Chapter Text
Greenland was frigid, which Charles had been aware of, but not to this extent. He reached into the small base and paused every human mind there, then nodded to Erik, who forced the massive metal doors open. Agony was fresh in the stale air as the two walked into the building, built into the mountain.
Their purpose was clear, get the mutant woman out, then step back and let the authorities handle the rest. Feeling through the base, he located her, the thread of her mind was weak and fraying by the moment. They had to hurry. Erik made short work of doors, and soon they were standing before a single gurney in a sterile white room.
The woman wasn't going to live, even seeing her from across the room, he knew that. She was restrained to the bed, which wasn't necessary with how quickly her mind was fading. The permanent tube at the crook of her elbow was connected to nothing, as was the breathing tube coming out of her mouth. A rattling breath shook from her lungs, and all was silent again. He checked, even though he didn't need to. The connection was gone.
Erik turned away, growling something underneath his breath and he rested a hand on his friends shoulder in an attempt to stabilize him, if not calm. He leaned into it just a moment before stalking out of the room, and Charles followed.
"Are there any other prisoners here?" Erik ground out, whirling on Charles.
"No mutants," Charles answered honestly, keeping his tone gentle.
" Any." He repeated.
"One,"
"Where?"
Charles didn't want to know why there was a muzzle locked over the jaw of the woman lying face down on the gurney. She was restrained to the bed as well, although her cuffs were bloody from where they'd dug into and split the skin of her wrists and ankles. The back of her gown was open from the base of her spine up and several neat scars were lined up across her back, each marked with some form of notation in pen. She was deeply unconscious, sedated given the heavy smog in her mind, so he hadn't bothered pausing her mind. Erik mangled her metal restraints, and after carefully rolling her over, braced an arm beneath her neck and another beneath her knees to scoop her up.
The plane ride back was long, but not nearly long enough for the woman to be waking as quickly as she was. He almost didn't realize when she opened her dark eyes, because she remained perfectly still and her mind was still dreadfully quiet, pulsing fear suppressed by apathy mixed with functional necessity. She didn't move her head, didn't move her body, but he could feel her pacing within her mind, observing her surroundings. The blanket around her shoulders perplexed her, as did the lack of restraints beyond her seatbelt, but he didn't delve too far into her thoughts, keeping his observations reserved to simply surface emotions.
"Good Morning," Charles greeted her quietly, drawing both her attention and Erik's.
She blinked at him slowly, then turned her head to look at Erik for a moment. The careful blankness of her gaze was off putting, but he attributed it to shock. They hadn't been able to pick apart the lock that held the muzzle tightly to her face, her bloody hair too matted in the locking mechanism for them to get it undone before the plane had taken off and they'd had to take their seats.
"I'm Charles, this is Erik, we want to help you." He explained, and her immediate response was a low sound in the back of her throat that mirrored the bit of skepticism that flooded her mind, dampened by the controlled calm she maintained.
"Distrusting," Erik remarked, "Smart."
Not helping. He shot Erik a look and the man shrugged. The plane was about to begin its descent, so they were close to the airfield, where MacTaggert would be waiting.
"When we land, there should be people waiting, and they can help you better than we can." He continued, feeling Erik's glare boring into the side of his head, as well as his needling thoughts and ignored it.
She was looking out the window, but there was a flash of fear across her mind, quickly quelled, but present. So she was listening, and understanding. She spoke English, or at least enough to understand their words and react to them in the silence of her own mind.
When she didn't look back at him, he stepped away to sit down and speak with Erik as the plane began to descend.
"We should help her," Erik said in a low tone, keeping his voice down but doing nothing to disguise his anger.
"She's not a mutant, Erik. The government is far more equipped to help her than we are." He replied, keeping his tone similarly lowered but as calm as he could manage.
"You saw what they were doing there--" He cut off as the plane hit the runway and started to slow, then opened his mouth to say something else but stopped abruptly, a strange look dawning his eyes that Charles didn't like.
Whipping around, he saw what Erik did, the woman's seat was empty. How had he not noticed her getting up? Reaching out, he found her mind in the cockpit, deceptively calm but pumped with adrenaline that made her thoughts race.
"Cockpit," Erik said before he could, looking towards the door to the cockpit, which had been open before. It was shut.
Both jumped up from their seats, but not before a gunshot echoed through the tiny space, and then Erik pushed past him and was sprinting towards it. Charles followed, and found the cockpit a mess. The woman was pressed with her back against the wall, a gunshot wound in her shoulder and a growing stain of blood soaking the shoulder and front of the medical gown she still wore. One end of the blanket she'd been given was wrapped tightly around her hand. The pilot stood across the space with a small gun in hand, a hacking cough, and angry red marks around his throat.
Erik was standing between them, facing the woman, hands up in a placating gesture. She wasn't even looking at him, instead twisting her head and looking at her wounded shoulder as the blood flow slowed and stopped. Pushing the fabric out of the way, she dug her fingers into the wound and finally pried the bullet out, holding it for just a moment before dropping it to the floor. The edges of the wound began to knit together, clotting and scabbing in record time, then creating and smoothing the new skin until her shoulder appeared as if nothing had happened. The look in her eyes turned to defeated realization and she slid down the wall into a seated position, looking out into empty space with horror.
MacTaggert stepped in, and Charles urged her to usher the pilot out, which she did after a few moments of stunned silence. Erik stepped forward, and she didn't flinch, but looked at him.
"She's still not a mutant," Charles whispered, he had checked again, although it no longer really mattered. Erik didn't look at him, but he could feel the barbed emotion the man sent his way.
He knelt down next to her and coaxed her forward, and she turned her head. After a moment of fighting with the lock, the muzzle finally came undone and Erik gently pried it off her face and set it down on the floor. Her jaw was bruised by the pressure, but the bruises disappeared mere moments after the muzzle was removed. Erik slowly stood and offered a hand out to her.
She accepted.
The car ride to the school was silent. Erik had elected to sit in the back with the woman, who had since been calmed, while MacTaggert drove and Charles got the passenger's seat. A healing ability wasn't a foreign concept, but one of this level was certainly new. For a bullet wound to heal in a matter of moments? That was new, and fascinating. He'd called the house in an effort to alert the others that they were bringing someone new in, but nobody had answered, so he was hoping nothing went too badly, although with his team trouble seemed to be unavoidable.
Parking the car in the front drive, MacTaggert climbed out and opened the door for the woman, who got out woodenly when prompted, standing a step away from Erik. In her illsized borrowed clothing she looked small, unassuming. It was a strange thing to reconcile with her prior violence towards the pilot. MacTaggert gestured to Charles, and the two stepped away to speak.
"I'm going back to the office, and I'll try to figure out who our girl is, but if you can find out, send it my way and I'll see what I can find on her. If you need help, I'm always here." She said and then smiled and got back into the car and drove off, leaving the three standing in the driveway.
The woman was looking around the property, perceptive, and analytical. Categorizing exits and distances, the placement of windows and fences, the lack of cars in the driveway, the massive house. She'd been memorizing road names and buildings on the drive in, whether to determine her location or to simply pass the time he wasn’t sure. He didn't delve further than surface level, not wanting to compromise any trust they might have had.
"There are other mutants here, but we can keep them away from you if that would make you more comfortable," Charles offered, walking towards the two.
She blinked at him, and he was struck by how young she looked. A little older than Alex, perhaps, but not by much, somewhere in her early 20's.
"You can speak freely here," Erik mentioned offhandedly, although Charles could feel conflicting emotions rolling off him in waves.
The scoff that sounded from the back of her throat was paired with the same skepticism in her mind, but she cut the sound off after just a second, going silent again. It was instinct, with the influence of old fear and a twinge of pain, and Charles felt anger flare in his chest.
Walking on Erik's other side, he led their small group into the house, noting the way the girl limped slightly, favouring her left leg but disguising it to the best of her ability. They stopped in the kitchen, because even if she didn't acknowledge it, the hunger signals had been dinging in the back of the woman's head like bells the moment they'd gotten into MacTaggerts car, which smelled distinctly of pastries and coffee. He'd done a mental sweep of the grounds to locate the rest of the class, and none of them were anywhere near the kitchen so he'd deemed it safe for now.
He gestured at the table and Erik sat, while she continued to stand. Moving over towards the fridge, he took out a few preprepared sandwiches, a backup to keep the kids fed when they decided against cooking, unwrapped them, and set them on plates. Turning around, he smiled at the girl.
"Sit, please," He gestured to the table again, this time with one of the plates he was carrying, and she promptly sat, folding her legs beneath her and settling onto the tiled floor. As Charles opened his mouth to correct her, Erik slid from his chair and sat next to her on the floor. She shot him a perplexed look, then studied him, as if evaluating him in a new light.
Silently, he handed them each a plate and sat down across from Erik. She didn't so much as look down at the sandwich despite the way the hunger pangs in the back of her head rose to a startling cacophony.
"You can eat," He offered, ignoring the way the realization dawned on him, of how much they had messed her up. There was no telling how long they'd had her until MacTaggert had her people sort through the data from the base, and even then, there was no real way of knowing how deep the psychological damage went.
She eyed him for a long few moments, and he recognized hesitation, suspicion, and finally the willingness to take a risk just before she took a bite of the sandwich and then another, until the sandwich disappeared. Erik shot him a glance, and Charles returned it as they finished their meal.
"Do you have a name?" Erik asked conversationally as he gathered the empty plates into a stack on the tile before him.
Her mind recoiled, and Charles could sense betrayal slithering across the surface, and beneath that, fear. Fear linked to pain, a strong association, by his superficial observation.
"No." Her voice hissed past her lips, as if compelled to answer despite the fear and betrayal that constricted around her vocal cords.
Lie . But he couldn't see why. If she'd been with those scientists since a seriously young age and genuinely didn't have a name, she wouldn't be lying about it. She was hiding something.
"Are you sure?" Charles asked, and her gaze snapped towards him. Hesitation and confusion, so much confusion roiled beneath the surface, mixed with turbulent fear, and then a search. She was searching, not for the right answer, but for an answer that would appease him. He kept his face carefully blank.
"The technician?" Her tone was hesitant, almost as if the title was a question rather than the answer. It was closer to a name than outright refusal, but still only a designation, not a human name. There was another name, one she kept smothered and strangled even as it attempted to surface, attempted to break into the forefront of her mind.
"That's not a name," Erik pointed out, and she glanced at him for a moment, but kept Charles as her primary focus.
"It'll work well enough for now," Charles accepted with a nod that he hoped came off as pleasant, and her fear lessened drastically. She was terrified of giving him the wrong answer, so he resolved to accept any answer she gave for now, until they could prove that they weren't a danger to her.
"The Technician, why did they call you that?" Erik asked, arching an eyebrow but keeping his expression largely calm despite the anger that raged beneath the surface. He was good at disguising the anger, and Charles silently thanked him for that.
The girl, the technician apparently, glanced over at Erik, then back at Charles for a moment before answering his friend, confusion ghosting across her thoughts again.
"I am a technician." She spoke factually and kept her tone as neutral as possible, although the words were stilted and hesitant and the confusion in her mind was growing by the moment.
"Of what?" Erik asked before Charles could.
"An asset and the technology involved in keeping it operational." That answer came out smoothly, the first question she felt genuinely confident in answering.
"An asset?" His friend continued to press, and the girl shot Charles another look that he couldn't decipher. "What kind of asset?"
"Zimniy soldat." She answered, and when they were still silent she glanced away, "I do not know how it translates."
"Soldat...Soldier. Was it a person?" Charles inquired, leaning forward until he realized that her fear had spiked again and moved back to how he had been sitting. She was silent, but her mind was moving rapidly, no lingering lethargy from the drugs, which he suspected was her healing factor at work.
"In the physical sense, yes." Cryptic . "In every other sense, no." Even worse.
"Charles, can I speak with you in the hall?" Erik stood, and he did the same. The girl stayed where she was, sitting on the floor with the plates.
"That is a human weapon she's talking about, Charles." Erik said in a shouted whisper the moment the kitchen door clicked shut. "A person turned into a weapon, possibly multiple, this goes so much deeper than we can fathom."
"I know, believe me, I know," Charles said, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment before running a hand through his hair. "She's pretty scared of both of us, but she's been sticking closer to you, so maybe you can get her to talk, help her settle in around here and then we can figure out the depth of this… issue."
"Fine,” Erik seemed satisfied by Charles' promise of action, although the telepath could already foresee how their ideas of ‘handling’ the situation would diverge, “Let's keep her away from the others for now, they’d be a lot for her to adjust to,” The suggestion briefly surprised him, although he wasn’t sure why it would. Erik had a history with situations like these, of course he’d be protective of the girl.
"I haven't gone too far into her mind, but whatever you can find out about her, what happened to her..." He trailed off, and his friend nodded.
"It'll come, in time," He said, glancing at the kitchen door. "But it's a long road."