Archive of Our Own

“Erik, you said yourself we’re the better men. This is the time to prove it.”

That’s what I’m doing. Erik’s mind feels clearer than it ever has, and it’s not from Shaw’s crumpled body in the sand or from the helmet keeping Charles from meddling. Those many conversations over the chessboard, Charles had almost gotten Erik to question what he knows to be true. They are not innocent, the men on those ships. They fired first; Erik had known they would and nobody listened.

“They’re just following orders!”

For some reason, Erik suddenly remembers the night he tried to leave the CIA facility, the night Charles boasted how he had marauded through Erik’s head, how he had seen everything there was to see, and then showed his magnanimity by offering to fix Erik if he stayed. He had always known that he was weak to have let that tempt him into obeying. He has always hated his unquenchable, childish desire to be shaped and beaten into something finally perfect, faultless. Liar. You don’t know me.

“Never again.”

Charles is yelling but Erik doesn’t hear him. He has finally accepted that he can’t be fixed. The promises were just lures, traps – anesthetic to keep him sedated and malleable. Shaw made him, or maybe Charles made him. They ought to have taken better care.

Charles is scrabbling for the helmet but Erik is bigger, stronger, made for this kind of mean brawling. Charles should have paid better attention when he raided Erik’s memories; Erik was weaned on violence. Now it sits easily in his hand, in his mind. He will not, cannot hesitate, not even for Charles. Charles doesn’t even like to hold a measly handgun. His reluctance would have been charming if it were grounded in reality.

Reality is the bombs in Erik’s palm and the bullets the human fires at him. It’s metallic and cruel and destructive.

It was always going to kill Charles, but Erik hadn’t thought he would be touching the instrument of death as its blunt tip flattens out in the millisecond before it punches through Charles’s skin.

Raven is screaming.

The first lesson Erik remembers learning is that everyone dies, so anyone can be killed. He knows this. Somehow, he is never prepared. He cannot hold onto the next bullet or the missiles. He is hardly aware of the metal encasing his own head. All he knows is the deformed lump of brass and lead lurching to a momentary standstill and then falling to the burning sand. It’s in his hand, in Charles’s back; natural in one, an abomination in the other.

Charles is dying slowly, or maybe his scream lasts forever only for Erik.

The bullet is ugly in Charles’s body. Erik should have had better control, should not have been so careless around someone like Charles, who stupidly didn’t think to be wary of someone like Erik. Arrogant little ingénue, but he’s learned his lesson now. No need to beleaguer the point or deny his own culpability by leaving the murder weapon in Charles’s body.

It’s like drawing back a dispelled piece of himself, drawing the bullet out of Charles. There is barely any blood on it, a last reclamation from the flesh that resisted its removal. Maybe—maybe it didn’t take. It never left Erik’s hand, after all, and he never wanted to hurt Charles. It never left him. They can’t prove otherwise. Maybe—

Charles is still screaming, still dying. Raven has stifled herself but the others have taken up her wailing. Erik has a sudden wild urge to shatter the bullet and lose the fragments in the glittering sand, to swallow it whole and hold it inside until it scars over.

“Get away from him!”

Something heavy and snarling sends Erik sprawling. His fingers clench protectively around the bullet.

“What were you thinking? You do not move potential spinal injuries!” Moving quickly and surely, Beast tears open the seams of Charles’s suit. “Shit!”

“Charles!” Raven sobs, her gloved hand hovering fearfully over his body, unable to look away from his exposed back. All the blood pooled inside his suit, now smeared and dripping down Charles’s sides. If it weren’t for his freckles, he would look like a slab of pork on the butcher’s block.

Havok wrenches Erik to his feet just for the satisfaction of a juvenile shove. “What the fuck is wrong with you! You shot him!”

The bullet has warmed in his hand. Charles’s blood is slick and hot, but Erik is almost certain that he’s imaging the sensation; there wasn’t nearly enough on the bullet to be noticeable.

Beast growls at the sand sifting out of his fur onto the wound, frustrated more with his own physiology than with the contamination; the burbling blood washes it away well enough. It’s lucky Erik kept the bullet rather than scattering its malevolent atoms into the sand after all.

“Oh, God.” The human runs forward, gun dangling uselessly by her side and a nickel chain hanging loosely around her neck. “How bad is it?”

A ring of plasma hurtles uncontrollably out of Havok’s body, luckily hitting nothing before it douses itself in the surf. “You stay away from him.”

“It was her! She’s the one holding the gun!”

Her chain is body-warm, slim but more than strong enough. Wearing a metal noose around a metallokinetic you distrust is an audacious stupidity only an American government agent and a human would perpetrate. Shooting at him was quite literally an engraved invitation. “She killed him!”

Brash in his anger and sparking energy, Havok shakes Erik by the straps of his flight suit. “You’re the one who controls metal and you let it—”

“Moira!” Banshee yanks her dog tags frantically, but the chain doesn’t break. Their hands fumble together to get it over her head and he flings it away toward the water. As if Erik couldn’t pick it up from there, or any of the tons of metal scattered over the beach.

“Shut up!” Beast’s voice has changed less than his body but he was never capable of a commanding roar before enhancing his mutation. “I need a stretcher and transport to a fully stocked medical suite now.”

“Charles! Charles, can you hear me?”

“Raven—”

“I’ll hail the fleet.”

“Like they’re going to come anywhere near us when you nearly blew them up!” But the human ignores him and runs for the downed plane.

Erik jerks out of Havok’s grip, holding his fist as far away as he can without drawing attention to its contents. “Did you forget that those were their missiles?”

“Leave it, Alex!” Banshee tugs him away against Havok’s uncoordinated resistance. “We’ve got to find something to make a stretcher for the Professor.”

“Charles!”

“Erik—”

“Get the first aid kit!”

“Erik! I can’t hear him. I can’t hear Erik. Raven! I can’t—”

Charles is panicking. Beast restrains his feeble thrashing with minimal effort but the blood rushes out more quickly. The sun is far too hot, but blood loss can be chilling. What makes Erik feel feverishly woozy might be a comfort to Charles.

“He’s fine, Charles! He’s fine! Erik, Erik—” Raven is gripping Charles’s hand very tightly, like her touch or her voice will keep him in his body. “He’s right there, Charles, I promise! Look!”

“Keep him still!” Beast’s paw presses firmly between Charles’s shoulders, his fur dragging in the blood. “He’s in shock from pain and blood loss. He’s delirious and movement could—”

In a puff of the putrid scarlet smoke that accompanies Shaw’s teleporter everywhere he goes, the human is abruptly standing over them, as startled by her sudden appearance as everyone else. “Change of plans.”

The teleporter blinks away, only to return immediately with a red box outstretched toward Beast.

“Hey!”

“What’s he—”

Disregarding their outcry, Beast snatches the box away and rips it open. White rolls of gauze tumble into the pool of blood.

Asininely, the human steps protectively in front of Azazel. “It’s all right! He’s helping. He’ll take Charles to a hospital on the mainland if someone makes sure his friend gets treated.”

“Shaw’s dead.”

“Angel?”

“Angel’s hurt? Where is she?”

Beast straightens to his impressive full height. “Raven, clean and pack the wound as best you can without putting too much stress on the spine. Get some sort of stretcher together. Show me your friend.”

Azazel clasps Beast on the shoulder and they disappear. Raven’s rattling breath belies her steady hands on Charles’s back. The human takes over her position holding Charles’s hand, though she doesn’t try to talk to him. Havok and Banshee are still searching the beach chaotically for a suitable piece of wreckage.

Erik holds the bullet, safe in his hand. They don’t know he has it. Maybe they think it’s still inside Charles. He wonders if they’ll try to take it away when the doctors at whatever hospital don’t find it in the corpse.

In another plume of gunpowder haze, Beast comes back, kneeling with Azazel over the prone body of the mutant Erik had knocked over to get to Shaw. The back of his head is misshapen and vomit smears his mouth.

“Bad skull fracture,” Beast says, looking around for the other boys. “I need another stretcher!”

The shouted curses in reply sound very far away. A wild burst of plasma from Havok catches the submarine wreckage with an screech of ripping and crumpling metal.

“Hank, I don’t—”

“You’re doing great, Raven.”

“How far can you take us?”

Azazel looks calm but he keeps one hand resting surely on his comrade’s shoulder. “As far as you need to go.”

“New York? With—four other people?”

“Of course. Anywhere, with anything.”

“I can’t go into a hospital like this. Tell them the Professor has a single gunshot wound with probable spinal fracture, at least a pint lost, probably two.”

Raven stands and fumbles her clothes off. “Gunshot, spinal fracture, blood loss, skull fracture, got it.” Her skin ripples and she looks like Hank just as he was the night they met, before the fur. She looks stricken but Beast barely pauses.

He jerks his head toward Shaw’s mutant, “He also has increased intracranial pressure and poor pupil response.”

“Charles lost consciousness.” The human doesn’t blink at Raven’s new appearance. “We need to move. Are you ready?”

“As soon as I get my damn stretchers!”

Erik has lost all his horror for dead bodies. He isn’t afraid of touching them, of tearing their seized muscles or breaking their sweating bones, of making them. He remembers being frightened of the first striped corpse he saw in the camp; he was terrified the first time he saw a person get killed in front of him, even without counting his mother as the first. He made sure to contain his humiliation the first time he had to kill until no one was watching. At some point, he had realized that a newly dead body is just a living body without the potential threat, and that a rotting dead body is just so much stinking mud.

Charles’s body will rot quickly in the sun and the brine. There will be fat maggots in the wound and his eyes and his mouth and his nose before sundown. Erik needs to watch it happen. It would be only appropriate. He’s supposed to bear witness to the death of a—a friend.

Raven’s claim comes first, though. Charles loved her, so even if what she wants to do is pointless, Erik is obliged to respect her wishes.

He keeps his fingertips resting reassuringly on the bullet even as he slips it into the pocket where he kept Shaw’s coin and wrests the smoothest, flattest piece of metal plating on the beach from its struts. It screams in protest as he bodily rips it into halves as evenly as he can manage with muscles trained for raw power rather than finesse. There are holes and warps where the soldered rivets were torn and the ragged edges are ugly. Erik’s ashamed he can’t fix these imperfections at all, let alone as quickly as Raven needs him to do.

“Sean, Alex, get him onto the other one. Gently!” Beast cradles Charles’s legs while Raven as Hank supports his shoulders and head. Charles is already dead but the other mutant jerks and mumbles when three pairs of hands transfer him to the less whole of the two makeshift stretchers.

Shaw’s teleporter rests his hand firmly between the other one’s shoulder blades to keep him still and holds out the other to the human. “Hold onto the telepath.”

“No. Raven will hold onto Charles, I will hold onto your friend, and we’ll both hold onto you.”

“Smart.” He bares his teeth in approval. “This is fair.”

They switch places. She takes his hand without hesitation, nodding encouragingly to Raven. On her throat, Hank’s Adam’s apple bobs in trepidation, but she accepts his proffered hand.

All five vanish.

Beast exhales sharply, somehow drooping as he stands. “Think he’ll come back for us?”

“You think he won’t?”

Havok ignores them both and punches Erik. His knuckles connecting with the helmet probably hurt him more than it does Erik but it’s less than comfortable, not to mention a bit embarrassing how the punch knocks the helmet askew. Charles is gone in every sense anyway, so Erik pushes it off. The next punch catches him solidly across the jaw.

“Alex, stop it!”

“The Professor might be dying and it’s all his fault!”

“He didn’t mean to!”

“Let him go, Sean. He’s about to blow and take your arms off.”

Banshee hastily releases Havok. True to Beast’s prediction, the sparks of energy build and discharge, leaving a slithering streak of glass across the sand. It passes close enough to Erik for him to have felt the burning heat of the plasma ring even in the blazing afternoon sun.

Light-headed, Erik reassures himself that the bullet is still in his pocket, in his hand. “You missed.”

Chest heaving as he struggles to control his roiling power, Havok looks like he would like very much to reduce Erik to a charred stump. “I’ll kill you if the Professor doesn’t make it and Raven doesn’t want the honor.”

He’s a child and Erik doesn’t feel obliged to disabuse him of his childish hopes. Anyway, Havok is unlikely to be interested in anything Erik has to say.

“Nobody dying right now, that’s good. What are we going to do?” Banshee looks between them for some sort of guidance. “How are we going to get home?”

“Stop being a baby, Cassidy.”

“Stop being a jerk, Summers,” Beast snaps.

Banshee looks beseechingly to Erik. “Can’t you, like, float us all on a metal raft back to Florida? Then we could—”

“Did you miss the part where Hank is blue and furry? We can’t just—”

“Shut up, Alex. He’s right, though. I can’t go anywhere where people might see me, but you could—”

“No. We’re not leaving him behind. We stick together and we look out for each other.” Havok glares around, daring them to disagree.

“Yeah,” Banshee nods, trying to hide his hesitancy. “No way we’re going to leave you in Cuba.”

He can’t blush but Beast looks pleasantly startled and stutters out his thanks.

“So, now what?” Banshee is looking to Erik for guidance, like he hasn’t grasped that doing so dishonors Charles.

“We wait. Either freaky demon guy will come back or Moira will send someone to pick us up.” The third and likeliest possibility, that they’re all on their own, is left unsaid but the other boys accept Havok’s pronouncement without dissent.

“You should get out of the sun. It might be a while.” A very, very long while but they’ll know that soon enough.

Erik absently traces the shape of his bullet as he thinks about the best direction to go in to find a ready source of cash and transport to one of his stockpiles of supplies. He may have to go back to Westchester to get his passport. As much as he hates the idea of being back in Charles’s country castle, he also hates the idea of leaving one of his only identifying documents behind where anybody could do anything with it. Not to mention it’s lamentably difficult to fly out of or into any halfway decent airport without documentation, and Erik refuses to be smuggled around as human cargo.

East, he decides. If he walks along the shoreline, he’s bound to run into a town eventually. Erik has barely broken away from the boys before Havok has grabbed him yet again.

“Oh, no! You don’t get to walk away from this.”

“You should stay,” Beast agrees, shooting a warning look at Havok. “You should wait to hear if he pulls through. If he got to the hospital in time, his chances are decent.”

“And Raven should get the pleasure of kicking you out either way.”

Erik twists Havok’s wrist, digging his fingers into the vulnerable pressure points to make him let go.

“Fuck! Jesus Christ, man!”

“Will you two just—”

“Angel!” Banshee yelps, pointing at the girl running across the beach towards Azazel as best she can in heeled boots. All three boys take off in pursuit or perhaps are just eager to catch a ride out of Cuba. Surprised he came back at all, Erik follows.

“Angel!”

She glances back and runs faster, grabbing the teleporter’s arm as soon as he’s within reach. “Go, go!”

Fastest by far, Beast isn’t the least out of breath as he questions Azazel. “Are they at a hospital? Have you heard anything?”

“Angel, you’re here!” Banshee skids to a halt ten feet away, blithely oblivious to Angel’s evident terror but cautious of Azazel’s wicked tail. “Where were you? Why were you hiding?”

Groaning, Havok punches him in the arm. “You’re such an idiot, Sean. She was with them. She’s a bad guy.”

Angel sobs as an amused Azazel shrugs her off. “Get away from me! Just leave me alone,” she begs, her wings held unnaturally stiff as she looks pleadingly to Erik; he looks away. “You’ve punished me enough already, okay? I don’t care about any of it. I just want to get out of here and a million miles away from him.”

Havok crosses his arms and frowns at her boots. “Whatever, I’m not going to apologize for keeping you from killing people.”

“There was a fight and people got hurt. Get over it.” Erik stares at Azazel, willing him to answer Beast’s question and state the truth for everyone to hear: Charles was dead before he fell.

“They are at a hospital. The American government agent told me they are both in surgery and to take you to where you want to go.” He snags the helmet out of the sand with his tail as he walks and holds it out to Erik with evident expectation.

“We’re going back to the Professor’s place, right?” Havok looks around for Banshee and Beast’s nods.

“It’s as good a place as any to wait to hear back. And Raven shouldn’t have to deal with this alone.”

“You can come, too,” Havok offers with ill grace, meeting Angel’s gaze with grim determination; she recoils. “If you want to.”

“You should come,” Banshee adds. “It’s a sweet house.”

Erik takes the helmet from Azazel with a crisp nod. “We’ll all go to Westchester for now. Anyone can decide where else they would like to go from there.”

“I want to go back to Cincinnati,” Angel says immediately.

“After we go to New York,” Erik repeats and looks to Azazel, who recognizes the implicit command and immediately takes his hand. With the helmet occupying Erik’s left hand, Angel grabs onto his wrist with both hands, leaving the boys to string along Azazel’s other side. Beast is the one brave enough to take Azazel’s hand, growling warningly when he flicks his tail barb teasingly through Beast’s neck scruff.

Wide eyes transfixed, Banshee gulps. “Wait, does he know where we’re going?”

Teleportation is an anti-climactic experience. Erik thought it might be like being squeezed through a tube or moving at an incredible speed but it is simply that in one second they are on a Cuban beach and in the next, they are at the mouth of the long drive up to the Westchester estate, hunching collectively against the chill. The only real sign that they have not always been here is the sudden overpowering smell of black powder, though that dissipates almost immediately.

“Holy shit,” Angel gasps, gripping Erik even more tightly. “Xavier lives here?”

“He used to.”

“It’s so cool inside,” Banshee enthuses. “Like a movie! There are, like, a hundred bedrooms. There are wings.”

“Speaking of which,” Beast interrupts, staring at the singed edges of the chunks taken out of Angel’s wings.

“Come on,” Erik wrests his arm away from Angel and leads the way, already nudging the tumblers in the front door’s lock into alignment. Silent and obedient, Azazel falls into step just behind him. “We could all do with a wash and change of clothes.”

“I bet Raven won’t mind if you borrow something of hers,” Banshee assures Angel. “I’ll show you where her room is.”

“Can your wings get wet? Can you not assimilate them with the—”

“I can take care of myself, Hank.”

“I—I know. I just—well, if you need anything…” He trails off awkwardly as they walk inside, no doubt shedding sand all over the marble atrium.

“Yeah, it’s fucking ridiculous,” Havok mutters when Angel sucks in an awestruck breath. “Xavier’s fucking loaded.”

Erik tunes them out, focusing entirely on walking to and then up the main staircase, which is, as Havok says, fucking ridiculous. He’s been in genuine royal palaces with less grandiosity. To think Charles had almost convinced him he could belong in a place like this, Erik is almost relieved that he’s about to die and won’t be able to make Erik think whatever suited his whims. He feels sorry for Raven, imagining her languishing alone with a hundred empty bedrooms and a hundred cold beds gathering dust, before he remembers that she and Charles haven’t been living here at all. Or maybe she and the other children will stay here together, if the CIA doesn’t take them all away to some other secret facility.

That thought gives Erik pause. Imprisonment, experimentation—he can’t wish that on them. They’re just children too young to truly understand they’re too fragile and stupid for reality. Except for Angel, they’ve all been indoctrinated into Charles’s delusional vision of coexistence. They’ll just trip heedlessly into danger. And now that Erik has killed Charles, they won’t listen to truth. He hasn’t had the time to teach them to be wary, to make them stronger.

One careless twitch of his hand and five lives snuffed out. How efficient.

Erik furiously rounds on Azazel. “What do you want? Why are you following me? I am not in charge.”

“You could be.” He tips his head in confidence. “Shaw spoke highly of you.”

You and me, son—I’m so proud of you. The bullet, the helmet, the fittings on his suit, the nails and wires and pipes in the walls—Erik reaches out for them all and just rests his palms against them. I want to help you.

Maybe—if he would, maybe—maybe he could save them all.

For all it represented, Erik misses the familiar, decided contours of his coin.

Azazel watches, placid and anticipating. Erik flicks two fingers impatiently and a door down the hall bursts open. “If you’re staying, there’s plenty of room.”

“The American agent said to come back every hour.”

“No, that’s a waste of time. She can call here when there’s news.”

“I will tell her.”

“You do that.”

Erik lets his door slam behind him. He strips economically, fleetingly wondering what possessed Beast to make leather flight suits, let alone in blue and yellow. His bullet stays in his hand. It’s shocking for something so small, hovering over the white marble countertop.

The shower feels freezing on his sweat-tacky skin. He bears it, scrubbing until his skin is raw and numb.

He dresses efficiently, breathing more comfortably when he’s covered from neck to wrists and the bullet is carefully secreted in hem of his jacket. It’s the work of several minutes to retrieve all his belongings from around the room. There are certain things he always takes out of his bag and hides for safety but he berates himself for the clothes in the armoire and the shaving kit lazily left out on the bathroom counter. As usual, he takes a moment to reassure himself that his pictures and his name are still intact in his passport. After a moment of hesitation, he packs the helmet. He doesn’t let himself think as he tucks the gun between the folded stacks of his clothes.

Sealed inside a handful of steel cases only he can open, he has pounds, francs, pesos, marks, and just over a thousand American dollars. Erik empties the dollars out of one case into his pocket and puts the rest into his bag. Reaching out into the house, he looks for the cheap nickel coating on Angel’s belt buckle. It’s in the room Erik knows is Raven’s and her body heat has leached out of it already. There’s water running through the bathroom pipes, so he may not have to explain himself.

Raven has pictures cut from magazines all over her walls, clustered by type. Near the vanity mirror is a group of women with long blonde hair and dimpled smiles. Under the dust, all her makeup is creams and peaches and girlish blushes. He pities the child who sat there and practiced making herself unexceptional.

“What are you doing?” Angel holds a towel awkwardly in front of herself to keep it off her mangled wings. Her hair is pulled up off her damp neck, making her look younger than she usually does.

“Will they get better?”

Her face twists before smoothing into a mask. “I don’t know. I’ve never had them burned off before. Hank says flies don’t regrow missing wings.” She smiles sharply. “But I’m not a fly, so. Who knows?”

“I’m sorry—”

“No, you’re not. Whatever you came for, do it and get out.”

Erik shows her the money and sets it down on the vanity. He didn’t count it but as far as he recalls, it should be nearly four hundred dollars.

“What’s that for?” Her voice is horribly quiet and her knuckles are tight on the towel.

“Azazel will take you wherever you want to go, if you decide to leave. If you don’t…” He shrugs. She could burn it for all he cares, but he thinks she’s smart enough to be practical.

Naked and crippled, Angel looks at him like she pities him, or like he disgusts her. She is unexpectedly difficult to read.

“See you around, Magneto.”

It would be quickest and easiest to teleport somewhere, but Erik doesn’t like the idea of relying on Azazel. He’s unnerving. His guarantee to Angel necessitates some sort of communication, though, so he writes two notes: one to Azazel, telling him to make himself available if Angel wants to go, and one to Beast, telling him what Azazel is to do. Stringing the notes on wires, Erik impales one on the lintel of Azazel’s door at eye height and threads the other under Beast’s door. 

It’s a shame the boy saw what Erik did to Charles. Now that he’s shed his human meekness, he’s a powerful fighter. He would make a useful ally.

There are a thousand rich baubles thoughtlessly on display that he would normally pocket on his way out of a place like this, but Erik has some propriety left. He highly doubts Raven would ever notice their absence, physically or financially; he concedes them as reparations. An empty and meaningless gesture weighed against the enormity of his crime, but he wouldn’t presume to think he could ever make up for what he’s done.

The nearest town is several miles away and the sun is balanced on the treetops. After weeks of soft living, Erik braces himself for wind and cold and sore feet.

“Erik? Are you—” Beast looks at his bag. “You’re leaving.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Oh, well,” Beast gestures vaguely. He’s stripped to the waist and barefoot, standing over a bucket of soapy water. “It seems that—shedding is going to be a problem. I didn’t want to clog the drainpipe. An old house like this probably doesn’t have the best plumbing.”

Erik’s bark of laughter startles them both. “You’re thinking about the plumbing,” he marvels.

“Yes. Well, I mean, it—yes.” Embarrassed, Beast looks down. The fur on his forearms is matted with water, too dark to tell if the blood came out. “I know it’s not really any of my business, but I don’t think you should leave.”

“I didn’t ask your opinion.”

“It’s just,” Beast’s huffed breath haloes his massive head. “Charles isn’t dead. He’s still alive and there’s a good chance he’ll survive. And I think he’ll forgive you for whatever happened but if you leave—well, I think he’d forgive you anyway; you’re his friend. But you have to be there for that. I mean, you have to show you want to be forgiven, you know?”

Exasperated at his clumsy words and Erik’s lack of response, he shakes his head with an irritable growl. “Whatever. Please don’t leave. Alex is already in a mood and I will kill him if he gets any worse because he’s pissed you ran out. Also, I think he’s right about Raven getting to be the one to kick you out if she wants to. Or Charles, because, you know, he could be out of surgery within a couple of hours and awake by morning. If you care about that.”

Holding the bucket gawkily to keep from slopping its contents over himself, Beast leaves, presumably to find a more private place to finish bathing.

Erik is clutching the bullet to keep still, to keep his expression from betraying his guts turning painfully to stone. The visible ebb and flow of his breath is the only living part of him.

His debts are too great to pay in a thousand lifetimes. He may as well deny owing anything to anyone for all the good any effort at repayment will do. And he is indebted to such dangerous men. It would be safer to cut all ties, forget everything that came before now and go on without entanglements to hobble and humiliate him.

Erik goes back inside. He doesn’t see anyone on his way upstairs to drop his bag in the room assigned to him, nor when he forces himself to go to Charles’s study. Their last chess match is still on the board, stalled with their queens in standoff. It was foolishly optimistic to take a rain check on the final moves when they were probably going to die the next day, Erik had said.

“Such a high opinion of our chances!” Charles had laughed, alarm unsuccessfully hidden in his eyes. “I hope you won’t frighten the others with talk like that.”

“Is it better to lie about their life expectancies, going up against Shaw and his pet war machines?”

“Of course not. They understand the danger. But we do have a good chance of beating him, Erik.” His earnest eyes crinkled with his quick smile. “Besides, the promise of another thorough trouncing from me gives you something to look forward to.”

Maybe—maybe he didn’t really die. Erik takes his turn, moving a rook to lure Charles’s bishop into an ambush. After a moment of trying to guess the next ten moves, Erik resets the whole board, placing each piece precisely in its square and orienting them all identically. He would have been able to draw it out, but Charles probably would have lost.

Erik goes to bed. By morning, he’ll know the outcome.

“That’s the trick, little Erik,” Schmidt says as they pass an open trench, the naked corpses like paper dolls in the dirt. His eyes are dispassionate but he’s smiling benignly, as he always does. “If you take away just some things, they think they might be able to fight back. And they’re right. You must take away everything, all at once. Then you may do as you wish. This is why the Nazis win now and this is how we will emerge victorious when our time comes.”

He stops and tilts his head in consideration. Without looking away from Erik, he points arbitrarily into the morass of bony limbs. “I think I saw a gold tooth in that one’s mouth. These greedy Jews,” he tsks, “hoarding even into the grave! It’s shameful.”

“Yes, Herr Schmidt.”

Schmidt’s gaze is consuming, even with his own eyes downcast. That pleasant little smile that lives on his face has a terrible presence all its own. “As the Americans say, waste not. Fetch it for me.”

He imagines there’s a hole in Schmidt’s head, the coin that Schmidt gave him not in his pocket but finally moved. He imagines the little trickle of blood down his forehead, his cheek, dark droplets onto Schmidt’s fine wool coat, obscuring the horrible insignia on the collar. He imagines stepping over his body and executing cowering Nazi soldiers, liberating his people, finding his father and his mother, miraculously alive, falling into their arms, being taken care of again—

It’s all stupid, useless fantasy. He looks into Schmidt’s calm, calculating eyes and swallows the urge to cry. He won’t give him the satisfaction of that.

“Yes, Herr Schmidt.”

The corpses are cold and stiff and crackling, and none of them have gold teeth in their mouths anymore.

In the morning, Angel is gone. Banshee is surprisingly upset for all she nearly killed him the day before. Havok asks Azazel if he took her home and he confirms he did without offering details. There’s nothing more to say after that.

Erik eats mechanically while the boys wander restlessly. Azazel eats as well, fussily peeling an apple in one long spiral.

“Why don’t you use your tail?” Flushing darkly, Banshee stutters, “I mean—”

“It’s got human blood on it.” Lifting the barb in casual menace, Azazel leers widely. “You think I was born looking this way?”

“Why haven’t we heard anything? It’s been over twelve hours. How long does it take to stitch him up? Fuck!” Havok storms out to do another circuit around the house.

As the minutes of the morning crawl by, they all follow his example, pacing restively through the halls. Eventually, they end up in the room where they saw the broadcast that sent them to Cuba. It’s difficult to believe that was only forty-eight hours ago.

Finally, finally, the phone rings. Banshee beats Havok to the receiver. Erik isn’t looking but he hears the unmistakable sound of Havok hitting something to express his feelings and Banshee’s blurted hello.

“I’ll tell him. Is the Professor okay? He—okay. Okay, bye. He’s alive,” he reports breathlessly. “She’ll tell us more when they get here. Oh, yeah, scary murder devil dude is supposed to go pick them up.”

Havok lashes out against the wall to convey relief. “Jesus fuck, where’d that bastard go?”

“He could be anywhere,” Beast points out unhelpfully.

Reaching out into the house, Erik finds a body-warm zipper upstairs and tugs. Azazel pops into being before him, crossly smoothing down his trousers.

“You rang?”

“You’re needed at the hospital,” Erik orders curtly. Azazel raises an eyebrow at his roughened voice but he leaves immediately.

“They’re probably starving. I’m going to make sandwiches.”

“They probably just want to sleep,” Havok argues. “And you don’t know what they like.”

“Well,” Banshee reasons, “I’ll make myself a sandwich and then when I ask them if they want a sandwich, they won’t feel like they’re imposing.”

Havok follows him into the kitchen to finish upbraiding him while Beast comes to stand by Erik.

“He’s alive.”

“My ears work just fine.”

“You seemed pretty convinced that he was going to die, so I thought repetition might help the news sink in.”

Erik won’t believe it until he sees Charles in person. Raven won’t let him stick around that long. He could have Azazel take him into Charles’s hospital room but he’s trying to be respectful of her wishes. Really, Charles may as well be dead.

“I kept Alex from saying anything before,” Beast continues in a gentle, careful voice. “But are you sure that’s what you want to be doing when Raven gets here?”

It’s calming, Erik wants to say, but that isn’t something they would understand. Even for him, it took several times going through the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly before he could distance himself from the clammy chill he initially had felt touching his gun. It’s just a gun, not the gun; not the murder weapon. That went with that woman to the hospital. He should have taken it from her, twisted and crushed it into a useless lump of slag. Why hadn’t he? Why not from the start—he could have stopped it, stopped her before she did it. Why—

“Erik?”

He drops the pieces. He can barely feel them in his hands; it’s like they knit themselves back together, instinctively seeking their true shape. Probably even he couldn’t unmake a gun, or at least not one that had been fired. Probably once the metal knows its purpose, it will always be for that. Even melted down and forged into something else as all metal has been, a weapon retains its cold soul. Maybe that’s what draws his fingers, why he can touch it like nobody else can – one weapon recognizing another.

The gun settles into his hand, already warm with borrowed heat.

“Erik?” Beast takes a wary step back.

“I’ll put it away.” The roughness hasn’t gone away but Erik manages to disguise it better this time. He forces himself to meet Beast’s eyes before leaving. Even though there’s nobody to see, he walks calmly and assuredly up the stairs and takes his time tucking the gun and kit away in his packed bag.

Azazel has returned by the time he comes back. Everyone is gathered in the kitchen, listening as Raven, apparently returned to her natural form, relays the prognosis.

“…taking him into surgery but it was another two hours before they actually did.”

“X-rays,” Beast interjects unthinkingly. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, x-rays and testing for his blood type and they had to call in the right surgeon to do it because he wasn’t even there at the hospital. Then the surgery took hours. They had to—” Her exhausted voice breaks. “Had to find all the broken pieces before they could fix it, plus they nicked a blood vessel. They had to sew it back up.”

When she sniffles, the human cuts in. “He got out of surgery around five. We couldn’t see him before seven but he’s stable and no longer fully sedated, just sleeping.”

Havok swears and Raven chuckles tearfully. “Yeah, no kidding.”

“Someone should go get Erik.” Banshee sounds like he would prefer that someone not be him. “He was completely freaked.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Alex, that’s enough.” The human sighs. “Where is Erik?”

“He had to put something away,” Beast answers vaguely.

Raven sucks in a breath. “He isn’t packing, is he?”

He hedges the truth. “Not right now, I don’t think so.”

Erik backtracks down the hallway and makes his steps noisy as he walks to the kitchen.

“Erik!” Raven launches herself at him. He grips Banshee’s mayo knife on instinct but she just throws her arms around him.

“God, Erik,” she sobs into his chest. For some reason, she’s pink and blonde and wearing green surgical scrubs. He can smell the beach and the hospital on her. “I didn’t even realize when we got here but I’m so glad you’re still here.”

“Why?” Havok asks snidely. The human looks like she agrees but masks it better.

“You have to stay,” Raven insists, stepping back so she can look up into his face. “You heard him on the beach. Charles probably thinks you’re dead. You’ve got to be here so he can see that you’re fine and he’s going to be fine and it’s all going to be okay. Okay?”

Erik doesn’t look at the others but he can feel their disapproval. Even Beast probably can’t make himself take Raven’s side. Hell, Erik thinks she’s an idiot for wanting to keep him around. But she is only a child who has known nothing but luxury and rich liars her whole life. She doesn’t recognize a real threat.

He flashes her a tight smile that he hopes will seem appropriate to her, given the circumstances. “Of course. Have you eaten? Banshee’s making sandwiches.”

“I already offered.”

“Actually, the night of terrible coffee is catching up with me.” Smiling apologetically, Raven sits back down. “If you don’t mind—”

“No, I can—there’s ham and some chicken and some kind of white cheese.”

“Whatever is fine as long as there’s no mayo. I think there’s some mustard in the door.”

The human turns to Azazel. “I didn’t know your friend’s name to tell the doctors. I should have asked but I forgot.”

“This is understandable,” he graciously allows. “He is Riptide.”

She hesitates. “Do you know his real name?”

“We disagree on what his real name is, but I know he was once called Janos Quested.”

“Janos. Well, he’s alive and he’s awake. The doctors were able to reduce the pressure in his head and pin his skull back together. He’ll be physically recovered in a month or so.” Again, she hesitates, watching his reaction closely. “There is some mental damage. I’m sorry, Mr. Azazel, but Janos can’t speak right now and it may be permanent.”

He snorts. “This is all? Riptide has been mute as long as I have known him.”

“Oh, I’m—” She bites down an automatic apology. “Do you know the cause? It might be useful for the doctors to know.”

Azazel picks a burr off his sleeve. “Shaw found Riptide in Argentina as a boy just after the war. This is years before he found me in Ukraine but Shaw always said that the humans had been keeping him chained up like a dog. Riptide could not speak to tell a different story. Maybe he was born silent, maybe they beat his voice out of him. Maybe Shaw didn’t like the sound of him.” Shrugging, he bares his teeth in a grin. “Riptide never needed to communicate, only obey. I think he does not know how to read or write at all. He only knew how to read Shaw’s face to do what Shaw wanted of him.”

He spreads his hands. “This is all I know about Riptide.”

“Thank you.” She smiles faintly. “You’ve been very helpful.”

Azazel’s tail snakes over his shoulder to scratch his jaw. “If you say so.”

He leaves with his usual drama, making the human flinch. It’s a pity Azazel misses out on the effect he has on her.

“God, that’s awful.” Her sandwich already gone, Raven picks at one of the ripped off crusts. “I can’t believe his friend can’t speak or even understand anybody. We can’t even tell him Shaw’s dead.”

“I’m sure he’ll figure it out, if he hasn’t already. I mean,” Banshee giggles nervously. “We were the ones that took him to the hospital.”

“Technically, his friend took him.”

Erik watches her tip her plateful of crusts into the trash and deliberately unclenches his jaw. “Somehow, I doubt Azazel has friends.”

The human speaks firmly over Raven’s protestations. “The exact nature of their relationship really isn’t the issue here. Right now we need Mr. Azazel’s aid but we cannot forget that he and Mr. Quested are murderers.”

Abashed, the children fall silent. Raven shoots Erik looks across the table like she expects him to come to their defense. And maybe they were manipulated into doing Shaw’s bidding against their will—maybe he cut their will out of them. He had a talent for that.

Erik doesn’t really care one way or another. He wouldn’t have run the operation on the CIA facility as flamboyantly as Shaw had done, and he would have considered leaving with only one of the six children in hand, another dead, and the other four completely disregarded, without even finding out how useful their powers might be, a complete failure. It was a show of power that was immediately negated by an incredibly stupid tactical decision. As far as Erik is concerned, though, Azazel and Riptide comported themselves with the compliance that becomes soldiers. It is a pity that they found their powers subordinated to someone like Shaw.

The human is unlikely to appreciate his input, though, and he can’t risk inciting public opinion and getting evicted now. He doesn’t know how but Erik still has a chance to save Raven from Charles’s extreme ideas. Her mutation is too beautiful to hide under the sickeningly bland façade everyone else insists she wear. If he is patient, he can steal her out from under their thumbs.

So, he just meets the human’s eyes, matching her mask for mask.

She is first to look away. “Raven, you should go shower and change so we can get back to the hospital before Charles wakes up.”

Raven rises obediently. “You guys can come, too, if you want. It might be a while before he wakes up but it’ll be sometime today.”

The other three mumble their replies but Raven’s gaze lingers on Erik. He forces another tight smile, cuts his eyes to the side, and lets her draw her own conclusions.

Her steps retreat down the hallway. As soon as she’s out of hearing range, the human takes a deep breath. “There’s something you need to know. Raven hasn’t accepted it but there is a strong possibility that Charles may have permanent damage, too.”

Havok grips the edge of the table. “You said he was going to be fine!”

“Raven said that. I think she needs to believe it right now. Barring complications, he’s going to live, but the doctors said there are signs of nerve damage, possibly paralysis.”

Stunned, Banshee raggedly rasps, “The Professor’s going to be a cripple?”

“There’s a chance, yes.”

“No.” Shaking his head, Havok rises and throws his chair into the table. “No way.”

The human calls after him but Havok storms outside, the air already crackling with his anger.

Banshee is flushed with imminent tears, his hands squeezed into helpless fists. “I don’t—she said he was going to be okay. They fixed him.”

“There’s only so much you can do with the nervous system.” Snuffling, Beast scrubs a paw over his eyes. “They’re too delicate and complex to just stitch back together.”

“But he was still moving on the beach. He was still—” The human touches his arm and murmurs comfortingly as Banshee starts crying.

“I was keeping him still to keep him from tearing anything else. He was moving, yes, but only above the waist. His legs— If there was damage to his spinal cord, there wasn’t anything they could do surgically to help.”

“Hank, could you get a glass of water?”

He obeys and she keeps petting Banshee soothingly. His choking, hiccupping sobs are somehow louder for the constant hum of the refrigerator and the hiss of the sink faucet.

Erik can’t look at him. His hands are tingling and he can smell and hear things he knows aren’t real. Keeping still and silent, maintaining the illusion of sureness and impassivity, takes monumental effort. He has to curl up tight to keep from shaking the pipes and silverware. He loses some control, his breathing hitching and becoming shallow. He can’t tell if the others notice; he can’t look at them. The orderly, perfectly aligned rows of floor tiles fill up his vision as he struggles to imitate their discipline.

Over the ringing in his ears, Erik can hear Beast saying his name, asking him if he’s all right, asking if he needs a glass of water. If he didn’t think he would scream, Erik would laugh. He tears himself in two to keep from flinching or retaliating when Beast touches him.

“Raus,” he croaks. “Get out. Get out!”

Beast recoils with a grunt. The human bundles Banshee out of the room and Beast hastens after them. At some point, Erik becomes aware of his knuckles aching. He digs his thumb into the developing bruises and lets the pain guide him back to the present.

Hours later, Erik emerges to find himself with the newspaper in the sitting room and no recollection of what he had read. He keeps reading, compulsively consuming every word on every page. Eventually, it dawns on him why his hand is bruised.

Around four, the phone rings and they come back.

Keening wretchedly, Raven huddles against Beast’s chest. She hugs herself and he cradles her like he isn’t sure how tightly he can hold her. Havok goes down to the bunker. Banshee fists the sofa cushions and pretends to watch television, biting his lips in turn. Coming to stand by Erik’s chair, Azazel looks on with vague interest.

After what seems like forever, Raven calms down enough to ask Beast what happened to his mouth. His lie is clumsy but Raven is too distraught to notice and Havok isn’t there to call him on it.

The human doesn’t look in Erik’s direction. Banshee catches Erik’s eye and cringes.

After a bolted early supper that Erik swallows involuntarily, Raven insists on going back to the hospital. Banshee speaks quietly to the human. At her nod, he takes his bag and goes along with them.

Making up a plate to bring down to Havok, Beast mumbles his excuses and leaves Erik alone. He boils water on the stove and sets about giving the dinnerware an aggressive cleaning. When the dirty plates and cutlery are finished, he empties all the cupboards into the sink, boils pot after pot of water, and scrubs until his flushed hands are numb.

While Erik is reorganizing the kitchen, the phone rings. Azazel comes back without Banshee and his duffel bag. Raven just smiles weakly at Erik before trudging upstairs. Even the human is too exhausted to give Erik one of her judgmental looks of.

He waits until he’s certain they will be in bed before following. After his episode that morning, undressing entirely is too difficult, so Erik only takes off his belt and shoes before getting under the covers. Resisting childish urges to curl up, he lays flat on his back and rests one forearm with practiced casualness over the covers on his belly.

In the hours it takes to finally fall asleep, Erik can feel the skin on his hands cracking and blistering.

“We have to get ready to bring Charles home.”

Beast gapes. “Raven, he got shot and had spinal surgery less than forty-eight hours ago. He should be in the hospital for another week at the very minimum. Plus, he’ll need rehabilitation for the—”

Everyone looks up to see if he’ll say the word aloud.

“I just mean that he needs to be there right now. Bringing him home sooner isn’t going to help him heal faster.”

“Under normal circumstances, I would agree with you, Hank.” Even after a full night’s rest, there is fatigue inscribed around the human’s eyes. “But Charles is a special case.”

Raven nods confirmation. “He projects without meaning to if he’s sick or in pain or on drugs.”

“He wasn’t projecting when he got shot in the back.” Havok flings a glare down the table to Erik.

“He could have been,” the human counters, deliberately composed. “If I had to guess what he would have been projecting, I’d say panic. But we were all panicked, too. We wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.”

Havok sneers to disguise his unease with the memory. “I tend to notice if there’s a voice in my head.”

“He has to concentrate to project words but he projects feelings pretty easily if they’re strong enough. I already told Moira this but Charles and I found out about his problem when we were kids. A year after we met, he got pneumonia and I accidentally gave him cocaine.”

Beast chokes on his toast. “How do you accidentally give someone cocaine?”

“Charles was fourteen and he had convinced the nanny to collect her paycheck from home because he was an idiot and thought he could take care of himself.” Warming up to the story, Raven forgets the context and rolls her eyes. “So, there was no one checking on him and I wasn’t supposed to be there, plus I was getting a little freaked out by Charles hallucinating from the fever and there was no way I could have held a shape well enough to fool even his drunk mother. I found a bottle of medicine in a cabinet somewhere and I could read well enough to tell that it was supposed to fix coughs and fevers, so I gave it to him.”

Beast stares at her. “And it had cocaine in it.”

“Yeah, it was a really old bottle of old-timey medicine. So the whole time, Charles was making everyone who came within a hundred feet of him cough and feel like they were burning up or freezing. Finally someone called a doctor and he gave Charles antibiotics and sleeping pills and Charles got better. A couple of times since then, being sick or being in pain has caused him to accidentally project.” Shrugging, Raven smiles sadly. “He got really good with handling himself drunk pretty quickly, though.”

“Are you sure it was the medication and not the fever making him project? It’s just that—”

“The point,” the human says firmly when it looks as though Beast is about to interrogate Raven about the particulars of the bottle and its contents. “The point is that Charles is on medication and from what Raven has told me, he won’t be able to control his telepathy when it comes time for him to do so. Luckily, he sleeps a lot but at best, he may draw suspicion. At worst, he’s an unwitting danger to everyone around him.”

Havok scoffs and she gives him a sharp look. “This is not a laughing matter, Mr. Summers. Charles will have enough to deal with once he’s lucid without adding on injuries and deaths sustained from people walking into walls, falling down stairs, forgetting to give medication on time, and botching surgeries because Charles is stoned.”

The table falls silent, contrite except for the steady movement of Erik’s fork. There’s nothing he can do to help Charles, nothing to be gained by abstaining. He can’t taste the eggs and he doesn’t feel hungry but he eats.

“We have to be as prepared as possible to take over Charles’s care and rehabilitation.” Tearing her eyes away from the metronomic movement of Erik’s arm, the human turns to Raven. “Are there any bedrooms on the ground floor?”

“No, they’re all upstairs.”

“Any room with an attached bathroom?”

“I—I don’t remember.”

Beast comes to her rescue. “There’s a study across from the room where Charles let me set up my chemistry equipment. I used the bathroom all the time. It’s not huge but it’s—well, it’s large enough to accommodate a wheelchair.”

“Good.” The human nods shortly, blinking away a sheen of tears. “Clear it out and clean it out, quick as you can. That’s where we’ll bring him and all the equipment.”

“Wait, are you going to steal it?” Havok looks at her with a combination of shock and awe. “From a hospital?”

“No, I’m going to take it without asking and leave adequate compensation in its place. While we’re on the subject, Raven, make out a blank check to Manhattan General Hospital. Charles is about to make a donation. Alex, start clearing out that study. I’m going to be bringing Charles exactly two hours from now at 9:55 and it has to be ready.”

As soon as Raven and Havok are out of the room, the human turns to Beast. “You can help Alex but I need to speak with you first. You had medical training, didn’t you?”

“Just regular first aid stuff that everyone had to do.” Under her skeptical gaze, Beast admits, “I was considering medical school for a while and read a lot, but that’s not the same!”

“It’s going to have to be. I will get you every bit of information I can but right now, you’re the most qualified of us all.”

“I’m not a doctor!”

“I’m not asking you to do major surgery, Hank,” she snaps, eyes blazing. “I’m telling you that you are responsible for Charles’s physical health from the time he gets to his house to the moment he can see a doctor without frying the brains of everyone in hearing distance!

“Look,” she sighs, raking a hand through her hair as she deflates. “I know this is a responsibility that you shouldn’t have and I wish I didn’t have to put it on you—”

“It’s okay. I understand, Agent MacTaggert.” Beast smiles weakly, concealing his fangs. “It’s a bad situation and I’m the best of bad options.”

“Not a bad option, just less than ideal.” She reaches out and lays her hand reassuringly on his forearm. “I have complete confidence in your abilities, Hank.”

“What abilities?” Raven looks curiously around the table as she comes in with the check pinched between two fingers. Erik avoids meeting her gaze. Beast clears his throat and pulls away from the human’s touch.

“Medical, such as they are.” Taking a last gulp of milky coffee, Beast pushes out his chair. “I’ll get you a list of the essentials, Agent MacTaggert.”

She stands, too, even though Beast is already walking out. “I’m leaving in fifteen minutes. Raven, are you coming?”

Raven hesitates to answer as she readily hands over the check, Charles’s loopy signature perfectly forged in the corner. The human whisks it away immediately and offers Raven a swift smile.

“You don’t have to. I’m just going to bully the doctors into signing release forms and bring him right back here.”

“Yeah, I know. And that study is kind of a mess.” She makes an attempt at a laugh. “I don’t think it’s seen a housekeeper since Charles’s mom died.”

“I’m sure Alex would appreciate the help.”

“Yeah,” Raven snorts. “He’s just overflowing with politeness and gratitude.”

“I’ve found that to be the male condition,” the human says drily. “I’ve also found that there’s nothing to do to change guys like that except your job and to do it well. Keep him in line and make sure the job gets done before I get back. I can’t deal with Summers having a hospital bed dropped on top of him along with everything else.”

“Who knows? It might improve his personality.” Raven loiters by the kitchen door. “Are you coming, Erik?”

“I haven’t gotten my assignment yet.” He stares down the human, not bothering to hide his dislike. Raven ducks out. Erik can feel her anxiously rubbing her silver ring all the way down the hallway.

Erik gestures around the cavernous kitchen. “Now we’re alone. You can say whatever you’ve been wanting to say.”

“What do you think I’ve been wanting to say, Mr. Lehnsherr? That you’re responsible for what happened? That you should follow your instinct and run away before you have to face the consequences of your actions?”

Erik lays a deliberately relaxed hand over the handle of his fork, tapping one fingernail against the decorative etching. Beast must have told her what happened and of course, she interpreted it exactly wrong. Running away implies that there is an imperative to stay. Now that Shaw’s dead, there’s no reason for Erik to stay in New York, to stay here. There is nothing for him here or anywhere else; there is only the mission and the cause. He’d like to see her try to cage him.

She shows unusual courage, barely glancing down and meeting his gaze again unflinchingly. “Even if I had any intention of saying those things, it wouldn’t matter. Nothing I say is going to change your mind about anything.”

“It was not I who fired the gun.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She regards him coldly. “But I don’t regret or second-guess any of the decisions I made on that beach.”

The fork crumples and Erik finds himself on his feet. “Perhaps you should,” he hisses. “If you hadn’t—”

“If I hadn’t—” She cuts herself off, visibly tamping down anger but not reclaiming her seat. “I’m not going to argue hypothetical scenarios with you. I don’t have to blame you because you already blame yourself.”

“I didn’t—”

“I don’t care! I’m telling you that I’m leaving, so either kill me now or get that knife out of my face.”

Before she said it, Erik hadn’t realized that the knife was in his hand. It’s pointed at her vulnerable eye socket and she doesn’t have the sense not to glare at him.

“What do you mean, leaving?”

“I mean that by noon today, I’m going to get in a car, drive away, and not look back. Drop the knife, Mr. Lehnsherr.”

He presses it close enough to feel the thin, bruised skin under her eye give under the tip of the blade. “You’re very demanding for someone in mortal danger.”

“I’ve been around you for weeks and you hate humans and me in particular. I built up a tolerance.” A shaking breath belies her words. “You consider yourself a logical man, Mr. Lehnsherr. If you don’t drop it, Hank’s going to come back and we’ll all waste time trying to calm everyone down, which just means I’ll be in your life that much longer. Put the knife down.”

The knife handle slaps into Erik’s palm. He savors her shuddering relief, setting the chef’s knife down neatly at the side of his plate as he sits, drinks his coffee, and gloats.

“I knew you wouldn’t stick around the freak show for long. You’ve been faking it to spare the children’s feelings but you can’t keep it up anymore. Charles must have known,” he realizes with a quickly quashed frisson of betrayal. “But he wouldn’t like to admit that he was wrong about humans.”

“Then it will disappoint you to know that I’m doing this with the best interests of mutantkind at heart.”

Erik considers her skeptically. “And what do you think those interests are?”

She’s saved from having to answer by Beast’s return with a long list written in blocky capitals. Erik imagines it’s difficult to adjust to writing with claws after decades in the wrong body.

“That and whatever else the doctors might suggest should be enough to be getting on with.” Beast looks askance at the eight inch knife now at Erik’s place setting. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine, Hank.” The human scans the list briefly and nods that everything is legible. “Mr. Lehnsherr and I were just talking about my imminent departure and his impending obligations.”

“Obligations?”

Beast goggles. “Wait, you’re leaving? Where are you—why?”

“I still work for the CIA. At least,” she amends with sardonic asperity, “I haven’t been available to be officially fired yet. If I’m not here, they’ll at least have to dig a little deeper for an excuse to come snooping and hopefully by then, Charles will be able to handle it.”

“But I’m still here,” Beast argues. “I still work for the CIA, too.”

Even her carefully practiced sympathetic expression is wan and strained. “They think you’re dead. Nobody was keeping track after Platt’s facility got gutted. I called in a favor the other day, had the records at Langley changed to say you died with everyone else. There’s enough going on that I doubt anyone’s going to notice the lack of a body.”

Ignoring Beast’s crisis, Erik repeats more forcefully, “What obligations?”

“Hank, I know this is a lot to take in but I’m afraid there isn’t time. Would you please find Mr. Azazel and send him here?”

Starting at the reminder of the larger picture, Beast stammers an apology as he goes to search the house. Erik could tell him that Azazel is in the west wing library, likely drinking Charles’s very fine scotch and lounging in one of Charles’s antique bergère armchairs, but he wouldn’t like to rob Beast of the opportunity to practice his tracking capabilities.

The human takes a deep breath and turns to Erik, a composed mask in place. “The agency will be motivated to find me after they put the pieces together. Charles kept them from hearing where we would be going after Shaw’s attack but they could figure it out if they thought it was necessary. I can go to them, make them think I don’t know anything, and hopefully keep them off your backs for a little while.”

“As touching as your concern is, your government doesn’t pose a threat to—”

Eyes blazing, she slaps the table for emphasis. “This isn’t about who would win in a fight! The point is that I won’t be here to give Hank pep talks or tell Raven that life goes on even though her brother can’t walk, or keep Alex from picking fights to hide that he’s scared, or even try to help Charles to—”

She chokes on the words, covers her mouth to keep them unsaid, even if they can’t go unheard: handicapped, housebound, cripple, lebensunwertes Leben.

Erik swallows. Charles’s mind is untouched. Thinking that his paralysis would change who he is, lessen him in some way, is just the limitation of a human mindset Erik should have discarded long ago. Charles is more than human, better than the meat and blood and bones that encompass the existence of a human. This woman could not fathom how far beyond her puny imagination Charles was before the accident. Now he’s been liberated from the confines that constricted him then. It may be painful and difficult at first but Charles will emerge even more powerful and more breathtaking than ever, Erik’s certain.

“I don’t know what I should do or even could do for him,” the human frets, oblivious. “But he’ll need support and Raven and the boys will need it, too.”

“And you think I’m an ideal candidate for the position of helpmate.”

“Of course not. Frankly, you would be my last choice for reasons I’m sure you wouldn’t care for me to list.”

Erik was being sarcastic, but her derision and her impertinence rankles anyway.

“But there are two adults who haven’t undergone spinal surgery in the past few days, so one of us needs to distract the CIA and one of us needs to stay here. Since I have a mostly positive relationship with the agency and have a plan that doesn’t involve blowing up Langley—”

“I’m the best of bad options,” he concludes.

“You’re the only option. But it could be worse.” At his inquisitive brow, she elaborates, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, “At least I know you care about Charles.”

Erik wants to correct her, even though she’s correct. He wants to deny it, even though it’s true. He wants to lift the knife and demand to know how she dares to comment, to insinuate—

Azazel lands next to the refrigerator in a flume of acrid smoke. The human barely flinches, quickly regaining her composure.

“Mr. Azazel, thank you. If you’ll walk with me, I’ll get my coat and get you up to speed on the plan for today. You wanted to be a leader of mutants, Mr. Lehnsherr,” she adds over her shoulder on her way out of the kitchen. “Now would be an excellent time to lead.”

Erik shatters her plate with a vicious stab of the chef’s knife, embedding it in the table below, and seethes. Charles told her about their private conversations. He betrayed him and probably laughed at Erik’s guileless trust before he took the human to bed and fucked her. A choice with typical lack of foresight, given how she’s abandoning Charles the moment he doesn’t suit her prosaic tastes. Really, Charles is as much a victim of his own naiveté as he is of her prejudice.

Tamping down his roiling emotions, Erik forces himself to think strategically. He had despaired of ever convincing Charles that the humans can never accept mutants, but maybe the confluence of his injury and the human’s desertion will present Erik with an opening. It would hinge on Charles not blaming him for the paralysis, which is an admittedly slim possibility, but in any case, Erik could win him over by showing contrition and devotion. Charles is soft like that.

This plan does necessitate letting the human leave unscathed, which presents a problem. She will most likely end up, either through malicious intent or incompetence, setting the American government onto them. While Erik is confident he could meet or evade an attack with success, he now has to consider Charles’s and, by extension, the children’s safety along with his own. With help from Havok and Charles, Erik is reasonably confident they could square off against a small army and win, but he has no way of knowing how soon the assault will come or whether he will have won them over to his side by then.

The most sensible thing would be to follow the human out the door. He had entertained the idea of leading mutants to their rightful place in the world with Charles by his side, but the reality is so very complicated. Erik doesn’t know how to do this, to handle these sorts of relationships with any proficiency. Thinking he could learn, that he could be accepted back into Charles’s company after Erik—

If there’s anything Erik knows he cannot do, it’s protect the people he tries to keep safe.

Feeling dull and stupid, Erik sends the knife back to the drawer from which he pulled it and throws the shards of the human’s plate in the trash. There’s nothing to do for the notch in the wood. Erik thinks of finding a tablecloth to hide it and then winces at his own ridiculousness. He clears the rest of the dishes and cutlery, putting the crushed fork into his pocket for later. Its absence won’t be missed and he doesn’t think he could coax it back into its original form, possibly not at all but absolutely not right now. It rests heavily against his thigh, the reminder of yet another loss of control, the most recent of his many failures.

By the time the kitchen is spotless, Erik has resigned himself to staying. He knows the attempt will miscarry but he cannot walk away and wonder the rest of his miserable life what could have been had he taken this opportunity to forge alliances. The inevitable arrival of the CIA is a natural deadline for this experiment; once the Westchester mansion is compromised, he will either leave alone or with Charles and the others.

With a fresh carafe of coffee and a tray of mugs, milk, and sugar in hand, Erik joins the others in the study. Except for short but frequent breaks to glower at Erik, Havok keeps his head down, scrubbing the bathroom from ceiling to floor with furious diligence. With their superhuman strength, Beast and Raven can heft most of the furniture with ease, but they aren’t well coordinated or practiced in manual labor, leaving the doorframe dented and the massive oak desk horribly scratched. He frets over the inadequate width of the doorways and excessive height of countertops; she is erratic with nerves, by turns manic and petrified, constantly fiddling with her jewelry and her clothes. At a loss of what else to do, Erik dusts, vacuums, grunts thoughtfully at appropriate intervals as Beast monologues about retrofitting the mansion for wheelchair accessibility, and keeps Raven well supplied with overly sweet white coffee.

The countdown to 9:55 throbs through Erik’s body like blows raining down, like his heartbeat welling up in a fresh bruise.

“It’s almost 9:50,” Beast finally announces, holding up the wristwatch that doesn’t fit around his wrist anymore. “We should get out of the way in case Moira comes back a little early.”

Erik takes the coffee things back to the kitchen but doesn’t allow himself to give in to the compulsion to wash them. Instead, he rejoins Raven and the boys. They mill around in the hall just outside the study, watching the empty room for abrupt arrivals. Beast has to stand away from Havok, whose tension is manifesting in hair-raising static electricity. At 9:53, Raven suddenly shifts into her peaches and cream guise; at 9:54, she reverts to her natural form. She grabs Beast’s arm at the unexpected sound of a pipe banging overhead and he gently maneuvers their hands together as she trembles from the adrenalin rush.

Erik closes one fist around the former fork in his pocket and the other around the bullet hidden in the hem of his jacket upstairs, bracing himself between the tiny ballasts and their symbolic weight.

When Azazel comes at last, he brings the equipment first. Erik resentfully acknowledges the human’s cunning calculation as the room fills up over successive trips with everything but Charles. There are so many books with the titles flaking off their fat spines that the hospital library must be half empty. The wheelchair inexorably draws their eyes, ugly and ominous. Despite his best efforts to shy away, its cold steel chills Erik from across the room.

There is a brief pause between Azazel’s jumps, long enough for the smell to dissipate. Raven loosens her grip on Beast and takes her hand away from her mouth, disgruntled at the anticipatory letdown.

“That’s it? What the f—”

Azazel is almost completely silent when he moves, so only Raven’s squeak accompanies Charles’s bed appearing in the middle of the study. He’s on his side, hair lank with three days of salt and sweat, his legs meek lumps under the white sheet. Erik obsessively runs his hands over the exposed metal skeleton of the hospital bed frame, feeling for weaknesses to chase out of his head the thought that Charles looks far too big on the narrow mattress.

Raven and Beast rush forward like dogs let off their leads, nearly bowling over the human and Riptide when they’re suddenly in the way.

“Charles!”

“Let’s not crowd him,” the human cautions, catching Riptide across the face as she flicks her hair back. “He’s not ready to have a circus on top of him.”

Beast grabs the chart from her hand and hunches to peer at Charles’s pupils. “How’s your pain? I have Tylenol or Algoson if you want to sleep.”

“They gave him a shot of morphine less than an hour ago.”

Harrumphing skeptically, Beast straightens and begins flipping through the medical record. “On top of an intrathecal injection after surgery? It’s like they’re asking for respiratory depression.”

“And here I thought you weren’t a doctor.”

Quite rightly, he pretends not to have heard her.

Raven is holding onto the bed frame to keep from falling onto Charles as she leans forward on tiptoes. “Welcome home, Charles. You’re in the downstairs study across from Hank’s lab. We’ll bring stuff down from your room if you want, or whatever.”

Everyone falls into expectant silence as Charles’s side rises with a deep breath.

“Thank you, Raven.” Throat working around his disused voice, Charles clumsily shifts his head on the pillow. His cheeks are incongruously flushed in his pale face, his eyes glassy. “Moira, I can’t—I have to—”

With Riptide trailing involuntarily in her wake, she hastens over to hold his hand. “It’s okay, we’re back at the mansion. You can relax.”

His hand spasms around hers as he obeys. Almost as if his telepathy was taking up space, Charles seems to wither with its release, shrinking and sinking into the flat little mattress. A frisson goes around the room, leaving a strange, heavy prickling in Erik’s legs and an oddly distant cold dread in his belly. Beast and the human make a good show of not acknowledging the foreign sensation; Raven and Havok are not nearly so circumspect.

“Sorry.” Charles miserably squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m sorry.”

Tail flicking irately, Azazel leaves. Erik can feel him hopping farther and farther away through the house and grounds, trying to get away from the way Charles feels, until he goes beyond Erik’s reach. He would give anything to follow.

His burning shame quickly overwhelms the secondhand sensations.

“We should talk with Hank about your condition, okay?” The human combs Charles’s hair behind his ear, brazenly taking the opportunity to caress his cheek. “Unless you want them to stay, I’m going to send everyone else out, all right?”

“All right.”

“Wait!” The bed jolts as Raven launches herself off the footboard. “At least let Erik and Alex see you first.”

The human frowns. “I don’t think—”

Raven starts to offer a rebuttal but stops almost immediately, perplexed and alarmed in equal measures, before turning and vomiting sugary, milky coffee over her hand onto the ornamental carpet.

“Shit, Raven.” Beast exchanges the clipboard for an empty bedpan and gravitates to her side. “Have you been having flu symptoms?”

“Fuck, Raven,” Havok complains, much less heatedly than he would have been without inhaling Charles’s morphine haze. “We just cleaned that.”

Unexpectedly, Charles starts giggling. “She’s not sick. It’s a side effect: dizziness and nausea can result from sudden movement,” he recites in a mocking tone. “Shame that you all can stand and have to worry about that sort of thing.”

“Charles!”

Erik feels the stab of guilt and then the oily slide of resentment with startling clarity, almost as though Charles wants them to feel the bitter barbs they could otherwise politely pretend not to notice. He’s still sniggering with unfocused malice, distracted from Raven’s distress by a weird light on the edge of his awareness. Through the blurred impression of Charles’s cognizance flickering around the room, Erik realizes he’s seeing their minds as Charles does, like sprawling, intricately formed filaments in which the constant flux of light and dark creates the illusion of movement. The only exception is Riptide’s mind, almost perfectly still in its alert brightness, fixed on the frenetic tumult of the human’s thoughts.

Sighing, she temporarily turns away from Charles. “Alex, will you please see Raven to her room?”

Mumbling assent, Havok takes up his position on Raven’s other side, wrinkling his nose at even the empty bedpan.

Charles groans theatrically. “I told you, she’s not sick.”

Ashamed and shaking, Raven keeps her eyes downcast as she wipes her mouth with her clean hand. “Why is he being like this? Charles is never like this.”

“It’s the morphine.” Beast’s hand on Raven’s elbow steering her out of the room is as firm as his tone. “It’s affecting his moods and his behavior.”

As if on cue, Charles suddenly begins whimpering and hiding his face behind his arm. “I know, I know. I didn’t want—this is worse. This is so much worse. I just want to go back. Let me go back,” he pleads, voice thickened by tears. “I don’t want to live like this. Please, just let me die.”

Beast shuts the door on Raven’s horrified face. It’s pointless; walls can’t contain Charles’s suffocating, cloying despair.

The human swoops down on him, her long hair mingling with his on the pillow.

“You don’t mean that, Charles. You’re having another hallucination. Here,” she coaxes his arm down. “Open your eyes. You’re at home at the mansion. You’re downstairs in the room across from Hank’s lab. Come on, look at me.”

Charles keeps his eyes tightly shut. “I can’t do it.”

“Of course you can. I promise I’m—”

“No, no.” He shakes his head vehemently. “The way you look at me, how you’re all looking at me. I can’t—please, please just go away.”

She doesn’t understand. She keeps trying to cajole him into docility and Charles continues refusing, pulling as far away from her as he can, his breath coming in increasingly shallow gasps. His growing distress is infecting the room. The human presses harder, her desperation reverberating and growing with Charles’s until it’s like a strobe beacon. Physically, Beast is drawing tighter into himself, trying to disappear into the background, but his thoughts are growing brighter, flashing and whirling more violently. Even Riptide grows tense, focused so urgently on the human that Erik can see the delicate sculpture of his mind shiver and spark with the frantic need to somehow touch hers.

It’s a searing, dizzying, oppressive spectacle. Erik’s heart is straining, his head pounding like he’s suffocating. The already ruined fork tightens and heats under massive compression force as he struggles to drag himself away from Charles’s telepathic visions.

Please, Erik, calm your mind. Just calm your mind.

He can’t, he never could, he—

A bang like a gunshot startles the room into stillness, the filaments freezing for a split second into stable shapes.

Erik becomes aware that the sound was the door crashing against the wall and Shaw’s helmet is in his hand. He hadn’t consciously decided he needed it but having it in his hand now seems the most logical thing in the world. It’s a strange alloy, light as raw silk and so smooth it feels slippery like suede. It begs to be touched, to be worn. And it’s Erik’s, as properly as anything can belong to anyone.

Charles gulps in another breath and the moment passes. Minds shift back into gear, frenzied with alarm.

“What are you doing?” Beast scrambles to his feet clumsily, like he’s lost some control over his lower body. “Erik, what are you doing?”

The human puts herself between Erik and Charles. “Whatever you’re thinking—”

Erik shoulders her out of the way. It’s difficult enough quelling his instinct to flee from the communicative panic in the room. Every atom in his body rebels against each step towards the threat. He has no will to spare on trying to articulate his unformulated reasoning.

Charles is hyperventilating, his lips bluing, tears seeping out from between his matted lashes. He’s trying to curl up into the fetal position with his arms protecting his head, but his legs remain where they are, only his feet twitching weakly. Erik easily overpowers him, pulling his arms down and trapping them against the bed.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Get off! Get away from him!”

Erik hardly feels the human’s fists, carefully raising Charles’s head far enough off the pillow to slip on the helmet. His hand passes from Charles’s damp hair to his overwarm, tear-streaked cheek, fingertips lingering on a rough spot the nurse missed while shaving Charles this morning. He had watched Charles shave in eleven different cities, fascinated with the gentle scrape of the blade against Charles’s exposed throat. Automatically, Erik reshapes the helmet to fit more comfortably around Charles’s head and not dig into his neck while lying down.

The effect of containing Charles’s telepathy is immediate and staggering. It’s like waking from a nightmare and suddenly comprehending the terrors aren’t real, the fear dissolving as unconsciousness quickly fades and rationality takes command. The visions of electric minds vanish. The human stops beating her fists hysterically against Erik’s back and Beast regains full motor control over his legs. They can all breathe again.

The helmet comes the rest against Charles’s crown and his eyes open. He looks like Patroclus, tragically beautiful in his pain and sorrow, weeping in agony and ecstasy. He looks at Erik like he’s never seen him before, like he never thought he’d see Erik again.

Charles sucks in a deep breath, shuddering through its slow release. His pupils contract in the light, then expand hugely as the morphine finally takes full effect.

“Erik,” he whispers, reaching out blindly. “You’re here. Thank you. Thank you.”

His voice trails off in a sigh, his eyes drifting shut. Catching his falling hand, Erik settles it against Charles’s chest. He feels the working of Charles’s lungs and heart fleetingly against his knuckles, the strengthening pulse in Charles’s neck against his other palm, before gently pulling away.

Erik steps back so Beast can check Charles’s vital signs for himself. He takes step after step until he’s out of the room, staring blankly at the opposite wall. It’s covered in wallpaper painted with curling leaves in muted green and blue and gold. He doesn’t know where to go or what to do with the memory of Charles under his hands, warm and alive and breathing Erik’s name like it was a blessing.

He can’t have been in his right mind. That wasn’t anything Erik could have, let alone deserve, not ever but especially not now. And yet he’d had it, cradled in his hands for one moment, slipped away in the next. There ought to be some mark or sign, a brand on his flesh, a scar, a tattoo, commemorating that moment when he wasn’t a weapon.

Perhaps this is a fitting punishment, to have hands that will always remember the feel of something untouchable, sanctified relics never truly purified of their unclean devotions.

Someone thunders down the stairs.

“What happened?” Warily watching Erik for sudden movements, Havok keeps his distance, poised for a fight. “Raven was bawling and I was freaking out and then nothing. What’d you do?”

“Charles fell asleep. Did you ruin anything? Is she still in one piece?”

Havok’s face sets stonily. “Fuck you, Lehnsherr.”

“I think it’s a valid question. You said you were freaking out” – Erik raises his voice so Havok will hear as he retreats stiffly down the hall, – “and we all know how that tends to go.”

As soon as he hears a door slam, Erik examines his hands more closely. They look normal, still pale but reddened and dry from the dishwater, three fingers slightly askew from broken bones long since completely healed. They feel normal, strong and steady and responsive, flexing easily and painlessly except for the minute splits in the roughened skin over his knuckles and wrists, which is only to be expected. These are the same hands that touched the bullet that cut Charles down.

They’re somehow different, though, he’s sure of it. They must be.

Charles sleeps heavily for nearly two hours before the human insists on waking him so she can say goodbye and meet her self-imposed departure deadline of noon. When Raven finds out she’s going, she refuses to speak to her again and pointedly plants herself at Erik’s side. Then Havok announces he’s leaving as well. Raven throws a plate at him before storming upstairs in an unspeakable rage.

“I just can’t stay,” Havok mumbles, glancing quickly toward Erik. “It wouldn’t be a good idea. Sorry, Hank.”

For once, Beast doesn’t offer absolution.

Once roused, Charles is confused but surprisingly sanguine, nodding agreeably at everything said. He doesn’t even cry when the human clasps his hand in farewell, thwarted from giving a farewell kiss by the helmet Beast has insisted Charles wear while the morphine erodes his telepathic shielding. Havok is deeply reluctant to even approach the bed, shoving his hands into his pockets and corroborating the human’s recitation of his intentions primarily through shrugs and jerks of his chin.

Then Charles becomes convinced that he’s told them to leave but doesn’t remember the reason. Teary-eyed, he apologies to Beast for keeping him blue to make him stay and, once he realizes Raven isn’t in the room, breaks down entirely.

“She thought nobody could love her because of me,” he blubbers wretchedly. “I never told her how beautiful she is.”

The human tries to tell him that Raven is only upstairs, but Charles refuses to believe her. Beast declares that the morphine has addled Charles and shoos them out before they cause another panic attack.

The door snapping shut between Charles and his treacherous ex-lover with such finality is enormously satisfying. Erik takes a moment to savor the look on her face before striding away.

“Come on, then. I don’t have all day.”

“What’s he talking about?”

He takes some pleasure in trampling over Havok’s attempt to ignore him. “She was going to call a taxi from town because she’s an idiot. I, on the other hand, would prefer not to have to deal with the CIA this week and am going to ensure you don’t leave a painfully obvious trail back to this place.”

Solicitously holding open the door for them, Erik executes his most threatening smile. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that I will personally deal with anyone who finds us, but not before I determine which of you was responsible.”

“Maybe you could be a little more sinister,” Havok sarcastically suggests. “That’d lull us into a false sense of security.”

The human flaunts her complete lack of preservation instinct with a dismissive snort. “He likes to be intimidating. Why are we going upstairs? Is Azazel back? Why didn’t you just say so?”

“No way.” Havok halts halfway up the staircase and crosses his arms resolutely. “I’m not going with that guy.”

“Alex,” she sighs, winding up to cast him a look filled with compassionate understanding and guilt-inducing exasperation.

“He’s probably going to have us killed and our bodies dropped into a volcano or something.”

“I’m insulted you have such a low opinion of my imagination.”

In truth, he had considered telling Azazel to get rid of them, or at least the human. Havok doesn’t have any associates Erik considers a potential threat, and isn’t likely to cause trouble for them. Erik expects he’ll find some way to disappear or else lose control and run away out of shame. There is a chance he would turn himself in or deliberately get arrested to quarantine himself away from society in prison, but Erik is willing to gamble that Havok feels indebted to Charles and wouldn’t risk his life by revealing their location.

The human would almost certainly prove a hazard. Unfortunately, Charles will be back to normal soon and Erik wouldn’t be able to conceal his decision to have her killed. It’s bad enough that Charles will know that Erik has seriously considered it. His handicaps in this campaign for forgiveness are already so great that he can’t afford to offend Charles’s naïve morality. In any case, Erik doubts the human’s confidence that she successfully concealed their movements from the CIA. Killing her could only buy them a little time. Erik doesn’t consider that an acceptable bargain for the loss of any chance with Charles.

At least he has the pleasure of administering her prompt departure. Perhaps Azazel will take the initiative and drop her in Siberia, or from several thousand feet off the ground.

“If you won’t teleport, your only other option is me driving you several hours away from here. Which do you prefer?” Smiling in response to Havok’s murderous glare, Erik grabs the zippers and clasps on and in his knapsack and pulls. “Excellent. I’ll get your bag.”

With his distinctive cobalt cufflinks, Erik easily locates Azazel in one of the guest bathrooms. He has Riptide draped in a sheet and seated on the closed toilet lid, carrying on a one-sided conversation in Russian as he lifts handfuls of Riptide’s hair and shears them with sweeps of his tail. The resultant widely variable lengths are not much of an improvement over the hospital’s patchy trim to remove the clumps matted with gore, but it seems unlikely Azazel cares one way or the other. As always, Riptide is blankly silent, acknowledging their arrival only by shifting his intent gaze to Erik’s right hand.

Tossing shorn hair negligently to the side, Azazel looks between Erik and the human like he’s expecting an entertaining struggle for dominance. Annoyed he could think there would be a contest at all, Erik doesn’t bother to dress up the order with polite trappings.

“Take these two away.”

“To where?”

“I’ll leave the details to your discretion.”

Subtly stepping in front of Erik as though on accident, the human cuts in officiously, “Virginia, if you please, Mr. Azazel; perhaps one of the smaller towns. But I’ll see Mr. Summers to wherever he’d like to go first.”

Except for Riptide, they all turn to Havok, who bristles. “I don’t know. I was just going to hitchhike or something.”

Azazel makes a casual and undoubtedly rude remark in Russian to Riptide, who barely spares him a glance before resuming his unblinking surveillance of Erik’s hand.

“I’ve heard good things about the Australian desert,” Erik offers. “Vietnam’s supposed to be nice this time of year.”

Tangibly surly, Havok snatches his bag back. “Nebraska.” He sets his jaw, daring anyone to question his choice. “You can drop me off in Nebraska.”

Azazel looks to Erik for approval before wordlessly holding out his hand to the human. Rucking her purse strap more securely onto her shoulder, she takes Havok’s hand and then accepts Azazel’s.

If she or Havok intended to say any parting words, they don’t get an opportunity, whipping away immediately. Left alone in the bathroom with only a vacant mute with an unhealthy fascination with his appendages for company, Erik feels oddly bereft.

“Why are you doing that?” Aggravated, Erik waves his hand in front of Riptide’s face. Riptide finally blinks up at him, but makes no indication of understanding the question, let alone any intention to answer it.

“I don’t care what Shaw taught you; Shaw’s dead. You may not be able to speak but you must be able to understand orders. Show me you know what I’m saying. ¿Entiendes? Muéstrame que entiendas.”

Riptide looks down at Erik’s hand again. It twitches with Erik’s frustrated urge to slap him.

“Are you useless? Show me!”

“If you don’t ask him to destroy, he does not know what to do.” Stepping around Erik, who somehow hadn’t noticed his return, Azazel pushes Riptide’s head toward his shoulder to resume his role as barber, considering the length behind Riptide’s ear.

“How’s he going to know when to do anything if he spends all his time watching my hand instead of listening?”

Azazel shrugs and lashes his tail; strands of dark hair flutter to the floor. “Shaw talked with his face. You talk with your hands. He knows where to look.”

They don’t talk about it. They don’t even skirt the subject, except for once in the motel in a speck of a town off Interstate 70.

“I don’t understand it,” Charles muses, apropos of nothing, as he rinses his razor. He’s done his neck, so now he’ll spend an inordinate amount of time on his chin and jaw. For an adult man, he’s an unusually tentative shaver.

“It’s good to see you still have some humility left.”

Occupied near his ear, Charles fleetingly projects his amusement. “I mean,” he elaborates during the next rinse. “You spend nearly twice as long watching me shave as you spend shaving yourself. That’s interesting enough but it’s positively annoying that I actually like shaving and you think of it as a chore, but I’ve never seen you without so much as a single whisker, whereas I spend the whole day in anticipation of the moment when I inevitably discover the spot I’ve somehow missed.”

Erik’s stomach clenches painfully. It wasn’t as though he had really expected to go completely unnoticed by a telepath, but he’d thought he had been discreet enough that they could tacitly agree to let it slide. He only actually watched if wherever he sat to read the paper happened to be in view of the bathroom sink. Charles couldn’t expect him to not keep an eye on nearby metal.

Pretending to be oblivious to Erik’s ashamed self-flagellation, Charles meets his gaze in the mirror. “What’s your secret?”

He doesn’t have secrets anymore. Charles could just pick the answer out of Erik’s head, yet he continues smiling expectantly, quietly insisting Erik give it up before it is taken. Desperately hoping Charles will let the other topic pass without further comment, Erik offers a neutral, inconsequential truth.

“You use too much shaving cream.”

“You’re supposed to use this much,” Charles protests, as indignant as Erik is relieved. “It ‘saturates and lubricates’ so there’s less friction and no razor burn.”

“That commercial tells you whatever they think you need to hear so you’ll buy new razors and cream you don’t need and keep them fat and rich.”

Charles laughs at Erik’s hostility. “Calm down, Lenin. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The razor is sharper so you need the cream to soften up the bristles so it cuts them instead of your skin.”

“You are an idiot when you can’t read peoples’ minds and know they’re lying to you,” Erik marvels. “It’s a waste of money. You said yourself, my method works better and I use plain shaving soap.”

“I said I hadn’t noticed any spots you missed. That’s only one variable.”

“Considering the goal of shaving is to remove hair, I would think that’s the only relevant variable.”

Humming dubiously, Charles leans into the mirror. Erik keeps his eyes carefully on the paper, moving steadily through an article discussing a court ruling about segregation in Southern universities, barely aware of the words and absorbing none of them. He can’t tear himself away from the narrow blades in Charles’s razor, the slickness of the shaving foam and the supple give of Charles’s skin under the metal edge. Shaving himself is just part of his morning routine; Charles shaving is performance art.

Finished at last, Charles rinses off the last of the shaving cream and pats himself dry. “It looks all right now but I’ll find a few truants before dinner, you’ll see.”

Erik grunts noncommittally, determined as he is every morning that he won’t get caught up in Charles’s ablutions tomorrow.

“I’ve thought of another variable,” Charles says, suddenly at Erik’s elbow with his voice pitched low and his eyes sparkling with mischief. “I bet my cream is kinder to my skin than your soap.”

And he caresses Erik’s cheek with the backs of his fingers, watching closely for a reaction. Erik is frozen in his seat, hardly breathing as Charles traces a delicate line from his jaw to his cheekbone. At the pad of Charles’s thumb filling his philtrum and dragging over his lips to his chin, a pang of arousal makes Erik’s cock twitch.

“I knew it,” Charles murmurs, meeting Erik’s eyes with a slow, satisfied smirk. “I win.”

The blood falls from Erik’s face, leaving him cold and numb. “If you want breakfast before we head to Cincinnati, you’ll have to hurry. I’ll wait in the car.”

Charles allows his hand to drop and steps back. “Of course. I’ll just be a few minutes.”

Resolute that he won’t entertain Charles any further with his mortification, Erik throws his thoughts against the car engine, rubbing compulsively, obsessively over the scars from a hundred thousand controlled explosions. He doesn’t touch where Charles burned him.

“I need your help.”

Beast is distracted, caught between apprehension and affront, as Azazel makes a point of his presence by taking a loud bite out of what must be his sixth apple of the day. Erik is beginning to wonder if he doesn’t subsist entirely on fruit and expensive stolen alcohol. He’s certain that Azazel is conducting a psychological campaign against Beast, purposefully letting the apple drip on the Persian rug to elicit a strangled squeak.

“Excuse me,” Beast splutters, drawing himself up in righteous outrage.

“Leave us.”

Sulking, Azazel obeys. The apple hits the rug with a muffled thud. Beast scrambles to pick it up.

“Are they just going to stay here? Him and the other one?”

“He’s very useful.”

“He’s a terrible guest, and a murderer. I think he’s been stealing from the wine cellar. Probably a lot of other things, too, but I can only smell the liquor on him.”

“Didn’t you say you needed help with something?”

“Oh, right.” Reluctant but at a loss, Beast finally throws the apple into the hearth. “Charles’s catheter needs to be changed. That one’s been in for days and there’s already a high risk of infection. They never even checked if he has control over his—you know. They just assumed because of the—”

Having a hard time meeting Erik’s eyes, Beast clears his throat. “Anyway, I’d do it myself but my—the fur gets in the way, and I broke a pencil this morning, so Charles wouldn’t want me holding his—I mean, the tubing is just nylon. That’s nowhere near as sturdy as wood. And Raven—I’m not sure it would be proper—”

“All right.”

“Oh, you mean—you’ll do it?”

“For the sake of Charles’s cock, I seem to be the best option.” Smirking at Beast’s embarrassed stammering, Erik stands. His own flush can’t be noticeable if he leads the way out of the room.

Though still wearing the helmet, Charles has been moved to lie on his back, propped up on a mountain of pillows and much more alert now that his last morphine dose has expired. He’s restless and damp with sweat, symptoms of withdrawal due to the large doses he was administered.

“It was a stupid risk to take with a patient with paralysis of unknown extent,” Beast seethes under his breath. “Are they not aware how lungs work? Have they no idea of the side effects of morphine?”

“Erik!” Charles brightens at his arrival; he clearly has forgotten that when last they spoke, they had brawled on a beach in Cuba. “I didn’t expect you to come back. Of course, I didn’t expect to be in a hospital bed here, or for there to be a here at all, so it’s been a surprising day all around.”

Erik’s step falters. He hadn’t thought Charles would be so cruel as to lace his crumbs of affection with casual insinuations that he holds Erik responsible for his injuries. It would have been too much to hope for immediate, unconditional exoneration, but Erik had only steeled himself for anger, hatred, and condescending compassion. The mix of warmth and censure leaves him lurching, all his planned reactions now useless. Grateful for the helmet enforcing his privacy, Erik manages a brittle smile.

“I’m not surprised you don’t recognize it. Raven said you probably hadn’t been in here in decades.”

“Yes, but I would have thought I’d put myself in my own bedroom. I suppose my subconsciousness chose to keep continuity with where I was before.”

“He keeps saying things like that,” Beast says, frowning. “He’s still convinced he’s responsible for how I look now, apologized for it about three times while we ate lunch.”

“It’s just I know how you felt about it, Hank, and it’s very unkind of me to do that to you. But then I’ve been very unkind to myself as well, haven’t I?” Charles casts a disgusted look at his legs.

Beast unsuccessfully tries to disguise a wince as a shrug. “See? I don’t know what’s causing the delusions. He should be pretty well cleared of everything the hospital gave him.”

Now, though, Erik has an inkling that there is something more wrong with Charles than drug-induced confusion.

“Charles, do you remember the last few days?”

At his affirmation that he does, Erik sits in the chair Beast has set next to the bed and tries to hit a balance between approachable openness and interrogative insistence. “Tell me what happened.”

Charles’s fidgeting ceases, his hands flattening and pressing against the bedspread in upset. “Why? We all know what happened. Saying it out loud isn’t going to fix it.”

“I know that very well. Tell me anyway.”

“What are you doing?” Beast hisses in his ear. “You’re agitating him.”

“I need to hear him say it. Charles, tell me what happened.”

“Why are you doing this? You know what happened.” Charles’s hands have clenched into fists, his eyes shining with overpowering emotion. “You were there. You were the one who came to take me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Is he talking about Cuba?”

“No, I am not bloody well talking about Cuba,” Charles snarls. “I’m talking about dying! I was trying not to think about my sister being left alone in a world that doesn’t understand her, but thanks ever so much for bringing it up.”

He looks away as though their shock is an unbearable, appalling encumbrance. His labored attempts to control his breathing fill the room.

“Why do I have to tell you this? You’re just projections of my subconscious.”

“But we’re not. You’re not dead, Charles! Professor,” Beast urgently tries to explain. “You’ve had several large doses of morphine over the last few days.”

“I remember that, Hank. I remember Moira taking me home from the hospital. I was in this room and you and Raven and Alex were there. It was—” Throat working unsuccessfully, he shakes his head angrily. “Then it was all gone and I fell asleep. I guess it’s possible I’m only in a coma but I don’t know if the possibility of waking up is much of a silver lining.”

“Stop with this nonsense,” Beast orders shakily, occupying himself with his medical supplies so he can turn away from the bed. “Just stop it. You’re awake—you’re fine.”

“Obviously,” Erik says, sharply so his voice doesn’t shake as well, “he’s not. Charles, tell me what makes you think you’re dead.”

“I don’t know why you’re angry,” In an instant, he blinks away his tears to throw Erik a sour look. “You were philosophical enough about death before we left for bloody fucking Cuba. God, I wish you would have blown up that wretched fucking island instead of those ships.”

“That wouldn’t have solved anything, and we were on the island!”

“Oh, and you’re all about finding solutions, are you? It’s all idle talk now, Erik. Congratulations, I’m sure you’ve secured the war you always wanted.”

Sucking in an affronted breath, Erik draws himself up to reiterate his position on human-mutant relations, because he can’t help but try yet again on the gossamer hope that Charles might see reason. “It’s hardly a matter of wanting—”

“To quote Alex, bull-fucking-shit.”

From the sidelines, Beast nervously tries to interject. “I’m not sure this is a productive conversation.”

“No, this is definitely something I needed to say to you a long time ago.” Charles struggles to push himself up into a more erect sitting position, growling furiously when Beast makes an aborted move to help him.

“You,” he points an accusing finger at Erik, panting from the exertion. “You talked me into that utterly insane—”

“I would have done it alone! I was leaving before you invited yourself and your verdammt after-school club along!”

“I couldn’t just let you get yourself killed! For fuck’s sake, Erik,” Charles barks out a humorless laugh. “How did you not realize? You were so much more than—you were the most stunning person I’ve ever—”

Ears ringing, Erik jumps to his feet and rounds on Beast. “Get out. You heard me,” he reaffirms over the spluttered protests. He feels dangerous, teetering on the edge of something cavernous and consuming. “Leave.”

“I’m not sure this—”

Erik backs Beast toward the door. “I’ll let you know when you’re needed.”

Propelled by its handle, the door shuts with a bang. The silence hangs ponderously over their heads for a long moment.

“I cannot believe this,” Charles marvels. “We’re finally going to have sex and I can’t move my legs.”

For a moment, Erik is so lightheaded he thinks he may black out.

“Unbelievable,” Charles repeats, voice trembling with warring emotions. “Can I even—whatever, I don’t care. I’ll be happy with you in my mouth for eternity.”

Arousal settles swiftly and heavily into Erik’s groin. Charles can’t know what he’s saying. Spinal injuries must be able to affect the brain somehow, or maybe Beast calculated the half-life of the drugs wrong. Lowered inhibitions are a side effect of opiates, aren’t they? Charles must have adapted to the helmet’s dampening effect over time and gotten lost in other peoples’ thoughts again. Or maybe it’s trapped the last thoughts he overhead inside his head, rattling around like marbles in a tin bucket until the echoes are deafening.

That has to be it. Charles wouldn’t say things like that, not to Erik. Not unless he got infected with Erik’s thoughts.

“I can’t chase after you any longer, darling, so you’ll have to come to me. And then, with any luck, on me.”

Choking on nothing, Erik whirls around, immediately regretting it when Charles leers at his crotch. He isn’t quite visibly aroused, but Charles licks his lower lip and smirks beguilingly up through his lashes at him all the same. The intended aesthetic effect is ruined by the harsh shape of the helmet cutting across his face, and Charles’s practiced ease with seduction. With the flush of withdrawal on his face and his cheeks gaunt from two days of minimal food, he looks like a whore earning his next hit.

And Erik wants still wants him. He’s never wanted anyone as much as he has wanted Charles, wanted him in spite of his entitled arrogance and his fop-haired, bright-eyed, white-toothed innocence, wanted him because he was young and soft and alluring—Donatello’s David, made sinful even by his consecration. To find that virginal David is tarnished by greed and lust, has eagerly taken men – other men – to his bed to fuck, to be fucked, to be sullied and spread open under their unworthy gazes, wanton for their slavering mouths and grasping fingers—

It should be dismaying, offensive, repellant; Erik still wants him, perhaps even wants him all the more.

Unthinking, he obeys the command in Charles’s outstretched hand. As soon as he’s close enough, it impatiently tugs him forward by his belt loops, knocking his knees against the side of the bed.

“Touch me, Erik, please.”

Before Erik can even consider complying, Charles brings his hand to his mouth and impresses kisses over his knuckles and on each of his fingertips, touching his tongue to the salt of each before passing to the next. He can barely feel it, as detached as Erik is from his body right now, but his shameless cock presses against his zipper, aching for that indecent mouth.

Charles drags a nail down from Erik’s belt buckle, breath hitching simultaneously with Erik’s at the tangible jolt from the other side of the fabric. “Show me?”

“Charles, I’m not—”

Blown eyes greedily fixed on Erik’s face, Charles kneads over the bulge in Erik’s pants. “You’re not what? I think it’ll be easiest if you kneel on the bed.”

Struggling to remember why fucking Charles’s face is a bad idea, Erik can’t stop himself from pressing into Charles’s hand. “We should—talk,” he gasps. “Charles, you—are you—”

“Oh, I suppose I should—” Frowning, Charles uses his other hand to check his own groin. “Well,” he sighs, “it’s not like I didn’t expect it. God, that feels weird.”

Grimacing, he pulls his hand out from underneath the blankets and doggedly turns his attention to unfastening Erik’s pants. “No matter. I’ll make you come enough for the both of us.”

“Charles, I don’t want—”

“Nonsense. I know you do because I want you to.”

Erik catches both of Charles’s wrists in one hand and turns his hips away to do up the zipper and button with the other.

“What are you doing that for?” Finding Erik’s grip resilient to his attempts to break free, Charles’s playful pout strengthens into a sulk. “What’s so bloody important that we have to talk before you let me taste you?”

“Charles, I don’t think you’re quite yourself.”

“No,” he agrees, falsely pleasant, “I’m dead. Or possibly in a coma. Can we get on with the wish fulfillment?”

“That’s the thing. They’re not your wishes.”

In spite of the fresh images of kneeling over Charles, cupping his lovely skull, and rutting desperately into his mouth, Erik’s cock withers at the prospect of having to humiliate himself like this, to make Charles suffer Erik’s humiliation, too.

Bemused, Charles stares at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s my fault. I was closest when— I didn’t even realize I was thinking about this.”

Of course, the fantasies had been used often enough to likely be close to the surface of his mind no matter what he was contemplating in a given moment, but Erik isn’t going to admit any more than he has to.

“Erik,” Charles interrupts kindly, “you’re not thinking at all. You’re not real.” His wry smile is tremulous. “It’s just like a figment of my imagination modeled after you to be so stubborn and troublesome.”

“I’m not a figment. Look, if you take off the helmet, you’ll see.”

“What helmet?”

“I didn’t know it would affect you like this. Just please,” Erik can’t help but say, the words wrenched out of him by the terrible thought of a Charles no longer able to meet his eyes, keeping a careful distance. “Please don’t—I didn’t mean to. I don’t mean to be—your friendship is all I will ever ask for, if you’re willing to give it.”

“You have it,” Charles says, bewildered. “Of course you have it.”

Erik doesn’t believe him but he loosens his grip enough to allow Charles to pull away, if he wants to. He can’t quite do it himself.

Charles touches the helmet and looks surprised to find it there. Whatever he sees in Erik’s eyes frightens him. “What’s going to happen?” His hand twists in Erik’s grasp, trying to hold on tighter. “What’ll happen when I take it off? Are you going to disappear?”

“I told you, I’m not a figment. You’re touching me right now. I’m real.”

“It doesn’t feel real.”

“It will.”

When Charles’s telepathy spills out, it hits him like a shock wave. Erik tries not to flinch and fails. It’s like inhaling water or ashes, having someone else invade his head. It’s painful and viscerally wrong, even though it’s Charles, who favors the soft touch and prefers to leave people unsure whether he’s there or not.

With a ragged gasp, Charles yanks free, leaving Erik with brief but potent vertigo. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry, Erik.”

“It’s all right. It’s fine.”

They’re still holding hands. Erik doesn’t want to let go but he isn’t sure how Charles will react when he notices, and now Erik can’t pretend that he hadn’t noticed and chose to let it be.

“It’s not all right!” Charles shudders in revulsion. “I thought—”

“I know, I know,” Erik says, not sure if his face is heating from shame or anger. He takes his hand back. Charles had already known how he feels and hadn’t been excessively cruel. Now he looks like he’s about to vomit, like hearing Erik’s thoughts for months hadn’t prepared him for the horror of experiencing them.

“I didn’t mean—I know how you—”

“It’s fine, Charles. We don’t need to talk about it.” Please, Erik begs silently. Please don’t talk about it.

Thankfully, Charles acquiesces. He eyes the helmet he dropped into his lap. “You put that on me?”

“You were having a fit. I thought it would help.”

“I can’t believe you still have it.”

Startled, Erik checks to make sure the helmet hasn’t turned into something monstrous when he wasn’t looking. “Of course I still have it.”

Charles takes a shaky breath. “Because of me? Because you don’t like me in your head, even though it means using that? I haven’t been inside your head without your permission since you asked me not to. You don’t need to use something of his to keep me out.”

Since it would be a reminder of what they’re not going to discuss, Erik refrains from pointing out the infraction of only just a few moments ago. “Why would I be upset because it was Shaw’s?”

“He killed your mother! He tortured you!”

“Yes,” Erik says tersely. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“Doesn’t it just feel evil?”

Erik laughs at the appalled outrage on Charles’s face. “It’s just metal, Charles. It feels like metal. As a matter of fact, it’s the most—friendly and inviting alloy I’ve ever touched.”

He picks up the helmet and sets it carefully on top of the bedside cabinet stolen from the hospital. “And even if Shaw made it evil by touching it, by now, you would have undone it by wearing it.”

After a beat of silence, Charles smiles tentatively. “I didn’t know they had personalities for you. It’s marvelous, your mutation.”

Unsure how to respond, Erik shrugs. “It’s served me well so far.”

A deeply uncomfortable silence falls over the room. It’s the first time in their acquaintance that they haven’t just paused to regroup after a heated debate, or else simply enjoyed companionable quiet together until in the next topic presented itself. Before Charles, Erik had always felt most at ease in solitude. He’s pained to find he has forgotten how to not crave companionship.

“Erik,” Charles blurts out, too loudly for how closely together they’re sitting. “I just want to say again that what happened—”

“Unless you’re telling me to leave, I refuse to hear any more about—”

Charles is preparing to pursue the point when his attention shifts and his eyes refocus on somewhere else. Casting out, Erik can feel movement in the hallway, quickly approaching the door. He shifts back in his chair, moving farther away from the bed.

“Hank’s coming back,” Charles says redundantly, staring fixedly at nothing Erik can see. He starts, his cheeks pinking prettily. “Oh, dear.”

Beast bursts into the room with his fur bristling in agitation. “Excuse me, Professor, but I must insist on changing your catheter now. If you’ll pardon me saying, it hasn’t been changed since you were hospitalized and it’s simply not sanitary.”

“Oh, well,” Charles clears his throat, flush deepening to a splotchy scarlet. “I’m sure. That sounds—necessary.”

“Rather extremely necessary.”

Balking at whatever disgusting infection he sees in Beast’s mind, Charles shoves the covers down his legs and nearly loses his balance in his haste to cooperate. There’s a plastic tube emerging from the placket of his hospital issue blue pyjama bottoms and trailing over the other side of the bed. Completely oblivious to the indignity of the proceedings, Beast blithely unhooks a hard plastic bladder from the lower bedframe and puts it in better light to inspect its contents.

“Healthy kidney function, thank God. And you’ll be getting sponge baths until I can work out something for the shower.”

“Of course,” Charles agrees faintly, ears flaming. “I’d expect nothing less to cap off this experience.”

Beast presses Erik into service to get buckets of water and towels.

“Were you too busy practicing your little entrance speech to bring them yourself?” Erik retorts waspishly before stalking off to do as requested. Being helpful during Charles’s recovery is a major facet of his plan, after all, and he’s not leaving unless Charles throws him out, no matter how painful it gets.

When he comes back with the buckets floating at his side, the first clear water and the other filmy with soap, and the towels piled higher than his own head, Beast tries to send him away for shampoo and a new set of linens. Congratulating himself on thinking ahead, Erik produces the bottle of shampoo procured from Charles’s own bathroom upstairs from amid the mountain of towels with a flourish.

“Yes, well,” Beast huffs in annoyance. “We’ll still need the sheets.”

Folding his arms, Erik looks pointedly to the sideboard, where Beast had put a set of freshly laundered sheets, obviously in anticipation for this procedure.

With no other stall tactics, Beast bends down to Charles and asks in an inadequately low voice, “Are you all right with him being here? If you’re not comfortable, I can get Raven instead.”

“Tell me,” Erik snarls. “What in the last twenty minutes has changed your mind and made you think that would be appropriate?”

“It’s quite all right, Hank.” Patting his furry arm, Charles shoots Erik a warning look. “Erik and I won’t have a problem, will we, Erik?”

So they begin.

No one had thought to get a guide to basic nursing skills from the hospital library, if there was one there, and with Charles fuzzy on everything that happened while he was on morphine, they have only the vaguest intuitions of what should be done. Charles’s pillows are taken away so he can lie down fully on the bottom sheet. Beast carefully helps him roll onto his side so a towel can be placed underneath him to protect the mattress from getting too wet. Charles’s hands are perfectly dexterous, but Beast instructs Erik to undress him after poking claw holes in the pyjama top while struggling with the first button.

Erik’s seen Charles undressed before, but he has to will his thoughts away from the bitter realization that this is only instance in which he’ll ever get to do the undressing, when Charles is in sickbed and there was nobody else to be given the responsibility. He tries not to think about the hair on Charles’s chest or how his nipples pebble in the cool air, and knows he’ll never be able to forget this.

Charles trembles and turns his face away when Erik pulls apart the two halves of the shirt to bare his stomach. Swallowing against the sting of rejection, Erik silently begs Charles to excuse his distasteful thoughts: I don’t mean to, I swear I don’t. I don’t know how to stop. I swear I won’t touch you.

The freckles on Charles’s shoulders nearly ruin him.

They find that the pyjama bottoms are split down the front and tied closed at the waist, so they can be taken on and off without disturbing the catheter line. The nurses didn’t give Charles underwear. Erik gently works the pants down Charles’s limp legs, pretending he hasn’t seen Charles’s penis, soft and uncircumcised, lying to one side with the obscenely wide plastic tube trailing out of the tip. He doesn’t think about the hair on Charles’s shins or his elegant ankles, or the blister on his right heel from the boots he had complained about on the way to Cuba, keeping everyone’s spirits up by pretending to beg to trade them for someone else’s.

“Not yours, Erik. Your feet are too much bigger than mine. Not,” he had added more quietly, leaning closer until his arm was pressed against Erik’s, “that that’s a bad thing. Lots of things you can do with big feet.”

Erik still has no idea what he meant by that. Charles had retreated and immediately struck up a lively barter with Havok, making increasingly exorbitant offers for his boots to make the children forget they were going to war. Now, of course, he can’t ask for an explanation. It would remind Charles of what happened afterward.

“I think we’ll work from the top down,” Beast decides. “Simple germ theory, the patient has to be clean before any invasive procedure."

Washing someone’s hair in bed turns out to be extremely difficult. They put down three towels under Charles’s head and change out the top one twice for being too waterlogged and sudsy. Since Erik isn’t in danger of accidentally slicing open Charles’s scalp, Beast reluctantly assigns him the task of shampooing. It’s agonizing, running his hands through Charles’s hair, supporting the nape of his neck, and trying not to be reminded of vivid fantasies involving similar positions. He refrains from looking at Charles more than absolutely necessary, and Charles keeps his eyes tightly shut the entire time, breathing unevenly and holding the edges of the towel in a white-knuckled grip.

“Hank,” he says suddenly. “I don’t think I need to be completely naked for this part, do I?”

Apologizing profusely, Beast hastens to pull the sheet over his lower body. It doesn’t help Charles relax.

To rinse, they end up moving Charles so his head hangs off the side of the bed and the water can run into a bedpan rather than into the towels. Beast has to empty the bedpan and refill the bucket in the bathroom four times before the shampoo is finally rinsed out. Erik lets him take over moving Charles onto his back without argument, relieved to step away and try to gather himself back together, to get the smell of Charles’s clean hair out of his head. The bucket of soapy water has gone cold, so Erik volunteers to fill it again just so he can escape the room for a few moments.

Trying to speed things along, Beast applies himself to the first pass with the soapy washcloth and tells Erik to follow along behind him to rinse and dry, giving him the transparent warning to spend exactly as much time in physical contact as needed to do the job and not a second more. Erik is torn between fury that Beast would think he would exploit the situation for his own pleasure and hysteria that anyone could mistake this torture for pleasure. He has to feel the shape of Charles’s cheek against his palm, the heavy pulsation of his heartbeat stutter at his touch, the responsive flex of his arms and belly, and know that it isn’t freely given and won’t ever be, that Charles is enduring Erik’s hands and won’t ever welcome them, plead for them.

It’s not my fault, he repeats as he strokes the cloth and then the towel down Charles’s arm, down his back, down his belly. If I could stop feeling this way, I would.

Charles can probably tell better than Erik if that’s a lie or not.

He doesn’t look when Beast changes the bandage on Charles’s back. Unluckily for him, though, Beast narrates the process for Charles’s benefit. Erik can’t dispel the image of the incision, clotted with blood serum, its edges puckered with stitches holding Charles together.

Once Charles’s upper body has been washed and dried, Erik covers him with a dry towel to keep him warm and make up for the removal of the sheet. Beast decides to do Charles’s legs before dealing with the catheter.

“Careful!” he sharply admonishes Erik when he lifts Charles’s knee to wipe the back of his thigh. “Tendons in lamed limbs can tear at the slightest movement.”

“I’m doing exactly what you did!”

“No, you just pulled up instead of articulating the joint! I’ve read multiple physical therapy manuals today and I know the difference!”

“Could you perhaps not talk about my body as though I’m not in it?” Charles has both arms clamped across his stomach and chest, keeping the towel firmly in place.

Finally, the catheter is unavoidable. Beast flaps his hands over the slight crusting at the insertion site, questioning the medical credentials of every employee at Manhattan General. After being told that Erik will have to do it but Beast will be supervising the whole time, Charles squeezes his eyes shut and tries to hide his face in the towel under his head. He shivers at the sound of Erik putting on latex gloves.

Pulling the sheet halfway up Charles’s thighs so there is only as much of his body as is necessary visible between the two fabric shields, Erik attempts to shut off his brain entirely. Predictably, he fails, and has to contain an inexplicable and grossly inappropriate urge to laugh as he follows Beast’s instructions to clean Charles’s penis without pulling on the catheter and then to carefully remove it. As he gradually pulls the ridiculously long tube free, he silently recites the Fibonacci sequence in a desperate, doomed effort to keep from noticing that he knows how loose Charles’s foreskin is and the delicate lace pattern of blue veins along his shaft.

When it’s done, Erik has a brief moment of reprieve before he has to start washing again, more extensively this time, over and behind Charles’s balls and around his anus. His mouth is so dry he can barely swallow.

“We’re going to put in a new catheter,” Beast announces, uselessly trying to show Charles the new one still in its sterile packaging. “But if you eat and drink on a schedule, you can—everything will happen at predictable times and you can just use a Robinson catheter to go to the bathroom more independently.”

Charles doesn’t respond and he doesn’t open his eyes to watch when Beast reminds him he’ll need to know how to do this for himself in the future. Prudently, Beast doesn’t press the point.

Insertion isn’t any more difficult than removal, consisting essentially of the same steps in inverse order of operation and lube. When Beast says he’s done, Erik immediately steps away from the bed, goes to the bathroom, and locks the door behind himself. His hands shake as he strips off the gloves and his harsh breathing echoes loudly around him.

He should have taken Beast’s reluctance for the opportunity it was and let Raven do that. It hadn’t been arousing in the least, touching Charles for clinical reasons with someone looking on disapprovingly the whole time, but it will be later. When he wakes up tomorrow with his cock hard and weeping, he’ll be ashamed enough to resist. The day after, or next week, or five years from now, he’ll rut against his hand or into some stranger and come thinking of Charles, the look and the feel and the smell of him, imagining the taste of him, imagining Charles looking at him and reaching for him, wanting him. Erik will still be ashamed but too greedy for his ill-gotten pleasure to stop.

He should have left when he had the chance.

Erik washes the powder from the gloves off his hands and drinks from the tap until he can breathe again. In the mirror, he straightens his clothes and his hair and then schools his expression until the evidence of his loss of composure has been erased. It’s useless, of course; his mind will always betray him to Charles.

Beast is gone. The damp ones have been taken away but Charles is still wearing towels, turned away from the bathroom door so he doesn’t have to look at Erik. Another small hurt to add to his collection, but Erik supposes it’s no more than he deserves right now.

“Where’s Beast?”

It’s just something to say that isn’t pathetic. He must be going to get Charles actual clothing. That’s the only reason he would leave them alone together.

When Charles doesn’t answer, Erik tries to find some other harmless thing to say, but the words that fall gracelessly, involuntarily off his tongue are “Do you want me to go?”

After several interminable seconds in which Erik panics over the ambiguity of the question and the chance that he may have given Charles the perfect opportunity to order him out of the house instead of out of the room as Erik is almost certain he had meant to ask, Charles whispers, “No, I don’t want you to go.”

Not having thought through this possibility, Erik is momentarily struck dumb.

Sniffling, Charles chokes out, “Please don’t go. I know it’s selfish, but I don’t want you to go.”

Charles is crying and Erik has no idea what to do. Since the camps, he hasn’t dealt with a crying man that he hadn’t purposefully made cry with spilled blood and broken bones. This doesn’t count in that category, not really, not quite.

Fleetingly, just for the barest moment, he wishes Charles had told him to get out and never come back.

Working from the only needs Charles had previously expressed, Erik piles every dry piece of fabric in the room over his body. “Tell me if I hurt you,” he murmurs, carefully maneuvering Charles’s legs to tuck the covers around his feet. Beast had confirmed Charles’s circulation is adequate, but his toes are cold to the touch. How could he have remembered shampoo but not thought to bring socks?

“I can feel that.” Plainly trying for detachment and falling well short of it, Charles watches as Erik manipulates his unresponsive legs. “It’s strange. I can feel them, but I can’t move them. Isn’t the body fascinating?”

“Lift your head.”

Charles obeys, holding his head up so Erik can replace his pillow. It’ll get wet, but there are plenty of others to be switched in for Charles’s comfort. Flopping down again, Charles thanks him.

“You really don’t have to,” he protests faintly when Erik drags the chair to Charles’s bedside by its nails and sits. “If you feel guilty about what happened, you shouldn’t. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know it wasn’t my fault.” He doesn’t say aloud that the human is obviously the one to blame. She was the one with the gun and she was the one who pulled the trigger anywhere near Charles. Erik is about as culpable as anything a bullet might ricochet off of.

“I know you feel guilty. You wouldn’t still be here otherwise.”

Erik ignores that. “It isn’t selfish, what you said before. I don’t want you to want me to go.”

He wants to die. He hasn’t been this inarticulate in English since 1945. But Charles smiles in spite of his tear-streaked cheeks, and Erik considers that more than a fair reward for his awkwardness.

“Good.” Charles’s voice is soft but certain. “I just want you to feel free to go, if you ever decide this is too much.”

To match his confessional manner, Erik leans forward and speaks quietly. “What would be too much?”

Charles flops his hand to indicate a vague space. “This. Being here, staying in one place with nothing to do.” He shrugs self-consciously and looks down. “Me.”

“I can find things to do.”

That inanity earns him a strangled chuckle. “You’re kinder than I deserve after what I did.”

Erik tries to recall something Charles would feel sorry for doing. Certainly there were things he had done and said to Erik that had stung, but Charles had chosen to do and say them in full knowledge of their effects. Most of them were minor, anyway. There’s no reason for Charles to bring them up now.

With a sickening lurch, Erik remembers that Charles could have done anything to him and he wouldn’t have any idea of it if Charles didn’t want him to know. There would be no gaps in his memory, no way to notice if something was amiss if Charles decided there wouldn’t be. He clutches the armrests to keep himself still, ready to snatch the helmet off the cabinet at the first sign of danger, if he gets one.

“What did you do to me, Charles?”

He looks so innocent with those wide eyes, so authentically contrite. “It’s a terrible excuse, I know, but I truly didn’t think any of it was real. I had no idea what being completely cut off telepathically would feel like.”

Unable to fathom why Charles is taunting him or why he’s doing it like this, Erik gapes dumbly.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it, or even think about—”

“Then why,” Erik grits out, appalled at the minute tremor in his voice, “do you persist in bringing it up? You know how I—what I—you know everything about me, isn’t that right? You knew from the start. Either it’s a problem or it isn’t; either send me away or don’t. I won’t be your plaything to tease and mock when it amuses you.”

As mercurial as he always is, Charles’s regret flickers to fury. “My plaything? You think it’s fun for me? Yes, it’s delightful being around someone who wants me so much and so loudly that I barely even need to be telepathic to know what he’s thinking. But every time I try to tell him I want him just as much, he looks at me like I’m scum and walks away and doesn’t speak to me for hours before starting the whole thing over again. And now I try to apologize for molesting you and you’re the one getting frustrated?”

He laughs bitterly. “I tried being patient, I tried being subtle, I tried being obvious, and you hate me every time, every single thing I try. Well, I’m sorry for wanting you despite how much it disgusts you. I’m sorry you want me, even though that’s not my fault, but I would be a lot better at not making unwanted passes at you if you would just decide once and for all if you hate me or not. I’m sorry—”

The anger runs out. Welling up with grief, Charles looks away. “I’m sorry,” he says again, small and quiet. “I have no right to—I’m so sorry, Erik.”

Erik tries to tamp down the swell of incredulous hope and think how this could be a trap, but he can’t come up with anything Charles would gain from lying. And after the last few days of living on tenterhooks, he’s tired. He’s tired of feeling ashamed and hunted. He’s tired of the uncertainty, the constant wondering. He isn’t going to be afraid anymore. If it all goes wrong, he’ll find a way to move on.

But he doesn’t know what to say, so he simply takes Charles’s hand and kisses it.

“Please don’t.” Charles’s face crumples but he doesn’t pull away. “Don’t you dare pity me, Erik. Hank is bad enough but I couldn’t bear it from you.”

He always assumed Charles knows, but maybe he never looked. Maybe it’s all been a misunderstanding. Maybe—

Maybe Charles has been wondering, too.

Feeling more in control than he thought was possible, Erik places Charles’s fingers against his temple, imagining shutters around his mind being flung open.

“I don’t pity you, Charles.”

“Are you asking me to—”

“Yes, I am.” Ignoring his latent doubts, Erik turns to kiss the inside of Charles’s wrist. “I’m asking. Don’t make me beg.”

It doesn’t hurt like it has before, earlier today and that night in the water in Miami. It feels like Erik wouldn’t notice the intrusion if Charles wasn’t being cautiously, apologetically overt as he sinks into Erik’s mind. Although it goes against every one of his instincts, Erik doesn’t try to direct Charles toward certain memories in a vain attempt to keep his secrets. He hates the idea of not being able to hide anything but if he wasn’t able to consider ever sharing them with Charles, he wouldn’t still be here. So he holds himself open for Charles’s gaze, and hopes he isn’t found wanting.

Eyes widening, Charles’s mouth falls open in a startled gasp. You thought I was mocking you? Never, he promises, ghosting psychic kisses over Erik’s eyes, his cheeks, and his mouth. Never, never.

Somehow, their foreheads are pressed together. Erik’s knees are uncomfortably crowded against the side of the bed so he can lean in close enough. He takes the opportunity to kiss Charles properly, his aim off entirely and tasting Charles’s sour breath, but he doesn’t care. Charles’s hands are in his hair, not holding him in place as much as Erik’s hands on Charles’s wrist and neck are keeping him close.

I’ve been a bit laid up, Charles protests, clamping his lips together but unwilling to pull away. Erik can feel his reluctance, harmonizing with his own fierce determination to live in this moment for as long as they can. He kisses Charles again, reveling in the warm bloom of pleasure Charles projects into his head.

You didn’t know. Erik kisses from the corner of Charles’s mouth across his cheek, tasting and chasing the salt tracks. How could you not know?

“If I didn’t look, I wouldn’t have to know if you didn’t want this. I could hope you felt the same way.”

“You go into everyone’s head.”

Charles huffs hotly against Erik’s jaw, but doesn’t argue.

Don’t take what I don’t want to give, Erik pleads softly, helplessly, inhaling the smell of Charles’s damp hair. I’ll give you everything. Just don’t take it away.

“Never,” Charles says fervently, dragging Erik back to where he can kiss him. I won’t, I won’t.

Erik doesn’t quite believe him, but it’s nothing personal; there’s no way to know what will need to be done in the future. He appreciates that Charles took the time to sound so sincere even though he must have known it wouldn’t do any good. It’s difficult to care about what will happen and the inevitable sins they’ll commit against each other when he’s finally touching Charles.

Falling back against the pillow, Charles snorts. “You’ll do wonders for my ego.”

“Your ego doesn’t need the help.”

Erik readjusts a towel that has slid out of position and exposed Charles’s hip. In his head, he can feel Charles’s shame at the reminder of his situation for a brief moment before he disengages.

“No, it really doesn’t,” Charles agrees with forced cheeriness, not meeting Erik’s eyes anymore.

“But,” Erik adds, disgracefully anxious about the small but rapidly growing gap between them, “I imagine I’ll flatter you all the same.”

“Well, it doesn’t take much.” But he’s smiling again. Brushing the pad of his thumb over Erik’s jaw, Charles makes a soft, pleased noise. “You know, I never realized how beautiful you are.”

“I wasn’t fishing for compliments, Charles.”

Very immaturely, Charles rolls his eyes. “I meant that I’ve not really seen someone just as they are for at least twenty years, not since my powers manifested. Even if I’m not trying to read people, their perceptions filter how I experience reality. You think you’re much harsher than you actually are.”

“I know what I look like.” He uses it if he needs to. The combination of a tolerably handsome face and the illusion of interest opens nearly as many doors as does the illusion of wealth.

“You think you do.” Charles holds up a hand and wiggles his fingers illustratively. “Let me show you?”

He waits for Erik’s nod before touching his temple and placing the images in his mind. The differences are plain in side-by-side comparison. Both men fit Erik’s general description, tall and slim with brown hair and light eyes, but one looks older and more severe, a thrilling hint of danger in his unapproachable coolness. The other looks horribly vulnerable under the affectations, his eyes wider and brighter than Erik would have thought possible and the hard line of his mouth twitching with a smile at the corners.

You could never be vulnerable, Charles chides, absently combing Erik’s hair behind his ear. You just like to pretend you’re not a good, kind man.

Except for the reminder that he needs a haircut soon, Erik isn’t much interested in how he looks objectively. Charles couldn’t show him that, anyway; even if the helmet filtered out Erik’s perceptions, all of Charles’s biases went on uninterrupted. This exercise says at least as much about Charles’s predispositions as it does about Erik’s, and it sends a frisson of delight though his body to recognize that Charles is attracted to both iterations. He’s compelled to cross the scant inches separating them to show his appreciation.

Yes, you’ve found me out. Smiling against Erik’s eager mouth, Charles immediately betrays his feigned crossness. I like you and I think you’re awfully good-looking.

Erik wordlessly pictures Charles, knowing his adoration and affection and awe are on naked display. Overflowing with happiness, Charles pulls him closer, greedily running his hands over Erik’s arms and chest, drawing Erik’s lip between his teeth as if he would take him inside his own body for jealous keeping if he could. At that moment, Erik would go willingly.

Whimpering, Charles reluctantly releases Erik’s mouth. “Hank’s coming back.”

“Now? He takes his time only to interrupt now?”

Possessiveness strums up his spine as Erik lays his hand against Charles’s cheek like a blinder to keep them in this space where only they can fit. It’s as if their bodies are in perfect proportion, the heel of his palm aligning with the corner of Charles’s jaw and his fingertips in Charles’s hair over the top of his head. If his spreads his fingers, his thumb brushes the corner of Charles’s mouth.

Charles turns into the gentle pressure of Erik’s hand and takes his thumb into his mouth. He doesn’t suck, doesn’t even properly wrap his lips around the digit, but Erik’s cock leaps in anticipation of the potential. Pupils wide and dark, Charles drags his teeth down the side of Erik’s thumb as he slowly pulls off, teasing Erik with just the tip of his tongue at the last moment.

“Hank’s going to be here any minute.”

Erik muffles his groan in a short, hard kiss. “Fuck him.”

“Not if you want to fuck me.”

More confidently than he would be if he were actually considering tossing Charles over for Beast, Erik scoffs. “You’d beg me for it anyway.”

Charles hums in mock thoughtfulness. “No, I couldn’t let you go before I got to taste you and feel you inside me, lovely and hard and big.” Ducking Erik’s attempted kiss, he smirks. “Hank really is coming downstairs right now, with Raven. You should take a moment to calm down.”

Erik grudgingly sits back in his chair. The loss of the Charles’s heat around him helps but he’ll need to find something else to think about if he doesn’t want to confirm Beast’s worst fears about leaving them alone. “Your hair is a mess and your lines are terrible,” he informs Charles.

Perfectly smug, Charles carelessly runs his hand over his hair. “You say that as if they didn’t work.”

“I say that because they didn’t work. They didn’t need to work.”

Inexplicably, Charles’s expression softens and he all but melts into the bed. “Oh, Erik. You don’t even realize what you’re saying.”

Before Erik can wonder what the hell that means, Beast bursts in without knocking.

“Sorry that took so long, Professor. Raven’s waiting outside, if you want to see her.”

“Of course I want to see her.” Charles begins to push himself upright. “But perhaps after I get dressed.”

Dropping the bundle of clothes, Beast hurries to help him. After discreetly adjusting his softened cock into a more comfortable position, Erik puts himself in the way of Beast’s efforts and reassembles the stack of pillows supporting Charles’s back. In tandem with a polite verbal iteration, Charles’s mind brushes against his, warm with real gratitude.

Somewhat ruffled, Beast squares his shoulders. “Right. I fixed a pair of pants like the ones from the hospital so we won’t have to worry about the catheter, but we’ll start with the shirt. If you’ll put your arms up—”

Charles tips his chin up resolutely. “Thank you, Hank, but I’ll need to be able to do this for myself and I may as well start practicing sooner than later. I may need help with the trousers but I think I can manage the shirt.”

“Oh, well, yes,” Beast stammers, chagrinned. “Yes, I—quite right, of course.”

Feeling like he might burst from emotion if he stays any longer, Erik excuses himself. Raven, in her human façade, pounces immediately.

“Is he all right? Hank said he was still confused.”

“A side effect of the helmet.”

“So he’s fine? I mean, I know he can’t move, but other than that, he’s okay?” Her eyes aren’t hers, but they’re gold rather than any human color. Erik wonders if that’s a loss of control like Charles has said he always worries about or if she’s choosing to keep something of herself even as she adheres to Charles’s preferred form.

“You can ask him yourself. And when you do,” he adds, fighting to keep the smile threatening to break out over his face from showing, “you should tell him how you feel. About your natural skin, I mean. He might be more understanding than you expect.”

She stares, mouth hanging open before she snaps it shut. “You’re being weird and it’s disturbing. Are you high? Never mind, I don’t have time for this right now.”

Barreling past him, she barges into the room. In response to the outraged squawks that greet her, she snaps, “Don’t be ridiculous, Charles; it isn’t like I haven’t seen it all before!”

The door slams shut behind her, and Erik laughs for what feels like the first time in years.

Once the shock of hearing someone inside his head has worn off, Erik is feeling extremely uncharitable toward his rescuer. Not that he could even be called a rescuer, given how quickly he tired from just treading water. If the Coast Guard hadn’t descended on them so quickly, he might have drowned. Erik wouldn’t have felt obliged to take the trouble.

Luckily, they seem to hold no special interest to the Coast Guard. They’re left alone with their orange blankets and belated life vests on the short boat ride back to the docks. Erik distrusts this good fortune, but his power has been drained enough to make him willing to bide his time and take advantage of whatever he can from the situation before he leaves to continue his hunt.

Leaning in to be heard over the motor, the telepath shouts, “I’m sorry it didn’t happen under better circumstances, but I’m glad to meet you. I’m Charles, Charles Xavier.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“Oh,” he laughs, breathless from the wind, eyes bright in his pale face. “I suppose I did say that already.”

Beginning to suspect the man is a halfwit, Erik turns away. He can feel the waves slapping the hull but he doubts he could lift anything heavier than his coin after straining against the submarine. A hidden submarine! How typical of Schmidt’s self-aggrandizing melodrama.

They’re herded into chairs with slightly uneven legs in a small office and given steaming mugs of a poor excuse for coffee. The continued lack of interrogations into what they were doing in the marina, particularly given Erik is dressed for the water while Xavier is patently not, is becoming suspicious. He cuts a wary look at Xavier, shivering in spite of the blanket. He’s pretty like one of Caravaggio’s boys, all rosy cheeks and inviting eyes and tempting pout, but Erik suspects his appearance is misleading.

“Are you keeping them from questioning me?”

“Not really,” he carelessly replies, perking up at Erik’s interest. “They’re predominantly happy to pass the buck, as it were, but I’m discouraging their interest in what you did with the anchor. You have an astonishing mutation, my friend, absolutely stunning power and focus, but I think we should keep it out of the papers as much as possible. Best not to cause panic.”

He takes a sip of coffee and grimaces. “God, that’s appalling.”

“When you say you’re discouraging them,” Erik begins.

Grinning impishly, Xavier taps his temple meaningfully. “Just shifting their attention elsewhere. Nothing worse than a reminder of paperwork that needs doing.”

Nodding in acknowledgement, Erik gulps down his coffee. It is as appalling as advertised, but it’s hot and a distraction from the spiraling chain of implications of what Xavier has said and done. He must be enormously powerful, which is attractive, but the nature of his power is terrifying, which doesn’t dim Erik’s attraction to him as much as it should. The ability to speak mind to mind and know someone’s name without asking is one thing, but to actually influence what people think, to restrain one idea and force another on a whim—

Erik shudders, not only from the chill of the water.

Xavier sucks in a sharp breath but doesn’t say anything, watching the room instead of Erik for once.

The door bursts open and bangs against the wall. “Charles!” The blonde girl in a coat that clearly isn’t hers rushes inside. She throws herself at Xavier, who barely sets his coffee aside before the collision. A girlfriend, Erik surmises, but isn’t sure what that makes the other woman, who’s slightly older and dressed more appropriately for the weather. She has a walkie-talkie and thanks the Coast Guard for their assistance with cool professionalism.

“Charles, you idiot!” The girlfriend breaks off hugging Xavier to smack him across the upper arm. He winces but she is unrepentant. “Serves you right for jumping into the water like that! You can barely swim in a pool with a week to prepare!”

“You can’t swim?” The other woman gapes at Xavier. “What were you thinking?”

“I could hardly let Erik drown!”

“The Coast Guard was literally right there! You couldn’t have just told them where their job was?”

Ignoring this salient fact, Xavier hauls the blonde against his side and waves a hand toward Erik. “Raven, Moira, this is Erik Lehnsherr. Erik, my sister, Raven, and—”

“Moira MacTaggert,” she introduces herself, shrewdly evaluating Erik even as she offers him a handshake. “CIA.”

When Erik stiffens, she smiles wryly. “No need to worry. If you’re as eager to take down Sebastian Shaw as you seem to be, we’re on the same side.”

“According to Erik,” Xavier interjects with sudden seriousness, giving no sign that he took this information directly from Erik’s mind rather than learning it in conversation, “his real name seems to be Schmidt and he has committed crimes far worse than espionage. Also, he hasn’t aged in twenty years, so it’s a good bet that he’s a mutant as well.”

Glancing around the room at the various Coast Guard personnel diligently bent over paperwork and showing no interest in this fantastical pronouncement, MacTaggert sighs. “You’ve got to stop doing that, Charles. You can’t just take over people’s minds whenever you want to.”

Raven snorts. “Charles likes to make rules for other people and ignore them when they’re inconvenient.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Xavier scolds her without rancor, grinning conspiratorially up at Erik. He is unfairly beautiful for someone who could be described accurately as looking like a drowned spaniel. “Erik doesn’t know you’re slandering me. He’ll get the wrong impression.”

“You mean the right impression.” Raven looks Erik up and down with evident interest. “You’re a mutant, too, right? Going to stick around?”

If they have any information about Schmidt, he hardly has a choice. Not to mention, he’s intrigued by the possibility that he isn’t alone, that there are people with talents, mutants like him, living outside of Schmidt’s orbit.

Erik smiles at her, as benignly as he can. “It would seem in my best interest.”

“Splendid!” Xavier throws off his blanket and claps Erik on the shoulder. “You must call me Charles, my friend. Now, let’s find somewhere to change out of these wet clothes.”

For several days, Erik is the happiest he can remember being in his life. Charles’s incision is healing well but Beast has ordered him to stay in bed until the stitches can come out as a precaution. He spends the majority of every day at Charles’s bedside, waiting impatiently for Raven and Beast to leave them alone for any significant stretch of time. They put it to good use, gravitating toward each other from the moment the door closes until they’re kissing, lazy and heated in turns, communing through a telepathic link because they cannot bear to separate long enough to speak aloud, or simply breathing together, warm and contented, curved like parentheses around the inexpressible certainty they have in each other in those moments.

For bathing and urinating, Charles is nearly self-sufficient, needing real help only bringing buckets to and from the bathroom. He’s partially elated at his triumph, mostly ashamed to be celebrating such an infantile victory at thirty-one. He retreats briefly but dramatically whenever he has to ask for the bedpan. Unable to come up with words to reassure Charles that he doesn’t care, not for one solitary moment, Erik coaxes him back more gently than he would have thought himself capable of being, kissing him with the reverence of faith he has long since lost.

The third day, Azazel interrupts Erik’s morning run to tell him that he’s disappointed with Erik’s leadership.

“I did not come to watch you zaymatysya kokhannyam z the telepath like a servant would his lord. This is undignified, even for a lord’s estate as nice as this. What are you doing for the cause of mutant supremacy? Nothing.”

Erik, who has been looking forward to finishing a game of chess he and Charles abandoned yesterday in favor of exchanging increasingly explicit promises of future sexual favors as soon as Beast lets Charles out of bed, is surprised to find himself inclined toward amusement instead of outrage at Azazel’s impudence.

“Have the liquor cabinets run dry already, Azazel?” He doesn’t look the least bit abashed at the gibe, but Erik suspects that Azazel goes through life unremittingly shameless. “What do you think I should be doing? I’m not Shaw; I treat the prospect of nuclear war with all the averse precaution it deserves.”

Azazal’s tail flicks this away like it’s no more than a gnat. “Shaw was a small bit insane about this, but he had vision. You have a silly look on your face.”

He does, and he would be embarrassed about it under any other circumstances. “Make your point or leave me alone.”

Sniffing aristocratically, Azazel examines his finely shaped cuticles. “You cannot think with the telepath nearby, this is plain. The Brotherhood will only acknowledge your leadership if you leave now and begin to truly lead. Otherwise, we have no use you.”

Erik has never heard of any Brotherhood and he has no idea who is encompassed in Azazel’s we, but he expects he would have a lot in common with them. No doubt he would take extremely well to leadership as well; certainly he would do a better job than Shaw. On the other hand, it’s difficult to care about any of that when he knows that he will be with Charles and not only allowed but expected to touch him, today and tomorrow and the day after that.

“I’m not leaving.”

“We will go,” Azazel insists, “or I will go. This is the bargain.”

Unconcernedly, Erik shrugs. “Then I suppose this is goodbye.”

Lashing tail betraying his annoyance, Azazel narrows his eyes. “I will go to the White Queen and she will take over the Brotherhood.”

Whether that’s an appellation Shaw’s telepath gave herself or one Shaw or Azazel made up to suit their grandiose tastes, it’s hilarious. Erik cannot wait to relay this conversation to Charles and the others.

“Do whatever you like. But if you see Miss Frost, give her a message from me.” He speaks calmly and smiles as he issues threats, how he learned to do from Shaw. “It would be unwise to hold a grudge. If she comes here with anything but a song in her heart, I haven’t decided how I’ll begin but I’ll finish by shattering her into a thousand shiny pieces and making her into tasteless jewelry. I’m sure you can imagine what I’ll do to anyone doing her dirty work.”

Azazel isn’t the sort to cower in the traditional sense, but he looks appropriately intimidated. “I will tell her. I will tell you that when you are done with this,” he gestures toward the house and all it represents, “the Brotherhood will be waiting.”

Erik barely contains the urge to roll his eyes. “Take the other one with you when you leave. I have no use for him.”

Inclining his head in a truncated bow, Azazel vanishes. Reaching out as he resumes jogging, Erik can’t feel any of the metal pieces he associates with Azazel anywhere within his range. Having never found anything memorable about Riptide, Erik can’t gauge his presence, but he assumes that Azazel followed orders. Riptide’s an unobtrusive houseguest, but reliably unnerving whenever Erik trips over him in odd corners. Nobody is sure what to make of him, and Erik is glad not to have to concern himself with the matter any longer.

They’ve taken to sharing breakfast in Charles’s room and abstaining from coffee in deference to Charles’s dietary restrictions while he’s recovering. Conversation begins every morning as a round of complaints about the hole it leaves in their lives. Erik waits until the ritual has been observed to its natural conclusion and then relates what happened.

“So he just left?” Raven is unaccountably stricken at the news. “But why? Where will they even go?”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Charles soothes automatically.

Beast snorts. “Well, I’m glad to see the back of them. He didn’t have the decency to even hide his stealing—all the empty bottles in a neat pile on the counter with a note that we should look into recycling! The nerve!”

“He wasn’t stealing,” Raven argues hotly. “We would have given him as many drinks as he wanted if he asked. Maybe he was just trying to be helpful with that note. You just want to believe the worst of him. He was actually kind of nice once you talked with him.”

“You talked with him? Raven,” Beast says incredulously, “he’s not nice. He’s a murderer. Do you not remember watching him kill hundreds of my coworkers and friends?

“Yeah, like they were such great friends after they found out you’re a mutant.”

“People don’t deserve to die just because they hurt my feelings!”

“Raven,” Charles cuts in warningly when she looks prepared to disagree. “What’s done is done. Azazel decided to leave of his own free will and we must respect that.”

Her utensils clatter onto her plate as she stands and hisses, “Because you’re so good at respecting people.”

“Raven—”

Throwing one last injured look at Beast, she storms out.

“Where on Earth did that come from?” Beast looks beseechingly at Charles. “You don’t think she actually liked that guy, do you?”

“I’m learning that I am really not the best authority on what Raven thinks or feels,” Charles admits ruefully, patting Beast on the shoulder. “But I can’t say that I disagree with you about Azazel. He had an unsettling mind that I’ll be glad never to stumble into again.”

After pushing his food around his plate in silence for a few moments, Beast excuses himself. “I’ve lost my appetite,” he mumbles, collecting his and Raven’s things to take to the kitchen. “I’ll be in my lab if you need anything, Professor.”

Keeping a faint frown off his face, Erik focuses on his breakfast. He doesn’t care in the least who did nor didn’t like Azazel; he hardly cared for the man himself, though he was an excellent utility in any case. Their reactions to the story are completely unexpected. They’re all missing the point, which is that Erik stayed. He had two good options available and he made a choice in their favor. They were supposed to be pleased.

“The White Queen,” Charles muses once Beast is gone, putting ketchup on his scrambled eggs like a heathen. “I don’t remember seeing anything about that in her mind.”

“Perhaps Azazel was inspired by Raven’s little codenames.”

“Do you think she’ll be a threat?”

Having thought about little else for the latter half of his run, Erik answers confidently. “She’s not a fool, and she didn’t take the opportunity to escape the CIA when she easily could. I doubt she’s happily wedded to Shaw’s plans, even if she agreed with his ideas. She’ll play the long game, if she feels inclined to play at all, which she may not.”

“And I’m sure she’ll take you seriously,” Charles adds, raising a sardonic eyebrow. “Even if her chances against us were good, she’d think twice if there’s even the slightest chance of ending up as tasteless jewelry.”

“Sold cheaply,” Erik adds with relish.

Chuckling, Charles sets aside his adulterated breakfast and holds out his hand. “Come here, won’t you, darling? It’s slightly inappropriate right now, but I’m afraid I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to being alone with you.”

Lacing their fingers together, Erik contains a reflexive smile. “There are more direct ways of asking me to kiss you, Charles.”

“But if I use them all the time, you’ll get bored.” His lips occupied, he concludes silently, We can’t have that.

Unfortunately, Beast comes back after only a few minutes of leisurely necking to tell them the food situation is becoming grim.

“We’re down to some scraps, martini olives, stale bread, and two gallons of milk. I wouldn’t bother you with it,” he says, staring at the lingering indentation Erik’s hand had left in the mattress as he leaned over Charles, “but I obviously can’t do it myself, what with—well, for the obvious reason.”

“I’ll do it,” Erik volunteers before the inevitable request.

“You’ll take one of the cars, of course,” Charles blithely dictates, “and my wallet, wherever that ended up. Raven will know. There should be enough there to cover what we need today, but I’ll give you my bank information now so it won’t be a problem when that runs out.”

And he follows through immediately, placing directly into Erik’s head the account details and his vague impression of the staggering amount of money he has. Even having spent all of his adult life concealing his emotions, Erik openly gapes.

“All right then.” Beast clears his throat uncomfortably, already backing out of the room. “I’ll make you a list.”

His brain still caught on the sheer number of digits in Charles’s balance, Erik manages to say, “I’ll leave at quarter to ten.”

“Take Raven with you,” Charles suggests, apparently oblivious to Erik’s shock. “She’d probably like to get out of the house for a while, and she knows where everything is.”

“I’ll ask her. Charles—” Erik can’t find the right words, so he hopes Charles hears him. How can you trust me with this? How can you be sure of me?

Charles is carefully shifting his position so he doesn’t develop bedsores. If he heard, he doesn’t let on, smiling up at Erik, slyly coy. “Help me shave before you go?”

“You don’t need my help.”

“I like watching you watching me.”

Watching Charles shave now that Erik knows how his shaving cream tastes on his skin is at least as erotic and thrilling as it was before, if not more so. Charles is positively indecent, letting his head tip back and his mouth fall open as if in ecstasy as he drags the razor up his neck. He hardly looks into the mirror Erik is helpfully holding up for him, fixing Erik with a heated gaze completely unsuited to the activity. It should be ridiculous.

“You’ll cut yourself,” Erik warns, voice roughened by arousal.

“With my metal razor when you’re right here? You’d let that happen?”

“That doesn’t make sense, Charles. You know I can’t control something like that.”

Charles just gasps breathily as he begins on the left side of his jaw.

I don’t know why you like that so much, he confesses while they’re celebrating the fact that he emerged unscathed in spite of his criminal lack of attentiveness. I like shaving but I’ve never thought of it as foreplay.

Surprised, Erik pulls away. “Then why do you do it? Why make a fool of yourself?”

“Because you like it,” Charles says, as if that meant anything, tugging Erik close again. “Now kiss me again before Hank comes to send you away.”

The drive to North Salem is short. Raven agreed to come but she’s uncharacteristically quiet, meeting Erik in the garage already in her human skin and staring moodily out the window the whole way. Not wanting to consign himself to being her confidant, Erik only asks her which of the two grocery stores is superior.

Her sustained silence breaks abruptly while Erik deliberates over apples.

“I just don’t think Hank realizes what Azazel must have gone through, looking the way he does.” She throws a head of lettuce into her basket without checking its quality and glares at the tomatoes. “He probably worked for Shaw because he was the only one who didn’t treat him like crap just for looking different.”

“You’re projecting. I don’t know the details,” though he can guess that everyone around him became the target of Shaw’s sadism sooner or later, “but I don’t get the impression that Azazel was ever in need of validation from anyone.” After putting the obviously inferior lettuce back, Erik tears the list in half and gives Raven the dry goods portion. “Get these and meet me at the butcher counter.”

Scowling, she snatches it away. “I don’t need validation.”

“Then stop begging all the men in your life for it.”

Raven’s mouth drops open in shock. Almost immediately, though, she snaps it shut, snarls, “Fuck you,” and stomps furiously away. Satisfied with his efforts to mentor her, Erik returns his full attention to the produce.

When Raven finds him waiting in line with his paper ticket, she’s wearing a new skin, some slightly older woman with exaggeratedly lush lips and breasts that Erik doesn’t recognize. When she speaks after a few moments, staring straight ahead, her voice is throatier, like Lauren Bacall after a few cigarettes.

“I’m not saying you’re right, but you may have a point. I have been acting like I need your approval and I don’t. Not yours or Charles’s or anyone’s.”

“No,” he agrees. “You don’t.”

“I have spent my whole life waiting for Charles to fix me, but that’s not going to happen. He’s smart but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know my life.”

“You don’t need to be fixed, Raven.”

“Maybe I don’t, but I’ve always felt like I did, and that made it real. The point is,” she continues determinedly, gaze boring into the overlarge bouffant of the woman ahead of them, “I don’t know Hank’s deal exactly, but I know it better than you or Charles. I should know what to say to him, but I don’t.”

Before he can think of an intelligent response, Erik’s number is called to the counter. The butcher’s assistant who does the slicing stares covetously through the glass display case at Raven’s impressive bust a few seconds too long. When he hands over the packages of meat, Erik takes vindictive pleasure in deploying his most frightening smile and melting the little pervert’s keys just enough to be completely useless.

“Don’t bother trying to say the right thing,” Erik advises Raven as they’re walking down the next aisle. “Actions are more honest. Treat him how you would want to be treated and tolerate nothing less in return from him or anyone else.”

Her false face is unreadable as she considers this. Finally, holding both baskets while he inspects the eggs, she announces, “I would want to have my choices respected, so his choices should be respected, too. Hank hates when you call him Beast. You don’t do it to his face anymore but you do it behind his back. It’s mean.”

“You were the one who gave everyone mutant names.”

“That was a game, not real life! I would want to be able to decide for myself who I am, and I’m not going to let you ignore his decision. Stop calling him by a name he doesn’t want.” Raven thrusts the basket of produce back into his hands and turns on her heel. “I’ll go save a place in the checkout line.”

Taken aback by her sudden fierceness, Erik finishes picking out the best eggs with half his mind preoccupied elsewhere. Beast is not the same person he used to be, and not only in the way he looks. Surely Raven also recognizes that where Hank was shrinking and timid, Beast is more assertive and confident, though not quite as assertive and confident as he could be. Hank wanted to be normal and instead he became Beast, the mutant he should have wanted to be all along.

As strongly as he believes this to be true, though, Erik has to acknowledge Raven’s point about being able to choose one’s own identity. He may not agree with the choice, but he won’t be the sort of man whose principles are contingent on circumstances.

He finds Raven at the cash register. “You should talk to him,” he tells her without looking away from the change the cashier is counting out. “You and—Hank should be honest about what you need from each other.”

After a beat, she companionably knocks her shoulder against his. “Not that I’m right or anything.”

“Of course not.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Raven bite her lip to hide a smile and he has to do the same.

The sixth day after the disastrous sponge bath, Charles has the permanent catheter removed and, in celebration, gives Erik a blowjob.

It’s the fulfillment of a good number of Erik’s fantasies. He looks down at his body, stripped bare on Charles’s request, kneeling over Charles on his pillow throne, holding his head in place with one hand and bracing himself against the wall with the other, and watches his cock thrusting shallowly into Charles’s open mouth with giddy delirium. It’s better than he ever imagined, not only because Charles gives excellent head but also because he can hear Charles’s smug satisfaction with the circumstances, all his incredulous delight and molten desire mirrored in Charles’s mental presence.

Keeping Erik’s cock warm with expert pulls of his hand, Charles leans back for a moment, a drugged smile on his face. “Do you know,” he asks, conversational except for being breathless and a bit raspy, “you have the most enormous cock. So beautiful and so fucking big—”

He nuzzles from base to tip, smearing spit and precome over his face. The sight tightens Erik’s balls, makes his hips flex, bumping his cock against Charles’s cheek and leaving another slick stain on his skin.

“Want you in my mouth,” Charles pleads, and squeezes Erik’s ass, urging him forward. “Need you, Erik, fuck me, fuck my mouth—”

“Such lovely begging, Charles, but it has to stop for you to get what you want.” Erik presses his thumb against the hinge of Charles’s jaw, urging it open, and takes his other hand off the wall to direct his cock. He has to bite down on a groan when Charles begins sucking, his cheeks tightly hollowed, his lips in a ring just below the flared tip, shiny and red and swollen.

I’ll have to do better than that, Charles teases, even his mental voice affected. He sinks down, nose not pressed into Erik’s pubic hair but certainly in contact, his throat working around Erik’s head. Meeting Erik’s eyes, he pulls back slowly, lips dragging along Erik’s cock, which looks nearly as enormous as Charles said it is in this context, coming out of his mouth inch by deliberately revealed inch until he pulls off with a filthy pop.

“That’s how deep you can go when you fuck me. And I do mean fuck me.” He puts his hand over Erik’s and presses it harder against his own head in demonstration of what he wants. “When you come, don’t pull out. I want to feel and taste you on the back of my tongue all day.”

Gritting his teeth, Erik squeezes the rising heat out of the base of his cock. “If you want me to fuck you, let me do it before you talk me into coming.”

Obligingly, Charles opens his mouth and waits, his blue eyes equally wide and expectant. Erik carefully pushes in and begins rutting, gradually hastening and deepening his stroke until the entire bed is shaking with it, springs squeaking and frame knocking against the wall. The whole of Westchester must know what they’re doing but Erik can’t stop, can’t slow down, can’t shut up about it.

“Fuck, Charles, fuck—made for this, your fucking mouth, I swear. God, you must have blown the whole of Oxford to be this good—so perfect, Charles, look so happy with a cock in you—my cock in you, fuck, give it to you whenever you want—”

It’s over much sooner than he would have liked. He would have lasted longer except he can feel Charles’s pleasure on top of his own, can feel how much Charles revels in taking him, in being taken, being used, being the perfect hole for Erik to fuck.

It’s too much. Erik loses control, fisting his hand in Charles’s hair and pulling him onto his cock, curling around him as he comes. Charles makes a noise that’s muffled against Erik’s groin but entirely audible in his head, wild need tempered with satiated contentment. Releasing his bruising grip on Erik’s knee, he brings his hand up at an awkward angle to massage another shot of semen out of Erik’s balls.

He knows the moment Erik is too sensitive to endure any more and retreats, easing back against the disheveled mound of pillows at the same slow rate at which Erik opens the fist clenched in Charles’s hair. Erik would never have believed there was anyone in the world who loves to swallow as much as Charles appears to, sucking the last taste of Erik’s cock off his bottom lip like it was ambrosia, tipping up his chin so Erik can more clearly see his throat bob up and then down, watching his reaction with languid, hooded eyes. With Charles, he doesn’t have to believe it; he can feel it, even almost taste himself on Charles’s tongue, knows Charles got hard from the reward as much as from the rough treatment.

“Let me,” he pants, inelegantly walking backward on his knees. The fingers of his left hand ache a bit from being so tightly clenched as he fumbles Charles’s pants open. “Let me—”

Charles’s abdomen jumps when Erik takes his heavy, flushed cock in hand. He smells of heady, desperate arousal, precome limned around the head where his foreskin hasn’t retracted all the way.

Erik has never had sex with another man or wanked an uncircumcised penis before, and the sight makes him hesitate. With a breathless little laugh, Charles teases, The mechanics are much the same, darling, not to worry.

Hoping Charles can hear his deafening lack of amusement, Erik spits into his palm and begins.

He experiments with different speeds and grips, glancing between his hand and Charles’s face for cues as to what works best. After Charles’s overwhelming exhibition of prowess, Erik feels awkward and clumsy, crouching over him like a naked, bony gargoyle, the drying sweat chill and tacky on his exposed skin. It becomes apparent that he’s not very good at hand jobs, the deepening frown on Charles’s face becoming a wince when Erik pulls his foreskin too roughly or doesn’t remember to rewet his hand at the appropriate intervals. At some point, Charles throws an arm up to cover his face, his neck stiff with tension.

With swelling horror, Erik realizes that Charles has disconnected their telepathic link and his penis is quickly becoming flaccid.

“Should I—” He’s mortified to hear his voice crack. “Should I use my mouth?”

“I’m not—I don’t think that would help,” Charles says sadly. “Maybe—maybe another time?”

The bottom falls out of Erik’s stomach. In the perfect end to the whole debacle, he nearly crushes Charles’s legs as he stumbles off the bed. “Of course. Whenever—whatever you want.”

He dresses in jerky movements, numb except for where Charles dug his fingers into Erik’s thighs. The marks are blooming under his skin, the minor ache a bittersweet counterpoint to his all-encompassing humiliation. Of course he would be disastrously bad at sex with Charles. If he got to have Charles’s affection, the sweet kisses and the gentle caresses, the mutually unspoken but plainly displayed love, he must lose it all in banal physicality in the most crushing manner imaginable.

For once, being covered from wrists to ankles doesn’t make Erik feel less vulnerable. There’s a thick lump in his throat he can’t swallow against and his face is hot.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out. He should say it at least once before he goes. Surely Charles deserves at much in recompense as Erik can give, meager though it is. “I’m sorry, Charles.”

There’s a wet scoff in response. “I should be the one apologizing.”

Something metal embeds itself in the wall with a thunderous crack. “Is that a fucking joke, Charles?”

“Christ, Erik!” Suddenly furious, Charles yanks his trousers closed, hands shaking as he knots the ties. “Can’t you just take a fucking apology for once in your—”

He sucks in a sharp breath, all the anger draining abruptly out of his expression. “Oh, no, no, no—no, that was not your fault. Erik, don’t you dare walk out of here thinking that was your fault!”

“Are you going to make me stay, Charles? After all those pretty words about leaving me free to go if I need to? ” All the metal in the room trembles with Erik’s misplaced rage. “Did you know you were lying then, or do you just enjoy going back on your word?”

“Oh, my God, could you please have your telepathy crisis sometime after I’ve had time to deal with finding out that I’m fucking impotent!”

As he shouts the last words, Charles’s ruined voice breaks. Scrubbing at his eyes, he struggles to calm his ragged breathing. He drags the blankets as far up his bare chest as they reach and clutches them in place.

“Fucking hell, Erik,” he whispers shakily. “Can I have five minutes to come to terms with this, please?”

Intellectually, Erik knows that it’s rude to hope for anything that makes Charles this distressed. Really, though, he will fall on his knees in gratitude if impotence is to blame for his failure to bring Charles off.

Oddly conscious of his bare feet, Erik comes close enough to the bed to take Charles hesitantly into his arms. After a few, terrifying seconds without a response in which Erik is convinced he has made a mistake, Charles loosens his white-knuckled grip on the covers and wraps his arms around Erik’s neck.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” he mumbles into the collar of Erik’s turtleneck. “I should have known you would blame yourself for that.”

Hugging him tightly, Erik presses a firm kiss into Charles’s mussed, sweat-damp hair. “I don’t care if you can’t—I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, how you feel about my body completely betraying me was not my absolute first concern,” Charles replies as drily as is possible with his voice thickened by both abuse and tears. “But I appreciate that. Truly,” he says, shifting into a position where he can fix Erik with his earnest gaze. “I do. It’s better if only one of us panics over each particular issue so the other one can be the voice of reason.”

His overwhelming doubt wavering against a single grain of hopefulness, Erik protests, “I don’t know if either of us is qualified to be anyone’s voice of reason. We wasted three months on completely needless angst because we didn’t just say what we wanted.”

“In our defense, homosexuality is illegal. You never know how someone might take your friendly advance.”

“Charles, you’re a telepath.”

As best he can without releasing his hold on Erik, Charles draws himself up in affront. “And I was respecting your explicitly expressed request for privacy, Erik. But in the spirit of saying what we want, I demand a cuddle. Get up on this bed this instant.”

“You’re a tyrant,” Erik accuses, unable to bring himself to be disgusted with the fondness in his voice.

Attaching himself to Erik’s side like a limpet, Charles doesn’t bother refuting the charge. Erik doesn’t pursue it, instead helping Charles into a mutually comfortable position and tucking the sheets securely around him. Charles grumbles something about not needing coddling, which is patently untrue and easily ignorable. They settle into near stillness, Charles’s head on Erik’s chest, Erik petting Charles’s hair, the thick smell of sex mellowed into something unobtrusive but deep and abiding.

“Do you really not care?” Erik feels more than hears Charles ask, his words hot against Erik’s skin even through his shirt. He looks up at Erik, lost and bewildered. “Even if I never—how can you not care?”

Taking Charles’s hand, Erik presses it not to his temple but to the steady beat of his heart. “See for yourself.”

Although his presence isn’t audible this time and his expression doesn’t change immediately, Erik knows when Charles has touched his mind. He couldn’t say how he knows, but he does, just as surely as he knows which way is up or that he’s alive. After a few moments of quiet spent gazing at each other, Charles takes a shuddering breath and wipes away his tears.

“I don’t know how you can be so wonderful when I’m not even a walking disaster.”

“We’re both disasters,” Erik states quietly. “In all likelihood, this will end in disaster.”

“You love me,” Charles says simply, “as much as I love you. That has to count for something.”

It’s a monumental risk, but Erik hopes he’s right.

Erik has sex for the first time when he’s nineteen years old. They meet in a Jewish settlement in the new state of Israel. She’s Polish, another survivor, and the only language they have in common is Hebrew, fumblingly patched together from half-remembered childhood lessons. He can’t pronounce Wladyslawa to her satisfaction, so she has him call her by her second name, Anna.

After a few days of adolescent kissing and handholding during which Erik begins to wonder how to ask for more, Anna closes the curtain that separates the room she shares with her cousin from the rest of the house, tells him to stay quiet so her aunt downstairs won’t hear, and takes off her dress. It’s quick and awkward and wonderful, ending with shy smiles over a shared cigarette Erik stole from one of the other laborers at the building site where he works.

They have sex several other times, ineptly using the pull out method rather than a condom because neither of them is brave enough to buy one from the druggist. It’s sheer dumb luck that Anna doesn’t get pregnant before she gets married less than two months later to a Pole who lost his first fiancée to the camps. Erik leaves the settlement several days before the wedding, telling the few people who care to ask that he’s going to look for more stable employment in one of the larger cities. He had never told Anna about the metal, or Schmidt, or the significance of the Reichsmark he carries everywhere, and it wasn’t only because they didn’t have the vocabulary to communicate it.

He never has trouble finding a woman if he decides he wants one, but sex is an infrequent diversion from his all-consuming pursuit of Schmidt. The women he fucks don’t know who he is, some of them don’t even know to call him by his real name, but Erik is careful to choose women who won’t care if he’s gone the next morning without saying goodbye.

The only woman who ever knows about his command over metal is a Romani he meets in France in 1953. Erik introduces himself using his current false name and she says it’s sweet he thinks she cares what it is. She’s a secretary for the moment, Magda tells him in unaccented French, but she’s taking night classes in English so she can marry an American and leave all the bad memories in Europe. Her gaze is frankly and unapologetically assessing before she accepts the invitation to come up to his room; she carries her own supply of condoms.

Erik leaves Vichy sixteen days later; his business there is concluded after ten, but the room is rented by the week and every night is spent with Magda. Quite by accident, they become friends in that time. She sees the tattoo on his arm and knows; they never talk about it, but there’s a weight of intimately shared understanding between them afterward. When Magda asks him if he has any fantasies, he dares to tell her to put her hands on the brass headboard and carefully move one of the bars to wrap around her wrists. She has bracelets of bruising the next morning that she wears as proudly as if they were made of diamonds and comes home from work that evening with a hundred ideas for creative application of his ability.

She smokes in a totally unselfconscious way, exhaling from her nose rather than her mouth. It makes her seem so real compared to the women trying to look as alluring as Marlene Dietrich. Everything about her is unfailingly honest.

“You like to pretend you’re a gentleman, Max,” she declares one night, her bare breasts painted blue in the moonlight on the balcony. “You think people will be frightened to know who you really are.”

“I don’t care if people are frightened of me.”

“You ask me every time if you can hold me down or pull my hair, even though you know I love it. Not with words, but you ask.” Magda stubs out her cigarette on the railing and comes back inside to where he’s lying on the bed. Dropping the blanket she was wearing as a shawl, she straddles his hips, plants her hands on his chest. “You let me fuck you like this sometimes even though you hate being under me.”

“I don’t like feeling helpless.”

She scoffs. “You and every other person alive. But this is sex, not real life. I wouldn’t let you chain me up if it mattered.” She grinds against his growing erection and grins. “Anyway, my point was that you’re not very good at pretending. I knew from the first time I saw you that you’re not a gentleman.”

He rolls them over and kisses her, hot and sharp. “You think you know me? I promise you don’t.”

“I don’t need to know your real name.” Her nails rake across his back but she wraps her legs around him, tilting her hips up in an implicit command. “I know you, and I’m not frightened. I want you to fuck me. Come on, Max, hold me down and fuck me. Fuck me like you’re scared to let me do to you.”

After he leaves her to go to South America for the first time, Erik often wonders where she is and who she decided to make her husband. He thinks he would have asked her to choose him if he thought she would have him. What little he could offer her wasn’t what she wanted, and all he wanted at the time was Schmidt dead.

But he hopes she’s happy. Someone like Magda deserves to be happy.

The stitches come out, and Hank starts Charles on intensive physical therapy that same afternoon. The upper body exercises are tiring but when Hank starts on Charles’s legs, it’s torture. The muscles and tendons have been still too long, and even through his partially deadened nerves, stretching them to Hank’s satisfaction makes Charles scream in pain.

“I’m sorry, Charles,” Hank says miserably. “I shouldn’t have put this off for so long, but we have to do this. We can’t let your legs become brittle.”

“How can this be better?” Raven has been pacing nearby, flinching every time Charles cries out, the living manifestation of all of Erik’s forcefully contained anxiety. “He’s in pain, can’t you hear him? Can’t you at least take a break?”

“It’s all right,” Charles gasps, blinking sweat and tears out of his eyes. “I’m okay. It’s got to be done. It’s not that bad.”

He can’t completely stifle the next scream as Hank pushes a little bit farther.

The physical therapy is only an hour every day, but it’s far from the only challenge Charles faces. He has to relearn the most basic of skills, from how to dress and undress himself to how to get and stay upright without being propped up. Much to his frustration and embarrassment, he needs help constantly. Although he no longer needs the Foley catheter and bedpans, Charles can’t use the bathroom without someone standing by to help him maneuver the small space, open and close the taps he can’t reach, and pick him up after the inevitable spills he takes because he can’t transfer successfully and is too proud to ask for assistance. Closed doors are impossible obstacles; everything seems to be just out of reach on counters that now come up to Charles’s chest. Worst of all, Charles is so totally incapable of simultaneously propelling and steering his wheelchair that it would be funny if it weren’t unbearably pitiful. Refusing all offers of assistance with increasing snappishness, Charles pinches and crushes his fingers in the wheels, crashes into walls and doorways, and even falls out of the chair several times. His extensive and growing collection of bruises prompts handwringing and lecturing from Hank, which only serve to make Charles more obstinate and reckless.

Other times, though, Charles becomes disconsolate for days at a time. He resists performing his therapeutic exercises, even once they’re merely challenging and exhausting as opposed to excruciating, preferring to sleep the days away. If he can be wheedled into them, he does them halfheartedly and with the wounded sorrow of a cruel taskmaster’s victim. These depressive periods are easy to discern, always beginning with Charles neglecting to shave and ending with a collective sigh of relief when he picks up the razor again.

When Charles withdraws from everyone’s company, Erik feels the rejection especially keenly, as Charles also uncouples the link between their minds during these times. It’s never an obtrusive presence, hardly even noticeable unless Charles purposefully projects his thoughts, but when it’s active, Erik cannot doubt Charles’s love. When the subliminal warmth is gone, his uncertainties rise from their slumber, hungry and vicious, subsiding only when Charles comes back to him, apologetic and adoring until the next absence. They’re returning sooner and lasting longer each time; Erik senses that the tether holding the sword of Damocles at bay is fraying.

Erik’s hatred of the wheelchair as a symbol of all their problems grows to a close second behind his hatred of Shaw’s coin. The metal is riddled with impurities, poorly formed, and incompetently welded. He commandeers the aircraft grade titanium from the spare parts for the Blackbird jet they no longer have and begins designing and creating a wheelchair that won’t offend his senses. Hank is livid at the sack of his lab until he realizes what Erik is doing, and then begins offering up suggestions for motorization.

“Maybe if he doesn’t have to provide the momentum,” he conjectures hopefully, “Charles can put more energy into not running into everything that doesn’t move out of the way.” When Erik’s only response is skeptical silence, he concedes, “Or maybe we should put in an airbag.”

It’s difficult to find time to work on the new wheelchair when there are so many modifications to be made to the house. Raven takes over Charles’s physical therapy to give them more time to work on renovations, but it often seems like there won’t ever be enough time.

“The doorways have to be widened, in here and then throughout the house,” a distinctly frazzled Hank lists. “We’ll have to relay pipes for a new shower and lower sink. Should the kitchen be remodeled, too? Even the light switches are out of reach; that’s a hundred rewiring and plastering jobs throughout the house. How’s he going to get upstairs? There’s no room to install a ramp that he could actually push himself up, and putting in an elevator will be a massive undertaking. Where would we put it? The only thing I know about construction is not to knock down load-bearing walls, but I have no idea how to tell which of them are. Where do you buy an elevator?”

Erik interrupts before Hank starts tearing out his fur in agitation. “Stop overwhelming yourself. Take it one task at a time. What’s the most urgent thing?”

Hank answers instantly. “The bathroom. It’s wearing on him, having to rely on someone else for simple hygiene tasks. Greater independence will do the most to stop the depressive episodes.”

“Then that’s where we’ll start.” Vaguely aware that some trite encouragement is necessary, Erik claps him on the shoulder. “You’ll do fine, Hank.”

Blinking disconcertedly, Hank pushes his glasses up his nose and continues gamely, “Right, yes. I think we should do it in his suite upstairs so he can get out of that hospital bed and back into his own space as soon as possible. You’ll take his chair up and down the stairs for now, won’t you? Not forever, of course, but such a massive project will need a lot of careful planning that will have to wait until we get the basic necessities done. Someone will have to make a run to a library or a bookstore soon. Plumbing shouldn’t be too much of a problem between your mutation and my physics degree, but I’m not touching the wiring in a house this old without a good text to consult.”

They go on. There’s nothing else they can do.

They have sex a few more times, always at Charles’s discretion when he’s on one of his upswings. The infrequency doesn’t bother Erik in itself, but he always responds enthusiastically to Charles’s overtures in case a good enough performance can keep his mood from dimming. It hasn’t worked yet, but Erik won’t stop trying.

At first, their respective rewards are just as lopsided as they were the first time.

“It’s no use,” Charles sighs, nudging Erik away. Smiling sadly, he wipes the spit from around Erik’s mouth with his thumb. “Any other time, that would have gotten me off in a moment, but now it’s like—it just doesn’t feel like my body anymore. It doesn’t feel bad, but it doesn’t feel—normal isn’t the right word. I don’t know.”

Thoroughly defeated, Charles tucks himself back into his trousers without bothering to dry off.

“We’ll figure it out,” Erik reassures him, guilty over his failure to reciprocate the consistently spectacular orgasms Charles has wrung out of him. “You get hard just fine. No reason you wouldn’t be able to come, right?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Charles says darkly. “It’s ridiculous! I have a gorgeous man trying to make me feel good and my stupid prick won’t even give him the time of day.”

Erik kisses Charles’s disgruntled pout and gathers him into his arms. “Give it time. I’m sure it’s difficult for a prick to learn to tell time.”

Charles softens the sharp poke he gives Erik’s stomach with a telepathic bloom of amused appreciativeness. “Orgasms make you silly, darling. Take a nap.”

Through trial and error, they discover that Charles can only come if Erik hasn’t yet. Though he still has a high degree of sensation below the waist, it’s diminished and different enough compared to how it was before that Charles can’t completely surrender to physical feeling alone. When Erik’s arousal overlays his own, though, the unfamiliarity and hesitancy with which Charles regards his changed body is overwhelmed.

The first time Charles comes after being paralyzed, he weeps with joy and relief. It isn’t quite the same as it was, a slow, diffuse welling instead of swift, punctuated bursts, but that doesn’t matter when Charles’s fears that his body was no longer entirely his own have been disproven.

“I’ve lost so much control,” he sniffs, beaming through his tears. “And to not be able to have sex, not even when I wanted it more than I ever have, when I had it with you after wanting you so desperately and thinking you’d never want me back—” Laughing, Charles shakes his head incredulously. “I’m being ridiculous. Thank you. Thank you. Let me—”

Erik catches his hand before it reaches his groin. “I don’t need it. This is for you.” He touches the corner of Charles’s smiling mouth, “This is everything I wanted. Let’s enjoy it together.”

Charles drags him into a fierce kiss. I love you, he swears. I don’t deserve you. I love you. You must know that, you must always remember that.

Though Charles still falls into dark moods, they have sex more frequently after that, the crushing lows succeeded by dizzying highs. Erik finds he doesn’t enjoy the taste of come, but Charles seems much more interested in seeing Erik dripping in it than he is in Erik swallowing. The possessive gratification Charles exudes as he smears his semen over Erik’s skin is shockingly thrilling, sending a bolt of need directly to Erik’s cock.

“Look at you,” Charles croons, powerful even in his chair with his spent cock staining his rumpled trousers. “So happy to be on your knees for me. You’d do anything, wouldn’t you? You belong to me.”

His imperial certainty makes Erik shudder. “Yours, Charles. I’m yours, always.”

“Touch yourself, Erik. Get yourself off for me. I want to see you come.”

It should be demeaning, kneeling naked on the floor, leaning back so the hand tugging on his cock is clearly visible, being instructed to speed up and slow down and hump at thin air as if he were a horse being put through its paces to impress a potential buyer. It is, but it isn’t.

Charles orders him to come; head thrown back in a high, keening moan, Erik complies. A small, secret part of Erik thinks he may enjoy the degradation.

“Gorgeous. You’re so beautiful, darling, so good for me. Come here so I can clean you up.”

A few days after that particular interlude, Hank approaches Erik in the library and puts an unlabeled glass jar of something clear and viscous on the table next to Erik’s coffee.

“Obviously, there aren’t official guidelines for such things,” he says in a rush, strenuously avoiding looking Erik in the eyes, “and I’m not sure that anal sex is advisable for someone in the Professor’s condition, mental or physical, but since you’re already—involved in some way, as his doctor, I feel obliged to make sure that you’ll be careful.”

Erik might find Hank’s abject mortification amusing if it wasn’t obvious that he’d be running to turn them in if he thought there was anywhere else in the world for a man with blue fur to go. “So you’re giving me lube.”

Stiffly, Hank tells the spot over Erik’s left shoulder, “I’m given to understand lubrication helps ease the strain of—”

“Yes, I know.” Erik closes his book with a snap that makes Hank flinch. “Don’t worry, I don’t think you understand that from first hand experience. Although given how much I disgust you, I’m beginning to wonder if you don’t have a few perversions of your own you’re trying to pretend don’t exist.”

“I do not have—I’m not disgusted!” He has the gall to look offended. “You’re not the first homosexual I’ve met, you know!”

“But you still look down on me. You think what Charles and I do isn’t normal, don’t you, and you hate that. You want everyone to be normal, that everything would be fine if we could all just be normal—”

His teeth click together as Hank hauls him forward to within inches of his snarling fangs. “Don’t tell me what I want.”

Just as quickly as he lost it, Hank regains some of his composure and drops Erik the few inches to the floor. His claws snag on the new tears in Erik’s shirt.

“I can’t understand being what you are,” he rumbles, golden eyes blazing with conviction, “but I understand being different. And yes, I didn’t want to be different because I thought I was alone. No one likes to feel isolated, but none of us are alone anymore, not when we’re here together. Maybe the rest of the world will come to accept us or maybe they won’t, but we have to accept each other or we’re just making the same mistake over again. So just take the damn lube and don’t hurt him. It’s awkward enough knowing that you two are doing whatever; I draw the line at having to stitch up anal tearing.”

The gratification of hearing Raven’s beliefs from Hank of all people is completely derailed. “I’m not raping him!”

“Oh, I know,” Hank says grimly. “Charles put in a fairly transparent request to see all the books from the hospital library that discuss sex practices for paraplegics. ‘Out of curiosity’ he says, as if the whole room doesn’t smell to high heaven. Open the window sometime, for God’s sake. It’s giving me a headache.”

“I’ll take that under consideration.” Not liking the turn this conversation has taken, Erik asks, faux innocently, “How have you and Raven been getting along?”

“Much better, thanks.” Before Erik can get annoyed at Hank’s unwavering calm, he adds, “Really, I mean it. We’ve been following your advice and it’s helping a lot. We’re not together together but we get each other a lot better now and maybe—”

Feeling faintly green from all this sap, Erik holds up a hand. “Spare me the details.”

Practically purring in self-satisfaction, Hank smirks. “Likewise.”

In retaliation, Erik cracks open the jar of lube that afternoon and drags out the preparation for nearly an hour before taking Charles at a slow, leisurely pace. By the time they finally come, they’re both soaked in sweat and the room is muggy with sex.

“Poor Hank,” Charles sighs happily, wiping come onto one of the spare pillows. “He made us scented lube and look at the thanks he gets.”

“Humming absently, Erik licks the salt from the crease of Charles’s thigh. “I didn’t hear you complaining.”

“I’m sympathetic to Hank’s suffering, not an idiot. I’ve wanted your cock in my arse since I saw you in that delightful wetsuit.”

“And?”

“Marvelous, of course. We must do it again sometime soon, and then a few more times after that.” Tugging Erik up to his level, Charles chatters excitedly, “I’ve been thinking about some different positions we might try. I know my current one turns you off, but if you tweak the design of my new wheelchair, it could open up some intriguing possibilities.”

Two days later, Charles is too depressed to even eat breakfast. Erik can feel his mental touch slip away as he takes back the uneaten, cold toast, and starts his internal clock of how long the estrangement lasts this time. The wheel has turned; he can only hope that it turns again. 

On the sixteenth of December, Raven accompanies Erik to the grocery store. She’s experimenting with a new body, tall and androgynous with an unfashionable black bob, and mischievously tells Erik on the ride into town that all her clothes are part of the disguise. By now, they have a routine in place for the various errands that need to be run, but today she requests a quick side trip to a confectionary.

“It’s our tradition,” she explains. “When Charles was at Oxford, we would go to parties Christmas Eve but stay in the whole of Christmas day, eating candy and drinking champagne. Hangover cure for him, hangover creator for me since I wasn’t allowed to drink in public.”

Erik grudgingly agrees and then goggles as Raven proceeds to buy enough candy to open her own store.

“This is obscene,” he hisses once the counter attendant has gone into the back to get a five-pound jar of assorted jelly beans on Raven’s instruction. “There are people starving.”

Raven drops the faux British accent she’d put on for the salesgirl. “And I’m sorry for them but I don’t know any of those people. I know my older brother who was recently paralyzed and needs cheering up with the reminder that some things don’t change. We’re not saints, but we look out for each other.”

At the shop girl’s return, she simpers, “Oh, very good, darling, that’s just the ticket. Now, that will do for the sweets, but I’ve never known a party that couldn’t be improved with chocolates. Won’t you be good enough to tell me about your bonbons?”

Their purchases from the confectionary, which will put the salesgirl through a couple semesters of college if she’s paid on commission, fill up the entire backseat of the car. Raven nicks a Hershey bar from the hoard to eat on the way to the store for actual groceries.

“Is that the only thing you do for Christmas? The candy and champagne?”

“Well, we don’t go to church or anything. Like I said, we would go to parties on Christmas Eve but they were never very fun for me—nothing’s funny when you’re the only sober person in a room full of drunks—and obviously, Charles isn’t up to something like that this year. We would do presents, of course, but it just little things. I would make something crafty for him that would turn out horribly and he would love it anyway and use it all the time until I got embarrassed for him and burned whatever it was by Easter. He would always get me a new dress and some comic books or magazines.”

Wistfully nostalgic, she crinkles the Hershey bar wrapper to catch the light. “I haven’t had time to make him anything this year, and he hasn’t been able to go out to buy me a dress. But that wasn’t ever the big thing, you know? It was just being together for a day, just the two of us, getting drunk and making ourselves sick with sugar. We still have that, only even better with you and Hank there.”

Touched, Erik clears his throat. “Is there enough champagne at the house, or should we get few bottles?”

The stranger’s face that doesn’t and yet does belong to Raven creases with a grin. “Better make it a case. It’s going to be a very merry Christmas.”

“I’m Jewish.”

She shrugs. “That’s all right; Charles and I are atheists.”

In deference to the holiday spirit, Charles gamely tries to stay optimistic. He keeps smiling for Raven and Hank, keeps initiating sex, but there’s a haunted look behind his eyes. Erik catches glimpses of it when Charles hesitates a beat before forcing himself to go on with the charade, compelling himself through the motions of normalcy he doesn’t feel. The cracks are showing, and everyone knows it.

The tension finally breaks two days before Christmas. Raven is coaching Charles through his physical therapy, undaunted by his listless reluctance and the fact that she couldn’t convince him to leave the bedroom. Hank and Erik are lowering the light switch in the bathroom, trying to give them some privacy by conducting a conversation that ends up being a narrative dialogue of what they’re doing.

“These wires are old,” Hank announces over Raven’s stream of encouragement for Charles to do another sit-up, as if Erik didn’t know that before they opened up the wall. “You can see the fraying all around the connection.”

“There’s not enough slack to reach the new switch,” Erik observes blandly, as if they haven’t done this a dozen times already. “May as well just replace the wire.”

“I brought the spool just in case. Where do you want to splice it in?”

“Three more, Charles. You did this yesterday; you can do it today. Just three more to go, don’t stop now.”

“What’s the point!” Charles explodes, making Hank jump and Erik accidentally rip the frayed wire out of the wall entirely. “What’s the point of any of this! This isn’t recovery. I’m not getting better. I’m crippled! I’m always going to be fucking crippled.”

“Don’t say that—”

“What, the truth?” He laughs hollowly. “I can’t walk, Raven. I’m going to be stuck in this house I hate for the rest of my miserable life, with only these stupid fucking exercises to pretend I’m not completely useless and pathetic! I can’t do it. I can’t let you lie to me. If this is all there is, then I’m done. Just—just leave me alone. I can’t be like this forever, suffocating on your pity. I’d rather die.”

The silence following that pronouncement is punctuated only by Charles’s labored breathing and the heartbeat thundering in Erik’s ears. He wants to do something, say something that will make everything all right, but he’s frozen. All he has to offer Charles is his devotion and clearly that hasn’t been enough.

“Charles Francis Xavier, how dare you call me a liar.” Raven’s voice is crackling with vehemence. “You are not useless and you are not pathetic, not unless you lied to me when you taught me that people are just people, no matter what they look like or whether they’re different from everybody else. This is hard and sometimes I get scared. Sometimes I’m sad and I’ve gotten angry because you don’t deserve this or because I don’t deserve to have to watch you be in pain. But I have never, ever pitied you. Go ahead and look if you don’t believe me.”

Charles hiccups, “You don’t have to do that. You’ve never wanted me in your head.”

“You’re my big brother. It’s my job to take care of you.” She barks out a wet laugh. “This is a beautiful moment. Don’t ruin it by trying to be noble.”

Whatever Charles sees in Raven’s thoughts must be good, because all Erik can hear is them crying together. Hank looks petrified, the spool of copper wire protesting under his punishing grip.

“I’m sorry,” Charles sobs. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said those things. I’m sorry I’ve been so wretched.”

“Don’t apologize for how you feel. Just know that I love you and I’ll be here no matter what. We can talk about it—we’re getting almost good at that.”

Charles chuckles weakly. “You’re a lot better at it than I am. Please, I think I need a hug.”

“Then get up here. This’ll be one of your three. You didn’t think I was going to let you out of it.”

“Slave driver.”

“Slacker. Come on, up!”

When Erik chances a peek around the doorway, they’re sobbing in each other’s arms, clinging to each other like shipwreck survivors in a vast, turbulent ocean—or like they’d been separated in the war and miraculously found each other in a new country after giving up hope.

Hank pokes him in the shoulder, whispering, “What’s going on out there? What do we do?”

“A reunion.” Erik looks away, feeling that intensely private moment should be respected. “We go back to work. Cut me three meters of new wire and I’ll thread it up to the main line. It’ll be ready for plaster in five minutes.”

Nobody is naïve enough to think that will be a permanent solution, but open acknowledgement that he’s been depressed and permission to grieve for the life he lost in Cuba make a palpable difference in Charles’s outlook. He smiles and laughs less, but it is only from the elimination of false cheer from his behavior. He promises to ask for help if they will stop trying to do things for him without having been asked. He begins talking about what he might do in the future, getting truly excited for the first time in months over the germ of an idea for an academy for mutants.

On Christmas morning, he’s up and dressed before anyone else, a bit wan from having to get up an hour earlier than usual but pleased with the accomplishment. “I’d like to eat breakfast in the kitchen,” he informs Erik, impressive in spite of his stubble and overlong hair. “It’s nice of you all to sit with me but I’m not an invalid. I can manage eating at a table like a civilized person.”

Of course, the table is too high for the wheelchair, but before Hank or Raven can make a fuss, Erik reshapes the wheels so Charles is on the same level as everyone else. When Raven worries that the wheels are no longer wheel-shaped, Erik waves a hand dismissively. “The new one’s finished except for the seat cushion, but any pillow will do. It’s down in the basement and I didn’t wrap it, but Merry Christmas, Charles.”

“It’s perfect,” Charles declares, having seen all the designs and the progression of the manufacturing in Erik’s mind. He lays a hand over Erik’s, giving him a more intimate caress telepathically. “Thank you, my friend. I can’t wait to break it in.”

Knowing that he doesn’t mean trying it out on the difficult turn from the hallway into the kitchen, Erik has to hide a shiver of anticipation.

For the sake of tradition, breakfast is dry toast and bacon with lemony salted tomato juice garnished with celery. Charles splutters when he takes a sip. “I thought this was a Bloody Mary!”

“Don’t blame me. Hank says no vodka, so they’re virgin. It was hard enough convincing him to let you have champagne.”

“So you had drunk the vodka already,” Charles translates.

She crunches on her celery, unaffected. “Azazel took most of it. It was only one and a half bottles over at least a week.”

They retire to the sitting room, where there in place of a tree Hank has clamped laboratory flasks filled with colored water on a tall metal stand placed in front of the window. “It isn’t traditional,” Hank demurs as Raven and Charles exclaim over his handiwork. “But I thought the beakers might catch the light.”

Raven punches him lightly in the shoulder. “Shut up, Hank, it’s beautiful. Now help me carry the candy.”

The odd facsimile Yule tree is rather lovely, especially bedecked in chains of colorful cellophane and gleaming foil candy wrappers and viewed through a bubbly alcoholic lens. Charles can’t loll on the floor like Raven and Hank are doing, but Erik prefers him where he is, mind and body both leaning into Erik with fuzzy warmth, his hand brushing teasingly close to Erik’s groin with his increasingly sloppy gesticulations.

There aren’t proper presents, but Erik brings out the new wheelchair for everyone to admire. Raven tipsily ties a chocolate box ribbon around one of the armrests, “so it’ll be like new when Charles’s sober enough to drive it.”

Hank brings out some of his unmarked pots and Erik is halfway convinced he’s going to present them with more lube in front of Raven before Hank shyly explains that they’re lip color. They have metallic sheens, one gold and the other silver, meant to compliment Raven’s natural skin tone.  “I want you to be beautiful in your real body.” His eyes widen in dismay. “I mean, I want you to feel like you’re beautiful. Because you are! Of course you are. I mean—oh, no, this is coming out all wrong.”

Charles takes pity on him. “This is when you kiss her, Hank.”

That prospect seems to terrify Hank even further, but Raven tackles him to the floor, smacking kisses all over his face, and he responds enthusiastically. Finally, she pulls away to pronounce them possibly the best present she’s ever gotten.

A dazed Hank struggles to come up with an appropriate response. “Oh, well, they should be moisturizing, too.”

“I would be offended,” Charles tells Erik when Raven attacks Hank again. “But I’m too relieved that the sexual tension is finally over.”

“Fuck off, Charles, you and Erik are worse.”

“Yeah,” Hank interjects. “It’s not even any better now that you’re having sex.”

That cuts through the pleasant fog of champagne like a bucket of ice water.

“What?” Raven yelps, scrambling upright. “You two are together?”

Far too late, Hank backpedals. “No, no. It was just a—a joke! I mean—”

“Excellent work, Hank,” Erik grits out, arm clamped around Charles’s shoulders. “Masterful. I can see why the CIA wanted you.”

Raven’s looking at him like he stabbed her through the belly. “Is that why you’ve been so creepily cheerful lately? Because you’re fucking my brother?”

“Raven—”

She rounds on Charles. “How could you not tell me? You know how I felt!”

It would have to be now, Erik despairs, when Charles is finally beginning to come to terms with his condition and he and Raven have just reconciled. Losing her now will be devastating.

“What was I supposed to say? Sorry you’re a little bit in love with me but I don’t feel the same way and by the by, I sometimes like to have sex with men? It’s not something you just bring up in casual conversation!” 

“You don’t just keep this secret!” Raven shouts, in complete disregard of the fact that keeping it secret is exactly what homosexuals do. “When did this happen?”

“When I came back from the hospital.”

“Right after you—” Raven sucks in a sharp breath. “Charles,” she gasps. “Before your stitches were even out! Is that even safe?”

Charles protests, “We didn’t start sleeping together right away. It was just kissing.”

Hank, the traitor, chimes in to say that they were definitely at it before he removed the stitches. Raven points triumphantly at this testimony and fixes Charles with glare that demands an explanation.

Erik is reeling. “Wait, you’re just upset he didn’t tell you?”

“That’s reason enough.” Eyes widening in realization, she snaps her fingers. “Cute stripey-sweater guy! He wasn’t copying your notes!”

“That’s why he was there at first, we just got,” Charles waves a vague hand, “friendly.”

“I’m sure you just got friendly with Simon and Michael and Alfred Lord-whatever-his-name-was and Wesley Anderton—Charles,” she admonishes gleefully, “you slut!”

“I may have gotten a little carried away at times.” He shrugs sheepishly at Erik’s amused eyebrow. “It was university.” I learned a lot, he adds privately, with the suggestion of a lascivious smirk.

“Oh, my God,” Raven exclaims. “You should have just told me you were gay!” She shoves Erik against the couch cushions. “Why the hell did you kiss me, you jackass!”

Charles’s half-cocked argument that Erik is European and kissing is just friendly on the continent is completely lost in Hank’s guttural snarl.

“What?”

Glass rattles as metal trunk and branches of the Yule tree hum in Erik’s hands. He’s not to drunk to defend himself, but it will be more difficult against someone with Hank’s reflexes and natural weapons.

“Honestly,” Charles scolds exasperatedly, “that’s completely unnecessary! It was one completely platonic sign of affection months ago—hardly something to duel to the death over.”

For some reason, Erik hadn’t realized that Charles knew about that night. He had almost forgotten about it himself, given all that came after.

“Completely meaningless,” Raven agrees, stroking the raised fur on Hank’s forearm, clearly pleased with his territorial instincts. “But perhaps we should go somewhere and talk about it. Somewhere private where we can work things out.”

As they start to leave to go to Raven’s bedroom, Erik can’t resist one last jab. “I’m not your doctor, but I feel obliged to make sure you’re careful. Do you need any condoms?”

“Fuck off, Erik!” Raven sings back, footsteps already bounding up the stairs.

“It wasn’t meaningless, you know,” Charles tells him after the giggles have subsided. “Raven admires you a great deal and you’ve inspired her, helped her view herself more confidently.”

“I’m not interested in your sister.”

“You are, just not romantically. That’s good; she needs someone other than me giving her advice. It turns out I don’t have very good judgment.”

There’s something ominous in Charles’s sudden melancholy. Erik tips his chin up and meets his eyes. “You’ll be a wonderful mentor, Charles. You’re allowed a few mistakes when you’re starting out.”

“If Raven had found you when she was young,” Charles whispers, “you wouldn’t have made those mistakes. You wouldn’t have told her she had to be afraid all the time, that no one would ever accept her for her real self. I didn’t mean to do it but I did, and when I realized what I had done, I didn’t even try to fix it. I knew I was hurting her and I didn’t know how to stop. How can I think I’ll do any better the next time?”

As best he knows how, Erik broadcasts his marrow-deep certainty in what he’s saying. “You’ll never get it exactly right—nobody could. Don’t try to be perfect, try to be better. And you won’t be alone. I’ll be here to help you, and Raven and Hank. You don’t have to take the whole weight of the world on your shoulders.”

Charles gives him a wobbly smile. “With a group like that, I’m hardly necessary. I’ve just gotten in the way so far.”

“How can you say that? You saved us all, you brought us together, you bring out the best in us.” Erik shakes his head in wonderment. “Charles, you may need us to advise you, but you’ll be the leader of the mutant community. I’ll help you—we’ll all help you, but we need you to direct us. You have a vision for the future; we’re just resources to help you create it.”

Charles’s glass of champagne topples over and spills on the floor. “Erik, if you don’t kiss me this instant—”

Erik never hears the rest; Charles’s mouth is otherwise occupied and all he can feel in his head is a symphonic crescendo of Charles’s thankfulness, affection, esteem, and love. 

“So,” Armando says awkwardly after they cross the bridge out of New York. He had accepted the fact that he wasn’t the only mutant with the equanimity of someone who sees a wider sample of humanity’s variability than most. There are still more than five hours left before they arrive at Langley and the car radio is too broken for even Erik’s power to fix.

“I don’t know what to talk about,” Armando admits with a self-deprecating chuckle. “I guess you know all about me already. I can’t even remember what you said your names are.”

“Charles and Erik,” Charles supplies smoothly, pressing against Erik as he leans more directly into Armando’s sightline in the rearview mirror. “No need to stand on ceremony when we’ll be working closely together. Feel free to ask us anything you like.”

“Okay, well—how many of us are there? Mutants, I mean.”

“Based on the population density I found telepathically, I would estimate somewhere between ten and twelve thousand in the continental United States. Of course,” he adds, “those are only the ones I found because the people were aware that their appearances and abilities are beyond baseline humanity. There may be many more mutants who are too young to realize their uniqueness or people who just write off a mutation as standard variation. We may never have an exact count but the actual number could theoretically be in the millions.”

Charles says this as though it’s a point of minor interest. Erik is all but bowled over at the idea. Millions of mutants! Millions of compatriots and kinsmen waiting to be found. Millions who will need organizing and protecting from humans.

“I can’t believe I’ve never met another one before, if there are so many. But I guess it’s easier to tell with the—” Armando taps his temple to indicate telepathy. “It must be nice to know who you can trust to tell the big secret to. No wonder you guys are so close.”

Startled away from his aimless inventory of the passing cars, Erik stiffens. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I just meant you seem like old friends. Did you go to school together or something?”

“Hardly,” Charles laughs, squeezing Erik’s wrist in warning. “It’s not even two weeks since we met.”

“No way. I would have thought you’d known each other for years.”

Erik isn’t sure how Armando decided that after knowing them less than an hour, most of which was spent listening to Charles’s enthusiastic recruiting spiel, but he does find himself drawn to Charles, like iron filings to a magnet. Sometimes, he even thinks that Charles feels the same inexorable pull.

“Isn’t it funny,” Charles says, directing a friendly smile at Armando’s reflection in the mirror. His hand is still on Erik’s arm, grip loosened to a light pressure, his thumb brushing over the border of his shirt cuff onto Erik’s skin. “I sometimes think the same thing.”

“What is that?”

“You can’t guess?” By no means proficient but much more assured than he was even a few weeks ago, Charles wheels himself over to the black fabric harness hanging from the ceiling. “I bullied Hank into making it for me. If I have to hear his daydreams about my sister gyrating on him, then he either suffers the consequences or he provides me with a sex swing. It was a surprisingly easy choice in the end.”

Flicking his fingers against the hinges of the widened door to swing it shut, Erik stalks over to Charles and boxes him in with his arms. “Did you invite me here for a demonstration?”

Eyes innocently wide, Charles trails his fingers over the buttons of his shirt. “If you’re not too busy.”

Erik strips quickly and strokes himself to full hardness while Charles does the same. He’s much quicker than he used to be, but Erik has a suspicion that he takes his time to enjoy the view and draw out the anticipation.

“What do I do?”

“Absolutely nothing yet, that’s the point.” Positioning himself under the hanging straps, Charles maneuvers the padded loops onto his legs and to the top of his thighs. “There’s no metal at all in it except for the hooks it’s hung on. I do all the heavy lifting.”

And he does, raising himself up to eye level with Erik with only his recently developed upper body strength. The muscles straining in his arms, emphasized by the black ligatures, make Erik’s mouth go dry, but he’s most overcome by the pride and confidence in Charles’s eyes. He hadn’t realized that doubt and self-consciousness had been clouding them until the dimness had been dispelled. It’s as if Charles has been wearing an oppressively heavy mantle, a burden that didn’t crush him but always weighed him down and kept him stooped even when he appeared to hold his head high. Erik can’t believe he hadn’t noticed.

“Erik?” Charles brushes uncertainly against Erik’s thoughts. “Is this all right?”

Snapping of his self-recrimination, Erik pushes away the wheelchair and steps close enough to feel the heat rising off of Charles’s skin and taste the wine on his breath. His fingers fit into the furrows of the serrated muscles over Charles’s ribs as if they were made to. “It’s perfect.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that the sex hasn’t been phenomenal because it obviously has been, the best of my life and so much more than I ever thought it could be after something like this, but—” Taking a deep breath, Charles makes an abortive movement like a shrug. “I can’t do everything with you I dreamed of doing, but I can have this. I want this. Please.”

“You know my mind and you think you have to ask?” Erik pushes Charles’s hair behind his ear and cups his cheek reverently. “I want you. I will have you in any way you want me. And this—”

Erik puts his hands under Charles’s thighs and lifts them to bracket his own hips. As they breathe, their chests expand against each other. Their half-hard cocks press together, hot and sweet, and Erik marvels to think it’s the first time. “This is no hardship, Charles. It’s a privilege. Let me?”

“Yes,” Charles gasps. “Yes, touch me—want you in me, please—”

Finding Charles’s ass already relaxed and slick, Erik groans. He’s achingly hard imagining Charles working himself open in this room, biting his lip as he filled himself with two, three, four fingers, making himself ready for Erik.

“Yes,” Charles sighs into his mouth. Couldn’t wait to have your thick cock, so big—don’t tease, need you inside—

In spite of all the preparation, Charles is overwhelmingly hot and tight. This position keeps Erik from burying himself to the root unless he hitches Charles’s legs higher. He doesn’t do it, not least because it would tip Charles back and too far away. This is about Charles being in control. Holding Charles’s gaze, breathing the same breath, unable to keep from rocking shallowly inside, Erik braces his legs.

“Come on,” he urges lowly. “Show me what you wanted to do to me. I’m ready. I want it. Give me what I need.”

It’s the right thing to say. Leveraged between Erik’s hold on his legs and his strong grip on the harness straps, Charles arches in a long, powerful undulation. Leaving wet trails of precome on Erik’s belly, he fucks himself on Erik’s cock, the rim of his hole catching on the mushroom head. Through their mental link, Erik can hear the echo, like plucked harp strings singing, the vibrations layering into a complex chord of pleasure. Charles is transcendently magnificent, a creature of pure hedonism, a demigod reveling in his divine carnality, and Erik is his acolyte.

“Give you what you need,” Charles pants, sweat glistening on his trembling arms. “You need me to fuck you? Need my cock in you—ashamed that you want to get on your belly and spread your legs, lie on your back and hold yourself open for me, but you’ll do it, won’t you, and beg for more.”

He would, he would. Unable to speak, Erik hopes Charles can hear his tangled thoughts and his unarticulated, half-hidden cravings for the things he’s never trusted anyone to give him but thinks Charles could. His cock slips out of Charles’s ass, but it doesn’t matter. Just from the eroticism of the situation and the second-hand sensations, Erik can feel his cock leaking onto the floor.

“—belong to me, Erik, all of you, have you whenever I want—keep you open and wet, just push your pants down and fuck you against the wall—fuck, love how you take me, love when you moan for me, love you—Erik, Erik, oh, fuck, Erik—!”

Charles comes, a steady gush over Erik’s stomach and his own cock, and Erik spends himself on the floor, long stripes over the dripped precome like a Jackson Pollock painting. The aftershocks reverberate between their bodies, leaving them both shuddering and fighting to stay upright. Somehow, they get Charles out of the harness and Erik carries him over to the bed, where they collapse in a jumbled heap.

“That was amazing. I’ll have to buy Hank some new lab equipment as a thank you gift.”

“Only if it can be used to make more sex toys.”

Huffing in amusement, Charles laboriously shifts himself onto his side to look at Erik. “Thank you. I know you’re used to topping and some of that stuff I said was—well, they’re just fantasies. That isn’t how I think about you. It wasn’t real.”

Erik rolls onto his side so their faces are only inches apart. He strokes his knuckles lightly across Charles’s jaw and thinks that the stubble, no longer a bad sign, looks quite good, and that Charles should experiment with a full beard. Erik is curious how it will feel when Charles kisses him.

“I would do anything for you. That’s real.” He rests his hand on Charles’s waist, where full sensation gives way to oneiric half-sensation. “I loved every second of that. That’s real, too.”

“Could you kissing me right now be real?”

Smiling, Erik closes the distance between them. He remembers when he thought this might be all he would ever have, that he would be happy with only this, the tender caresses and openmouthed kisses on a shared pillow. He could still be happy with only that, but now Erik knows the heat of Charles’s body, the weight of him in his hands and his mouth, the sound and the taste of his pleasure.

He wants to wake up every morning in the bed they’ve shared since Christmas. He wants to stay up late debating politics over tumblers of excellent whisky and languorous games of chess before setting their differences to the side where they belong so he can sleep at Charles’s side, where he belongs. He wants to fulfill every one of Charles’s sexual fantasies and all of his own, a list that is growing every day. He wants to learn whether Charles will go grey in stages or all at once, if he’ll lose his hair or not. He wants more heretical Christmases with candy and champagne and fond reminiscences of the tree of metal and glass—at least fifty of them for a start. He wants a long life, and he wants to share it with Charles.

They’ve been talking about opening a school, arguing over which books count as modern classics and how much of the school day should be devoted to developing the children’s mutations. As short as their relationship has been, Erik never expected he would have a lover for more than a few weeks, one he would think of in both the present progressive and future tenses. For the first time in his life, Erik is considering staying.

Erik tries to convey all of this to Charles in the silent symbols of their bodies pressed together from forehead to ankles, their fingers laced together, their hearts beating in concert.

“You are the most wonderful man,” Charles murmurs, eyes drifting shut. “You don’t believe it yet, but I’ll keep telling you until you do.”

“You may be saying it a long time.”

“Oh, my darling, I hope so.”