For I Mean to Conquer Troy

by twelve_pastels

Summary:

Set one year post movie, Charles overloads himself in Cerebro, and his mind goes walkabout; wherever he is (and he’s around), it’s not in his body. Erik temporarily takes over the school in his absence, and finds that there’s little time for resentment or hatred when he’s busy organizing assigned reading for English lit, keeping the youngest children out of trouble, and trying to talk Raven into wearing clothing for the boys’ sake. Somewhere in between taking responsibility for the students and dreaming Charles’ dreams every night, he manages to remember that he’s something rather more than a weapon. In other words: A Love Story between two Gentlemen, told in Prose, Epistles, and Nonsense Rhymes.

Prologue, part the first

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad
When he put on his clothes.
Wallace Tripp

Westchester, Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. Last days of October.

Nearly a year on and he’s still not used to not being able to feel his toes.

The first batch of children are settling in admirably, although he is deeply saddened by the fact that so, so many of them were sent here so quickly by their families, just on hints of information that there might be somewhere to send “different” children to keep them out of the eyes of the neighbors.

And then there are the children he really considers his, his first class. His own.

Alex has been creeping around the house like a dog that’s waiting to be beaten, his thoughts a maelstrom of betrayal and hurt, longing and guilt, and, for the first few months, the odd whisper of should have gone too, maybe that wrenched on Charles’ heartstrings. If it hadn’t been for having Scotty to think of, his room might be empty, too. Hank has buried himself in his lab, barely emerging to eat, and Sean has taken to flying himself up to the roof and spending the day there, out of reach of everyone, at least physically. His family is fractured, and he hasn’t the least idea how to even begin going about fixing it.

Thinking about Erik constantly doesn’t help.

Reaching for his mind, casually, involuntarily, only to meet cold blank space; thinking if only one of them had said something different or moved another direction or a myriad other possibilities; none of that is going to bring him back.

But it is the silence that aches the most.

Charles has heard no word, no whisper, neither from Erik nor Raven, nor any information about their movements. That void is terrifying, the idea that Erik could be locked in some remote government lab, that his sister could be buried in a shallow grave in the Catskills and he, for all his gift and power, would never know.

He’s taken to filling the empty spaces with more work, either gathering accreditations or stocking the house, or, most often, using the new Cerebro to continue his search for more people like them. Hank’s latest modifications have just been entered, and he’s eager to test them. Every mutant child he saves makes him feel his own loss a little less bitterly, or so he likes to imagine.

The doors slide smoothly open as he wheels himself forward, his upper body feeling nowhere near the strain it had the first couple of months in the chair. Hank insists that he can make him an electric one, but Charles refuses. Bad enough to have lost most of the functions in the lower half of his body; he’s not going to surrender the upper half in order to save his hands a few calluses.

“Hi, Professor, glad you could make it down today! I mean, not that I think you couldn’t, but, well, the elevators haven’t been as good as they should be, and, well, you know…”

For all that Hank has gained newfound confidence in his abilities as the Beast and a surprising grace in his body, he still occasionally employs the tactlessness only seen in those of truly extraordinary intelligence. It might be part of the reason why Alex sticks so close to him, as he is now, skulking around the edges of the Cerebro platform; for all that he lacks any discernable cultural refinement, he’s much better at communicating with people and reading their reactions than his blue-furred, genius counterpart. They make a good team, when they can get over their own problems.

“It’s quite all right, Hank; I’m happy I was able to make it down myself. What new modifications do you have in store for me today?”

Alex frowned, obviously uncomfortable with a subject he didn’t understand, and moved to stand protectively behind Charles’ chair. Hank pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his azure nose (something that is taking a lot of getting used to, he looks in the mirror in the morning and doesn’t see a stranger and is shocked by that and is shocked by his shock and then). Charles pushed the images away, gently, gently; some gestures and thoughts are louder than any possible words.

“Well, the current modifications should be enough to extend your range so that you’re able to reach any mutant, anywhere. With the exception of strongly shielded ones, of course, meaning in military bases, or, well. You know. Shielded.” Hank cleared his throat and gestured to an impressive bank of computers. “I’ve done the basic calculations, and you’ll be able to see as far as central Arabia with no problems, and maybe even as far as Asia and China, if you really focus and the mutant’s signature is strong enough.”

Alex snorted before Hank could make any kind of reply. “What do you mean by signature? The way they sign their names, or how strong their powers are?”

Hank shot Alex an ugly look, which was laced with something Charles chose not to analyze at the time. “The latter, of course, but every mutant is different and-”

Charles interrupted, sick of the fighting and the bitterness and the underlying hollow spaces he could feel in all of them (oh my sister oh my friend so far out of my reach you are.) “Enough. Just. Just hook me up and we’ll go from there, all right? I have full faith in you, Hank. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

Alex made a noise of dissent, but stood his ground all the same. Charles reached for the helmet, put it in place, and nodded to Hank. It was an action based solely on pride and avoidance that he’d later come to regret.

The helmet is on, and he’s reaching, and there’s so many of them! So many others like him and Hank and Alex and Sean and what is Sean doing in the room, but it doesn’t matter! So many, and he can hear and see them all! And it’s wonderful and it’s working but something –

“Professor, the readings, they’re spiking, you-”

- something is wrong he is seeing it all too fast it is too fast but that just means more he can help and hear and save and train and teach -

“- what do you mean, he’s not responding? Hank, you have to get him out of-”

- and it’s fast too fast too fast can’t keep up must help please helphelphelp ohgod ithurts -

- and right before everything goes black and horribly, sickeningly quiet, right at the edge of his awareness Charles brushes against a familiar (missyou) presence and pushes out with all his might ERIK HELP ME-

- and then silence.

***

Prologue, part the second

If you ever go to Dolgelly,
Don’t stay at the ----- Hotel;
There’s nothing to put in your belly,
And no one answers the bell.
~ Wallace Tripp

Paris, 13eme Arrondisment. Sunset. Hallowe’en. Really, my friend, how trite.

“No, no, it’s not possible, it’s not -!”

Erik (Magneto, damnit, Erik Lehnsherr had died in Auschwitz and the last fragments of him had been left to rot on a beach in Cuba), just in time. The crystal tumbler Mystique had thrown shattered against the wall, but not before making a large dent.

Azazael had moved quickly enough to avoid it hitting his head and now swept out of the room, pausing only to mutter to Magneto as he passed. “She is upset by news of her brother. Either avoid her or pacify her, but I will not suffer to have anything else thrown in my direction.”

Emma, seated in what remained of the evening light, flipped a page in her fashion magazine, apparently not at all concerned with the drama going on under her nose. The Louis XIV furniture arrayed in front of the bank of windows clashed angrily with the bleakness of the abandoned warehouse in which it was placed. He had to give her credit; Miss Frost was nothing if not resourceful when it came to her own comfort, and that ability extended to the entire Brotherhood – funded, of course, by what remained of Shaw’s extremely ill-gotten fortune.

Mystique crouched on top of the ostentatious dining table, naked and blue as was her current wont, her hands in her hair and a high pitched whine pushing its way through her teeth. Emma interrupted before he could ask what was wrong. “She just heard the news that Xavier is in a wheelchair, and she’s feeling guilty. It will pass.”

Magneto’s mind simply refused to process the information. “How? And for how long?”

Mystique leapt towards him and fisted her hands in the front of his cloak, a strange echoing timbre accompanying her words. “Since we left him on the beach, damn you.” She darted around him and out an open window at the far end of the warehouse floor, likely headed for the roof. Emma didn’t even look up from her reading.

Magneto strode across the room, cape swishing behind him. The purples and reds of his costume blended perfectly into the sunset as he slowly sank into the seat across from his current telepath.

Emma sat perfectly still for a moment, ostensibly finishing her article, and then snapped the magazine shut and focused her unwavering gaze on the metallokinetic across from her. “I know what you’re thinking, even with the helmet, and I didn’t know about it either. Remember, I have my talents, but I have nowhere near his reach and the people we’ve come across haven’t had any information about him, either.” She cocked her head, slightly. “It looks like he really is setting up a sanctuary disguised as a school, although I don’t understand his long-term plan for that. Hiding forever is ineffective.”

Magneto smiled, or at least tried to; the expression didn’t feel like it fit on his face, and was thus quickly discarded. “Who knows what he was thinking. But you should have told me as soon as you found out about his disability. I would have been better able to break the news to Mystique, and it is something of a tactical advantage.”

Emma gave him an odd look, for someone so impassive, and didn’t speak for a moment. When she did, her response wasn’t at all what he had expected. “I don’t think that helmet is particularly good for you.”

Magneto scowled. “Why? Because it keeps you out?”

She shook her head, slowly. “No. Because it keeps too much of you in. I can’t explain it any better than that. Take my advice and put it aside for five minutes.”

He arched a brow at her, an effect completely lost under the helmet. “What reason do I have to trust you?”

Emma smirked and patted the magazine. “Honor amongst scoundrels, and the fact that I haven’t finished Vogue yet. Besides, Mystique will be able to tell if I mess with your head, and she’ll come down here and rip my limbs off. Growing up with a telepath has certainly expanded her skill set.” She idly turned a page, the glossy paper rustling quietly. “Of course, that all depends on how far you trust her, too, so I’ll leave you to make your own decisions.”

“Fair enough, then. Just remember that you’re sitting in a gilded chair.”

Emma wasn’t even remotely fazed. “Killing me with my underwire would be faster and far more interesting.”

Magneto let out a sound that might have at one time been a chuckle, and then carefully lifted the crimson helmet off his head and set it on the edge of the dining table. He had just enough time to walk to the window, see Emma’s eyes go wide in the glass, and hear her say, “Wait, I feel something coming, watch ou-!”

-and he’s hit by a sudden barrage, no, more like a twenty-ton lance straight through his mind but it’s not an attack it’s a cry a plea a desperate request something wrong with that damn machine never trusted it anyways but he hears ERIK HELP ME and feels the sorrow and the despair and the god damned loneliness right before everything goes black.

When Erik came to, he was propped up on the couch with his feet on a stack of pillows. Emma lay half stretched out on the divan, her lips white and hands shaking as she took a long pull off of a very large glass of scotch. Azazael, Riptide, and Angel sat at the table, murmuring quietly and looking worried. Mystique held his head in her lap with her blue fingers rubbing his temples, her yellow eyes very wide.

Erik tried to move and squeezed his eyes shut at the sudden sensation of a million Vikings having a very energetic party in his skull. “Emma, if you would be so kind as to explain what just happened?”

The telepath took a deep breath and set her glass on the floor, managing to keep it upright on the second try. “It wasn’t a psychic attack –“

Mystique narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth, but was cut off by Erik’s snapping, “Of course it wasn’t; Charles would never do such a thing.”

Riptide and Angel looked at each other, then at Azazael, who merely rolled his eyes.

Emma’s full lips thinned in impatience. “If I might be allowed to continue?” Erik shut his eyes and nodded, Mystique’s thumbs pressing slightly against the soft spots behind his ears. Emma arched a blonde brow and continued. “As I said, it wasn’t a psychic attack; though strong enough, it was unfocused, at least damage-wise.” She smiled unexpectedly and glanced out the darkened window onto the lights of Paris below. “I knew he was much stronger than me, but to reach across the Atlantic? Impressive.”

Turning back to Erik, she continued in a more serious tone, “From what I could pick up on the fringes of the blast, there was something about the modifications that they made to the machine he uses that expanded his powers further and faster than he was used to doing. I could feel his mind overloading, and it’s likely that his gift shut down completely for a few minutes in order to – hey, watch it!”

Erik opened his eyes and took a few deep, careful breaths. The furniture continued to creak, all the ornate carvings warped by the constrictive pressure he’d been unconsciously exerting on the metallic paint.

“I think I know what happened.” A soft voice broke the silence, Mystique talking without looking any of them in the face.

This wasn’t Mystique speaking, however. This was Raven, whose brother had screamed across the ocean for Erik when he was in pain.

“Charles isn’t like the rest of us. Even I wasn’t born looking like this, although I turned blue very, very young. I don’t know how it was for you, Emma, but he was born with his mind completely open. He’s been hearing the thoughts of everyone around him for his whole life, and you’re saying he was cut off?” Raven reached a hand up and swiped messily at the tears that rolled down her cheeks, though her voice was steady. “God. I wonder if he’s still alive.”

That last part was enough to galvanize Erik into action. Some tiny part of him, buried beneath layers of hurt and pain and rage, howled in alarm at the thought that Charles could be anything less than the way he last saw him. He stood up, carefully, trying his best not to fall over.

“Charles’ little mutant haven will be in shambles, and without a strong enough presence to guide and defend them, the ones he’s collected will be easy prey for the government or anyone who gets their hands on them.” He took a deep breath. “It is our duty to at least see them safe. Also,” he added as an afterthought (and why was this only an afterthought?), “seeing their own vulnerability may be sufficient to convince them of our cause.”

Riptide nodded, and added in a quiet voice “Si. And recruitment is far simpler when covered over by respectability.”

Erik nodded, sharply, ignoring the fresh spike of pain it caused. “Very well. We’ll head there immediately.” He turned to Emma and raised an enquiring eyebrow. “Will you all be able to depart Paris on short notice? I intend for us all to be settled at the house in Westchester by morning.”

Emma cracked her neck and smiled. “I’d guessed as much, honey. Which is why the movers should be picking up my things in an hour or so.”

Erik blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

The telepath batted her eyes at him as she pulled the white fox shrug off the back of her chair and over the shoulders of her suit. “It turns out that some companies are so paranoid about protecting their intellectual property that they’re more than happy to hire someone with my skills. They’re paying me quite handsomely, and they’ve even gone and set up an apartment that’s exactly to my tastes.”

She leaned over and ruffled his hair, then kissed him on the forehead, and he was too surprised to stop her. “Don’t sulk about me not coming with you; I’d make a miserable teacher, and you know it. I’ll send postcards. Make sure you write back and tell me how it’s all going.”

Erik cocked his head, gingerly. “Evidently you’ve been planning this for some time. Should I expect any other surprises?”

Emma shook her head, her expression serious for a moment. “No, honey, I don’t think I’ll need to use any of my other little failsafes. Getting the helmet off you was enough, and no,” she raised both her hands, palms outward, “I didn’t get into your head. I didn’t need to. It’s just.” She pursed her lips and turned her head away. Erik couldn’t quite read her expression, but it held a touch of fear.

“Shaw was scum, we both know that. The only reason why any of us stuck by him was once we realized what he was, it was too late to run. You were heading well in that direction, and wearing a dead man’s armor wasn’t doing you any favors. Look at you, you’re already doing better!”

Erik folded his arms. “Am I then?”

“Yes, quite. Not only did you not threaten to harm me if I left, you didn’t even begin to think of forbidding me. I’d call that a win.” Erik frowned. The idea hadn’t crossed his mind at all, although something told him that it should have.

She swished across the room and picked up her white overnight case, which had been sitting quietly under her chair the whole time. (Why hadn’t he seen that? What else hadn’t he seen?) “Take the helmet with you, and keep it with you, but really, you don’t want to put it on again. And besides, the color doesn’t suit you at all.” Emma turned her head and shot a winning smile at the teleporter, who was leaning against the wall with his eyebrows raised. “Azazael, sugar, if you wouldn’t mind giving me a lift? Just SanFran and back, won’t take you more than a minute, and then you can help Erik and the others to New York.”

Azazael bowed, slightly, and smiled. “It would be my pleasure, on all counts. I have always fancied being a schoolteacher rather than some rich man’s attack dog.”

Erik blinked and said “You have?”, but a few moments too late; he was addressing empty air.

Janos spoke up from behind a mountain of luggage that had appeared suspiciously fast, as though it had been pre-packed, helping Raven close a suitcase that she was standing on and cursing at with words no lady should know. “We did not all serve your predecessor out of blind loyalty.” He looked up, then darted his glance away. “Yours…was not the only childhood he ruined.”

A snap of displaced air announced Azazael’s return before Erik could respond. He rubbed at his temples; everything seemed to be moving altogether too quickly, and his head hurt as much as it had when he’d woken up. “Did everyone know we’d be going to Westchester except for me?”

Angel, who hadn’t helped at all with any packing, snorted and turned away. Azazael shot her an ugly look, and then turned to answer Erik. “Know? None of us. Suspect? Emma. Hope? Most of us.” He twitched his tail, a graceful gesture that was more expressive than a shrug. “It is a haven for our kind, and no man can make war all his life without losing that which makes him a man.”

Erik stood and snarled, head throbbing, the cape tangling around his body and getting in the way. “Well, in that case, by all means, let’s go! It’s not as though I’ve any decision, apparently!” He undid the clasps of the cape from his shoulders with an impatient gesture and let it fall to the ground unnoticed, leaving him in just the suit and a pissy expression. “If we leave now and arrive on the outskirts of town, we’ll arrive at the main house in time for breakfast. Don’t forget to pack the helmet.”

He strode off in search of the last of his belongings. After he’d climbed up to the loft he’d claimed as his own, he sagged against the wall for a moment and pressed his fists into his temples. He felt – strange, achy; the closest thing he could compare it to was having a limb that had been asleep for so long that you didn’t even notice until you tried to use it, which was not something you were ever supposed to feel inside your skull.

Downstairs, out of Erik’s sight, Janos used the discarded cloak to pick up Shaw’s helmet and wrap it, being oddly careful not to touch the metal. He placed it gingerly in a box that Azazael had produced from somewhere and locked it while Raven looked on with worry.

The box sat apart from the rest of their luggage, which was all iron-bound so that Erik could float it along once they arrived. Azazael came back to retrieve it on his own, later, in the darkness of full night. Anyone watching would have seen him appear oddly reluctant to approach it, the shadows around the box looking darker than they should have.

He braced himself and touched one digit to the lid, disappearing with a snap of air filling an empty space. In the moonlight, the warehouse looked as bleak as it truly was, even with the overdone furnishings.

A considerable amount of dust was to collect on the furnishings before anyone returned.

***

Chapter One

There was a young bugler named Breen
Whose musical sense was not keen.
He said, “Ain’t it odd.
I can never tell God
Save the Weasel from Pop Goes the Queen.”
Wallace Tripp

 

Westchester, Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. November, but only just. And yes, the name does sound pretentious, but it’s my school, after all.

And because the world exists to make the lives of good men more complicated, Hank was the one to find the mutant formerly known as Erik Lehnsherr sitting at the dining room table, perfectly calm in housecoat and slippers, reading the Wall Street Journal and rapping a naked, blue Raven on the knuckles with his fork every time she reached for his toast. Janos and Azazael were bickering quietly over a plate of scones, and Angel was sulking at the end of the table with a cup of extremely milky coffee. Emma Frost was conspicuously absent.

The helmet was casually sitting on the sideboard, next to the punchbowl. Everyone was very carefully not looking at it.

Hank sputtered. Erik shrugged his dressing gown further over his shoulders and turned the page. “Do stop staring. Breakfast will be getting cold.”

Azazael snorted and said something uncomplimentary in Russian. Hank turned and roared at him, the fur on his ruff standing straight up. “What the hell are you doing here? How dare you come here!”

Azazael slammed his butter knife down, Janos taking advantage of the situation to steal the last half of his scone and eat it with evident enjoyment. “I was under the impression that any mutant seeking sanctuary was welcome in this place. Was that untrue, or does it only apply to mutants whom you find harmless?”

Hank made a genuinely alarming noise and bared an impressive set of fangs. Azazael leapt to his feet, tail lashing, and Raven crouched on her chair, lips thinned and eyes wide, ready to spring like a cat. Angel watched the burgeoning fight with an inappropriate look of enjoyment on her face.

Erik reached out to all the metal in the room – a considerable amount, flatware included – intending to bind everyone to the ceiling until they saw reason, if he had to. The headache that had been driven away by breakfast and coffee was coming back, and there was a tiny and very unpleasant voice in the back of his head whispering that it would just be so much easier if he killed them all and hid the bodies.

The furor was quite effectively interrupted by Alex shuffling into the room, his eyes half shut and hair sticking out in all directions, clad only in a pair of boxers and a t-shirt that had seen better years. He wove between Azazael and Hank with the practiced ease of someone used to constant, low-level physical violence, snagged Erik’s coffee cup off of its saucer and drained it without flinching in spite of the steam that had been rising from the surface of the liquid. He repeated this action twice more, refilling from the silver pot in the middle of the table, before dropping himself in the dining chair between Erik and the door with a grunt and an incoherent mumble.

The shocked silence in the room seemed to get his attention, and he opened one vivid blue eye to stare at Erik, who had put his paper down next to his plate and was gazing at the younger man, one eyebrow arched.

Alex coughed, and then spoke in a raspy voice. “Nice of you to finally come home, asshole. Pass the bacon.”

Erik did so, silently, curiously, while Alex groped for the chafing dish of scrambled eggs and accepted a scone from Janos with a nod of thanks. Once there was an indecent amount of food piled on his plate, he turned his head slightly and said, in a surprisingly calm voice, “Siddown, Hank. Azazael isn’t gonna steal the silver.”

Hank bared his teeth again, silently, but took the chair across from Alex, reached out a claw, and drew the bowl of fruit salad towards him. The dining table was silent, except for the scrape of silverware on china.

Alex arched an eyebrow. “What? You knew this was coming. We all planned for it. We had to.” Raven watched the conversation carefully, eyes flickering between each man as they talked to each other. Erik, too, held his peace; speaking would have dissolved the fragile truce they seemed to have going.

Hank spoke like he and Alex were the only people in the room. "We don't need him or any of them, damn it! We’re more than capable of running this place on our own until the Professor recovers!”

Alex leaned forward and spoke quickly, his voice low and rough. "You real sure about that? How many calls have we had to field for him already? Okay, maybe we have the basics down for running the school, but you and I both know we need a public face, if nothing else." Hank looked away and snarled, and Alex leaned further across the table to catch his eyes. "It can't be you because of the fur, it can't be me because of the baby face, and you know damn well Sean can't do it. You know what it looks like here, from the outside: in their eyes, we’re just kids ourselves, and now the voice of authority for the place is missing?" He shook his head, lips thinned.

“Someone is gonna notice, eventually, and we can’t keep saying he’s “indisposed” forever. From there, it’s only a matter of time before someone calls the authorities about all the weird stuff that happens around here, and when that day comes?” He slashed his hand horizontally through the air. “We’re sunk. The little ones are all too young to control their powers, and I don’t wanna think what a government school for mini-mutants would look like, especially with the military looking for every weapon they can against the Reds.” Alex glanced over at Azazael, and jerked his chin in the other mutant’s direction. “No offense, man.”

Azazael shrugged and flicked his tail, his expression pinched.

Alex shot a surprisingly calculating glance sideways at Erik. "It's gotta be him. That fancy European accent and those fine Sunday manners will give us all the cover and legitimacy we need."

Hank didn't look up from his plate, and spoke quietly. "Are you willing to trust them with the students?"

Raven mumbled under her breath, "We're right here, you know." Azazael looked uncomfortable and guilty, which came as something of a surprise. Janos fished for another scone and said, quietly, "Let them be. We are on their territory, after all, and for a year we have been the enemy."

Alex leaned back and drained the rest of his third cup of coffee. "If they can behave themselves," he shot a look at Angel, who sneered, "and not bring any harm to the student body, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to stay. We’re using them as much as they’re using us."

Hank muttered something in response, and Alex shook his head. "Don't even, man. You of all people know what kind of stake I have here."

The other mutant nodded, and let out a long breath. "Okay, yes. I'll give you that much."

Alex clapped his hands and smiled one of his sunny, bright smiles that he used (as Erik recalled) whenever he was feeling cornered and particularly violent. "Great! Now that we've cleared up all that bullshit, let's eat."

Nobody spoke, but the clatter of cutlery resumed. Hank poured himself a cup of coffee and muttered, “Is Sean coming down this morning?”

Alex shook his head, his mouth full of eggs. He chewed, gulped hugely, and then answered, “Nah. I think he had a little too much last night. He said something about the allegory of the cave as it applies to current social theory and vanished back into a cloud of smoke. I think he’s working on the syllabus.”

Azazael visibly perked up and said “Aristotle? You teach the classics?” Raven, giving up on filching Erik’s toast and attacking a bowl of oatmeal very heavily laced with molasses and cream, nodded vigorously. “Of course they would. Charles was hopeless with Greek and Latin, and really jealous when I took to it; it seems his abilities make learning dead languages nearly impossible. There’s a separate library of the more important texts in their original languages. You could fit a few desks in there, I’m sure.” Azazael favored her with a look that was suspiciously sappy.

Janos, craning his neck around to look out one of the windows, asked “Oh! Is the greenhouse empty? You must not have a botany instructor yet.” Hank spooned yogurt and granola on top of his fruit and munched the first spoonful, looking simultaneously mutinous and resigned. Angel pouted and sank down in her chair.

Erik leaned back in his seat and listened to everyone hashing out teaching duties with absolutely no input from him, except for when they unanimously decided that he needed to take the lit courses, and that German needed to be added to the syllabus.

Erik felt an elbow nudge him in the side, and turned to see Alex giving him a tentative smile that looked like he didn’t use it all that often. “Just because you only have two classes doesn’t mean you’ll be working the least. You’ll have to do all the bullshit the Professor usually does, you know, certifications and accreditations and admissions and mountains of paperwork that look like they’re gonna grow legs and eat the smaller kids.”

His words brought home just why they were there with a sudden jolt, Charles’s lack of presence still palpable but all the more noticeable now that Erik remembered he wasn’t just having a lie-in. “Perhaps the division of his empire might wait until the king is truly gone?”

His tone had been vicious, even for him, but not unwarranted; Raven’s tense back and everyone else’s guilty faces told him so. “Should Charles’s recovery not be our first priority? I had no intention, when I arrived, to stay here as an instructor for more than the time it took him to regain his health.” Hank rumbled deep in his chest, but didn’t say anything.

Alex, whose smile had fled, shook his head until Erik could swear he could hear the boy’s brains rattle and heaved a gusty sigh. “I don’t have time for this right now. I gotta go get dressed because Scotty’s outside, and I have to take care of the home ec stuff for the next semester. Erik, I’ll get you a list of what everybody’s going to be teaching, it’ll be on the desk in the study.” Erik nodded, not trusting his tongue again so soon.

Angel laughed, an oddly ugly sound. “What, your precious professor has you taking home ec? Have you made an apron yet?”

Alex turned and stared at her until she turned red and dropped her eyes. “No. I teach home ec here, and I have to write up the lesson plans. I also have to plan out the phys ed courses and training for each kid’s talents. You’ve kinda missed a thing or two over the past year. So fuck you very much and you,” he pointed his spoon at Erik, “get dressed and put on a suit or something respectable and bossish, not that beatnik shit you usually wear. And that robe makes you look like a hobo.”

Erik grumbled, but didn’t disagree. Even though it was ratty, it was comfortable and still in one piece, one of the first things he’d bought himself, and he still had several carefully ignored psychological blocks against the waste of resources of any kind.

Alex rose from his chair and stretched his arms over his head, eyes squinched shut and back arching indecently, a swathe of skin showing between the hem of his shirt and the waistband of his boxers. Hank’s eyes darted towards it, then away, so fast that Erik almost missed it.

Raven asked the question that nobody else had thought to. “Who’s Scotty?”

Alex voice wafted in from the hall as he left the dining room. “Oh, didn’t I mention? Turns out I have a kid.” The slam of one of the upstairs doors cut off any possible rejoinder.

Raven turned to Erik, brushing crumbs off of her fingers. “Is it just me, or is anybody else feeling like they fell down a rabbit hole?”

Hank relaxed very suddenly, his ruff going down, and gave her a tired smile. “Every damn day.” He picked up his papers in one paw and his plate in the other, walked around the table, and leaned down to give her a light peck on the forehead. Azazael frowned, and Janos smirked into his coffee.

Hank turned to Erik, maintaining a careful distance, his hackles once again slightly raised but his tone civil. “Once you’ve finished breakfast and gotten dressed, come down to the lab and let me know. You should probably see the Professor.”

***

As they walked out to the west wing of the mansion, Hank nattered on about small things, something about how long it had taken to find staff that had no problems working for and with mutants, and please don’t inadvertently kill them, Erik, and oh, here we are.

It was a small room, relatively speaking; in real terms, it was the size of an average hospital room, and furnished as such. There were chairs, presumably for visitors, a table to go with them, a nightstand holding a small vase with snippets of bittersweet vine and, of course, the bed.

Charles lay on his back, hands on top of each other on his stomach, face in a neutral expression, hair clean and neatly combed. He looked as though he’d dozed off, with the notable exception that, apart from breathing, he didn’t seem to respond to anything at all.

Hank sighed behind him, and Erik turned to see the young man remove his glasses and pinch the bridge of his nose delicately with two fingers. “It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s not like he’s even in a coma; there’s been no change in him since he passed out, and when I say no change, I mean nothing. No muscle issues, no loss of bodily functions, not even after twenty-four hours. It’s like he just stepped out of the bath and lay down to take a nap.”

Erik didn’t feel surprised at this information, merely a combination between fond and exasperated. He was, however, somewhat unnerved. “You do realize that it is medically impossible for nothing to have changed?”

Hank threw his hands up in the air. “Yes, but it is Charles Xavier, after all. He pretty much redefines impossible, even for mutants. It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”

Erik looked away from him and back at Charles, who for all intents and purposes was apparently soundly asleep. “Most of the original fairy tales were quite horrible.”

Hank nodded, looking serious. “My grandmother was Scots. She told me the stories she grew up on. They used to give me nightmares.”

Erik couldn’t take any more; he spun away from Charles, or the shell that typically held him, and made for the door. Hank caught up to him in several long strides, and they walked along quietly to the end of the hall and the top of the staircase.

Behind them, the only things that moved were the motes of dust in the sunbeams and the slow, regular inhale and exhale of Charles’ chest.

***

Erik made it through the rest of the day more or less on autopilot, feeling exceptionally numb except for the odd flash of sorrow or self-loathing.

(“They will need us there to protect them,” Erik had said as they walked up the path from the lake where Azazael had dropped them.

Raven was the only one who voiced the party’s thought, one that plagued on Erik himself. “Of course they’ll need us. But will they want us?” Even now, Erik didn’t have an answer to that, and neither did anybody else.)

Alex had introduced him to some of the students, including Jean, who was a telepath with a touch of telekinesis; Ororo, a silent little girl with dark skin, pale locks, and easy control over the elements; and Alex’s son Scott, a shy six-year-old fitted with a strange pair of dark glasses that he apparently couldn’t take off for the safety of others.

Erik didn’t even have to ask. He and Alex were sitting on one of the garden walls, watching the children play, when Alex started speaking, quietly, in a flat voice.

“So, I was pretty fucked up when I was a teenager. You know, excess rage, shitty family, strange superpowers, the whole thing. I was just sixteen when I met Alice, and she was into the whole getting attention by being yelled at thing, and I was trying to convince myself that I liked girls.” He took a deep breath and rubbed his palms on his jeans, clearly nervous.

Erik had suspected as much, but he hadn’t expected the young man to be so explicit in his statement, and as such took the prudent route of saying nothing at all.

Alex, after waiting a moment, nodded and continued. “It all ended about how you guess it did. She decides to go back to being the perfect little princess, her new quarterback boyfriend decides to beat the snot out of the punk she was sleeping with, and the punk accidentally releases a plasma blast that slices up half the gym and puts the quarterback in the hospital for the rest of the school year.” He smirked humorlessly. “All this you already knew, but it’s important, because it leads up to everything else.”

“About two months ago, I got a call from Alice in the middle of the night. I don’t know how she even found me, or the number, but apparently we weren’t as careful as we should have been, and six months after I left she had Scotty. Her parents were going to save face by passing him off as a late in life baby for her mom,” he paused for breath again, clenching his fists, “and they did okay until the day he started shooting lasers out of his eyes.”

Erik sat up straight from where he’d been lounging and glanced down at the little boy on the lawn, sunglasses firmly in place. Alex, noticing him looking, commented, “They’re Hank’s design. He started the blueprints the minute we got the phone call, and finished them as we pulled up at Alice’s house.”

The younger man’s hands were shaking, now, and Erik waited patiently for him to regain his composure. Alex relaxed his hands and continued speaking in a soft voice.

“The Professor had to mindwipe them, Alice and her family, not because of Scotty or anything he did, but because of how Hank and I reacted. It wasn’t pretty, and we both lost our tempers.” The younger man paused and swallowed, then kept speaking, his voice flat. “They’d duct-taped rags over his eyes so that he couldn’t open them, and they were keeping him locked in a dark room. All Alice did was scream at me to take him, calling him a punishment from God, blaming me for ruining her life, and Scotty had to sit there and listen. He didn’t even cry.”

Alex swiped his hands across his eyes, angrily, and Erik was painfully reminded that his companion was little more than a child himself. “I love him so much, Erik, you can’t even understand, and he trusted me just like that. I told him who I was, and he called me Daddy and wanted to know if we could leave now, and I couldn’t take it. I still can’t, but I do every day.”

Erik remembered being loved like that – dimly, but he remembered. He was pretty sure that his capability to do the same had been one of the things Shaw had cut out of him with his shiny, shiny knives before he was old enough or strong enough to defend himself.

The French Canadian matron who’d apparently been employed as cook in Erik’s absence took that moment to stick her head out the kitchen door and call “A table!” in a truly appalling voice. Erik winced, but the children shrieked with glee as they ran inside for supper. Alex, too, stood and brushed off his jeans. “Come on, if we don’t go now, there won’t be anything left. Hank really does eat like a beast, in spite of his fruit and yogurt action this morning.”

Erik caught Alex by his watch (as it were) as he walked away. “That story – your youth, your son – why did you tell me that?” He was genuinely curious.

Alex smiled sadly. “I figured that if you got used to listening to me whine at you, you might start actually telling me or one of the others some of the crap you’re carrying around so that you’re less of a moving ball of neuroses.”

Erik slowly released his hold on the watchband, Alex holding his gaze. The younger man reached down and clapped him on the shoulder. “Think about it. You’re not alone anymore.”

It had been the second time in as many years that someone had told him he wasn’t alone and meant it. There was a pattern there, but he couldn’t see it, not yet.

Later that evening, Erik sat at the foot of Charles’s bed in Charles’s room and felt the lack of its occupant like a physical pain. He’d meant to go back to living in his former quarters in the house, but hadn’t been able to open the door; he’d felt that if he’d opened it, he’d have seen the rotting corpse of the trust that used to exist between them, and had instead fled for the warmth and comfort of the only space that still felt like the man he’d known. Nobody had objected.

Sleep came late, and fitfully.

***

He’d heard something, someone, someone who was not supposed to be here, so he crept downstairs. Burglar? Maybe. Vagabond? Perhaps. Deserter from the Army? Best bring a baseball bat.

Whoever it was, they were in the kitchen, and they were so hungry that they were making him feel in need of a bite, in spite of the painfully formal dinner he’d had to endure with Mother earlier this evening.

Thinking about Mother always hurt, mostly because he always knew when she wasn’t thinking about him.

It was her usual hairstyle, and a dress she hadn’t worn in a while, and a smile that he hadn’t seen in a very, very long time and almost never directed at him. He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t read her, promised himself long ago, so the fact that his mother was actually someone else didn’t sink in until he let his thoughts brush against her, just lightly, to make sure she was alright, that she was sober and didn’t need help upstairs, and came up against the impression of a completely unfamiliar mind.

Her offering to make him chocolate was the last straw. The fury and the rush of bitterness that ran through him was nothing new, but it ached all the same, and only added an echo to the loneliness that was his constant state of being. Anyone else, anything else, he would have just pushed as hard as he could to make them want to leave and not think about being there, but this?

This deserved revenge.

He didn’t know what he expected to happen, but there was no way he could have imagined that Mother’s face and form would melt down into someone small, and blue, and female, and just as alone as him, and entirely magnificent and beautiful because this meant everything. This meant that he was not alone, and neither was she, and she never, ever had to be hungry again, or cold, or afraid, because now he had everything he could imagine wanting. Raven? Wise bird? Perfect. A sister, an equal, someone who was like him and not afraid, not ever, and the joy and frantic relief that he felt began to put a dent in that aching loneliness, assuaging it for the first time ever, and -

Erik jerked awake. The dream had been so vivid as to be nearly a memory, and most certainly not his own. He scrubbed at his face, the weak light from the waning moon shining in the window. Perhaps not taking his old room had been a mistake.

Emma had once mentioned something about psychic imprints, how those with telepathic abilities or even particularly strong minds tended to leave fragments of their personality clinging to places or possessions. By those standards, this room probably contained more of Charles than his body did right now.

(Erik also thought that information might explain Emma’s revulsion when he wore Shaw’s helmet, but the remnants of the dream spinning through his brain prevented him from exploring that too closely. For now, at least.)

In the silence of the late hour, Erik’s mind automatically went to the figure in the west wing, lying still and peaceful and perfectly blank, nothing of the fire and brilliance that he remembered. It wasn’t like he could even talk to him, ask him questions or test theories; wherever Charles was, he wasn’t in that room, in that body. Communication was therefore rather difficult.

Inspiration struck suddenly and quietly, and Erik got up and switched on the light sitting on the small desk by the window. He pulled out several sheets of loose-leaf, one of those foolish expensive pens that littered the house – bamboo and gold, this one, sodding Cartier no less – and added an envelope, for form’s sake. He paused for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts and separate them from the last wisps of the dream, and began to write.

***

Dear Charles.

Writing that salutation seems pointless. It is the thing one does when one writes a letter, a show of intimacy between author and reader. I have never needed such things with you, and find it odd that I must start now. I hold the hope that you can hear me as you once did, so what I write comes to the page as I think it. I do not know if the letters are for you or for me.

Hank says that your mind was cut off from humanity; that you, for a moment, were alone in your head. I cannot imagine what that must have been like for you, to only hear silence where all your life there has been nothing but the murmur of three billion other minds. (In retrospect, perhaps you did understand some of the horrors I have seen. Perhaps you heard me cry out once, long ago. I do not remember hearing you. Sometimes I think I wish I had.)

Be that as it may. Classes are to resume after the Thanksgiving holiday. Any Christmas celebrations are being taken care of by Hank and Alex, and we are all of us currently in the process of rewriting the curriculum for the winter semester to include a few new classes. I have made myself known to many of the students; I have neither your credentials nor your aptitude for instruction, as your sister has made quite clear, but I feel I shall be able to manage, for a time. We are currently out of the eyes of the American and Russian governments, so other matters can wait for the time being.

Wherever you find yourself, kindly do not linger too long.

Erik.

P.S. Your cook, Mme. Gagnon, thinks me underfed and has taken it upon herself to make me “more the healthy”. I fear that she is fattening me for slaughter – I have heard far too many disturbing tales of the Voyageurs to ever be fully comfortable with a Quebecoise in the house, even if her mastery of a roast chicken is unparalleled. –E.

***
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
I don’t wonder what you are;
You’re the cooling down of gases
Forming into solid masses.
Wallace Tripp

Westchester, Xavier Academy for Gifted Children. Late November. Wait – how did you change the name on the sign? And the letterhead?

Rumors had been running wild through the students about the new headmaster, and the strange new instructors. Someone said that the Classics instructor was an escapee from the Kremlin, while others insisted that he was ageless and had actually known Aristotle, and was the only person qualified to teach his works. The naked blue woman who said she was the Professor’s sister was a source of concern and not a little alarm, because she could be anybody, although some of the boys were fascinated by just what the scales did or didn’t cover.

The new botany instructor was rumored to be able to talk to plants, summon sentient tornadoes, exorcise demons with a thought, and speak to the Virgin Mary face to face, sometimes all at once. Nobody went near Miss Angel; nobody dared. She wasn’t going to be a teacher, so there was no real reason to talk to her. Plus, Scotty said his dad said that she could spit fire, and Ororo said (well, wrote really, she didn’t speak) that Jean said that Sean said that she was still mad at Scotty’s dad for burning her wings in Cuba.

And then, of course, there was him. Herr Lehnsherr, the new headmaster, an old friend of the Professor’s, and someone he talked about from time to time. He was very, very powerful; one of the older boys wondered if he could feel the iron in your blood, but nobody knew. All of the teachers had different opinions about him: Dr. McCoy didn’t like him at all, and Sean changed the subject whenever he came up. Scotty’s dad seemed to like him, though, or at least tolerate him. Scotty said that his dad had told him that Herr Lehnsherr had a really tough time before he met the Professor, and that the Nazis had done awful things to him, so it was okay that he was a little off.

In truth, nobody knew quite what to believe. He was going to come speak to them today, and nobody had a clue what he was going to say.

***

The door to the classroom swung open, and all sound ceased. Erik, wearing a grey suit and violet tie as though they were armor, walked in with a purposeful and measured stride. Raven quietly padded in behind him, standing off to one side, watching the room with wary golden eyes.

“Good morning, children. As you know, I am Herr Lehnsherr. I shall be conducting classes during Professor Xavier’s convalescence.” Erik thought he sounded even-tempered enough, albeit in a manner that recalled deeply buried memories of some of his older male relatives.

Everyone was very, very quiet. A concerned looking redheaded girl – Jean, that was her name – raised her hand timidly. “Can…can you tell us how long it will take Professor X to come back?”

Erik shook his head, his expression suitably somber. “I am afraid that I cannot answer you.”

The classroom erupted into chaos. The children had, in their minds, confirmation of all their worst theories.

Nearly all of the girls were in tears, Ororo managing to make it rain as well, the water freezing as soon as it hit the house and the grounds. The boys were alternately shouting and trying not to cry, and Scott looked ready to accuse Erik of orchestrating the whole thing.

Erik looked to Raven, helplessly and with not a little bit of terror. “How do I make them stop?!”

All she did was laugh, hysterically.

***

Chapter Two

I am gai, I am poet, I dwell
Rupert Street, at the fifth. I am svell.
And I sing tralala
And I loves my mamma,
And the English, I speaks him quite well!
~ George du Maurier

Westchester, Xavier School for Young People. Early January. Evening. Storytime. Do stop changing the name of my school, please. I find it difficult to keep up.

Ororo refused to go to bed without a story. As one of the youngest students in the house, she considered it not merely her privilege but her right. Her current choice was Just So Stories, and she wanted to hear a whole tale before bedtime every evening.

Erik could not even begin to guess why she had decided, back in November, that he was the one who should read to her. After the disaster that was the first day of lessons, he’d been certain that none of the children would want to come near him; yet, when he’d been sulking in Charles’s study that evening, he’d heard the slap of small bare feet on the floorboards and the creak of a heavy oak door being pushed open by someone almost not big enough to manage it.

Erik glanced up from where he’d been staring sullenly at a stack of maths quizzes, to see Ororo standing hesitantly about three feet away, clad in a shockingly purple nightgown covered in lace and frills (another evidence of your indulgence, Charles), and clutching a large, leather-bound and gilded tome to her chest.

Erik rubbed a hand over his face, and mustered what he hoped was a neutral expression. “Yes, Ororo? What is it that you want?”

The little girl bit her lip, and held the book forward. Erik arched an eyebrow. Her vocal cords were in perfect working order. There was no reason for her to be timid about speaking.

She shuffled a little closer, and in a small, rough voice, asked, “Would. Would you please read it to me?”

Erik knew enough to reward positive changes in behavior, and those were, as far as he knew, the first words she’d actually spoken since they’d dug her out of the rubble of her family’s home. He reached out and gestured to her, intending for her to hand him the book.

She did so. He hadn’t expected her to clamber into the chair and worm her way under his arm, as well. Nor had he thought that she might fall asleep against his side during Rikki-tikki-tavi and need to be carried up to bed. Jean’s door had been ajar, but he had thought nothing of it at the time, until she and Scott crept quietly into the study the next night and curled up on the rug as he continued with Letting in the Jungle.

By now, well into winter, they had gone through both volumes and were moving into the Just So Stories. Ororo chose the reading material, and she seemed to have a fondness for Kipling. Jean was willing to listen to anything, as long as she didn’t have to read herself, and Scott only objected if Erik skipped over the bits of poetry that peppered the narrative.

It was all very domestic, and the only peaceful part of his day. At least the little ones were well behaved. The others, well -

Suffice to say, Erik now knew why Charles had spiked his tea so liberally with whiskey at the end of the day.

***

My darling Charles, you selfish bastard,

You have done the most unutterably horrible thing possible. You have left me, of all people, to take charge of children. It is an impossible task: Ororo, now that she speaks, only addresses me as Mamma, and Scott has begun to follow suit. Jean and the other girls have been stricken with that new and horrible affliction called Beatlemania. Raven and Azazael have started having truly astounding lovers’ spats along with reconciliations in the most inconvenient places. I begin to wish that he’d remained a coward pining for her affections.

Moreover, I now firmly believe that your demon of a gardener, MacAvoy or whoever he is, considers me a threat to all plantings on the grounds, regardless of the fact that I have little interest in them beyond any potential flammability. He and his obsession with those bloody stupid topiaries. I made Alex use them as targets, especially the ones cut to look like prancing horses and peacocks. Sometimes, the belligerent affluence of your upbringing causes my blood to boil, dearest.

Our dear Sean has taken to the world of psychotropic drugs and the associated music scene, the little bastard. God be my witness (and how long it is since I’ve said that!), if I catch him playing one of those abysmal records of his again, I will do something entirely untoward. I don’t care if it enhances his curriculum; as far as I can tell, all they do is sit in a circle on the floor and discuss their feelings, so I doubt anyone will notice if something unpleasant happens to him. Of course, I’ll promptly have to hide his body, or else Ororo will start crying and we cannot afford more rain. The rosebeds are in ruins.

I realized yesterday that I have begun to turn into my Grandfather Wilhelm. I recall very little of him, or I used to before you began to gaily prance about in my mind whenever the fancy took you and stirred up things I thought long locked away. He seemed to use curses and bellowing as his primary forms of communication and had all the subtlety of a bear in a sweets shop. In spite of all that, everyone in the family was perfectly happy leaving the children in his care, and the youngest ones adored him. I spend most of the time shouting at the students, or so it feels, and yet they creep into the library every night to listen to me read. Some of the small ones even insist that I tuck them in.

I’ve been using some of my associates as instructors, filling in the gaps left by both my lack of knowledge and your continued absence. Riptide - my apologies, Janos - is teaching a highly esoteric version of botany, which seems to involve no small amount of superstition. The same goes for the religious studies course he insists is fundamental to the moral welfare of the student body. However, he does know the proper botanical names, and it keeps the children fascinated. Azazael, and that is apparently his real name, poor man, has a genuine aptitude for both History and the Classics. Unfortunately, it means that he’s teaching the children rude words in Greek and Latin and putting a decidedly Russian spin on the entirety of world history. You should hear what he has to say about Poland. Possibly you do hear it, and choose to remain asleep, you coward.

Raven’s grasp of geography is solid enough for her courses, especially with the help of maps; the only trouble has been convincing her to remain clothed on a regular basis. She shifts into the native costume of whatever region is currently the focus of the course, but outside of the classroom – well. I had despaired of her ever wearing garments again before Alex tackled her and forced her into one of your mother’s old nightgowns, all the while screaming about his son’s precious innocence, or something to that effect. The garments, while sheer and far too short, are better than nothing, and some balm to my sanity.

You must wake up, and soon. French and German classes I can manage, but I have had to take over instruction in English, a prospect I find horrifying insofar as it is my third language and yet I speak and write it better than most of the children, and I don’t only mean the students. I truly fear for Alex’s communication skills in the world outside these walls.

I know you’re there, somewhere. I can feel your presence as a continual subtext. If I’m not careful, you’ll be rearranging lines in “Just So Stories” in order to communicate.

Your Erik.

***

There was a young man so benighted,
He never knew when he was slighted.
He went to a party,
And ate just as hearty
As if he’d been really invited.
~ Wallace Tripp

"We had been talking about it for some time, you know."

Erik jumped slightly (something he would have not done two months ago and half a world away, pressed down upon by the helmet). Azazael was seated gracefully in one of the chairs in front of the desk, tail twitching at the tip and chin resting on his fist in a posture of studied calm.

Erik rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and sighed. After spending all day sifting through a stack of letters from the parents of prospective students (none of whom were mutants, as far as he could tell), his head throbbed dully and his eyes stung. “Would you like to elaborate on that last statement, or should I guess?”

The Russian mutant chuckled, teeth showing very white against his scarlet skin. “The others and I. For the year after you killed Shaw, we spoke of leaving, and how we might accomplish that without losing our lives.” He cocked his head and gazed at Erik with a dispassionate look that he recognized from having seen it in the mirror on far too many occasions. “Mystique was the one who convinced us to stay, to see for a year who and what you would become. She would never have left your side, but Emma was not the only one with a contingency plan.”

Erik frowned. That was oddly disconcerting to hear.

Azazael patted the arms of his chair and smiled fondly out the window at the snow-covered boxwoods. “This is a good place. Being here has been…well. I do not think I have ever lived anywhere quite like this.”

Erik snorted. “Very few people live anywhere like this.”

Azazael inclined his head. “True, but not quite what I meant. Even when I was a small child, living with the monks in St. Petersburg,” Erik sat forward, knowing that he was suddenly privy to information that few others held, “I was the only one of my kind. That sort of loneliness is wearing on a child, as I’m sure you know.”

Erik did indeed, although he wasn’t about to admit that his best knowledge of a lonely childhood came from the dreams of a comatose telepath. “How did Shaw get ahold of you, then? Did the monks turn you in?”

Azazael shook his head sharply, suddenly vehement. “They were good men, who believed that I had been placed in this form by God himself in order to live a more virtuous life, as an example to other men whose faces were fairer and hearts fouler. I would have most likely stayed there my whole life, and taken orders.” His voice and expression grew distant. “Shaw slaughtered every one of them, when the Nazis reached Russia. He considered their custody of me to be a personal affront.”

Erik didn’t say a word. He knew better than to try and offer a useless platitude. Even if he had spoken there was a very good chance that the other mutant, lost as he was in memories, might not have heard him at all.

“After Shaw found me, of course, came the training, winnowing and whittling and honing a frightened boy into the perfect killing machine, convincing him that the only place he was safe was with the few others of his own kind to whom he was carefully introduced, and stripping away any vestiges of civilization in favor of a Cause.” Azazael rose, a sudden movement, and walked quickly over to the sideboard. He poured two tumblers of whiskey, his voice steady but his face hidden from view. “I rather envy, you know; I was much younger when he found me, as was Janos, and as such it is quite difficult to remember anything other than the life he taught us.”

Erik blinked. “I…I had never considered that. I only thought that I despised him, for the pain he caused me and for my mother’s death.” Sharing that information seemed fair, after what he’d heard from the other man.

Azazael nodded, sitting back down and handing Erik one of the drinks. “Even so. You had love, albeit tainted by sorrow and pain, to fuel you and drive your escape. That was Shaw’s mistake, and indeed I believe his greed when it came to you was what eventually cost him his life. You were much too old, and even in your deepest agony had something to fall back on.”

The Russian looked down at his hands, rolling the glass between them, his tail slowly curling around the leg of the chair in a gesture that seemed unconsciously protective, much in the way that someone else would wrap their arms around themselves. “He did not make the same mistake with us, Janos and I. We were taken early in childhood, forcibly freed from any ties, and taught that pain and blood and the power one seized with them were the only way to live.”

Erik took a long, slow pull of the liquor. “How did you then come by this sudden desire to teach? What changed your mind?”

Azazael laughed. “You did.”

Erik jerked back in surprise. “What?”

“Shaw always kept us moving, kept us distracted, working towards his particular cause. You, on the other hand – after we freed Emma and hid in Paris, you spent a year planning your next move. Granted, I was privy to some of it, and it was a good and bloody and rather horrible plan, but we were all inactive for a long, long time, after having spent our lives constantly on the move. That sort of thing engenders introspection, especially when one is unsure of the nature of one’s new superior.”

Azazael shrugged and swallowed the last of his whiskey. “So I thought, and when I could no longer hold my tongue without going mad, I cornered Janos and we both got rather dramatically drunk. That, if you remember, was around Bastille Day, this past July.” Erik nodded; he vaguely remembered wondering, at the time, where the two mutants had gone and why they’d looked ill for days after they’d returned.

“We’d spoken to each other before then about life outside of Shaw’s delusion or your seemingly implacable mission, but that was the first time we had the luxury to speak, and to plan. Nothing concrete, of course, but enough of a foundation was laid that when you had your little, hmm, incident with Xavier, we were able to adapt to the situation far faster than we might have.”

He lowered his head, and pointed his index finger, the rest of his hand still wrapped around the glass. “Make no mistake – neither he nor I are yet particularly sane, and both of us are very much aware of our sins and the situations that would make us relapse. Here, however, we at least have something of a chance to better ourselves. There is no shame in being born and raised in a low situation, but there is shame in wanting to stay there.”

Erik nodded, and couldn’t help but laugh. If he’d known, at the time, that they were plotting to leave him – no, he couldn’t say what he’d have done. “I admire your preparedness, especially in the face of my own efforts. It is a comfort to see that this school benefits the instructors as much as it does the students.”

Azazael grinned and put his empty tumbler on the edge of the desk. “I should warn you that I have promised to start fencing classes as soon as Jean is old enough. But yes, this place has been good. I feel, for the first time, as though I am a man, free to stand and call myself one in the eyes of God and my peers, rather than a rude creature just above a beast.”

He rose from his seat, and after a moment’s pause, bowed deeply. “I can only hope that being here does as much for you as it already has for the rest of us.”

Erik realized, very suddenly, that in spite of all of his earlier words to the Brotherhood, he hadn’t had a single thought of using the school as a recruiting ground for an army. More than that, he didn’t know when his mind had changed and his resolve had been lost (although it was entirely possible that it was buried under one of the piles of essays on his desk).

Azazael walked quietly across the room and out the door, tail flitting quickly through the opening as it closed. Erik was left with a glass of scotch, cobalt twilight coming through the windows, and an entire year’s worth of efforts to look at through a completely different lens.

***

Erik wasn’t quite sure what kind of welcome to expect from Sean, whom he had not yet seen though he had been back for nearly two months. He didn’t have any time to rehearse his long thought out reintroductions, however, as he ran into him his second day into the winter semester.

Sean’s door slammed open as Erik was walking past, making the older man jump involuntarily. A cloud of smoke billowed out, smelling oddly of burnt rope, and Sean strode over the threshold with purpose, nose buried in a well-worn copy of Letters from the Birmingham Jail.

He stopped, very suddenly, and turned to look at Erik. Without warning, his face was split by a wide, happy grin, and he wrapped himself around the older man like a touch-starved ginger kraken.

“Erik! Man! I knew you’d come home for the next stage of your spiritual journey!”

Erik’s arms were pinned to his sides by the younger man’s enthusiastic embrace, and he was beginning to lose all feeling in his fingertips. The clothes Sean was wearing seemed to be held together with drawstrings, giving him nothing he could use to shove the overly affectionate philosopher away to a reasonable distance without causing serious physical harm.

The hug didn’t end, either, continuing on for far longer than Erik felt comfortable with. Sean snuffled into his collar at one point, and Erik awkwardly reached up and patted him on the back. The boy’s hair was even longer than when he had left, curling over the neck of his shirt, and smelled heavily enough of sandalwood to make Erik’s nose itch.

Finally, to Erik’s deep and sincere relief, Sean let go and drew back a few paces, far enough to look Erik in the eye. He was still smiling, but it looked significantly less manic than it had before.

“It’s really, really good to see that the mutant civil war is over. I mean, I kinda talked to Janos, and he told me about the shit that he and Azazael had to do when they were fighting with Shaw, and I gotta say, it’s heavy. There’s a good reason why Az is burying himself in classical philosophy and Janos is getting the kids to help him build a grotto to the Holy Mother out back. Penance is the price of peace, yeah?” Sean looked at Erik expectantly. Erik had no idea how to reply – penance was an unfamiliar concept to him, with everything else in his life so long subsumed under vengeance.

Sean nodded to himself for a moment, looking distant, and then clapped his hands. “So, the Professor’s out of commission. Does that mean you and Raven and everyone are gonna stay put for a while?”

Erik nodded. He thought about bringing up the fact that he’d been there for better than two months, that he’d not seen Sean once in all that time, and that if he had this conversation would not have gone anywhere near as easily. The boy’s hopeful expression quashed that, however, and Erik made his reply somewhat more mild. “Yes, at least until Charles is capable of resuming his duties here. Anything less would be…an offence against the kindnesses he once showed me.”

Sean looked very sad, all of a sudden. “Aw, man, you have so much to learn. It’s not about repayment, it’s about paying it forward.” He brightened up and clapped Erik on the bicep, squeezing his arm. Erik looked down at Sean’s hand incredulously. “Fortunately for you, you are now a resident of a school, a temple of knowledge, a palace of learning, a bastion of education! Where better to find your true self and embrace your path, huh? Nowhere, that’s where!”

Without waiting for a reply, Sean opened his book again and wandered off down the hall, muttering under his breath and apparently using his right hand to make notes in thin air. Erik stared after him and wondered if everyone had gone mad without him noticing, and if the confusion he’d felt since removing that damned helmet would ever disappear.

It shouldn’t have been so easy, but apparently the assurance that Erik would stay for the time being had been all that Sean needed in order to welcome him and his party into the house with open arms and well-packed pipe. Welcome Erik, at least; it seemed that the boy had been smarter than he’d thought, staying well out of Erik’s way until he was sure of an at least somewhat genial reception. Sean and Janos had rapidly formed an alarming bond based on some combination of rural herbal lore, being raised violently Catholic (albeit with different results), and a fondness for cats.

Speaking of cats…

Sean’s cat Morag was equally as forgiving of fault as her master, albeit only to one individual. The rest of the household she regarded as warm furniture, on a good day, or more likely as an abomination to be exterminated as swiftly as possible.

She was a Siamese, cross-eyed and with a voice like an air raid siren, and loathed everyone except for Sean and, oddly enough, Erik. Erik, Morag adored. She followed him around, talking to him; she slept on all his clothes and lovingly shed on them so that he would never be apart from her; and she sat on his lap while he was grading papers, nursing at the cuff of his jacket and drooling as she purred.

It was altogether disgusting and immensely endearing. She was sleeping next to him right now, escaping the smoke and music in Sean’s room in exchange for stealing one of his pillows and curling up on it, snoring rather loudly for such a small creature.

The noise carried over into -

- a marble rolling down the wooden floor of the furthest hall in the west wing, Raven giggling madly as she trounced him for the third time in a row. He laughed out loud; physical activities weren’t his strong suit, although he knew that in a few years he’d develop rather more coordination. Raven, however, was incredibly graceful, especially in her natural blue skin.

It had taken a lot of gentle persuading to get her to wear clothes, mostly based on the fact that it made it easier for him to slot her into the minds of the rest of the household, Mother especially. Also, it was odd seeing her naked: girls weren’t supposed to be naked, especially one’s sister. And she could have any kind of clothes she wanted, now. In fact, he intended to see to it that she’d never want for anything again.

It was odd to love someone so fiercely and, for once, have the emotion returned. It made him giddy. He actually felt like a child for the first time in his life.

Raven looked at him, slid her eyes to one of the portraits on the wall, and grinned widely. Her pretty blue smile was his favorite sight, and this one heralded the start of their favorite game, her taking the appearance of some ancient ancestor or a character from one of their books and Charles trying to trick her out of the adopted persona.

This one was a courtly lady from the Elizabethan era, someone from Father’s side, whose gown even in the paintings was pale blue but looked far better when Raven wore it with such glee. She didn’t even bother pretending this time, no stilted language or pretty manners, but hiked up her skirts over her dainty slippers and ran down the hall, shrieking with glee, projecting an image of the gardens into his mind. He made sure that everyone else was certain that they had pressing business deep inside the mansion and pelted after her, laughing. They’d take lunch in the flower gardens today, perhaps, and nap under the cypresses afterwards, and then maybe he’d teach her how to play chess.

The day stretched before him, golden and eternal, full of a happiness he’d never hoped to see in his own house.

Erik didn’t wake this time, merely rolled over and murmured into his pillow, mouth curving into a smile as the dream continued. It was the last peaceful one that he would have in Charles’s room for months.

***

Mother, may I go and swim?
Yes, my darling daughter –
Hang your clothes on yonder limb,
But don’t go near the water.
Wallace Tripp

The entertainment for the last week of January was the enmity between Raven and Alex finally coming to a head. Erik had known the event was on its way for a while, but had not known what form it would finally take, nor how awful it would be.

Erik could hear shouting from his office, and feet thundering past on their way to the noise. He rose from behind his desk – no, Charles’s desk, no matter who was sitting at it – and quickly followed the noise, more than happy to leave the stack of painful essays on Robert Frost’s A Further Range behind him.

Raven and Alex were facing off at either end of the east patio, Alex scarlet with rage and Raven screaming like a fishwife.

“-hypocrite! This place isn’t a school, it’s a nature preserve, somewhere to stick everyone who’s different so that the normals don’t have to look at them!”

Azazael had his hands on Raven’s shoulders and his tail wrapped protectively around her ankle. He murmured something, trying to placate her, but she didn’t back down.

Alex snarled, a noise that sounded more like Hank than himself. “You don’t know a goddamn thing, this place is important, what we teach here is necessary-”

Raven interrupted him. “Necessary for whom? Necessary for the children, to be taught to be ashamed of what they are, that they need to hide their true form all the time? Or necessary for the timid little normals?” She snorted and curled her lip at him. “It’s easy for you to talk about control. You don’t have to hide or worry about slipping up, you can always pass.”

Alex’s face went alarmingly blank. “Passing? Me? Go to Hell. Did you hit your head and forget where Erik and your brother found me? Did you forget what I did to get there?”

Hank, standing behind him, reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Alex, I think that’s enough, I think you made your point.” Alex shrugged it off sharply, his eyes never leaving Raven. “No. I don’t think I did. But I’m going to.”

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and seemed to relax a little. When he lifted his lids again a moment later, his eyes were glowing red.

Alex began to walk towards Raven across the patio, moving slowly. With every step, loops of brilliant red plasma appeared, slowly orbiting him in rings around his entire body, his wrists and fingers, even floating above his head like some kind of infernal halo. The cold flagstones cracked under his feet, and the remnants of the last snowstorm exploded in clouds of steam as he walked by.

He stopped just far enough away from her that she could obviously feel the plasma’s heat, but not get hurt. She didn’t flinch away. When he began to speak again, his voice was shaking, getting louder as he continued.

“You see this? This is what I look like when I’m not hiding. I sear the ground I walk on, I burn people as they walk past. Scotty? Anything he looks at burns or explodes or gets sliced in half; the only thing that makes him able to play with his friends without killing them is his glasses. I’m the only person his eyes don’t hurt, and that’s because I’m made of the same sort of shit he is.” The plasma rings pulsed, a flare of light giving away Alex’s anger. “And what about Sean, huh? You think he’d speak normally all the time if he didn’t work at it? No – he’d break glass and shatter eardrums.”

Raven opened her mouth to reply, her expression shifting into something difficult to read, but Alex was on a roll. He waved his hand to cut her off, and an errant small plasma ring shot out and neatly sliced the top off an ornamental urn. Erik felt for all the metal he could and prepared to pull it forward. Things were rapidly heading towards disaster.

“It’s not about hiding, you dumb fuck; it’s about self-control so that you don’t hurt other people.” He was nearly screaming now, plasma blazing so brightly that it hurt to look at. “Are you telling me you’re too goddamn good to care about that? Because if you are, then you can get the fuck out, because I don’t want you around any of the kids, least of all mine!” Raven looked like she’d like nothing better than to slap him, her hand lifted but blocked by the plasma halos.

Erik stepped forward at that point and roared “ENOUGH! Enough of this! Have you two no shame, fighting this way?” He snarled at both of them, Alex still ringed in crimson, his eyes glowing like coals; Raven shaking with rage, skin rippling, her fists clenched. “Both of you are wrong. Alex, there should be no lines drawn against our people in society – believe me, I have had to live in such a world, as well you know. None of us should have to hide who and what we are, no more than Darwin should have had to go to a different school from you as a child!” Alex flinched; Erik had obviously struck a nerve with that memory.

“Raven.” Erik’s voice had gone quiet, and she looked afraid of what he was going to say. “Surely you, of all people, would understand how important it is to be able to control your mutation. Did you never get confused, matching the wrong voice with the wrong face? Did Charles never have nightmares that he broadcast to the whole house?”

He thought she would accept his words with her usual aplomb, or perhaps present the sort of clever counter-argument he’d come to expect. Instead, Raven burst into violent, hysterical tears. Azazael wrapped his arms around her middle, holding her up as she sobbed and gasped, his face drawn and eyes closed.

Looking at the two of them, clinging to each other, Erik had a horrible premonition. “How long? And when did you know?”

Azazael answered for them both. “About two months along, and she made Doctor McCoy test her a month ago. I wished to speak to you about it, but she wanted to keep her pregnancy a secret.”

Erik was unaccountably hurt, and not just because the two of them had been going at it for months longer than he’d thought. “Raven, why would you do that?”

She answered, choking on her words. “Because I’m scared.” The look on his face must have been something terrible, because she rolled her eyes at him and made a watery little laugh. “I’m not scared of you, idiot; I’m scared for my baby.” She gestured to Azazael, who had stepped back with only one hand on her shoulder but had his tail wrapped around her waist protectively.

“Look at the two of us. Maybe my child will be able to shapeshift; maybe not. What is it going to look like? Purple? Tail or no? How many fingers, how many toes?” She sighed wearily. “For all that the government hasn’t come after us yet, we all know that it’ll happen eventually. And they’d love to get their hands on a child that’s the offspring of two mutants, especially ones that look like Azazael and me.”

Her lips curled back in a snarl and she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, roughly. “And that’s not the least of it. If it was just my baby, it would be easy. But I can’t go around in my own form, my real skin, without causing a panic, and Azazael? God, it’s worse for him. We will never get to go out in public as a family. And what if we go somewhere that’s segregated? Do I count as colored or not? I’m certainly not white…” She trailed off with a slight whine, the sound of too many concerns to voice.

Alex cocked his head, regarding her very carefully, and then sighed, the plasma rings fading away. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, looking sad and a little tired. “Look. You’ve gotta know that nobody here is gonna let anything happen to your kid. We’re your family, for fuck’s sake, and your kid’s too. And I really could give less of a shit what you look like, as long as you remember to wear clothes around Scotty.”

Raven snuffled into his shoulder and wiped her eyes on his shirt, smiling a little. “You’re an asshole, but a well meaning one. Thank you, Alex. You…you really don’t know how much it means to hear that.” Hank, standing closer behind Alex now that the rings had dissipated, looked vaguely uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Alex shrugged and used his fingertips to wipe the last of her tears off of her cheeks. “The Professor and I talked a lot about you while you were gone. He made me promise that I’d kinda look out for you and shit if anything happened to him or Erik.” He grinned brilliantly. “And on that note, I have to take Azazael aside and ask him what his intentions are. Or possibly cut off his tail and stick it up his ass, either one.” Azazael snorted and clapped him on the shoulder, making the younger man wince.

Raven pinched Alex on the side, and Erik let out a quiet breath of relief. Too soon, it seemed; Angel stepped forward from where she’d been leaning against the wall, listening to the whole thing, and snapped, “Is that it, Mystique? Are you just gonna cave like that, let them stuff you into the little box they think is right?”

Raven frowned at her, still wiping away the last of her tears. “No, Angel, it’s not like that at all. They’re with us, can’t you see it? We’re safe here, and that gives us a base to work from.”

Angel snarled and tossed her hair, wings fluttering with agitation. “You always were spoilt. Poor little Raven, whining about how hard it was to be rich and pretty and have a brother who doted on her. You’ve never had to work for anything.”

Raven hissed, darted forward, and struck her, nails leaving fine lines of blood across the other woman’s face. Angel jerked back and spat a fireball directly at her, which only missed due to Azazael teleporting Raven ten feet away.

Erik stepped forward, thinking to keep Angel from causing any more damage, but she spread her wings wide and took off, hovering over their heads. He called up to her, not knowing what good it would do. “Angel! Don’t turn your back on your own kind!”

Angel shrieked back down at him, “You’re not listening! You’re all mutants, but none of you are my kind!” She spat another fireball at his feet, and he leapt back just in time. Her face, usually so pretty, was contorted with rage. “You’ll regret staying and playing house, Magneto, and I won’t be there to bail you out.” Her voice lowered. “You of all people should know that power only belongs to people who are strong enough to reach out and take it for themselves.”

Fury ripped through him, and the gutters ripped free of the back of the house and snaked towards her. She darted up out of their reach, and shouted, “Remember what I told you! The future only belongs to those willing to reach out and take it! Remember me when it happens, and you get left behind!” With that, she soared away over the treetops and out of their sight, apparently gone for good.

Erik, breathing harder than he should have been, reattached the gutters to the house with a thought – and the copper from the top of the roof, and the weathervane, and repaired the wires that he’d inadvertently severed. Apparently he’d been angrier than he’d thought.

Raven closed her eyes and hissed, “Good riddance. I’ve never trusted that bitch. She was the only one who saw what Shaw was at the time he recruited her, and she went with him anyway. I think she was even making her own alliances behind his back. She wouldn’t have left unless she had somewhere else to go.”

Azazael said nothing but nodded, his expression pensive, his tail lashing. “I, myself, have far too much blood on my hands, but did not know his intentions until it was too late. She knew everything. In some ways, she reminds me rather horribly of him.” He turned and looked directly at Erik, his expression cold with bitter memories. “Someone like them has no business around children.”

Hank didn’t look at any of them, peering over the trees in the direction where Angel had flown. “Yes…but I can’t help thinking that she had a point. Of all of us, the younger ones of us, she had it the hardest. Maybe she doesn’t think she has any other options.”

Alex wrapped an arm around Hank’s waist and picked up Scotty with the other. “You’re a good guy, Hank, but I think she had plenty of choices. She wasn’t the only one who grew up poor, after all.” He raised his voice and addressed everyone who was still outside. “Come on, people, show’s over. Good thing Miss Angel wasn’t teaching any courses, finding a substitute would be really hard.” A few of the younger students giggled, but those who had some understanding of what had just happened stayed somber. Janos shook his head, his expression sad, and herded the rest of the children inside.

Jean was the last one outside, gripping the stone wall with white knuckled hands, staring out at the garden where Angel had taken off with a blank face. Erik touched her shoulder to rouse her, she spoke in a vague and prophetic voice, “Some people are never satisfied. Someone was always going to be the bad guy.” She turned to look at Erik, a growing horror spreading across her face, and whispered, “Once, it could have been you.”

Erik’s eyebrows shot up his forehead in surprise. Jean whimpered, “I’m sorry, sorry, sometimes I can’t help it,” spun around, and ran up to her room.

The sky had clouded up as night gathered, and the clouds were low and dark. The garden was very quiet and the air smelled of snow. Erik leaned against the low stone wall and tried to breathe evenly. He had the uncanny sensation that he’d just escaped execution.

***

All of the children went to bed early that night without complaint. Everyone was still feeling raw from the fight, and edgy about Angel leaving.

Erik wondered at the possibility of her taking over one of Shaw’s old fiefdoms. He’d never known what had happened to the Hellfire Club, and now suspected that it would soon have a new mistress. Someone named Angel running the place would certainly titillate its usual patrons.

He’d have to keep his ear to the ground. She had a grudge.

Mme. Gagnon had made up a supper tray for him and Raven and brought it to the study, then left without any of her usual chatter. As a normal in a household of mutants, this afternoon must have been even more discomfiting to her.

He poured himself a cup of tea and watched as Raven, still blue and now swaddled in a thick white robe, toyed with a plate of fruit and cheese.

Erik tried to make topical conversation. “You do know that you have a different set of nutritional requirements now that you are to be a mother. I believe that there are supplements you should be taking.”

Raven wasn’t having any of it. “How did you know?”

“What?”

She looked at him with alarming directness. “What you said outside, about me mixing up faces and voices when I was young, and about Charles’ nightmares. He would have let me know if he was planning on telling you, and he didn’t, so how do you know?”

Erik put his teacup down on the saucer, the china rattling quietly. “I had a dream last night that did not belong to me. One of your brother’s, I surmise. The two of you were playing marbles, and you had taken the face of a seventeenth-century courtly lady in a blue dress. The two of you spent the rest of that day in the gardens, because Charles had had bad dreams the night before and projected them to the entire mansion.”

Raven sat back in her chair, a slow smile creeping across her face. “I’d forgotten about that, about how it was. There were about five years like that, and I couldn’t get enough.” She looked back at Erik, her eyes sparkling. “I’d been on my own for two years, stealing and hiding and living like an animal, and this place? It was like something out of a fantasy or a fairytale.”

“And what about Charles?”

She laughed a little, lowly. “He looked at me and saw a person. He thought I was wonderful, a miracle, and no matter what face I took when we played he always told me my own was the prettiest.”

Erik listened intently, something acid clenching deep in his belly. “I can’t imagine you ever wanting to give that up.”

She sighed, her smile slipping a little. “Things…things happened. That time was wonderful, but growing up got in the way.” Her eyes were soft as she looked into the fire. “He was still the boy I met in the kitchen that night, though. He really doesn’t change much.”

“From your talk, all he did was make you hide, force you to change.” Erik leaned back sharply, his mouth running seemingly without his control. “If only my childhood had been as oppressive as yours.”

Raven’s lips thinned. “That hurt. I know I deserved it, but that was harsh even for you, Erik. And my darling brother could be quite the manipulative bastard when he wanted to be. He’d been bred for it, and the telepathy was just another one of his tools.”

Erik didn’t know how to tell Raven he was sorry for being jealous.
He wished, badly, that she could know what he was thinking.

The rest of the food on the supper tray went uneaten, and the tea in its silver pot gradually grew cold. The two of them sat in silence, staring into the fire as snow fell and the winter wind whistled in the twilight.

***

Dear Charles,

It is winter, and I resent a great many things. I resent never getting to know my mother beyond the blind worship of childhood. I resent that the last I saw of my father was him weeping. I resent the mud, and the cold, and the torment, and the hatred that my fellow prisoners held for me because I was inside and got slightly more food than they did, although the price was far higher.

I resent that many of the people who took my life from me still live. I resent that Shaw turned me into a beast, into something less than a man, and that I let him. I resent that it took so long, so very long to kill him, that it wasn’t the public shame that he deserved, and that you tried to make me feel guilty about it almost immediately afterwards. I resent that you didn’t come away with me, away from everything but a purity of rage and purpose, even when I begged you to do so. I resent the months of your absence from my life and my mind.

It seems to me lately that my life is little more than one long litany of resentments. I’m not sure what to do about that. I know that it is no way for a man to live, but I know no other life than this one. If you were awake, you could give me an idea, an option, an argument, but still you sleep.

I resent you for that.

Your Erik

***

It is three in the morning, all silent at the Xavier mansion, and -

Mother has something on her mind. This worries him.

He still isn’t reading her – he doesn’t even want to, now that he has the bond with Raven – but he’s caught drifts from her mind for the past month, cotton candy pink and roses and a waft of excitement that veiled itself as happiness. It keeps her away, but that’s not a problem anymore, not now that he has a sister.

The night she brings Kurt Marco home, everything changes, and he doesn’t even have time to mourn the shards of his former life.

Kurt is all smiles and nice suits and sweet words, but Raven has instincts built in from sleeping rough for years and hides behind him, feigning shyness when what she really feels is dread.

He is able to look into Kurt’s head there, at dinner, and is disgusted. He feels nothing more than vague ridicule for Mother and her infatuation, merely wants access to her funds and, even worse, Father’s research, something that was left to him. That is his, and he will fight for it. Kurt he loathes, but Kurt he can take.

It’s Kurt’s son, Cain, who frightens him. He is obviously a bully; the slabs of muscle, ill manners, and vacant face with sly little eyes easily bespeak that. Cain is also two years older than him, and the other boy’s mind is filled with things that make him want to scream. Pain and blood and panic and the pleasure that comes with causing them well to the surface, and detailed plans of how to cause them in him without Mother noticing.

Cain’s thoughts about Raven are too horrible to dwell on, and he feels ill just looking at the surface of them. Cain sees his sister’s Company Face, the gold ringlets and peach skin, and instead of thinking compliments imagines obscenity after indignity that he intends to visit upon her.

He knows that Cain cannot be stopped, not without giving himself away, and not without compromising every principle that he’s carefully constructed for himself to live by out of fragments of literature and philosophy and theory all the way back to Antiquity, the Greek and Latin phrases dripping from his sister’s azure lips in an effortless song that he can never himself manage. (He can only speak living languages, possibly another function of his gift.)

There is no choice. Raven must be safe, no matter the cost, and if that means a dormitory at Miss Porter’s rather than by his side, it is a small price to pay.

He’s brought out of his plans by another whisper from Cain’s mind, another insult to visit upon his sister – except Cain is thinking about blood and pain as well, and he’s in that fantasy too, and it’s horrible and Mother is smiling and all he wants to do is make them all go away and leave him and Raven in peace -

Erik jerked awake, panting with apprehension. How foul, to have to see inside a mind like that. And Charles had had to live with that? Here, in this house?

Of all the brutalities visited against him in Auschwitz, Erik had never had to endure being raped, or even the threat thereof; he was too valuable to be damaged in that fashion. Now, for all the overt and apparent comforts that the Xavier mansion offered, he was beginning to wonder if Charles’s youth had actually been as easy as he’d thought. If anyone knew the perversions that could be hidden under an elegant façade, it should have been Erik.

He jumped slightly as a timid knock rattled his door. Trying to rid himself of the last chills from sleep, he pulled on his dressing gown – a rather nicer one, now that Alex had managed to get rid of his old one in a highly suspicious “training accident” – and opened the door with a wave of his hand.

Jean stood on the other side in her little white robe and frilly nightie, her red hair mussed and a very confused expression on her face.

“Herr Lehnsherr? Who’s Darwin?”

Erik blinked a couple of times, still coming up out of the dream. “I assume that you do not mean the scientist, correct?”

She bit her lip and shook her head. “No, I know who he is. Only there’s someone named Darwin naked on the back lawn, well, he’s mostly there, and he wanted me to tell you that adapting is tough and could you please bring a sandwich and some clothes?”

Erik leaped off the bed and scooped Jean up – she squeaked in surprise, at eleven she should have been far too big to carry – and pelted down the hallway, stopping only to pound a fist on Alex’s door and bellow “Darwin adapted, lawn, bring pants” before thundering down the stairs and bursting out into the garden, the little telepath still in his arms.

Darwin was standing behind a strategically placed rhododendron, looking a little shaky but otherwise in one piece. He smiled brilliantly when Erik skidded to a stop in front of him, eyes wide and jaw gaping. “Hey, Erik. Nice school. The little lady there told me we whacked Shaw, the Prof’s asleep, and you went nuts for a year. Now go get Alex so I can punch him real good.”

Erik started to laugh, helplessly, so hard that he had to sit down on a snow bank. Jean lifted her head from where it was buried in his neck and said indignantly, “You can’t hit Scotty’s dad! That’s not nice! And it wasn’t his fault anyway, you know it!”

Darwin’s eyebrows rose. “Alex has a kid? Jesus, what the hell have you crazy people been up to?”

Hank, who had come up from the other end of the patio, snickered. “Rather a lot. We’ll fill you in over some food.” He held up one massive blue paw with a set of oatmeal-grey sweats and a pair of tennis shoes dangling by their laces. “Alex is wisely staying out of your reach and scraping something together in the kitchen. Seeing as the whole house is awake thanks to your little visitation, everyone is going to be stuffed into the dining room and attempting to fill you in all at once.”

Darwin’s eyes were very wide as he looked Hank up and down, the other man regarding him with a mild gaze. “Uh. Forgot to shave today, Hank?”

Erik gasped through his laughter, trying to calm down, and Jean made a concerned noise in the back of her throat, soft little hands wiping the tears of mirth off his cheeks. Hank snickered as Darwin quickly shrugged into the sweats. “Again, part of a long story. Let’s get you and Erik inside – I’m not sure which one of you is more in shock. Jean, sweetie, is Herr Lehnsherr going to be able to walk on his own?”

Erik felt a feather-light, inquisitive brush against his mind, and Jean turned to the other men and nodded. “He’s okay now. We’ll be in in a minute, you two go on ahead. I can hear how excited everyone is, and I need to block them out a little before I come in.”

Hank nodded and guided Darwin in with one massive blue paw on his shoulder, the other man still spouting off a litany of questions as he walked. “So, wait, is that little girl as strong as Charles? Does this whole place belong to him? Just how many of us are there, anyway?”

Erik took a few deep breaths and shifted, his robe doing little to protect him from the cold of the snow bank now that the heat of hilarity had faded. Jean shivered a little and curled closer to him, resting her small head on his shoulder. “I didn’t know that you and the Professor had your minds tied together.”

Erik tilted his head and looked at her in surprise. “Jean, what are you talking about?”

She frowned a little, brow wrinkling, and wiggled her fingers in an oddly familiar gesture. “I mean, you have a bond going with him. When he let me see in his mind the first time, I could see it there too, covering where the one he had with Miss Raven used to be. I didn’t know that the one you had with him was still whole, but it makes a lot of sense.”

Her statement had been quite final, but Erik was still rather perplexed. A link to Charles’s mind would go a long way towards explaining the dreams, but it should not have been able to survive with the interference of the helmet.

It was too much to try and think about now, though, in the cold of the winter gardens, especially with the joy of Darwin’s return and the happiness of the household so palpable that even he could feel it seeping through his skin.

Erik hefted Jean, her arms wrapping around his neck. Together, they headed up across the snow and ice to where the lights blazed in the house, laughter and noise seeping out into the cold night air.

***

Chapter Three

When Noah loaded the ark as bidden,
A few wily creatures stayed well hidden.
And that is why you will never see
The Vooner, the Sploke, or the Gabbidee.
R. Beasley

 

Westchester, Xavier School for Exceptional Youth. Early February, mid-afternoon. Another ice storm – Raven hates those.

Getting Jean interested in any form of literature, especially in the middle of winter when the whole school was bored and fretful, had been akin to teaching a pig to sing. Specifically, it wasted one’s time, and it annoyed the pig.

Jean didn’t think of herself as a pig, but it was something her father always said in impossible situations, and it seemed applicable.

She’d tried to beg Herr Lehnsherr for additional math courses, the equations and their purity of purpose ringing through her head in a way that nothing else would. He acquiesced, only demanding in return that she read, in private tutelage, at least five of the books that he personally considered indispensable in Western society.

She hadn’t known what she was getting into. Being eleven would have convinced anybody else to go easy on her; in Herr Lehnsherr’s case, knowing how young she was and how brilliant conspired to make him expect even more of her. It was worse than with the Professor, too: he’d just been disappointed when she failed to live up to a task. With Herr Lehnsherr, she was faced with genuine incomprehension, as if he truly could not understand why she would fail at any task she was given. It was infuriating, but it did make her work far harder to please him.

There were bits of the books she wasn’t supposed to read, mostly the ones about sex and blood. Herr Lehnsherr thought she was too young for them, in spite of the fact that he’d seen horrible things when he was her age. She read them anyway. Being a telepath meant that literature didn’t hold a whole lot of surprises as compared to the human mind. Besides, he’d given her tough things to read because he knew she could do it; comprehension would come along with the words. Eventually.

Reading a work based on The Ring of the Neibelung libretto had been bad enough, all full of murder and blood and petty, vengeful gods, but it hadn’t prepared her for Brontë. Clawing her way through Wuthering Heights was less of a chore and more torment than anything else. The characters made no sense; nobody had any reasonable motivation for their actions, and Heathcliff was a complete jerk. Cathy wasn’t far off, either.

She began to see what he was getting at with Gilgamesh, and she was pretty sure she’d figured out his reasoning for the book list by the time she finished The Once and Future King (she’ll never admit that she wept her way through the last chapter). A Town Like Alice, though, broke the pattern.

All the other books had been about loss, she understood that, and all of the loss came from human greed. Sometimes whole families were killed, sometimes people lost their partners, and sometimes the idealist who lived at the center of the tale lost absolutely everything, but it all came down to pride, either on the part of the heroes or the villains, or, most often, both.

But the last book – Jean hadn’t finished it yet, but it didn’t fit the pattern. Nothing awful had happened, the heroine (whose name was suspiciously familiar) hadn’t suddenly lost her livelihood or her love, and nobody was faulting her for trying to build something better out of the dust and her own terrible memories, as well as those of the drover she returned to try and find.

It didn’t fit with the others, so far. But then again, maybe it wasn’t supposed to. Four books about great people trying to do great things and coming to ruin through pride, and one about someone small building something wonderful out of nothing. Possibility.

She paused in the middle of the essay she was writing, wrinkling her brow and scratching the tip of her nose with her pen. Herr Lehnsherr was steadily working his way through a pile of papers, not grumbling audibly but still not pleased (imbecilic accreditation requirements, she picked up). His suit was immaculate as always, as though he were wearing a uniform or armor, and clouds of staples, paperclips, pen nibs, and other small metallic items were swirling and eddying across the surface of his desk in nonsensical patterns, like those formed by waves on the beach.

Technically it was still the Professor’s desk, Jean supposed, but so much of Erik’s personality was there and a part of it that she couldn’t see him ever completely leaving it. They’d just have to share when the Professor woke up again, one of them writing when the other one was in class. Sharing hadn’t been much of a problem for them in the time they’d known each other except for that one time, from what she knew.

His eyes snapped up to meet hers, suddenly, and she jumped a little as she felt his awareness of his surroundings expand very rapidly, something that nobody else was quite able to do. Seeing her flinch, he lowered his eyes with every appearance of calm, except for how she could feel the edges of his mind curling in on themselves in an unpleasant, chastising manner.

That tiny bit of pain from him prompted her to look at him again and speak impulsively. “Don’t worry, I’m not scared of you. Neither are the others anymore, not now that I’ve explained to them.”

Herr Lehnsherr cocked his head and regarded her with what looked like curiosity. “What do you mean by that, precisely?”

Jean shrugged and let her hair fall across her face – even though there was no malice in his gaze, it was on occasion a little too intense, like a lot of things he did. She knew that it was part of what the Professor liked about him, no masks, no hiding. “When I first met him, I wanted to know what the other mutants were like, and the Professor showed me some of his memories of you. Nothing big, just some of the things you did together, but I got a lot of emotions from him at the same time, because they were tied into the memories.” She licked her lips and paused for a minute. The intently neutral expression that Herr Lehnsherr was wearing told her that she should phrase her next words carefully, if she didn’t want to hurt him.

“So, a little while ago, some of the other kids wanted to know what I thought of you and if you were okay. I just told them what I knew from the Professor, that you were friends and you argued because you had different ideas, but everyone does that and you’re here now so it’s okay.”

She hadn’t lied; she hadn’t felt a reason to do so. When she saw his face change, his expression soften, and felt the barest edge of his thoughts, she was glad she hadn’t. Herr Lehnsherr looked like a man who could use all the good news he could get.

***

My dear Charles,

I have never pretended to understand the fascination that Western society has with the feast day of an obscure Eastern saint who had a fetish for marrying peasant couples. Moreover, I don’t see what red construction paper and pink glitter has to do with any of it. Putti, those foolish little winged things that people call Cupids, are a pagan concept left over from Ancient Greece, and chocolates are only an excuse for the small ones to have far too much sugar before bedtime.

That being said, the school has gone mad for the whole mess. The boys are skulking around in fear and comparing notes on what to get for whom and who to avoid at all costs, and the girls have turned into giggling messes that run down the halls trailing bits of lace and getting glitter into the spaces between the floorboards. Mme. Gagnon is all aflutter, and typically French about the whole thing – the meal she’s planned will quite possibly break the table.

I am loath to admit it, especially in light of my statements above, but I find myself looking forward to it. Their excitement is wearing off on me, and I find it almost comfortable. Jean says I look less like a shark when I smile these days, and Ororo has worked a promise out of me to wear a pink shirt and a flower in my lapel on the day in question. You’d be quite proud of how she did it, my friend - while she talks to me, and will listen to any text that I pick, I’ve had trouble getting her to read on her own or speak to her peers in more than short phrases. Having promised her her choice of rewards for good behavior, she promptly picked up a copy of Now We Are Six and carefully read “King John’s Christmas” aloud in front of a patient Alex and fascinated Scott.

Although after considering the matter, it seems as though I have been quite handily played. If so, well done for her, and better done for me; all I have to do is wear a flower, but she has overcome one more of her hurdles.

At least one thing has gone well for me. I’ll make sure that Janos cuts an extra blossom for your bedside.

Happy Valentines’ Day,

Erik.

***

Senator Warren Worthington II made it explicitly clear that his son was special. He had gone on at great length about the intellect, value, and overall unique nature of Warren Worthington III, with the boy’s mother nodding at every word and occasionally interjecting a word of her own to bolster the Senator’s assessment.

Warren Worthington III, a small boy in a heavy overcoat, looked about as bored and frustrated as Erik himself felt, but was not yet as good at hiding it. The interview that his parents set up for the Xavier School had taken most of the day, far longer than expected, with the family insisting on seeing every nook and cranny and textbook available. Azazael had very carefully made himself scarce, and Hank didn’t even come out of his lab for breakfast, so everything was quiet on that particular front, but Erik was still on edge.

Word had not yet gotten out that this institution catered specifically to mutants, and as such part of Erik’s duties was fielding calls from wealthy families who wanted a northern prep-school education for their precious darlings. Some of them could be fended off with a genteel phone call or a carefully worded letter, but there were always a few who insisted on an interview and tour. Most of that latter group could be put off by the alarmingly strict curriculum, but not the Worthingtons.

Erik got the feeling that they were trying to tell him something, in the oblique manner that Americans used when they were trying to broach an uncomfortable subject. He’d be damned if he could tell what it was, though.

Sitting down gratefully behind his desk (and carefully keeping any of the detritus from floating), Erik nodded at Mme. Gagnon as she set out the luncheon table at the far end of the study with a look that told him that if any more of the teaspoons got warped due to his distraction, there would be hell to pay.

Warren sat in the chair in front of the desk, still wrapped in his overcoat, shoulders hunched with a combination of misery and boredom. His mother had moved a chair to sit next to him and was very carefully trying not to wring her hands, although the way she toyed with her gloves was a definite indicator of her mood. Her husband loomed behind her, still going on about his special boy to a degree that Erik had by now tuned out as he sat quietly and groped for a way to get them all the hell out of the school.

Erik was about to take the opportunity to speak when, in a fit of exquisite timing that nobody would let him forget about for years, Hank McCoy walked in the door without knocking, waving a pawful of papers. “Hi, Erik, I know I didn’t make it in to breakfast but I’ve been up all night working on the new designs for Cerebro and I-”

He froze when he saw the three strangers in the room, all looking at him with very wide eyes. Erik was trying to figure out just how much damage control he was going to have to do when Mrs. Worthington said, “Oh, thank God, thank God!” and burst into tears.

Senator Worthington, without missing a beat, grabbed Hank’s empty hand and wrung it vigorously, an enthusiastic grin on his face. “A pleasure to meet you, young man, a pleasure and an honor! I’m Senator Warren Worthington II, and you are?”

Hank tried delicately to get his hand back and failed. “Erm, Doctor Henry McCoy? I teach math and the hard sciences here at the school?”

The Senator laughed happily. “Good man! I see you’re working on a project here; those blueprints look incredibly complicated. You are obviously a man of learning and distinction.” He turned and nodded at Erik, who was still sitting behind his desk and attempting to process the whole event. “I’m pleased to see that your school is able to attract staff of such high caliber. Evidently you can support your demanding curriculum.”

Mrs. Worthington had more or less calmed down, snuffling into her handkerchief. Erik leaned forward and spoke to her as gently as he could manage. “Forgive my inquiry, but you and your husband seem to be taking Doctor McCoy’s presence with great aplomb. I would have expected you to be nonplussed, at the very least.”

Her husband overheard and turned back towards Erik and his family, leaving Hank to shuffle through his papers and wave Azazael in through the door when the other mutant stuck his head around the corner, curious.

“We’re no strangers to the mutation issue in our family, Herr Lehnsherr; it’s part of why we came here in the first place.” The Senator turned and spoke gently to his son. “Go ahead and take off your overcoat, Warren, and show the headmaster what you can do.”

Looking rather put upon and not a little nervous, Warren Worthington III shrugged out of the heavy garment, leaving him in a much more suitable white oxford cloth shirt. With a little sigh of relief, he stretched out his arms, neck, and the two large, swan-white wings extending from between his shoulder blades. Azazael made an interested noise, and Hank grabbed for a pen and started making notes, muttering something about bone densities and wingspan-to-height ratios.

Erik leaned back in his desk chair, blinking in surprise. “It must have been extremely difficult to conceal such a mutation, especially considering your position.”

The Senator nodded, looking grim. “It was, and it was hard on all of us, especially Warren. I had to cut contact with my brother, in fact, once he suggested that my boy might benefit from a visit to a few, well.”

Warren himself spoke up for the first time, looking at his feet and sounding sad. “Doctors, Dad. Uncle Keith wanted you to take me to some doctors who’d cut the wings off, or take me to a government clinic where they’d try and cure me.”

Erik rested his hand on his chin, thinking. A handful of pen nibs began to spin idly around his blotter, catching the eye of the young mutant in front of him, who looked fascinated and intrigued and not at all afraid. “And I suppose you will tell me that you did not once consider your brother’s offer?”

Senator Worthington looked appalled. “The hell I would! Did you truly think we’d just hand our son over to strangers? Over something as trivial as this?”

Erik folded his hands and looked the Senator dead in the eye. “Others have. Others do.” He looked out the window where a few of the students could be seen on the lawn, watched over by Alex and Janos. “Indeed, others have done worse.”

The Senator drew himself up to his full height and stuck his chin out. “Others may have, but they were not Worthingtons.” Erik couldn’t argue with that. The Senator continued, spine straight.

“Besides, look at him and tell me that those won’t be an advantage? In the armed services, he’d be a tactical miracle; in the medical profession, he’d have the best bedside manner on the planet without even having to open his mouth.” He tilted his head and looked appraisingly at Erik. “I’m glad you asked, though. It shows me that you’re serious about this institution, and put the safety of the children first.”

Erik’s response was immediate and instinctual. “Always. No child should have to grow up afraid of what they are, or of what others will do to them for being different.”

The Senator’s gaze didn’t waver, but Erik could see him sifting through the information he’d gathered – accent, possible date of birth, reports from police services around the world. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, it sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience.”

Erik only nodded, throat temporarily too tight to speak. The Senator glanced at the inside of Erik’s left arm, covered by a shirt and a suit jacket, but didn’t say anything. They were both thinking the same thing.

Mrs. Worthington, either missing or ignoring the silent conclusion to their conversation, reached over and stroked her son’s head. “I always knew he was my angel, but when he grew the wings, I knew that it was God confirming what I’d always thought.” She smiled, tears in her eyes. Erik was, much to his surprise, very deeply moved. Warren Worthington III turned scarlet with embarrassment and buried his face in his hands.

In a flash of insight, Erik could see how things needed to go. Another mutant boy with his mother, in the office of an older and far more powerful man. It needed to be Warren’s choice, and no one else’s.

He could do this. For someone, this could go right. It was an invigorating thought.

Erik chuckled slightly and floated the silver tea tray across the room to rest in midair in front of the family. Senator Worthington raised an eyebrow, and his wife gasped in delight. Hank leaned back in his chair and muttered, “Show off,” under his breath, smiling.

Keeping the tea tray in place, Erik got up and walked across to it as the pot and creamer poured themselves into a cup and the sugar tongs neatly flipped in a single cube with a small splash. Reaching out, he lifted up the cup, took a sip, and smiled down at Warren, offering him a jam biscuit as he did so.

The boy took the sweet, his eyes wide, shifting between the busily pouring teapot and Erik’s face. Erik pulled up a chair, sitting in front of him, and offered the boy his own cup. The Senator was eagerly discussing something involving the potential for large explosions with Hank, and Azazael was having a conversation in Latin with Mrs. Worthington that was causing her to blush so hard that their skin tones nearly matched.

Erik gestured around with a sweep of his hand, casually dismissing the tea tray to a nearby table. “So, aside from your parents’ input, what do you think? As you can see, you would hardly be alone here.”

Warren looked at him, excitement written across his features. “Yes, sir. I can see that. And I can’t think of anywhere else I would rather be.”

His mother interrupted at that point. “Well, come now, Warren, you know that Herr Lehnsherr can’t make that decision immediately. After all, the spaces are limited, and the academics are very advanced.”

Erik leaned back in his chair and allowed himself the sort of smile that he rarely did, one that stretched his mouth in a way that should have felt painful but only felt like release. “Madam Worthington, I believe I can safely say that if your son wishes a place here, then there will be one provided for him.”

The boy laughed out loud with happiness, his wings fluttering, and from where he sat in the room Erik could see Jean, Scott, and Ororo peeking around the door for the source of the commotion. He’d let them show Warren on their own tour of the school, in a few minutes.

Senator Warren was pledging his support for endeavors scientific and mutant alike in a way that was only marginally pompous, his wife was planning out loud how to tell all the “horrid, really, just dreadful” women in her Junior League about the prestigious school her son was attending, and the boy in question was paying absolutely no attention to anybody in an effort to fix the way the feathers lay at the top of his left wing.

Erik felt as victorious as if he’d torn down the walls of Jericho with his bare hands and walked into the city, trumpets singing.

***

To give advice I hesitate,
I never interpose.
You’ll never see me dominate,
Or step on others’ toes.
Thus I trust I’ll not seem rude
If I by hints remind you:
There is a bear in search of food
About three feet behind you.
~ R. Beasley

 

Xavier Institute. March. Your names are becoming less creative, but then again, you are terribly busy, my dear. I only hope you continue to have time for me.

Alex was up to something.

In all fairness, Alex was always up to something, but this was rather more of a something than most of his other somethings. Erik winced – even in his head, that didn’t make any sense.

Alex had been spending a considerable amount of his spare time out of the house, tooling around the countryside on a dreadful death trap of a motorcycle that he’d found under a tarp in one of the garages and had sweet-talked Hank into helping him fix. The sweet-talking had been quite literal: Erik had walked in on them in the garage, Alex shirtless and covered in grease with his hands buried in Hank’s mane and his legs wrapped around his waist. He’d flushed scarlet at lunch when Erik had stared pointedly at the bite mark at the join of his neck and shoulder, and Hank had stuttered something about monitoring an experiment and vanished with a plate of sandwiches.

For all that he was happy for them, it rankled a little. Alex seemed to know it, and was apparently trying to make up for Erik’s loneliness as best he could. Unfortunately, he had all the emotional sensitivity and social nuance of a pile driver.

At any rate, something curious was afoot, and Erik was itching to know just what was keeping Alex out of the house, or on the telephone, at all hours of the day and night. It was odd by now for the two of them not to share confidences, which made the secrecy all the more strange.

On a Friday afternoon in mid-March, Alex stuck his head through the door of the study where Erik was tormenting himself by attempting to grade quizzes on basic German grammar. “Hey, boss, you doing anything you can’t put off for a couple of hours?”

Erik rubbed the spot between his eyes and laughed a little. “Absolutely not. Indeed, I think getting away from the atrocities committed against my native tongue might serve to do me some good.”

The younger man grinned, widely. “Great! Come on, put on a suit, we have somewhere interesting to go.” Erik arched a brow, and Alex mirrored his expression and pointed at him. “Really, dress nice. No black turtlenecks or any other hip cat shit.”

Erik didn’t think to ask where they were going until he was busy knotting his tie in the mirror, bright blue silk standing out against the dark charcoal of his jacket. “Is this another one of your recruitment efforts? We will need to be back in time for dinner, you know.”

Alex’s reply was shouted from down the hall. “You’ll see when we get there. Now get a move on, daylight’s wasting and we have a deadline!”

The drive through the countryside was peaceful enough, broken only by Alex tapping his fingers nervously on the wheel. The last time Erik had been in a car for any period of time with someone, it had been Charles, and that memory made him disinclined to speak. Instead, he sat and gazed out the window, watching the brown trees and tired-looking snow banks shoot by along the side of the road.

Shortly after passing the town signs for Mahopac, Alex slowed down and appeared to be looking for a specific address. Erik sat up and began to pay attention, hoping that the location would give him an inkling of what was going on.

The building, when they finally arrived, was small, white, and nondescript, with cars parked out front and people milling about the doors. Erik, having no answer of his own upon getting out of the car, turned to Alex and asked, “Would you care to tell me where we are?”

Alex leaned on the hood of the car and gestured, a self-satisfied expression on his face. “Welcome to Temple Beth Shalom. They’re sort of expecting you.”

Erik’s jaw sagged. “What? How?”

“Please, you act like I haven’t done my research. I looked ‘em up in the phone book, and drove out here last week to vet the place and find out when services were. I mean, it’s not like I know anything about what you people do, but I thought it might be good for you to start doing stuff like this again. So, go on, go over there and say hello. I see Mrs. Cohen, she’s the head of their Hadassah group and I kinda talked you up to her.”

When Erik, frozen with astonishment, failed to move in the direction indicated, Alex shrugged, a mad grin spreading across his features. “Come on, Erik, they’re not gonna eat you. They’re good women. They’re like, I don’t know. The Jewish version of Church ladies.”

Erik must have looked dubious, because Alex shook his head and clucked his tongue. He thrust something in Erik’s direction – a yamakah, apparently crocheted and a little lopsided, but done in an oddly familiar shade of blue. “Here – Raven made you this, and Ororo and Jean did the embroidery. Look, I’ve gone and buttered these women up with stories of,” he waved his hands in the air and pitched his voice lower, “my buddy Erik, yeah, he was in the camps as a kid, real sad, he’s kinda messed up. They’ve eaten it up with a spoon, and I think they have an image of you as some kind of waif who needs food and God and a loving community. You know, all that good Saturday Evening Post shit, except with that candle thing you people do around Christmastime.”

Erik, clutching the yamakah in his hand, glared at Alex and opened his mouth to say something quite probably regrettable, but was accosted by a tiny, elderly lady with steel grey curls and the most enormous pearls he’d ever seen. “Oh, you poor boy, Alex said you haven’t spoken to God since your Mother died! So sad!”

A group of women, obviously her companions, had congregated around him in a sea of excellent mink coats and were murmuring their assent in several languages. One of them, equally small and grey haired, reached up and stroked his arm with a smile on his face. “Well, now, a nice young man like you, and with such a good position at that lovely school, it’ll be wonderful to have you at temple with us. We need new blood.” Another piped up, “Passover is at Esther’s house this year. She’s in Florida right now, she’ll be livid that she missed you actually showing up, so here’s her card and you make sure you go and pay her a call when she gets home or else she’ll be wildly hurt.”

Alex, watching all this, laughed and gunned the engine. “I’ll be back to pick you up in two hours, boss. Try and have fun, okay?” He disappeared down the drive, and Erik was swept into the temple in a haze of expensive perfume, happy chatter, and the sense of an awful lot of gold present everywhere.

Alex was true to his word, reappearing two hours later in the dark of early evening. He’d even had the grace to actually bring a car instead of the motorbike. The ride home was quiet, the younger mutant humming to himself under his breath, and Erik’s head spinning with names and addresses, the cosseting of a large number of elderly women, the grave handshakes of their husbands, and the threads of a language that he’d thought long forgotten.

Westchester and all its inhabitants seemed determined to find everything he’d ever hidden away out of fear or shame and hold it up to the light as a lost treasure. It was a strange experience.

They arrived at the house with the stars all out, and a full moon shedding a cold, blue-white light on the house. All the windows were bright as they both got out of the car, and though the wind still had winter’s bite to it, Erik could hear laughter and smell dinner on the air.

Alex stood a little bit away from him on the gravel drive, head cocked. “So. How was the service? You meet anyone interesting?”

Erik, staring at the door to the house, nodded. “It was nothing like what I remember from my childhood. Though we were well off, we were nowhere near as wealthy as they, and of course by the time I was old enough to remember such things being a Jew in Germany was already perilous. We met in secret, when we could, not in a dedicated temple.” He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “In a way, I think the fact that it was a completely different experience was a good thing for me. For it to have been too familiar would have been unpleasant at best, and disastrous at worst.”

Alex nodded, breath fogging in the cold evening air. “That’s about what I thought. I went looking for the closest place, and I thought the people there seemed nice and it might be good for you.”

Erik turned around. “And you did not think to ask me whether or not I might wish to go?”

The younger man shrugged, not quite looking at him.

Erik sighed and sat down on the front steps of the house, yamakah in his hands. “Alex. I need you to know that a part of me wants to hurt you very, very badly for forcing this on me.”

Alex nodded, no trace of a smile on his face. “Yeah. But it felt good, better than you thought it would, and it helped, didn’t it?”

Erik nodded reluctantly. Alex pressed on. “And you can’t tell me you’d ever have done it on your own, can you?”

Erik laughed a little and looked up at him. “I most certainly would not have.” He felt considerably lighter than he had in a long time, even since the start of the day.

Alex cocked his head, grinning just a little. “So I’d say we’re even, then. You can put in a word with the big guy upstairs for me, right?”

Erik pulled himself to his feet, and giving into an impulse, slung his arm companionably around the younger man’s shoulders. Alex looked shocked. “I thought Janos was already doing that for you?”

Alex shrugged as the two of them walked inside, his warm arm coming around Erik’s back. “Yeah, but I figure it’s better to have as many people backing you as possible. What about you?” He shot Erik a sideways look.

Erik smiled in the dark. “I believe I might be beginning to agree.”

 

***

He can’t escape all the time. It would look suspicious, and above all he must not draw suspicion.

It’s actually a good thing that Raven is so furious at him. With the lack of letters coming into the house and her refusal to visit for the hols, it’s easier to cloud over her memory in Kurt and Cain’s heads. If he wants to know how she’s doing, he can slip into the minds of a few of her classmates without her even knowing he’s there.

For all her hurt and fury, she is safe and learning and content, if not happy, and that is all that truly matters.

He’s able to time it so that Cain will catch him when his father is far enough away to inflict damage, but not so far away that Cain could get away with the sort of offenses he truly desires. Kurt sees no financial benefit to him being injured in any way – indeed, it is a marked disadvantage – and as such stops his son whenever Kurt happens upon one of their little “encounters”.

In a way, Kurt is a merciful man, and he’s happy that there is someone to run a sort of interference. Mother is no good for that. Her drinking has gotten worse, and he fears that the bottle shall soon take her altogether.

What will happen then is anybody’s guess.

Cain is drawing closer, thoughts a morass of pain and domination, seeking pleasure in the most horrible ways possible. He holds out a little longer, though, using the intensity of the thoughts as a sort of proximity alert, getting himself close enough to Kurt that there will be bruises and perhaps a cut, but no more than that, no lost teeth, no more skin exposed than that which already shows –

He shudders as he brushes up against one of the worse thoughts roiling through Cain’s head. He’d thought those could be blocked out, but he had heard them with a particular intensity late one night and had had just enough time to leave his room and run like a man possessed.

He never sleeps in the same room two nights in a row now.

He presses himself into a dark alcove, waiting for the perfect balance of proximity from his stepfather and the man’s son (not his brother, not ever, not ever), and carefully rummages through his mind for something comforting.

The summer day when Mother was in the city for the week and Raven wore the Elizabethan girl all day. Blue, and sunlight, and cold tea, and wind in the trees.

(Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you – but when the leaves are trembling, the wind is passing through – Raven read. He finished it from memory – Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I – but when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by.)

Kurt is closer now. So is Cain, and he has a belt wrapped around one meaty fist.

He closes his eyes, clinging to the shred of that warm memory, and sighs, feeling far older than he should.

Time to get caught again.

Erik shivered awake from the dream to find that he’d unconsciously built something of a fortification around himself in his sleep, probably in response to what he’d been seeing. Through the mass of stacked furniture and assorted bits of metal, he saw Alex standing, arms folded, looking at him with visible concern.

Napping on the couch in his study might be inadvisable for the time being. Not only because of this particular reaction, but because it would be far easier for a grown Nazi hunter to curl into a small, terrified ball in bed, where nobody could see him do it.

Easing his mind back to reality, Erik sent all the furniture back to where it belonged and did his best to sort out the various metal bits hanging around the room. Alex carefully stepped out of the way as two candlesticks rolled down the hall back to the alcoves where they belonged. “Hey, man, you okay?”

Erik rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. What time was it, anyway? He had papers to grade. “Yes, quite all right. Just a dream, nothing more.”

Alex spun one of the Chippendale chairs around and straddled it, directly across from where Erik sat on the couch. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

He didn’t, really, but he began to do just that, spilling out everything about having Charles’s dreams, wondering if it was something he was doing to try and communicate, wondering if he was going mad, everything he’d ever planned to do for his people, for mutantkind, subsumed under essays and exams and the bloody stupid accreditation papers from the infernal State of New York.

He felt oddly light after he’d finished, better able to breathe, and Alex looked smug. “See? I told you it was healthier to let all that shit out. Caring and sharing.”

Erik rolled his eyes, but the younger man wasn’t done speaking. "This place is yours. You get that, right? This, us, everything here," Alex waved his arm, "this is something you get to keep. Nobody's gonna take it from you. Nobody could. And if they tried, we'd fucking rip them up." He leaned forward, voice low and face serious. "You do get to have something to call your own, people to call your own. You deserve it, no matter what you think or what that motherfucker Shaw cut into your skin when you were a kid." Alex grinned, sudden and a little feral. "And what the fuck did he know, anyway. He's shark shit and you're here. See? You won. Now stop sleeping on the couch like a squatter, it scares the students."

Erik snorted. “You’ve been indulging with Sean again, haven’t you?”

Alex laughed. “Whatever, asshole, you wish you were as cool as we are.” His expression shifted into something more serious, but still affectionate. “Look, all I’m saying is that you’re acting less like a ball of psychoses masquerading as a human, and more like the brilliant overprotective manic-obsessive asshole that we all were hoping you’d turn out to be. Which I guess isn’t that comforting, but hey. I’m twenty-two, father to a six year old, and my kid shoots lasers from his eyes. We all work with what we have.”

Erik blinked at him, lost for words. “I…thank you, Alex. That was in fact possibly far more comforting than you know.”

The blond man shrugged and grinned. “Yeah, I’m all kinds of special like that.” He turned and began to walk away, then stopped abruptly and looked over his shoulder with a serious expression. “Just don’t leave again like you did in Cuba, alright? My abandonment issues are eclipsed only by Scott’s, and I don’t want him spending the rest of his life thinking that it’s his fault his family split up.”

He rounded the corner of the hall and was gone before Erik could say but I’m not leaving. It’s possible that he wouldn’t have believed him – back in November, Erik wouldn’t have believed it himself.

But the crimson and purple cape was in the girls’ dress-up box, and the helmet had been stripped of paint and was being used as a teaching tool in Azazael’s Latin class. The man who had waltzed through the doors of the school with no soul and no plan was most certainly not Herr Lehnsherr in his sleek suit, seated behind a desk with coffee at one hand and a stack of essays on Longfellow in the middle of his blotter.

Erik wasn’t sure what to do with Magneto, who loomed even now like a specter, casting doubt on all his intentions. The only person who could help him with an exorcism of that kind, of a part of one’s identity, was lying pale and still as marble in the west wing, while Erik slept in his bed and dreamt his dreams every night.

Being haunted by aspects of your own personality is a truly unholy thing.

***

Chapter Four

The wizard messes up his bench,
Fills the air with smoke and stench.
He seeks the formula for gold,
But all he gets are sludge and mold.
Wallace Tripp

Westchester, Xavier School. Mid April, mud season. I see that we’re both running out of ideas, my friend. I wish I had more inspiration for you.

The thing about Charles –

(and Erik knows this, knows this and more entirely full well)

- the thing about Charles is everyone thinks that because he’s sweet, and kind, and rather self-effacing, and completely committed to peace at (nearly) all costs, he is therefore not a threat.

Erik knows better.

Charles has as much rage as he does, though it stems from a different source: crippling loneliness, rather than unbearable torment. His devotion to the cause of mutant rights is complete, every atom of his being focused on it, and the righteous anger aroused in him by the mistreatment of others is positively incendiary.

Months of sleeping in his bed, dreaming his dreams, has told Erik what he feared he already knew and didn’t want to believe possible. Charles’s effort is focused, completely so, channeled and directed and with a plan behind it that makes their evening chess games –

(and how he misses those!)

- look like, in fact, what they were: practice at outmaneuvering others, and quietly reshaping the world to suit his purposes, all the while making his opponents think it was their idea.

Erik is man enough, mutant enough, to admit that it’s worked on him too. Power is nothing without focus, Charles taught him that.

Charles’s absence has also taught him that perhaps, if only for now, channeling his power in the same vein might be his species’ best chance at long term survival.

If only he were awake for Erik to tell him this.

***

My Charles-

Spring is here.

You would be proud of me – I have finally managed to achieve a cease-fire with your gardener without resorting to threats or obscenities in any language. Well, I suppose he’s our gardener, now, as I’ve been here for the better part of six months. We have reached a compromise: he’ll cease that infernal business with the bloody topiaries, and I’ll allow him to fill the empty raised bed below the lily pond with as many peonies as he can reasonably fit in. He only gets one bed, though; Janos took over the other one as an herb and vegetable garden for the botany classes and has been wittering on about saffron crocuses and asparagus roots. Azazael just wants beets, but then again, he is Russian.

I never told you, but I actually have something of a pleasant association with peonies that I had quite forgotten. After Auschwitz was liberated, and the Red Cross had taken the most photogenic prisoners under their wing, I was sent to a hospital in Britain to convalesce. How it was paid for, I don’t know; I suspect it was simply something that they did, because they saw it as necessary. I knew next to no English, was barely well enough to travel, and existed in little more than a mire of fear and hatred and suspicion. I have no memory that I can access of whether or not I was unkind to the nurse who looked after me. I suspect I was.

I do remember, though, a morning in June when it had rained before sunrise, but not left enough clouds to impede the morning light. It was the first day that I woke in my hospital room and felt something close to human, and not quite a prisoner. My nurse, a cheerful farm girl whose name I never learned, came in with my breakfast and a flower that I had never before seen. She told me that it was a Peony, the most beautiful flower in the garden, and that her mother had sent it for “that poor young thing in Hospital, to put some color in his cheeks!” It was the first real gift that anybody had ever given me after The Camps, and it came from a woman who had never even seen my face and had no thought but to ease my suffering. I know something of the language of flowers, but to me peonies will always mean life.

It is late, it is raining, and this is very difficult for me to talk about when I can neither hear nor feel you.

Erik.

***

People forget that anything can burn, given the right temperature. Erik himself has seen metal catch on fire. Metal like lab tables.

Christ, Christ, Christ have mercy, Cain has finally gone too far. Cain has gone too far and they are all going to die.

He’s cornered in the lab; he’d slipped up, let Cain get too close with Kurt too far away and had had to run for it. It’s the first time he’s made a mistake in nearly five years, but he is just so tired. And now Cain’s set the surface of one of the lab tables on fire, and it has spread to the walls, and he’s going to die here today.

Father’s papers are safe, sent off to the family barristers along with the will that names Raven Darkholme-Xavier as the sole heir and executor of the estate, but the laboratory is on fire and the house is going to burn (a thought that keeps repeating over and over and over) and Cain’s thoughts make it very, very clear that Cain intends to kill him long before smoke inhalation would take their lives.

He just has time to send of a spike of Dearheart, I am so sorry to his sister’s mind before Cain charges him with a roar of frustration.

He swore he’d never use his mind like this on another living being, but mortal danger is a most definite and legitimate exception, so he forces himself into Cain’s head, pushing forward like a lance.

It’s disgusting, feels horrible from his end and must feel even worse from Cain’s, but it’s enough to trigger all the little bits of his brain that knock him out. (While in there, he erases the most unsavory of the other boy’s intentions towards him as well, as a precaution, leaving only empty spaces that will eventually be filled with the resentment and directionless fury that occupies the rest of Cain’s mind.)

Shutting down his brain is not enough to stop Cain’s body in midair, though, the older boy coming towards him like a juggernaut and crashing into him, making him fall awkwardly against one of the tables and twist his leg.

His ankle’s hurt; he can’t move fast enough to escape the flames. He can only freeze time in short increments, no more than thirty seconds at a time, which is not enough to get out of the reach of the flames.

They crawl closer, and he can’t scream through the smoke. Cain’s lying about five feet away, crumpled up in the wreckage from the lab table they’d both crashed into. He reaches out with his mind – surely there has to be someone, anyone there who will help him.

He doesn’t want to die.

The flames creep closer and hit the chemicals spilt on the floor -

 

Erik jolted up off of his desk, the stench of smoke in his nostrils and panting with fear that was not his own. He scrubbed a hand down his face and reached for the stack of math quizzes that had been taunting him before he’d dozed off.

A high, thin scream of pain came from the east end of the house – Jean’s voice, from the Classics room. Erik, already on edge, dropped the papers he was holding, and all the doors in his path slammed open for him as he flat out ran towards the source of the sound and growing psychic distress.

Just as he reached the classroom, people flooded into the hallway: Alex, his face white and lips thin, carrying Jean, who was shaking and weeping; Hank and Azazael having a quiet, furious argument in the classroom, involving a lot of handwaving; Janos and Raven, each carrying one side of a basket holding Shaw’s helmet and heading for the garden as though the hounds of Hell were behind them. Janos was frantically praying under his breath all the way, and Raven’s pregnant belly didn’t seem to impede her progress at all.

Erik processed all of this and then immediately dismissed it, coming forward to lift Jean out of Alex’s arms, her spot immediately filled by Scott, who was doing his best not to cry. Erik, with no regard for propriety nor for the cleanliness of his suit, sat down on the floor with his back to the wall and stroked Jean’s hair out of her eyes as she hiccupped with tears. “Would anybody like to tell me what happened here?”

Azazael came forward, his tail lashing in agitation. “Miss Grey was helping me with the curriculum for this coming week – going through Pindar’s Fifth Olympian Ode is not the simplest of lessons and requires significant preparation. I had turned to the bookshelf for a moment, and when I turned around again,” he shrugged, and shook his head, “she had taken the helmet from the plinth and put it on her head. I do not know what possessed her to do such a thing.”

Jean sniffled and lifted her head from the crook of Erik’s neck, where his shirt and suit collar were both well sodden. “I wanted to know what would happen. All I thought was that it would shut me off for a minute, I – I didn’t know, I didn’t know he was in there. And he tried to talk to me, tried to take me over and I wasn’t strong enough, but then Miss Raven ran in and pulled it off my head and threw it in the basket and Señor Janos said it was cursed, and it just really really hurt.” Her strength apparently spent, she buried her face in Erik’s neck again and let out an exhausted little sob.

Alex clapped a free hand over one of Scott’s ears and hissed at Erik, “I told you that fucking thing was haunted, you jackass. Now are you going to let Janos do his Catholic voodoo shit on it and give it a decent burial?”

Erik got to his feet, Jean still trembling in his arms. “I believe that my absence from any such ceremonies would best ensure their smooth proceedings. If what you say is true,” his lips thinned, “then it was a poison meant for me all along.” He turned and headed in the direction of the students’ wing. “Doctor McCoy, if you’d come with me; Miss Grey’s health is currently my top priority. Alex, Scott,” the little boy turned to look in surprise at being included in the adults’ conversation, “please go and reassure the other children that everything is alright, and keep them away from the gardens until Raven and Janos come back inside.”

Alex nodded tightly and ran his hand across his son’s head. “You got it, boss. Come on, Scotty. You and me, let’s go make everyone feel better, yeah?”

Erik didn’t hear the child’s answer, turning through the door of Jean’s bedroom and laying the girl gently on top of the covers, helping her out of her shoes as Hank spoke to her in low, soothing tones. He walked over and looked out the window to the grounds below as Jean listed her aches and pains in a thready voice.

Janos and Raven were barely visible down at the far end of the gardens, near the grotto that now housed a small, plain statue of the Virgin Mary. Janos was reading something from a book that Azazael had just brought him, and he made the sign of the cross over the basket with the helmet inside.

Outside, Raven jerked back, while indoors, Jean stiffened and whimpered. Hank growled in alarm, and Erik felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as though somebody were watching him.

Azazael teleported away and returned quickly with a large bag of salt from the garage, used when the walkways were icy, which he proceeded to dump on top of the helmet in an entirely unceremonious manner. Jean gasped and relaxed again, and Hank stepped out the door in search of aspirin.

Raven poured what looked to be a can of gasoline on top of the mess in the basket, and Sean, appearing down the pathway, dropped a lit match on the whole thing.

The helmet burned scarlet and purple, though that might have been the salt.

The last of the flames died down, and Erik felt something click in his mind, as though there had been a small item blocking a crucial gear.

Jean came shuffling out of the bathroom down the hall in her nightgown, and Erik quietly helped her into bed, tucking her in with gestures he’d seen in others but never used himself. “If you go to bed now, I’m certain that you’ll feel better in the morning. Doctor McCoy will be by in a little while with some aspirin, after which you will not be disturbed unless you call for one of us.” He rose from the side of her bed and patted her on the shoulder.

Jean reached out and grabbed his hand before he could leave, her eyes beseeching. “I’m really, really sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m not as strong as you are yet. I can’t believe you wore it for a whole year.” Her eyes slipped closed, and she began to doze off.

Erik stilled above her, and then leaned down to press a kiss to her brow. “Neither can I, liebchen. Neither can I.”

***

Dear Charles.

You were right. Not all of the time, and not about everything, but sometimes, and about some things, you were right.

Does that get your attention? I really did mean it.

Erik.

***

It is still cool enough in May in Westchester to need a quilt and blanket on the bed.

Bedding at home is so much better than in a hospital, especially when one is healing physically from burns and smoke inhalation, and mentally from nearly five years of constant terror.

Kurt dragged him from the fire. It cost his stepfather his life, and he will never know why Kurt did it. Cain is gone, he doesn’t know where, and quite frankly is happy to leave it that way. Perhaps someday he’ll search for Cain out of curiosity, but the legal papers have all been taken care of and all he wants to do now is leave this damned place to its repairs and memories.

With the right incentive, and with the right people, someday he’ll be able to come back. Until then the pile can gather dust.

Raven is home. She was weeping at his bedside when he woke up, and switched to her natural azure form as soon as the nurse and doctor left, curling up beside him in the hospital cot and clinging to him with all her strength.

She still loves him – this he can feel without any help at all – but after sending her away without asking her, she no longer trusts him. Not like she used to.

He tells himself and Heaven that he will accept any price for his sister not having to endure those horrible years. He doesn’t know what will be asked of him, and the toll isn’t really his choice anyway.

It hurts like losing a limb when Raven shuts him off, clamps down on their old bond. He can feel it wither and die over the course of weeks, and he very carefully hides from her. She thinks that he’s cross and doesn’t want to start a fight; in reality, he’s throwing up and shaking and quietly weeping it out in his bedroom as a piece of his mind dies, inch by inch.

He loves her, will always adore her, and understands why she did this. Perhaps some day, by the grace of God, he will even be able to forgive her.

He becomes more worried about keeping her safe once they both get to England, now that he’s not in her head and can’t look out through her eyes and know that she’s under control. He has waking nightmares about her being whisked off to a lab somewhere, his darling sister disappearing in the night.

It makes him sick to not be able to see her lovely blue face more than in the evening, when nobody’s around. He’d love nothing better than to walk down the street with her in broad daylight, her in one of the white sundresses she favors, showing off how beautiful and perfect and unique she is and always will be. He’d like to think that others would only react with jealousy.

Instead, he insists on safety in disguise, at all times, on either side of the Atlantic. He can see and feel her chafing at his requirements even without the bond (the raw end of it in his head like a festering, unhealing wound), and has no idea what to do about it. Outside of academia, he has always had difficulty vocalizing his thoughts and emotions; he has evolved in such a manner that he should not need to, but the rest of the world is speech-oriented, and as such he is, in a way, crippled by his own ability.

So they keep going, the two of them, a balancing act of hurt and love and loneliness. Raven, hiding her perfect face behind an imperfect mask, and he, with the thoughts of everyone in the world in his head and yet drifting loose, anchorless.

He’s desperate to open his mind to someone – has been for years – but there’s nobody.

That is, until he gets a visit from an American government agent while he’s rather badly drunk and nearly shorts out the synapses of half of London with his excitement at the news that there are others like him, like them.

He stands on the bow of the boat, watching the anchor and its chain whip through the air, frozen in awe at the spectacle. Everyone else on the ship stinks psychically of fear, even his sister, but all he can feel is a rush of elation and the deep desire to meet the person who is capable of such grandeur.

He didn’t expect to do so by leaping off a boat, but he’s more than happy to do whatever it takes, especially to save the other mutant from drowning.

He dives in after him, wrapping himself around him, and speaks into his mind as clearly as he can, searching and grasping for a name to give more import to his words.

Instead of just a name, he gets everything, all his history, every hope and dream and iota of rage, and beneath that the potential for true greatness, for accomplishment on a legendary scale.

More than that (and this nearly makes him weep and thank whoever is listening for the mercy of Heaven), he feels the other man’s mind reach out to him in turn and grab on, the filaments of a bond beginning between them, sealing over that raw spot in his mind and soothing it, growing into it like their minds have always belonged together and are just making up for lost years. The new bond anchors him in a way that he’s needed for the longest time but could never ask of anyone, and now can imagine having with no one else.

The mutant he saved jerks away from him in the waves and stares at him with wide, pale eyes and a dumbfounded expression. Beneath that, he can feel a pulse of joy, buried so deeply that the other mutant probably doesn’t even know it’s there, but it sings through the beginning of their bond all the same.

His words are as much for himself as they are for the beautiful, powerful, fearful man in front of him.

Erik. You are not alone. You’re not alone.

Erik sat up in bed with a start, then leaned forward and put his head on his knees, trying not to weep. This was becoming too much to bear.

Seeing his own face through Charles’s eyes was highly disconcerting. Feeling what Charles had felt, the relief, the joy – it made what had happened in Cuba seem like an even worse betrayal.

The school was running fine, but Erik felt like everything else was on the verge of crumbling. Especially him.

***

Early to bed, early to rise
Makes you miss all of the regular guys.
~ Folk Saying, adapted from B. Franklin

Westchester, Xavier Academy. Or perhaps School. Early June. 3 am. The hour of indecision, between fleeing and staying. Make up your mind, Erik. I can’t make up mine, so you’ll have to do it for both of us.

Hot chocolate had never been to Erik’s particular tastes, but coffee at three in the morning was simply unfeasible, and the concept of tea was locked firmly in the part of his brain labeled Charles Francis Xavier, a part that had been seeing far too much action as of late. Hence the chocolate, and the late hour.

Erik moved the spoon absently from the well-worn kitchen table to the sink and turned his head as Raven shuffled across the tiles, yellow eyes only half open, crystal tumbler half full of juice in her hand, and linen shift doing the bare minimum to cover her modesty.

She dragged one of the elderly kitchen chairs out from the table and dropped herself down across from him unceremoniously. “It is an unholy hour in the morning, even for you, and you’re still dressed. You dozed off at your desk and were dreaming Charles’s dreams again.”

It wasn’t a question. Erik grunted wordlessly into his mug, and Raven opened one eye all the way to fix him with an evil stare. “Just because Charles is the psychic in the family doesn’t mean I’m unobservant.”

The word family hung between them like a curl of cigarette smoke, almost visible in the silence of the early morning. Raven sighed and rubbed her face. “Sometimes I wonder what the hell I was thinking, leaving him. He’s my brother, I know that, and I’ve gotten mad at him before, but this? He promised I’d never be alone, and I went and left him alone. What kind of person does that make me?”

Erik rolled his mug between his hands and very carefully did not look at her. “About the same as it makes me. It would seem that he placed his trust in altogether the most unsound hands.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. The headache from the most recent nightmares (loneliness and guilt and overwhelming responsibility without respite) was returning in tandem with his guilt. It tasted bitter enough to choke out the sweetness of the chocolate.

He walked over to the sink to drop off his mug and leaned against the cabinets, looking away from Raven. “I only wish he were awake so that I might apologize, and attempt to rectify the astounding number of wrongs he has had to tolerate from me.”

Raven sighed, a weary sound, but she was smiling. “You know Alex has started calling you Frau Xavier, right?”

Erik snapped his head around and boggled at her. “What did you say?”

She laughed gently, looking a bit more awake. “Come on, face it. You’ve been moping around here like a war bride, you sit by his bedside most of the day and write reams of letters, Hell, you’re sleeping in his bed.”

Erik’s ears were ringing, and he felt lightheaded. “I…I didn’t…I don’t…” He staggered over to one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. He could feel his jaw hanging open like some kind of idiot, but between Raven’s comments and the tail end of the dream, large portions of his brain were busy rearranging themselves like a particularly complicated chess game.

Raven reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “Yeah, you did and you do. Come on, I showed up naked in your bed and all you did was give me a peck on the lips?”

Erik gritted his teeth. “That’s not what I’m saying – ”

Raven interrupted him. “You’re saying that you felt a pull, felt drawn to him, trusted him with everything you had and would have given him the world if he wanted it, and you still feel the same way. You’re also saying that you never even considered that to be love, and that sleeping with him was the last thing on your mind. I don’t have to be a telepath to get any of that.”

She adjusted her dress absently and gave him an exasperated look. “What really drives me mad is that you probably wanted each other equally as badly that whole time, but you were just this side of insane and Charles didn’t want to pressure you into anything you didn’t want, so you both did nothing.” Her eyes took on a faraway expression. “If the accident with Cerebro had never happened, and we hadn’t come back, who knows? I might have actually grown to hate him in time, and the two of you would have spent your lives dancing around each other, each too afraid and too bitter to reach out and ask for what you want.”

They both sat in silence, digesting that unlikely thought, until Raven hauled herself to her feet with a smile. “When it comes down to it, if I’d really wanted your attention that night, even then I knew I probably should have come to you as Charles. But that would have been weird, and you probably would have had one of your fits of insane protective rage and killed me, so it’s better that I didn’t.”

Erik, his eyes burning from exhaustion and something else he was unwilling to name, mustered up a smile for her. “Thank you for not forcing me into such an awkward position.”

Raven put the glass of orange juice she’d been holding next to his elbow and smirked at him. “If it’s any consolation, I’ll really enjoy having you as a sister-in-law.” She turned around and padded out of the kitchen, snickering.

Erik waited until everything was silent again in the house before heading back upstairs to the silent room in the far reaches of the west wing. Charles lay perfectly still, except for the rise and fall of his chest, exactly as he had when Erik had walked through the Academy doors.

It was far easier to feel the empty spots that Charles’s absence left when there was no anger to fill them.

Erik glanced at the bedside table with its stack of scribbled notes and unopened letters, the most recent flower not yet blooming and looking like a pale marble in the moonlight, any promise as yet unfulfilled.

Erik gave into his weaknesses once, just this once, and pressed a careful, slow kiss to the middle of Charles’s forehead. The spot where the eye of the mind, the intellect, was always supposed to open.

Nothing happened.

Erik pulled his chair as close to the bedside as he dared, reached for his pen and the last sheet of loose-leaf, and began to write.

***

Mine,

I cannot sleep, so I write to you, Charles. Can you hear me?

I have done a great deal of thinking lately. There are good people, and there are wicked people, and some are mutants and some are not, and you can never know their hearts until they bleed you for science or send you a blossom on a sunny day. My arrogance has been an affront to myself, and if I still prayed, I would believe that God has called me upon it. Please wake up so that I can tell you so.

I remember how it felt when you touched my mind. I remember that you wept, as I did, when I, when we, saw what I had forgotten. I have known love in my life, and I cannot bear to lose it a second time. I cannot hear you, and I cannot sleep. Charles, dearest, beloved, please. Wake up. I can no longer do this alone.

***

Chapter Five

Some faithful friend must now, perforce,
Go forth and bid my boy
To saddle me my wooden horse,
For I mean to conquer Troy.
Wallace Tripp

Xavier-Lehnsherr Academy for the Gifted. June.

It felt like the most unbelievable kind of hangover. Worse than red wine and champagne and Pernod all combined which was a really horrible thought and thoughts, thank God. He could hear again.

It took Charles a good three seconds to realize just who he could hear the best. He didn’t dare turn his head for what felt like an eternity, on the off chance that he’d gone insane and who he thought he felt, who he hoped he felt wasn’t actually beside him.

He managed to tilt his head to the side. Erik was half curled on the bed with him, more or less seated in the bedside chair but with his upper body as close to Charles as he could get. He was wearing a lavender shirt, French cuffs undone and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and trousers that looked like they went with the sharkskin jacket and dark silver tie draped over the bedpost. He looked younger in sleep, some of his lines smoothed out, but he had the coloring of a man who hadn’t been getting the proper amount of rest for some time.

One of his hands was curled lightly around Charles’s wrist, and Charles turned his hand to brush his fingers against Erik’s pulse, smiling slightly. Erik’s other hand clutched a crumpled piece of paper, a letter from the looks of it, and with almost no effort at all a chunk of Charles’s memory slotted itself back into place. Stilted formality (neither your credentials nor your aptitude for instruction), frustration (bloody stupid topiaries. I made Alex use them as targets), and over it all an overwhelming sense of tenderness (peonies mean life) that confused and frightened Erik in equal measure and that Charles had never let himself hope might be returned.

A rich scent wafted across the bed, carried by the air through the open window, and Charles glanced at the bedside table. Next to an uneven stack of letters, all in unsealed envelopes, stood a very small vase. In it, in full glorious blousy bloom, rested one perfect blush pink peony.

In the West, bashfulness, occasionally happy life and marriage. In the East, masculinity, disregard for consequence, and a devil-may-care attitude. How apt.

Charles gently twisted his hand out of Erik’s grip and reached over to stroke the other man’s head, putting as much affection into the gesture as he dared (and he dared rather a lot now, on a day with bright sun and the scent of peonies hanging heavy in the room).

Erik turned into the gesture, resettling with a cross, endearing little mumble, and Charles reached further, running the tips of his fingers under the strong line of Erik’s jaw and brushing his mind lightly against the sleep-weakened barriers.

Erik shifted again, then froze, his eyes slamming open. He sat bolt upright, his face shifting from surprise to fear to joy to a vast, merciless Teutonic rage that would have made a Caesar weak with fear.

“Charles. You utter bastard. Where the hell have you been?”

Charles smiled, feeling his eyes tear up, possibly from the sunlight but more likely from the emotions (relieved/thankgod/estatic/enraged/empassioned/ohlove) pouring off of the furious man sprawled next to him. His hair was badly rumpled, the fine lavender shirt was one big wrinkle, and he’d never seemed lovelier, not even when wet and hurt and surprised in the middle of the ocean.

“Hello, Erik. I love you. Thank you for taking over the school for me. Now would you kindly come up here and kiss me before some one of our well-meaning family breaks down the door and we don’t get the chance for another two years?”

Erik’s blue gaze darkened, sky to Pacific. “I’ll do a great deal more than kiss you, I think. I’m sure that you’ve already told Raven you’re awake. Kindly tell her that all the doors to this wing will be locked for the next three hours at least, as we have exceedingly urgent business to discuss.”

Charles’s gaze went slightly vague as he passed the message along, and then his forehead creased in puzzlement. “Why is my sister laughing at me?”

Any other questions were quickly silenced by Erik’s mouth on his, the taller man crawling up over his companion and doing his best not to jar him. God, fuck, Erik was hard against him and whining in the back of his throat and his thoughts were a jumbled mess of every obscene activity possible and several that could only be achieved in the realm of imagination, and oh god, that one, Charles was already trying to figure out how best to do that, some sort of mental projection trick, maybe?

Erik caught the barest edge of that thought and snarled in pleasure, nipping at Charles’s lower lip and grinding their erections together through layers of sheet and very well-tailored suiting. Charles moaned in appreciation (not purely sartorial, either), wrapped his arms around Erik’s back, and shifted his legs to allow for more room.

They both froze.

Erik pulled back very quickly, his mouth swollen and wet and red, his hair disheveled, and his blue eyes very wide. “Was that…did you…?”

Charles, just as surprised (and just as debauched when seen through Erik’s eyes, a high crimson flush on pale cheeks matching bruised lips), attempted to wiggle his toes and was moderately successful. Bemusement mixed itself with a healthy dash of scientific elation and not a little bit of panic, and (of course, you’re a Xavier, all you DO is talk) he began to speak. “Apparently so. The mutant genes, you see, even in those without the healing mutation, prompt a better degree of cell regeneration than in the average person, and the nerves must have been working overtime to-”

Erik rolled off of him and lay on the bed on his back, hands over his face, shouting. “This is ludicrous! I’m the headmaster of a children’s school, your sister is pregnant, Alex is a competent father, and I’m considered respectable in this town! Respectable! People ask for me by name! Women invite me to dinner with their families and make a careful point of not serving ham! Azazael is teaching Jean which end of a sword to hold, and she’s learning altogether too swiftly for my comfort!” He took a deep breath, and continued even louder. “And if that wasn’t enough, you go and wake up and kiss me like something out of one of Ororo’s story books, and surprise! You have your legs back too! This is madness!”

No it isn’t, Charles wanted to say, it’s all the good luck you ever missed out on catching up with you at once, like the story of Destiny and her wheel, and you chose me, without even knowing I existed.

Instead, he started to laugh, a happy, loud noise, and soon enough Erik joined him, even as tears rolled down his face. That’s how Alex found them when he opened the door, a hand over his eyes. (Erik had, admittedly, been distracted from making sure all of them were shut.)

“Um, Professor? Boss? You decent in there?”

Charles managed to gasp and sputter to a stop long enough to say, “As decent as either of us ever are, I expect. Is everything all right downstairs?”

Alex peeked through his fingers, and apparently satisfied that there was no nudity present, folded his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. “Yeah, it’s all good. Jean picked up on you being able to feel your toes – only that much, she says – and now everyone wants to run up here and see you, except for Hank, who wants to run down to his lab and do some bullshit with his slides. Him, I can keep occupied,” he leered, “and Raven and Azazael have taken everyone else down to the far end of the gardens for the next two hours. All except Janos; he’s run off to that little grotto of his to pray to the Holy Virgin in gratitude for you waking up and not passively cockblocking your charming little hausfrau over here any more.”

Erik sat up halfway (Charles stared as his arms and shoulders strained against the cloth of his shirt) and shot Alex an evil glare. “Thank you for that. You can leave any time now, preferably as soon as possible.”

Alex grinned unrepentantly. “Sure thing, boss.” He stood up and paused long enough to leer extravagantly and shoot them a double thumbs-up before leaping out of the way as Erik used the doorknob, hinges, and sheer force of nearly three years of sexual repression to slam the door in his face. They could both hear the Doppler effect of his laughter as he ran down the stairs and escaped outside, probably on a mission to do unspeakable things to Hank.

Which, speaking of unspeakable things –

Erik barely waited until the door was shut all the way to roll over and yank both covers and loose sleep pants off of Charles’s body as the other man struggled out of his top with a muffled curse. Erik ran his hands down Charles’s thighs, up his calves, across his feet, and up the insides of his legs with a frantic expression on his face.

“Can you feel that? Tell me you can feel that. Please, tell me!”

“Yes, yes, damn you, and there’s other parts that deserve your attention as well thank you very much and I would like that attention paid to them-”

Charles stopped speaking, eyes very wide, when Erik reared back and ripped his shirt off over his head in one smooth motion with a complete disregard for buttons and then kicked out of his shoes, trousers and underwear without any apparent effort. Erik caught him gaping, and a shy smile quirked the side of side of his mouth as he sat on the side of the bed to pull off his socks, which promptly fell under the bed and were forgotten when Charles grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked him back up the bed, their mouths crashing together.

Charles narrowed his eyes for a moment then gasped, loudly, and Erik felt a torrent of emotions not his own that left him feeling lightheaded. Charles pulled away and bit his neck sharply, then babbled, “My God, the bond, it’s still there, I wondered why I could feel you so well, I thought it was dead, I’d been cut off again and I’d never be able to feel anyone ever again.”

Erik whined as Charles sucked over the bite, darkening it, and gritted out, “I didn’t know it was there, damn you, and I still wouldn’t let it go. Not even through that damned helmet. I was just waiting. We both were.”

The two of them were shifting frantically, trying to find a comfortable position, Erik growling as he nipped at Charles’s jaw, Charles panting with his hand still fisted weakly in the other man’s hair. “I’m afraid that last move took all of my energy, my friend. I don’t know how you want to do this, but I want, I want-”

Erik slanted himself sideways, pressing their temples together. “Tell me. Show me. Let me know. I trust you, I’ve wanted this, and I can’t say it, I can’t, but. I trust you.”

Charles looked at him for a long minute, eyes wide and searching for any sign of uncertainty. Then he let out a deep breath, smiled beautifully, and reached.

-and it was everything, everything, and Erik could feel the joy of being awake and here and alive and healthy subsuming the months of silence and fragmented awareness. Before that, the year of agony and uncertainty, the loss and pain, all of it sinking under sunlight, exorcised and buried like a wicked ghost or bad dream –

-really, love? Haunted by yourself? I promise you, the only ghosts you have are the ones you bring with you, and they have no place in our home, nor shall they ever gain purchase-

-and he was stretching himself on his own fingers in a way he’d only ever done on speculation, not for any person living or dead, and Charles was staring at him in awe, hand reaching down to trace across and around the rim of his hole and the digits working in and out-

-Nobody else? (incredulity, lustlustlust, astonishment, pride). In that case, nobody else, at all. If you so much make eyes at someone else, I shan’t be responsible for my actions, love-

-“Ungh, god, Charles, you need to do something now and stop teasing me, damnit, just. Please, now.”-

-you never have to speak aloud and yes, yes, anything you want, ever, yes, this, yes-

And this. Erik stretched open wide, full and shaking with it, the thickness of Charles’s cock filling him as Erik rode him, hips stuttering in an unpracticed rhythm that was still enough to leave them both gasping, and it was fear and a thrill and inescapable pleasure, surging up out of Charles’s mind and into his, seeping in and soothing the infinite cracks and gashes that he’d spent years, almost decades, trying to forget he had.

Dimly he was aware of Charles speaking, thoughts and words weaving together until the whole thing cascaded over him in a combination of speech and sensation that left him breathless. No control, no suggestion, and no walls, nothing but their minds bleeding into each other and knitting together.

Erik gasped when he shifted his hips slightly on one thrust and felt a sharp spike of pleasure coursing through his body, Charles’s hand in the small of his back guiding him so that it happened again. It was enough, just enough, to clear his senses and hear what Charles was gasping out into the sun-drenched air of their room, letting his mouth run without any interference from his brain.

“I could hear you, you know. Not your thoughts, only fragments of your dreams, but every time you put pen to paper or finger to plaque or wrote something in steam and light on the bathroom mirror, I heard it. As thin as the bond was, I heard everything, and it’s the only reason why I made it back. I knew I had something to which I could return, someone. I’ve never had that before, not with anyone. Only with you. Only you.”

His voice rose at the end, desperate, and a pulse of lovelovewantlovepleasenow rang through Erik’s mind like the peal of a bell. It was enough; he twisted his hips down hard and came, messy and breathtaking and seemingly infinite, spattering all over Charles’s chest and his own belly. Charles clenched his eyes shut, ground his teeth at the feel of it, and snapped his hips up, and it was as good as coming again to feel that echo of triumph combined with the more physical sensations, a thickening cock and a rush of heat inside his body.

Erik pulled off, wincing a little, and collapsed forward suddenly, boneless, sprawled across Charles’s chest, completely uncaring of the various fluids sticking them together, and pressed his temple to the other man’s. Their minds remained intertwined, thoughts and emotions brushing against each other and carefully knitting together. Both were loathe to pull away, choosing instead to share the long months of waiting and confusion and frustration and fear (erik) and a year of emptiness followed by pain and fragments of consciousness and finally, hope (charles) mind to mind, rather than out loud.

Indeed, rolled on their sides and curled together in the sun, the school’s laughter echoing in through the window from the gardens below and the scent of summer heavy in the air, words seemed altogether unnecessary.

***

Dear Charles,

I’ve given everyone a long weekend. I know it’s Thursday, but I can absolutely promise you that nothing of any consequence will be accomplished in classes for the next four days, regardless of whether or not everyone is cooped up inside. The children, older and younger, have been told to spend the better part of their time at liberty on the grounds. The house is for us, and I intend to make good use of every second, as well as a few new locations.

There’s tea and toast downstairs. Don’t sleep too long or the butter will congeal and Azazael will eat all your bacon.

I love you.

Erik.

 

***

Epilogue

Is that Mr. Riley, can anyone tell?
Is that Mr. Riley that owns the hotel?
Well, if that’s Mr. Riley, they speak of so highly,
Upon me soul, Riley, you’re doin’ quite well.
~ Pat Rooney

Xavier-Lehnsherr Academy for the Gifted. Mid December.

“Mein gott in himmel, Alex, if you have any desire to be let anywhere near the garden again for the rest of your natural life, need I remind you to confine your indiscretions to the house and never! In! The orchard!”

Erik’s frustrated bellow rang across the gardens, quickly drowned out by two sets of running feet and Alex’s hysterical laughter. As he and Hank came ripping around the corner of the frost-covered garden wall, Charles raised his voice and called, “Aren’t you afraid he’ll catch you?”

Hank merely shot past, but Alex paused long enough to gasp, grinning, “We removed all the metal from our clothes and were saving it for a special occasion. Besides, he needs the exercise, yeah?”

An indeterminate roar of Teutonic rage rose up from behind the myrtle plantings, and Alex took off like his feet were on fire – or, more specifically, like Hank had made a special effort to clear one of the rooms in the little-used west wing of any traces of metal. Charles winced. There were things about his adopted family that he most emphatically did not want to know.

Erik had continued to teach English literature since Charles had awoken, but he had given up all the mathematics classes with profound expressions of relief. He’d also continued to show his love and affection for the students by shouting at them on a regular basis, much as Charles had found him doing in the dining room this morning, Sean clad in an eye searingly dyed shirt and clutching an irritated, cross-eyed Siamese in his arms.

Erik glowered at the younger man. “I hope you have a suitable explanation.”

“She’d gotten out! She could have been hurt by dogs or bees or bears or something! I knew she’d come if I called her, though.”

“Yes, of course, because nothing upsets the students and enrages your fellow faculty like drunkenly screaming for the house cat at three in the morning. Really, Sean, I thought you had better self control.”

“Morag’s just a wee kitty! She could have been anywhere!”

“Yes, and she was on the Professor’s lap all the time. Do that again, and I will drive iron filings through unpleasant portions of your anatomy. Are we clear?”

Christmas and Hanukah intersected this year, and the children were wildly excited. Kurt was far too young to understand anything at all, but the lights and decorations made him laugh and wave his little fists, wee blue tail curling clumsily around his mother’s arm.

The lights and decorations had been another new set of patents in the McCoy name, due to the unstable combination of abilities exhibited by the students and staff. Charles was more than happy enough to go on lighting candles on a real balsam in the manner of his vaguely pyromaniacal ancestors, but Erik had thrown a fit when he found out. His shouts about the danger of fires during the holiday had echoed through the house for a good few hours.

(He also insisted that, as he was German, he was the only one who knew what a real Christmas tree was actually supposed to look like. Everyone had laughed when he said that, but Charles saw Raven put her hand over her mouth and blink away tears. In spite of any levity, they knew what it took for him to be able to call himself German again.)

In his consultations with Hank, Erik insisted that the decorations be unbreakable, inflammable, chemically sound, not subject to refracting lasers, not heavy enough to cause damage if they fell, and of course appropriately decorative and festive.

Hank rubbed his eyes and growled slightly. “You do realize that you’ve asked me to come up with the perfect material with, what? A week’s notice? The kids want to put up the decorations after the first Sunday in Advent.”

Erik folded his arms and harrumphed. “Well, I don’t see why the hell you can’t come up with something in time. You spend enough time in your lab, and I know that not all of it involves Alex doing obscene things to you under the table. Or on it, for that matter.”

Hank blushed purple with embarrassment, stuttering. Alex, who had come around the corner in time to hear the last part of the conversation, started laughing so hard that he had to sit on the floor of the hallway, tears running down his cheeks.

Oddly enough, Hank managed to get the decorations made in record time. The menorah in the dining room, however, had come from Alex. It was quite old, and he didn’t say where he’d gotten it; nobody asked. He’d handed it to Erik in a paper bag, shrugged, and taken Scott outside to build a snow fort.

Charles appreciated his subtlety. Charles appreciated a lot of things these days, especially the ones he’d never thought he would get to have.

Things like being able to walk again, being able to crouch down and lay logs in the fireplace in his bedroom, the one he shared with someone. Sitting in front of the fire in their room, playing chess and working their way through a bottle of potent and rather awful Swedish Christmas liqueur, the gift of the parents of one of their students. Curling up in bed with his lover, kissing quietly, speaking to each other or just letting their minds brush up against each other.

It was a good way to fall asleep.

***

Breakfast is usually chaotic, but not on weekends, something for which he is eternally grateful. The students and faculty for the most part take the opportunity to sleep in, with a few rare exceptions.

Scotty is sitting across from him inhaling a bowl of something that was originally supposed to be oatmeal but has so much fruit and cream and sugar added to it that it more resembles candy than anything else. He’s vaguely jealous, remembering a time when he could eat like that, but doesn’t begrudge Scott his youth, especially when the boy smiles at him and addresses him as Uncle.

Erik shuffles into the kitchen, figure still slender after all these years, leonine shock of whitening hair combed out of his face, eyes barely open. Alex is right on his heels, broad shoulders straining against his fleece jacket, wittering on about how Erik has had the same fucking robe for twenty years since he took the fucking helmet off and maybe it’s time to call L.L. Bean and get a new one, you cheap Jerry. Scotty, with the ease born of long experience, holds out a cup of coffee as Erik walks by, and then rapidly pours another and hands it off to his father.

He smiles as Erik sits next to him, letting an affectionate greeting flow along their mental bond. It had started that night in the ocean, so long ago, a young tendril joining their minds. Erik sends back a slow thread of comfortable fondness, tinged with pre-caffeine grumpiness and the constant, low-level irritation he always projects for a few days after having to send in a new teacher’s accreditation.

Laughter comes from outside; Jean has jumped on the back of their newest addition to the school, Logan, and is stuffing snow down his sweatshirt. Going out for an early run without letting Jean know where you are is asking for trouble - her mischievous streak is as long as the shoreline of the lake, and she has a true talent for pranks.

Ororo, standing at the window with a cup of tea, snickers as she watches Jean run up to the house in her slippered feet, screaming with mirth. Scotty makes cow eyes at Ororo while her back is turned; he’s working up the courage to speak to her. Jean, in the role of older sister to the lot of them, has been pushing them to do something about it for years, but amongst the other things he inherited from his father, Scott is completely impossible when it comes to romance.

Erik pokes him in the side with one long finger and arches a brow; he’d zoned out. He really must be getting dressed. The Worthingtons will be here for lunch, and the senator wants to see his son and give an update on the Metahuman Rights and Recognition Act he’s been working on for the past year.

There’s never a lack of anything to do, never a moment’s rest or respite, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, Christmas will be here soon, and if Marie has her way, the house will look like something out of Southern Living. This must be prevented at all costs, as Erik doesn’t see the point of pomanders and finds balsam swag in the halls to be endlessly irritating.

He smiles into his teacup, and reaches for the paper - the bits Erik will let him have before noon, at least.

Charles took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Dreaming of the future wasn’t something that had happened to him before – or at least not that vividly – but then again, he supposed, there is a first time for everything.

The fire in the hearth had burned out during the night, the coals gone dark, but the room was still warm enough. In fact, it was positively toasty under the covers; Erik threw heat like a furnace.

He also snored, drooled, and occasionally talked nonsense in his sleep. Charles enjoyed every moment of it.

He rolled quickly out of bed, doing his best not to let out any warm air. The storm had arrived overnight, dumping a good six inches on what had been bare ground while they all slept. It didn’t look like it was going to stop anytime soon, either, the clouds darkening the morning sky and the snow sifting down like castor sugar from a sieve.

Charles shivered a little and wrapped his robe around himself, a quilted affair that Raven had made him some years ago and he’d never gotten rid of. His house shoes were under the night table, with the socks Jean had knitted for him folded on top.

Behind him in the bed, Erik snorted, very clearly said, “More, please, the pears aren’t ripe yet,” rolled over and began to snore again. His thoughts were peaceful, brushing up against Charles, who didn’t dare move lest the twisting sensation of affection in his chest flood over and consume him until the love he felt for the other man was all he had left.

It was early, not yet gone seven, and a Saturday. Charles decided to let Erik sleep in a little – Ororo had been running him ragged – but before heading downstairs, he went over to the desk to scribble a note.

He paused for a moment, and then instead of using a sheet of scrap paper, he reached for stationary and an envelope. He wrote out the message, sealed it in the envelope, and left it propped up against the lamp on the nightstand where Erik would see it as soon as he woke.

Charles headed downstairs, feeling his familiy dreaming around him, hearing the small thoughts of the animals in the snow, Scott’s plans for another snow fort, Alex’s plans to see just how warm Hank could keep him in winter, Kurt’s gentle, nebulous pleasure at the presence of his parents and the prospect of shiny things to play with. Over it all lay Erik, his pride in the school seeped into the walls, his fierce protection built into the iron gates, his astonished devotion to the children flowing through the classrooms, and his love for Charles built into the foundation of everything around them.

Christmas was in a little more than a week, and the start of Hanukah was only a few days away. The blizzard made the windows rattle, and Charles couldn’t stop smiling.

***

Mein Liebe-

Get your beautiful arse downstairs, or I will pour that tar you call coffee down the drain and see to it that Raven eats your share of the eggs.

All my love,

Your Charles.

 

FIN.

Notes:

Author’s Notes and Overly Obsessive Bibliography:

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Bulla, Clyde Robert. The Ring and The Fire; Stories from Wagner's Nibelung Opera. New York: T. Y. Crowell Co., 1962.
Frost, Robert. A Further Range. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936.

Kipling, Rudyard. Rudyard Kipling, Illustrated. New York: Avenel Books, 1982.

Milne, A. A. Now We Are Six. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961.

Pindar and Fennel, C. A. M. Pindar: The Olympian and Pythian Odes. Cambridge:
University Press, 1893.

Sanders, N. K., ed. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972.

Shute, Nevil. A Town Like Alice. North Yorkshire, United Kingdom: House of Stratus,
2000.

Stevenson, Robert Lewis. A Child’s Garden of Verses. London: Oxford University Press,
1970.

Tripp, Wallace. A Great Big Ugly Man Came Up And Tied His Horse To Me. Boston:
Little Brown & Co., 1973.

---. Marguerite, Go Wash Your Feet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985.

VanDerZanden, Ann Marie, Diane Nelson and Jane Lenahan. The Language of
Flowers. Ames, Iowa; Iowa State University of Science and Technology in
cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2005.

White, T. H. The Once and Future King. New York: Putnam, 1958.

And the other sources used for reference in this story:

Hadassah, the Jewish women’s organization to which Alex refers: http://www.hadassah.org/site/c.keJNIWOvElH/b.5651301/k.AE75/Our_History.htm

The closest temple of appropriate age to the Westchester area is Temple Beth Shalom at 760 Route 6, Mahopac, NY. Their website is http://www.tbsmahopac.org/

I owe an awful lot of my regional geographical information to ’s brilliant and informative “Westchester For Beginners”, found at http://traveller.livejournal.com/1435588.html, which is a resource no X-Men writer should have to go without.

 

Finally, the Author blathers for a while:

OH MY GOD I can’t believe I wrote a Big Bang. Seriously, guys, nothing at all for six years, and then this monster and a bunch of little ones? It’s like someone stood over my fic muse and screamed THE POWER OF ERIK/CHARLES COMPELS YOU, and the miracle is that she actually listened.

The story came about from a combination of the few scenes in X3 where Erik and Charles are working together, and the deep crushing emotional pain that I (and millions of others) felt during The Divorce Scene. I’m a sucker for happy endings, and wanted to see what would happen to these two characters of whom I was fond if they weren’t on opposite sides of the Mutant Civil War. That’s what it was, really, in the end; and as everyone knows, nobody wins a Civil War, they only survive it.

I wanted a world where they were more than broken, embittered old men. I wanted something where they didn’t just survive, they lived.

Of course, the only way I could see to do that was knock Charles out for nearly the whole damn thing, although he didn’t really object. Erik needed to focus internally, and the best way to do that was give him a situation where he was just plain didn’t have time to feel bitter and shit because he had to keep the kids from killing each other and Raven from walking around naked in front of the boys. Alex, that little shit, wasn’t even supposed to show up, but he kinda came in and started running off with bits of the plot.

It was only supposed to be about 4,000 words. When I hit 10,000 I realized I should probably sign up for the Big Bang. I mean, what the hell, right? Another 5k and I’d be done.

It went out to 32.5k before I managed to stutter to a stop and send it off to my beta.

So, the people I need to thank: , for being pretty much the best beta on the face of the planet and not listening when I whined that this was eating me; for creating indecently awesome artwork; , for letting me read great bleeding chunks of this out loud to her at infinite stages of its progress; everyone on the X-Men Big Bang support group, because it really helped; and everyone who didn’t look at me funny for doing this in the first place, You Know Who You All Are.

If you actually read all of that, then you are, in the words of Dr. Horrible’s cast, a Huge Fucking Nerd and I love you for it. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a peaceful New Year to you all.