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“They hung him for a traitor,
Themselves the traitor crew
But his soul is marching on....
Ye soldiers of Freedom, then strike, while strike ye may,
The death blow of oppression in a better time and way,
For the dawn of old John Brown has brightened into day,
And his soul is marching on.”
-“New John Brown Song,” William Weston Patton
If someone were to look at it from a distance, it would be as compelling as a Renaissance painting.
The shadows in their underground bunker, the thick steel walls protecting them from friend and foe alike, are nearly black as night. The bright lights of a dozen blinking screens, in sick yellows and greens, cast unholy shadows across their faces. The silence is so deafening that Charles is aware, for the first time, of the absence in his mind. Something small, long forgotten, and still even longer severed, is no longer there. He runs his mind over it again and again and again. It is the mental equivalent of running one’s tongue in the pulpy mess where a tooth used to be.
Charles longs for the iron tang of blood.
The X-Men, his X-Men, are seated to his left and to his right.
Scott, with some new paternal instinct, carefully drags a saturated cotton ball soaked through with rubbing alcohol across the dozens of scrapes and cuts that dot Charles’ face and neck. He’s gentle, cautious, as if he presses too hard, Charles will be once again pulled away into space or into the dangerous future or the futile past. It stings, but he remains statue-still. With each pass, he can only recall the searing sensation of Apocalypse's metal boot pressing against his forehead. The sting, the grit, the throbbing, but overtaking all of that is the desperate ache for him to press until bone is shattered.
Jean sits beside him. Her forehead rests on the cool metal of the table. Her red hair spills out across it, tendrils carving across the scuffed steel like oversaturated paint or phoenix fire. Charles is usually more delicate with her. She is more powerful than he could ever dream of being, but he still remembers the small girl as she timidly knocked on the door of his mind with her own. They danced around each other, these two telepaths, trying to contain the feelings they both felt so deeply. He recalls, absentmindedly, as if it comes from another time and place completely, the twinge he’d get behind his eyes whenever Scott or Logan had done something to annoy or frustrate Jean in those teenage years.
Now, he knows that he’s giving her a searing headache. He knows it, and he knows that his better angels call to him. Yet, he cannot bring himself to care even as a small moan escapes her chapped lips, as she squeezes her eyes harder shut. He is in pain. Excruciating pain, and he cannot stop it.
“Charles,” Hank finally gets through to him. “Charles, please. Tell us what’s going on. What’s happened to Magneto?”
Charles feels himself blinking. He can feel the sting of tears as they flood his eyes. A deathly chill creeps its way up his back and settles into the marrow of his bones. His heartbeat takes on a hummingbird rhythm, and it feels like his chest is about to crack open. Every bead of sweat still left on his body from the Egyptian desert turns to ice crystals. Each of them is a stinging reminder in and of itself. His hands rattle against Magnus’ helmet. The off-tempo tinkling of bone on alloy pings throughout the room. The twisted metal sits demurely in his lap. The sharp edges and dents cut into his palms. Still, he can’t let it go. He can’t even fathom the idea of ever letting it go.
“I think he’s in shock, guys,” adds Morph unhelpfully. Charles is just aware enough to watch the way that Storm gives him a reproachful glance, and how in turn, Logan glares at her.
“Charles, please. You’re scaring us,” Hank presses again. His eyes are searching, and Charles can see where dust and blood have matted down his fur.
“You should be afraid.”
That’s what Charles wants to say. It’s what he needs to say. The most brilliant, most convicted, most effervescent man he’s ever met has failed to change the course of Apocalypse's dark future. If he could not do it, what hope was there for this band of lesser men, himself included? They should all be terrified.
But he can’t say that. He can’t say anything at all. He opens his mouth half a dozen times. He wills himself to speak, to say anything. Not a singular sound can come out. Grief has stolen everything from him, even the words out of his mouth.
“He’s gone.” Rogue’s words are soft-spoken, and her accent is heavy with grief and rage and overwhelm. It takes a second for everyone to process what she has said. When they do, each head in the room, with the exception of Jean’s, swings between her and him like spectators at a tennis match. “Magnus is dead, isn’t he, Professor?”
Scott’s hand stills, and a drop of alcohol carves its scorching path down Charles’ cheek. He can feel all eyes on him, and even without telepathy, he knows that they’re all aware that it’s true. Yet, he still fears saying the words out loud makes it real. He isn’t sure he can stand living in a world where he must refer to Magnus in the past tense.
It never occurred to him that this would happen one day. They were supposed to find the winding road back to one another, to live to see a more just and equitable world, to see the fruits of their many years of labor. They were supposed to have more time. They always thought they had more time.
Charles realizes now that they were too old to engage in such a young man’s folly.
“Yes,” he finally manages to croak out. His voice sounds ragged and hollow, and his throat burns. Still, the word must be recognizable enough. Scott’s hand settles onto his shoulder and squeezes. Ororo’s eyes are a well of sympathy and understanding. Jean, the psychic pressure collapsing down on her mind finally easing away like a receding tide, raises her head to look at him. Rogue buries her face in her hands, and Kurt’s immediate reaction is to wrap a protective arm around his sister.
“I told you,” begins Forge, “that when they didn’t get back here at the right time, I should have went after them.”
“By yourself?” Bishop counters. “I don’t know what you think -.”
“No, we should have gone together. We’re X-Men. As much as I hate to admit, Magneto was an X-Man, too. We all should have done something more to save him. We’ve always taken care of our own.” Scott lowers himself into his chair next to his wife. It groans under the added weight of muscle. The baby fat that once clung to Scott’s jaw, the tender pockets of flesh, have been whittled away.
“What about Mother Askani’s words? She said that she brought all of us to a specific time for a reason. We have no idea what that would have done to the time stream, what that would have done to his future.” Jean pleads. Charles can’t help but notice that her forehead, once scrunched in pain a few moments ago, has more lines than he remembers.
“Since when do you give a damn about what Mother Askani has to say, Jean?”
“I -. There -. There’s nothing we could have done to save him.” Charles interrupts, exhausted all over again by this sudden marital spat. “I think that it was always supposed to happen this way.”
He can see the gears turning as Hank reconciles the truth of what he has heard and what he has seen played out in the hieroglyphs and comes to the same conclusion. Over and over and over, this world would see Apocalypse's accendency. The six of them would be there to witness the apotheosis. There was nothing they could do to stop it. It was already written in stone.
“I will pray for him.” Kurt, sweet Kurt, murmurs with finality. Charles could live a thousand years and never be deserving of the grace and kindness Nightcrawler gave without a second thought. “Magneto was a soul who was deeply troubled in this lifetime. Perhaps he has found peace in the next.”
Charles runs his hands across the cold alloy in his lap. There’s a severe indentation where the metal curved along Magnus’ cheekbone and then was pressed down further until the bone underneath broke. It matches perfectly the print of an oversized thumb.
The rest of the evening is done in methodical silence.
When anger and adrenaline and fear and loathing dissipate, nothing is left but bone-level fatigue. The bunker has flimsy cots enough for everyone, and it’s not the worst place that the X-Men have ever slept. Jean and Rogue are the first to wander off. Kurt is short to follow, hands grasping around a simple black rosary. Scott and Hank work quickly to bind up Charles’ wounds with the little sterile bandages they have left. Forge and Bishop linger, poring over designs and files. Morph and Wolverine volunteer for the first watch. The bones of Logan’s claws look even more gruesome and ragged in this light.
As they all peel off for what little sleep they can muster, Charles finds himself in a room he has not been in for years. Its cot, much lower than all the rest, is waiting for him with a dusty old quilt he remembers from his college days. A pitcher of water sits on a table with mismatched stains. He cannot bring himself to do anything more than wash his face and rinse out his mouth before hauling himself into bed. The sand lingers and still grits against his teeth, his eyes, his skin. The shirt he’s still wearing has been soaked through with sweat and dried in the desert air so many times that it feels practically starched on his back. For the first time in months, he lies in a dark room by himself. Only the crushed helmet, placed carefully on the table, is his companion. He had grown used to someone else by his side, the crescendo of Beast’s snoring, Rogue’s bitter sighs, the low mutterings of the nightmares that never seemed to loosen their grip on Magneto, even Nur’s rhythmic breathing. The newfound silence is oppressive.
In the rare event that Magnus has found eternal peace, it seems that Charles will have none of it.
Sleep evades him for hours, and when it does finally pull him under, he lapses into something between a dream and an old memory.
The sun is crushingly hot, but the beer is almost torturously cold and fizzy against Charles’ teeth.
If anyone asks, he thinks of himself as more of a wine connoisseur. Even if he liked beer, he wasn’t entirely sure that this heavy German Dunkel would have been his choice on the warmest day of the year. However, as Magnus sets down the six-pack and a haphazardly packed picnic basket in the middle of the clearing, he explains that it was the only German beer their little commissary stocked. And Magnus wouldn’t ever imagine drinking any other kind.
Their fellow researchers and doctors, at least those off duty this weekend, all have elaborate plans up at the lake, a few dozen kilometers from town. It seems like the steaming weather has driven everyone else in the compound they work at deeper inside, planted next to fans or a breezy window if they can find it. Ideal for what Magnus has planned. The forest is completely silent. They are joined by nothing but the sound of buzzing mosquitoes and the strange ringing of a thousand little items floating around them.
They follow a strange phantom pattern as Magnus guides his hand slowly. In front of them, fragmented pieces of ore, hunks of long forgotten farming equipment, the occasional tin can, a lost band of silver, dance in the warm golden light of high noon. As Magus collapses his fist shut, all of these things coalesce on each other. They weld together and bend to his will. It takes little energy for Magnus to pull apart thin arrowheads and even less to send them sailing into the nearest tree. With little more than a flick of his wrist, he buries a dozen projectiles down to the hilt in tough old bark.
“Incredible,” breathes Charles. He watches as Magnus, with just a single curl of his finger, beacons the projectiles forward. The liquify, rejoining the now shimmering sphere that settles between the two of them. “Just incredible. And to think that this is truly just the tip of the iceberg of all you can accomplish.”
“Now you.” Magnus urges, finally settling next to Charles. He lies back into the soft green moss that seems to sprawl out in every direction. The sunlight reflecting off the sphere bathes him in bright light, making his white hair look even more striking. There’s a bead of sweat that’s carving its way down his neck. Charles can’t determine if it’s from the heat or exertion or something else entirely.
“Magnus...” Charles trails off warningly.
Magnus pushes a stray strand of hair back from his forehead. His eyes bore into Charles so intently that he’s caught in that awkward place between wanting desperately to look away and hating that very idea. “I show you mine and you show me yours. Isn't that how this little game is supposed to go?”
Charles, begrudgingly, presses a featherlight touch to his temple. He doesn’t go deep, but opening his mind to Magnus’ is like unlatching a heavy door. So unlike nearly everyone he’s ever encountered, whose thoughts are as obvious and clear to him as if they had said them out loud. Without intensive concentration, he feels like he can only understand the muffles of thoughts and emotions.
Excitement.
Curiosity.
Thrill.
Longing for something he couldn’t articulate.
I think you already know mine.
“I’ve already seen that trick, Charles.” There’s more ire in his gaze now. Not necessarily one of true anger. “I know that there’s more that you can do. Don’t hold out on me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Charles tries to keep his laugh light and breezy, but in the echo of the trees, it sounds uncomfortable and forced.
“Then what else can you do?” Magnus inches closer. It doesn’t make him feel any more at ease. “At the least, you must have thought about it?”
He has, but not often. Everyone thinks that they want extraordinary power until the helpful adage comes to mind. To use the absolute limit of his power would be, perhaps, to be corrupted absolutely.
“Hallucination, manipulation, coercion - all things that I should hypothetically be able to do with my skill set,” Charles swallows, his hands growing suddenly clammy. If he were more judicious, he would have kept that to himself. Something about being next to Magnus compels him to confess. “The truth is that I could make you do anything I wanted to.”
He waits. Waits for Magnus to turn around with the same fear and disgust and loathing that Charles feels when he thinks of the fact that he could, with very little effort, make every human being around him his personal puppet.
Instead, Magnus turns to him with a gaze so tender that Charles can, all these years later, mark it still as the moment that his world turned on its axis. There was a before, and there has been a stretched-out epoch after. Charles can never parse out what sends him off balance - the searing burn of the sun, the rush of alcohol to his head, or the dizzying nature of the words practically whispered to him.
“There are much worse things that I could think of, Charles, than being under your control.”
It’s that undefined hazy hour, and Charles finds himself across from Scott.
Forge and Bishop, by the looks of the neat stacks of files carefully labeled with notes Charles can only begin to understand, have just turned in for the night. It would be another hour or two before even the earliest risers on the team would arise.
Scott has made them both coffee. The only coffee they have down here is cheap instant, black and bitter, and Charles would have preferred a tea anyway. Still, he doesn’t feel the right to complain after months of living off scraps of bread and whatever they could hunt in the sparse desert. He’s also not entirely sure that he deserves whatever kindness that Scott is extending him now. If he had been here, maybe he could have known that it had been Madelyne and not Jean. Maybe he could have done something to stop Genosha. Maybe he could have kept Magnus in better check. Maybe he could have avoided humanity’s panicked response and Bastion’s rage. Maybe he could have done something that would have never doomed them to unchangeable times far away from their own.
“I used to do that too,” Scott mutters over the top of the mug. A sharp chip of porcelain is dangerously close to the skin of his pale fingers. Scott, ready for action at any moment, is still wearing his visor rather than his glasses. His eyes are indistinguishable behind the thick red crystal.
“Do what?” Charles asks as he takes a sip of his own coffee. His face contorted at the taste, and he almost relished the way that it pulled at the healing cuts on his face. Perhaps Nur had been onto something. Perhaps, in its own way, pain was relaxing.
“Run through hypotheticals. Try to figure out where I went wrong, what I should have done differently. It used to haunt me. What I could have done to protect you, to protect Madelyne, to protect Nathan.” There’s a slight crack in his voice.
“And here I thought that I was the only telepath at this table.” The joke falls flat. Charles clears his throat. It’s still raw. “That’s a heavy burden to carry.”
“And one I have to carry for the rest of my life.” He abandons his coffee, half drunk and rapidly cooling, on the counter. Scott wraps his arms around himself. This close up, Charles can see how both lean and fragile one of his oldest students has become. His arms are thicker and more scarred and nicked than ever. Yet, Charles can see the lines of every artery and vein thrumming just below. “I am sorry for your loss, Professor, and I meant what I said. We should have done something.”
“Is that what we’re doomed to be, Scott?”
“What, Professor?”
Charles shakes his head with force. For the first time since he’s returned, he feels something other than the cool detachment of shock. Red eats at the edge of his vision as he nearly drowns in a rage that’s unfamiliar to him. “Perpetually sorry for each other’s losses. Perpetually remorseful that there is not more that we can give despite giving nearly all of ourselves over to this cause? Around and around and around we go. When does it stop?”
When the anger recedes, Charles is left with nothing but a heaving chest and Scott, who looks at him with more apprehension now than he did when Charles returned from space a day late and a dollar short, as the saying goes.
“I used to think that we’d stop it. Isn’t that what you always told us? Growing up? At the school?”
He had. There had been dozens, if not hundreds, of mornings just like this. Scott, Jean, Logan, Remy, or one of the hundreds of other children and lost souls who’d passed through his care would sit across from him. Charles would sip his tea or a glass of orange juice or the rare cup of coffee, and he would extol the virtues of patience and non-violence. The arc of the world is slow, but it bends towards justice, does it not?
“I was naïve. Horrendously so." Charles takes another sip of his coffee. It burns all the way down. “Perhaps in some ways, I was even wrong.”
“Don’t say that.” Scott’s voice is thick, and even without being able to see his eyes, he can sense that he’s looking at him pleadingly.
Charles can barely stop himself from snorting. “Why? We both know it to be true?”
“Because, Professor, if we don’t have hope, then we really don’t have anything left to be fighting for.”
As they each wake, Charles finds that his X-Men need him very little these days. They did, after all, evolve to accommodate his absence. So he can barely find himself shocked when the team turns to Scott for the answer to a clarifying question, to Hank for an explanation to something complex, to Storm for an uplifting word.
He doesn’t intervene. He isn’t sure if he has the energy or the right. Instead, he does little other than sit there and wait for the heavy blanket of exhaustion to settle over his bones. It’s not long before sleep grabs him and drags him under to that same strange land between reality and dreams.
The desert is frigid at night, and as much as Charles has thought that purple cloak was foolish and melodramatic over the years, he’s glad that Magnus is willing to share. The two of them sit side by side overlooking the brackish waters of the Nile. The moon is high and bright, and the last embers of their fire dance in the moonlight. Nur is among his people for the night, in some large raid which Baal made quite clear that Magnus was distinctly not invited to. With him gone, the rest of their group is able to rest a little easier, breathe a little deeper.
Except for Charles and Magnus. No matter how much either one of them wishes he could give himself over to sleep, their minds cannot help but allow their minds to wander to a new vision of the future.
“If we survive this, I’d like to see Paris,” answers Charles to a question that Magnus hasn't vocalized with his head tilted upwards. For all its misery, he is willing to give ancient Egypt this. The stars here are even more beautiful than they were on Shi’ar. Without the light pollution, he can see the rich bands of the cosmos.
“I hate it when you do this.” There’s no heat behind Magnus’ words. If he had truly wanted Charles out of his head, he had ample methods to ensure that. One lies just a few feet away from them on the wheelchair Charles has abandoned for the evening, purple metal reflecting the richness of the pinpricks of light above them. “And you’ve already been to Paris. Numerous times.”
Charles pulls the shawl around him closer. If that just happens to press their shoulders together, then so be it. “My apologies. It’s usually something I can control better when my mind is more occupied. Unfortunately for both of us, whatever entity that brought us here didn’t deign to bring along my collection of current readings.”
“Our task at hand fails to fully occupy your mind?” Even this far from home, with all that has changed, Magnus’ dry wit does not seem to fail.
“No, old friend. Just the opposite. It occupies my mind too much.”
Charles can’t help but twist around for a moment. Rogue is more accurately described as unconscious rather than asleep, curled in on herself in a way that looks painful. Kurt’s hands are folded neatly on his stomach as his chest rises and falls slowly. Hank is sprawled out so much that his large feet peak out of the tent. A fondness so deep that it aches pulls at Charles’ chest.
“So, Paris?” Magnus inquires indulgently, providing for Charles something he didn’t even know he should ask for.
“I’d like to see it. I’ve been there so many times for work, to give a lecture, to attend a conference, to speak out against my more extremist brethren. I feel like all I’ve truly seen is the airport and the inside of hotel conference rooms when I’ve been told there’s a great big beautiful city out there. The sun shining on the River Seine, the Eiffel Tower twinkling, more Beaujolais than one could stomach.”
“I’ve always preferred a Resling, but I suppose for you...”
Charles can see all of it flashing in his mind. Paris in springtime - the beautiful smell of fresh blooming lavender, the twinkle of lightbulbs in the warm night, the indecent flush of lips tinted by red wine.
Something calls Charles to act, and in the more conscious part of his brain, he can’t help but remark that if he had known what was to happen in a few short days, he would have. He has many regrets in life, but this one stings the most.
Instead, this time as he did then, he asks - “Where would you like to go, Magnus, if all this ends?”
“Home. I’d like to make a home somewhere.” His response is quick, like this is something he thinks of all the time, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. “Somewhere where I can live out my days in peace, the kind of peace that was denied to my parents, to me.”
He wishes, with hindsight that is twenty-twenty, that Magnus would have shared that hope more. The language of respect and dignity and self-determination is abstract and difficult. The desire to live peacefully in one’s own home is universal. It is a right that feels much harder to deny.
A new set of images flashes in his mind. There is the German countryside with its towering pine trees and seaglass blue lakes, and the gentle breezes. There are the cosmopolitan cities of the world - New York, Toronto, Miami - with their towering buildings whose metal sings. There are the tropical shores of Genosha and all its vibrant beauty before it was turned to ash. To Charles' great surprise, there is an old brick building, still standing, nestled in a dense forest upstate.
“But they shall sit every man under his own vine and under his own fig tree...” Charles begins.
“And none shall make him afraid.” And Magnus finishes. So it goes.
“That’s a beautiful thing to work towards, Magnus. A beautiful thing to hope for.”
Charles hardly notices when the shawl is pulled even tighter around their shoulders. The pressure of Magnus’ body up against his own feels like the only familiar thing in this confusing landscape. Stars above them twinkle.
“Ah, my old friend. There’s a saying about that.” Magnus is turned towards him. He’s close enough that Charles can feel the warmth of his breath on his face and the tickle of his hair on his cheek. “In the end, it’s the hope that kills you.”
“Yet, we still dare.”
“And dare we must.”