inside the diner the patrons scrambled to curl beneath the booths; Erik, a tornado, spun without warning. He felt the flurry of fingers, punching the buttons of a pay phone. 9-1-1. He could stop the call, has stopped them before, but as he raised his hand it fell pitifully against the ground.
The police would come within minutes. They would jostle him to his feet, further splitting open his wound or, like the mob before them, draw their weapons and create a barricade of bodies, impatiently waiting for him to bleed out.
Dread, like blood, crawled into his throat.
I cannot die here, he thought. Charles, I can’t.
His heart pounded in his ears, loud enough to drown out the sound of footsteps moving in his direction. The teleporter knelt beside him, her hand pushing the hair from his forehead. His thoughts were cottoned and his vision, grey, but he saw the sad tilt of her mouth, familiar and foreign all at once.
In her brown eyes, a flash of blue.
“Oh, Erik,” she said, lowering her body against his. “Hold onto her.”