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Charles Xavier has spent quite long enough moping. If time travel was possible all this time, then why was he getting drugged up on homemade heroine and wallowing in regret? This ancient, bald version of him seemed to have become content with everything that had happened, had rationalized it as divine purpose and compartmentalized the pain of it away. Had come to terms with losing everything by trying to get it all back and understanding one cannot cheat death, and there is wisdom in that, true.
But 30-year-old Charles Xavier is not yet wise, and he is much, much angrier.
So instead, and with vengeful vehemence, he goes home and heals from Erik dropping a baseball stadium on him. For someone who only thinks of Charles with the equivalent of heart-shaped glasses on, Erik sure does love adding continuous damage to Charles’ spine and pretending he doesn’t care that he’s doing that. For the vengeful vehemence part of the healing process, Charles tries very, very hard to be angry at Erik.
It would be much easier to be angry if Charles wasn’t a stupid fool in love.
It would be much easier to be a stupid fool in love if he didn’t know that he will still be one at ninety-six.
He blames Erik for quite a lot (mostly the baseball stadium), but can’t for the life of him bring himself to be angry outside the influence of Hank’s little serum. An inverse of his mother, who could only seem to reign in the anger when she’d had three glasses of bourbon in her stomach and another in her hand.
And the moment he is well enough to put on airs in front of Hank and use his powers without flinching and roll himself around well enough, he goes down to Cerebro and he searches. Vengeful vehemence keeps him using only his tolerated limits, even though the waiting pulls like a scratched scab unready to fall. The truly vindictive, which is a word Charles believes he can apply to himself now that he has a goal and an enemy and a cause (Erik has finally gotten to him, the insufferable asshole), are patient as saints. If Charles burns himself out, the whole thing takes longer.
So he is patient as he searches.
And eventually, he finds him. A six-year-old girl in Japan who can send people back in time. Poor thing lost both her parents by sending them back in time, and her grandfather has taken her in. All of this is fine, because Charles just needs her to send him back ten years ago, to 1962. He will not lose his kids again. He will not lose Raven again. He will not lose Erik again.
He books a plane ticket and convinces Hank not to wonder about why he’s taking this trip. Even without his powers, Hank is happy to fill in the gaps on his own, as he always has been. Charles is fairly certain Hank thinks he’s going to get some sightseeing in, take his mind off of everything.
When he arrives in Japan at the address he has written down, and six-year-old Takano Himiko answers the door, Charles says, “Hello, dear. I was wondering if you could send me back in time?”
Little Himiko does not ask many questions. She is desperately nervous about her powers, and doesn’t seem to understand them well. All she tells him is that “you think of where you want to go, and then you both go there!”
But she is eager to help when asked, and Charles doesn’t have any reason to doubt her.
Well, other than the fact that she’s six.
Truly, he should have been a bit more careful, because Himiko smilingly sends him off to the past, and he expects to blink his eyes open at the time he regrets most, 1962, just after they’d lost Darwin, his first lost soul, but instead finds himself ten years old in the garden behind the Xavier mansion.
He didn’t want to go back here at all. He has nothing here to fix. He and Raven are perfectly happy, Mother has yet to marry Kurt for at least a few years, and all was generally well in his life.
Currently, Raven is climbing a tree, and Charles had been reading. He takes a moment to think.
What had she said?
Think of where you want to go-- yes, Charles had done that-- and then you both go there!
Both.
Both?
Who on this beautiful green earth qualifies as the other person of this ‘both’?
Little Himiko had no reason to want to go back to 1944, she wasn’t even alive then and would have no body to land in as Charles had. In fact, other than Raven, who is clearly not brought from the future as she is still contentedly climbing a tree, and Erik, Charles doesn’t know anyone who was born yet in 1944! Much less someone who would have something to fix--
Oh, dear Christ. Erik’s mother died in 1944.
This narrows things down quickly.
But he does allow himself a moment of hand-wavingly frustrated groaning. Erik Lensherr is his ‘both’!? Charles needs to find better taste in men. He cannot be having a ‘both’ situation with a man who shot him in the spine and dropped a baseball stadium on him.
But, as frustrating as this situation, this man, and Charles’ taste in men is, he now knows where he should be going and what he should be doing. He needs to get to an airport.
Raven, who is nine years old at the moment, and exactly as mischievous as Charles remembers, agrees readily to pretend to be him until he gets back, which he assures her will take no longer than a week, because she knows this means that Charles won’t be here to tell her that she’ll hurt her stomach if she eats too many sweets.
Mother, as drunk as she already is, won’t notice the difference even if Raven does a poor job.
Funny. Charles didn’t think that part would hurt very much.
He sneaks his way into a cab and into an airport and into a plane.
Erik Lensherr is having a nightmare. He has had this nightmare, in many permutations, just about once a week for nearly three decades, so he is not surprised he’s having it. He is in Schmidt’s office, with two Nazis holding his mother in place behind him, and he is being asked to move a coin. He has many regrets in his life, but not having been able to move that coin is the moment that, every day, every hour, every second, he wishes he could go back to. See his mother again, alive and worried for him. Kill Schmidt here and now, before he teaches Erik that the only way to get the tools in the operating theater to Erik’s right to stop working into his flesh and marrow is to feel the metal in them, force them under his will, make them stop. Charles mentioned once, when they were at that mansion moving satellites and whatnot, that, were Erik to resolve the situation satisfactorily in his dreams, maybe they would stop being so frequent, and so Erik resolved to never resolve it. He wants very badly to come back to this moment again and again. His mother is alive here.
But, unlike most dreams, the singing of the metal is neither grating and off-kilter nor is it wobbling and watery. It feels very much real. Unlike most dreams, he can wiggle his toes if he tries, and see the lines in the palm of his hand. It feels unnervingly real. More real than any other dream he’s had.
It feels like he’s there.
And something in him trembles, perhaps the sound of his mother’s desperation-wheezy breaths behind him between her soothings. All ist gut.
Erik has never responded well to trembling. Or desperation. Last time he felt that way he dropped a baseball stadium on what very well might be the love of his life, and tried to get re-incarcerated for killing another US President. This time his reaction is much more tame. He simply raises the coin as Schmidt reaches “two,” causing raucous applause, and then he slides that coin, just the same as on that beach in Cuba, between Schmidt’s eyes before he can blink. Then he slips it through the throats of the two Nazis holding his mother.
No energy for Schmidt to absorb. No fuss. Not even very much blood.
It does, of course, horrify his mother.
“What did you do!?” she cries, in German. His mother tongue from his mother’s tongue, no longer a memory or permutation thereof but a new, novel sentence in a vocal inflection not machined together by his starved mind. His mother has always been a quick study though. She schools herself, takes in the dead soldiers and the way no other SS guards have stormed in. “Have you always been able to do that?” she asks, now very softly, stepping forward to avoid the leaking blood getting on her shoes.
The dream has never gone this far.
It always stops with his mother’s death. The guards kill her. Schmidt kills her. Other guards storm in and kill her. Once, Erik killed her himself (it was after Cuba, he didn’t sleep for four days). It always stops there, but no guards come in, his mother does not combust or melt or disintegrate or disappear; she just stares at him with terrified, imploring eyes. Erik is 32. Erik is 12. Erik has missed his mother terribly. He doesn’t care if it startles him to consciousness somehow, he runs to his mother and she wraps him in her arms and tells him it’s okay, they’ll figure it out, he’ll never have to hurt someone like that again.
Through what he realizes are sobbing apologies, he tries to tell her he already has. That he has lost count of how many he’s killed and that they all deserved it and he doesn’t feel bad at all. Erik is 12. Erik is 32.
Then the strangest thing happens, and the door is opened by a stone-faced SS guard who doesn’t so much as blink at the corpses on the floor. He closes the door before Erik can even process that he should have killed him.
It takes him too long to figure out that the guard let someone into the room, because Erik is tall for 12 and Charles is short for 10.
“Oh, thank god I’m not too late,” Charles says, and it isn’t the voice, too prepubescent to be recognizable, but the gentle tide of his power brushing the sandy shore of Erik’s mind that cues him in.
“Charles?” He pulls away from his mother. “You’re… here? In my dream?”
“It’s not a dream,” Charles’ voice is neither scathingly accusatory nor saccharine, so there’s evidence he’s right. Charles always loves or hates him in his dreams, a cut-and-dry cutout of a man with none of his shades of gray, but this voice is at once annoyed and sympathetic, longing and hurried. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Lensherr, my name is Charles Xavier, and there is nothing strange about my being here at all.”
Erik’s mother nods, a little less sharply than she otherwise would, especially being that her English should be rusty after decades of disuse.
“You cannot use your mutation on my mother!”
“We don’t exactly have the time for me to explain everything here and now, do we!?”
“What are you even doing here, Charles!?”
“Just popped over for a sandwich-- what does it look like, Erik!?”
“Erik,” his mother asks, “what’s going on? We need to get out of here.”
“That’s the plan, Mrs. Lensherr,” Charles says. “We’re getting everyone out of here.”
Erik cuts in, “Everyone?”
And Charles replies, “I don’t well plan on leaving a concentration camp intact, Erik. I have morals.”
“You have a plan?” Erik’s mother asks. It’s rhetorical. Fuck, Erik never thought he’d hear his mother ask anything in such a matter-of-fact, businesslike way of hers. “You are a child, what plan can you have?”
“It is a good plan,” Charles tells her, and, to his credit, he doesn’t make her believe it. “Erik will make a big enough distraction to draw the majority of the SS guards here, and I will explode their brains.”
She does not question how Charles will make their brains explode. She either believes Charles because he made her or believes this the fantasy of a child. Erik has a lot of questions about how Charles, with his supposed morals, is willing to explode the heads of enough people to leave a military installation unguarded, but he doesn’t ask them now. “The guards are not stupid enough to leave their posts for one child making noise,” his mother says.
Charles replies simply, “He’ll need to make lots of noise.”
“I won’t let you put my child in danger,” she says. Here, her spine is unbent and her expression one of steel. She does not cower here, just as she did not cower under the barrel of Schmidt’s pistol. “I will go with him.”
Charles looks to Erik, somewhat pleading. Tell her she can’t come, his mind begs, Erik, no matter our history, I don’t want you to lose her.
“Besides, you are so young,” she says, “where is your mother now?”
Like a snake from sudden sunlight, Charles’ mind recoils from Erik’s, and the loss is a chasm wide enough for echoes. “She is not here,” he says, stiff.
Erik’s mother misunderstands him to mean she is dead, and her expression wanes sympathetic. “Neither of you are to be put in danger, understand?” she says. This is not a rhetorical question. Edie Lensherr means to have answers, and they had better be the correct ones.
Before she gets them, voices sound outside. Their voices are scared, in the angry way that military men allow their fear to show, and they are clearly unnerved by the fact that the men at the door don’t have the foggiest idea what their own names are, much less that they should have reported in nearly an hour ago.
The door bursts open, and Charles mutters something derisive under his breath before putting two fingers to his temple and following with his eyes as both the new guards as well as both the old guards collapse to the ground instantly.
Drool leaks from their mouths and tears from their eyes, but they don’t make a sound. Other than their chests rising and falling, they do not move.
Erik’s mother curses like a sailor (he never remembered her cursing in his life), and Erik hisses, “What was that?”
“I exploded their brains,” Charles says simply, as if that is very obvious, as if he’s done this before. “Or, anyway, I ran through all their synapses in such a way that their brains have lost virtually all of their ability to differentiate the neural pathways. If they don’t starve to death on that floor there, they will have to relearn everything from moving their fingers to eating to using their voicebox.”
“Jesus,” Erik breathes, and his mother startles to herself enough to pull his ear.
“Erik Magnus Lensherr, who taught you that language!” she chides, ignoring her own verbal mud from moments before. “I should wash your mouth with soap!” Perhaps it’s the fact that she immediately turns to look for a bathroom with which to threaten him (she never followed through, but she always waved the soap in his face like she meant it) and sees that they have corpses behind them and soon-to-be-corpses ahead of them, but she is pressed to action. “We have to get out of here. Young boy, Charles, can you do that again?”
With a strange look on his face that Erik can’t decipher, some cousin of grief, Charles nods.
Erik’s mother pats his cheek. “Good boy. We will escape from here because my gifted son has gifted friends. Come on, let us go.”
Edie Lensherr is an unyielding woman. She did as much schooling as her mother allowed, then a little more just to hear herself called unsightly by peers, parents. Jakob was as good a husband as she was told was reasonable for her to expect, for her too-high cheekbones and too-far-back hairline and too-smart mouth. Women with large bosoms were popular as she was being courted and married, and so her mother had her stuff her bra with small bits of cloth for each date, and on her wedding day, and when Jakob finally saw her with no clothes, his mouth twisted a bit in disappointment.
But he never hit her or raised his voice, and if he was seeing other women on the side she tried to pretend it didn’t bother her that she was not allowed the same freedoms.
When she had her baby-- just hers, mind, Jakob was held up at work during her (blessedly short) delivery-- she named him Erik Magnus. There is strength in the name Erik, and Magnus meaning ‘great.’ She had always known he would be great.
Moving metal with his mind had not been high on her list of possible ways for him to be great. She had always thought he might be a carpenter, with his large hands and gangly height to grow into, or perhaps a teacher, with his toothy grin and slow, even speech. These, she had thought, would be great.
But her son has killed twelve people so far this afternoon, and he has not touched any of them. His little friend has brought at least four times that many to their ruin, although death will come for them slowly as maggots and just as painfully. Edie hopes it is at least that painful.
The SS guards that come after them see them as just a mother and two children, walking where they perhaps shouldn’t be, and each of them makes the same series of choices as if by rote memory: shout, raise gun, approach, fall. Charles is doing this interesting trick to make them all fall, and Edie feels maybe, in another life, this trick would scare her, but in this one she is nothing but proud. A passably-intelligent few try to sneak up on them, and these ones her son sends that coin whistling through their heads and they die instantly.
She should be scared of these children, perhaps, but she has seen enough, lived in fear long enough, that all she feels is a soft, unyielding pity that she cannot be the one with blood on her hands instead. Her son has lost his father, his uncles and aunts and grandparents too. Charles has said his mother is gone, and truly he must not have anyone if he has gotten himself here. It strikes Edie that she is all these children have left.
By the time she has had this thought, they are outside the gates of the camp, and Erik is rending the fences from their posts and the doors from their hinges and he is gathering it all up in the sky and he sets the ball of jutting metal and uneven spikes gently down on top of the unmoving body of the commanding officer near the guard dormitory.
“Erik,” Charles says, voice high and thready. It sends her son bristling as he whirls to face him, and when Edie looks as well, she sees blood leaking from Charles’ nose. His eyes roll toward the back of his head, despite an obvious attempt to stay upright, and Edie catches him before he can hurt himself. Her mind screams, suddenly, and it is only once it begins screaming that she realizes her mind has never been quiet as long as she’s had it, and it is awfully disconcerting that she had watched on as her son and his small friend killed dozens and she had felt nothing. Not the recalcitrant hope she had expected freedom to come with, not the horror of seeing men reduced to puddles, not the raging war of fear and anger inside her. Nothing. What is wrong with her, to have so docilely allowed herself to be led by children? Moreover, children she should be protecting!
Dear lord, what is wrong with her?
Erik frets horribly-- where did he learn to fret like that? He is twelve, and should not know how to fret for another twenty years. But he frets over his mother, carrying Charles with her emaciated arms, and he frets for Charles, muttering in his sleep about ravens and angels and beasts and all the havoc they wreak.
“He is resting,” she tells Erik as the three of them, just inside the treeline from the main road, walk westward, toward where whispers said that help could be had. She knows it is far, multiple days of walking at least, but she must appear so frail to her son for him to have spontaneously learned to fret over her. That is her right and duty as his mother, not the other way around (not until Edie is at least eighty or ninety, if she gets to decide). “I will tell you if something seems wrong, Erik. Why don’t we play a little storytelling game?”
As frazzled as her son is, she expects him to buck her suggestion. Just as he got his even-paced speech from his father, he got his mother’s unyielding nature. He will bite like a kicked dog and hold on until he decides to let go, and nothing but himself can get those teeth to yield. It was like this with everything from his homework to getting him to roll onto his stomach as a baby.
But Erik’s eyes shutter, his expression folding away into something horribly distant and sad. “Okay,” he says, and waits for her to start as she always has.
“Once upon a time, there was a little boy,” she says, even though she really wants to pry the secrets of whatever eats at her son from behind his furrowed little brow. How long has he been able to move metal like that? Why does he not seem any more upset than she is about what they’ve just done, what they’ve just been through? Why does he fret over his mother when he is just as skinny?
“He was lonely,” Erik continues, sullen even as his eyes cast over the specks of sunlight through the trees overhead, “and scared.”
Edie nods. “So the little boy went and found himself a friend,” she says, hiking Charles further up, so some of his weight can rest on her hip. He is not a large child, but Edie hasn’t had a full meal in over a week.
With a little scoff of, “More like the friend found him,” Erik continues, “And then the boy was happy, for a time, but he messed everything up eventually and was back to being lonely and scared.”
Hmm. What to do with a problem of this shape? Erik has always been her light, her little candle, she called him before he grew too old to tolerate such endearments, but now he seems determined to play the pessimist. “But the little boy’s friend came back for him, risking life and limb to travel through the thorns the little boy surrounded himself in--”
“And the little boy pushed his friend away,” Erik cuts in. “He told his friend to go home. There’s no prize under the thorns, just an assho-- a fool who is never doing the right thing at the right time.” His eyes water, and were Edie’s arms not already full, were they not already on borrowed time, she would stop everything and hold him for a minute.
But Edie is an unyielding woman who raised an unyielding son, so they walk on, and Edie continues the story. “And do you know what the little boy’s friend said to that?” she asks.
Erik is studying the ground he walks on now, hiding his face with its red eyes and trembling lip. He doesn’t reply.
“The little boy’s friend said, ‘I forgive you.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t see you were hurting.’ He said, ‘let’s go back home together.” She hopes Charles says that. It’s not right of her, maybe, to hope for this from a boy so young, when truly she doesn’t know the history he has with her son. Edie adds, “And they did go home together, and the little boy’s mother made them both kuchen.”
“We don’t have the ingredients for kuchen,” Erik scoffs.
Edie taps his shin with her toe. “Don’t scoff at your mother. We will make what I say we’re making.”
Charles wakes up slowly to the even rhythm of footsteps under him, and it takes him entirely too long to realize he is being carried like a child-- the fact that he is a child is irrelevant. Edie Lensherr is an emaciated woman who has just been through a significant trauma! She shouldn’t be carrying anyone!
With a wiggle, he alerts her to the fact that he’s awake, and he stumbles to his own feet before she’s even had time to protest against setting him down (a protest he can feel bubbling at the edges of her consciousness). “I can walk now, but thank you, Mrs. Lensherr.”
She puffs out a little laugh. “You are a polite one, aren’t you? Teach Erik a bit of this, if you could.”
“I am perfectly polite!” Erik insists.
“In public, perhaps,” Edie replies, “but you got my temperament and your father’s foolishness.”
Well, at least he comes by it honestly.
Leaving them to their bickering, Charles stretches his mind out, looking for a best direction to go for safety. Being a child during the war and a college student immediately after, Charles hardly knows anything of troop movements beyond school propaganda and the whispers of classmates. It’s not like they teach recent military strategy to anyone seeking a degree in biology. Guesswork and a recollection of which European countries held which allegiances (not anyone nearby, he recalls) is all Charles has without using his powers, and he would place large bets on Erik outpacing him in both areas.
So Charles stretches his mind out, as far as he knows how. Thin and thready, his consciousness spills away from him, pools around him in a shallow puddle. Distantly, he’s aware that he’s tripped twice, and that he now has hands holding his on either side, but that is inconsequential to trying to reach any human mind in any direction other than north.
The same way a person tends to approach someone they know first out of a crowd, Charles’ power latches not onto the front of the group his mind encounters, but on the most familiar. He had seen before that Logan was old, but it is still so strange to feel his mind, as howling and bitter as ever, in 1944. With a little effort, which Logan does not recognize well enough to resist, Charles pulls.
If Charles trips over one more tree root, Erik is just gonna float him around by his shoe eyelets and jacket zipper. His eyes are closed, but his steps are sure, so they follow his direction. Is it awful that Erik would trust anywhere Charles led him, even after dropping a baseball stadium on him?
That said, whatever inclination Charles is following doesn’t let him see what’s actually in front of him, so Erik holds one hand and his mother holds the other and they keep him from running directly into shrubbery. They don’t talk much. He has so much to say and that makes it all the harder to say it.
How can you apologize to your mother for letting her die when she walks, alive, beside you? How can you apologize for paralyzing your friend when he walks, unharmed, beside you? It would be easier to be angry at Charles for manipulating his mother’s mind if it wasn’t so convenient to not have her asking who Charles is or what he’s doing or why. It’s enough of a blessing that she isn’t asking about Erik’s wild swing of emotions. It would be torture to explain to his mother that he is not the same child he was this morning.
As they approach the edge of the trees, on the other side of the thicket they entered, Erik isn’t sure what he expected. It certainly wasn’t the grating mixture of English (both british and american) and French that assaults his ears. He can feel dogtags, the metal of guns. British, American, Soviet. Friendly.
Charles never would get him killed.
Erik supposes that’s the difference between them. Even if it makes Charles bleed from his nose and run into trees, he would never drop a baseball stadium on Erik. And Erik is destined to spend the rest of his life pretending he doesn’t care.
“I did not get us both sent back in time for you to--!” Charles realizes too late that he has responded to an inside voice with an outside voice.
“Who’s that?” a tense, british voice startles from ahead of them.
“Erik, would I offend your delicate sensibilities if I…” Charles wiggles his fingers near his temple.
Rolling his eyes, Erik waves him on. Mutations are beautiful things-- it’s just manipulating his mother that he has a problem with. The last thing Erik needs is to find out his parents were have marital troubles because Charles stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong.
This, Charles finds funny enough to giggle, which is not a promising sign for the perceived sanctity of the memory of Erik’s parents’ marriage. “What’s he doing?” Erik’s mother asks, as if responding to something said a bit too fast during a movie.
Whatever military they’re about to reach lowers their guns. “It’s friendlies,” a familiar voice says. Where has Erik heard that voice? It’s even-keeled and almost peppy, which is the last thing anyone expects to hear in Nazi-occupied Germany. “Come on out,” the voice says, and Charles walks confidently, which leaves Erik and his mother to be dragged out with him.
And for fucksake it’s Captain Goddamned America.
And Logan? The guy he wrapped in rebar? There’s no way that’s him-- he looks the same age now that he will in twenty years!
Mutation, darling, Charles reminds him, comes in all forms.
Not like it’s Erik’s first time hanging around a guy who doesn’t age. His arms cross, unconsciously defending himself from some kind of retaliation.
Oh, come on, Erik, you haven’t mutilated him yet, Charles’ laugh sparkles through his mind. Besides, when he came to help us before, you’d tried to kill him a dozen times in his recollection.
Erik finds it incredibly difficult not to make some kind of expression at this. Logan is apparently much more forgiving than he’d thought. Erik feels like a bit more of an asshole, and he mentally swats away Charles’ attempt to interject on his pity party.
Seeing a woman and two children reinforces the idea Charles put in their heads of them not being any threat, and immediately a few different people swarm around them, all asking questions and making assumptions and, mostly, shouting. It’s clear Charles has overdone it, and he stumbles a little in trying to stay upright, which is enough to motivate both Lensherrs to action.
Edie is faster. “We will answer questions one at a time, please,” Erik’s mother commands, and her voice carries despite the malnourishment that has begun to hunch her spine. “There are other prisoners there, that way,” she points, “at Auschwitz camp. The guards are all dead. Go help the people. And you will get me and my boys to safety.”
“She’s right,” Captain Goddamned America replies. “Buck, we’re headed east. Get Salvador to radio in about the situation. Logan, you alright to escort these three back to base?”
The grunt Logan gives barely qualifies as an answer, but he turns and starts walking west.
Of all the ways Erik might have guessed he could have maybe encountered Captain America, that one was the least likely. What the fuck.
You loved his museum exhibit though, Charles teases. Erik thinks Charles should mind his own business. Charles makes it clear he thinks making fun of Erik as they trek through the mud-splotched, tree-littered landscape is a much better use of his time.
They reach some kind of allied base by dusk, and Logan still has not said a word to them this whole time, despite Edie’s repeated attempts to thank him, ask about their direction, or make pleasantries. She appreciates what he has done, and she also thinks he is an asshole.
As they approach the fenced-in edges of the camp, a man greets Logan with a nod, and then says, “Sargent-- er, um, Mr. Logan, sir, I cannot allow you to bring unauthorized--”
And Logan doesn’t say a word, just unsheathes three claws on his left hand, and they are magically granted entry. Edie revises her opinion of Logan, and deigns that he may attend the kuchen feast she is planning in her head, and that she will make him little flashcards so he may communicate with words if he chooses.
Behind her, Charles bursts out in peals of laughter.
What a wonderful child to acquire as a bonus. Erik likes him too, although he is putting on a thick face about it. He holds his affection in his hands, like his father. It’s how she knows he once loved her and how she knew when he moved on. Always, Erik’s hands move as though to reach out, and then shy back before they reach Charles. Edie did not raise a shy child. What has happened to her boy? What did that man do to him before Edie could get back to him?
Logan leads them through the well-trod dirt of the camp into a tent, where a woman sits at a desk. Without looking up, she says, her voice british, “Steve, what do you-- oh. You.” She also thinks Logan is an asshole. Then, seeing the little family Logan has delivered, she stands. “Oh! So they’ve made it then?”
“More like we made it,” Erik mutters, and Edie bites on a smile at his timing to show such childish insistence. If not when hungry, then never, she supposes.
But the british woman takes this in stride, assuming whatever she likes as she takes stock of them and makes what Edie can only assume is a battle plan. “Alright, Logan, please show them to the mess and make sure they get something with protein and carbohydrates.” Logan grumbles, something perhaps near words but not loud enough to discern. “Carbohydrates, I said. Bread. Rice. Potatoes. Whatever we have today.” Logan’s claws flex in and out of his skin, a fascinating little trick. “Unless you have something else to do?” the woman says, one perfectly sculpted eyebrow raising.
Logan begins to amble in a direction. What a sweet asshole. “Thank you, miss,” Edie says as they go.
The woman is already sitting back down to her paperwork. “Of course, ma’am. You’ll be in allied territory by sunup.”
They are, in fact, in allied territory by sunup, along with a few tens of thousands of other survivors. From the allied militaries, there is cheering and singing, and the survivors sing too, yes, but it is too soon for the survival to feel real, for some, and so the place where they make camp is pockets of light and dark. Peace for some, and laughter for others. Today, everyone is free to choose.
Within two days, and a not-inconsiderable use of Charles’ power, they arrive in Westchester, New York, at the gates of the Xavier mansion. It looks… very different than Erik remembers. Nothing major, but after living there for weeks and then haunting the grounds like a ghost for months (you were haunting the grounds? Get out of here, Charles), Erik can tell it is different now than it will be when Erik comes for the first time. Less of it metal and stone, now, more wood and fabric.
A fire?
In a few years, Charles replies, ignoring Erik’s chastisement, my mother remarries, and the new beau is not as careful as he should have been. This does not feel like an adequate explanation for a mansion of this size to need extensive repair, but Charles’ mind slides away from Erik’s questions, not fully gone but sullenly resistant. It irks Erik that Charles is allowed secrets, but he is not. Charles does not rise to this bait, only steps sideways, away from Erik, infinitesimally as they walk toward the mansion.
Raven, nine and beaming and morphing herself between a facsimile of Charles and her natural form with each step, bounds over to them.
“Charles!” she sings, “You brought friends! Is this a new nanny? Is she an aunt? Do we have a cousin? What’s his name?”
“I did, no, no, no, and Erik. This is Edie,” he gestures to each of them in turn. “They will be living with us for a while.”
“Just until we get our feet under us, mind,” Edie repeats. She has been adamant that they not be a burden, despite Charles repeatedly assuring her that the two of them couldn’t possibly be a burden, and Erik telling her that they should take what help is offered freely. Still, Edie says, “I want to talk to an adult of some kind. Your guardian, Charles. Surely, you have a guardian?” She doesn’t sound entirely certain, like perhaps Charles and Raven have managed to weasel their way out of being parented and live on this vast estate with nobody but themselves. The image is funny, the two of them running about on the grounds and sleeping in blanket forts at midnight because nobody told them when to go to bed.
This bait, Charles does rise to, and it’s with a smile, You’re not entirely wrong, my friend.
Raven, donning the blonde hair and fair skin of a human child, introduces herself, the house, her favorite study, the maid they pass, and eventually, the door to Charles’ mother’s room.
“She’s still sleeping,” Raven says with a finger to her lips.
“Sleeping?” Edie echoes. “Child, it is midday! Is she ill?”
Raven shrugs, shoulders curling a bit, defensive, a shadow of who she will be when she comes with Erik. “She sleeps a lot. Charles says she’s just tired. When she comes out--”
“Raven, would you like to show Erik the kitchens?” Charles cuts in.
What are you hiding? Erik hisses as pointedly as he can, and Charles recoils the way one does if they have their ear yelled into.
With a sour look and a nudge to follow Raven, who is happily prattling along the way excited nine-year-olds do, Charles replies, Nothing you want to see.
Not that Raven doesn’t like Charles, but he can be so boring sometimes, when he’s not in the mood to play. He’s only a year older than her. It’s not like he’s all that grown up. But Charles has brought home a new friend! Erik doesn’t talk much, but neither did Raven at first, so she understands.
She shows him the main kitchen first, with it’s big island and all the fridges and cabinets that are so tall, Raven has to climb on the drawers to see the top shelves. “We never run out of food,” she says. “Even if you eat a whole lot and steal some to hide in your pillow.” Oops. “Don’t tell Charles I hide food in my pillow.”
Having been the type to hide food in his jacket pockets and under his mattress in the Soviet convalescent home and Polish orphanages after the camps and before he reached the age of majority, Erik wouldn’t dare share knowledge of her stash with Charles. Besides, Charles probably already knows. Which is infuriating. It hadn’t occurred to Erik that when Charles said, and ostensibly seems to have meant that he saw everything of Erik’s past, it wasn’t just the torture and loneliness and loss, it was also the fact that he stole an entire package of store-bought biscuits and hid them under his mattress and then lied that he threw them away because a mouse got into it when he was seventeen. He didn’t even like the biscuits. Erik thinks having to face Charles after accidentally permanently disabling him is going to be easier.
Why, the nerve of that woman! Edie Lensherr stomps through the house, dragging Charles by the hand. The poor dear looks just barely sad, which is worse, Edie thinks, because if he’s just barely sad by his mother’s atrocious behavior, then how has he been feeling when he looked fine!?
“Erik!” she calls through the spacious halls, and she grumbles something uncomplimentary in German about big houses and small people. “Erik! Where is my son.”
It’s hardly a question, but after a moment, Charles replies, “He and Raven are in the big kitchen. They’re making… pancakes?”
“Ach, my sweet boy.” Erik knows Edie’s feelings about breakfast foods. The food at the various military installations they’ve been shuffled between in the past few days is much more filling than anything Edie has had in the few weeks she spent at the camps, but it’s hardly close to tasty. Her son will make pancakes, and tonight, Edie will make kuchen, enough for herself and the children and even that maid.
None for Mrs. Xavier though. She can rot with her bottles and her sardonic smile and her mean words. Her struggles, she says! Edie has had more struggles in the past year than that empty-spirited socialite will have in her whole life! And through none of these did she ever consider treating her child as a burden to be passed off to some hired help! Even had Edie had the resources to hire help, there is nothing on this planet that could make her cherish Erik less, could make her see him as the inconvenience that Mrs. Xavier seemed to view her children as. No. This won’t do at all. There are three children in this house, and Edie means to see all three happy and loved, and she’ll do the job herself if Mrs. Xavier doesn’t deign it worth her time! It is worth Edie’s time-- it is worth every second Edie has left!
For Edie Lensherr has seen the shape of death, has seen what the clock looks like when those seconds run out, and she had just one thought: that Erik looked so terrified.
And from then she resolved that, should she live through that moment, she must build her life so that Erik never needs to lose her.
She had not expected to actually live through it. She had thought what she saw Erik do with the gate was some hunger-fueled delusion, and that he wouldn’t be capable of moving the coin at all. But he could, and he did, and his little friend came and got them out, and now, though Edie can scarcely believe it, she has her whole life ahead of her and not one, but three children to look after.
The blessings Hashem doles are surely strange in shape, but blessings they are nonetheless.
The house is asleep, but Erik has questions, and he has had quite enough of Charles dodging them by hiding behind his mother or Raven, so this is the perfect time to ask them. He waddles out of bed and into the halls of the Xavier mansion, which are much less straightforward than they will be after the apparently extensive housefire that Charles doesn’t want to talk about. Erik has things he doesn’t want to talk about either, it’s not like he doesn’t understand, but Charles has rooted around in his head and seen everything already regardless, so Erik thinks fair’s fair.
Though Charles mind never directly tells him, Erik feels him coming the way a hand can tell when it’s near the stove burner: the warmth reaches him first. Exhausted and content, Charles consciousness comes in like the tide, and Erik can’t help the way he wants to melt into it, let the salt of himself sluice away.
“You’re mother is overbearingly kind,” Charles says, when they are close enough to speak aloud.
To Erik, who has never had another mother, the comment is strange. His mother is terse, and sharkish, and of course wonderful, but he has never heard her described this way in the past or the present.
A wave of Charles’ mother rolls past him, and he watches, in the distant way that one watches a horrible, out-of-body experience, as Mrs. Xavier ambles down to the kitchen, sober and grieving, and drags a bottle out of the cupboard and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, and when she spots Charles, at something like seven, watching her, she shrieks at him that he should know when he isn’t wanted.
What Charles doesn’t keep as well controlled is the shame that envelops him, and thereby Erik. It trembles his fists and reddens his ears and tightens his jaw. It’s the same shame Erik feels when he does stupid shit like drop a baseball stadium on the man he loves.
Why does Charles love him despite that? It had never occurred to him that them loving each other was wrong, but Charles shouldn’t love anyone who hurts him, who leaves him, who pretends he doesn’t care, who keeps doing it over and over again. That fault has always felt like Erik’s-- and of course Erik should be better-- but truly, why does Charles keep choosing him?
There is no prize for loving someone enough to forgive the ways they hurt you. There is just more hurt.
When he looks at Charles, the only thing that catches the distant light of the moon through the window is the cusp of his tears. He knows Charles has heard him, he can feel more of that shame roll off him in wave after torrential wave.
“There’s got to be a better way to love,” Erik whispers. Don’t let me hurt you anymore.
Charles’ reply is watery and small. “Do you want to find it together?” Don’t leave me again.
And, though Erik is too sharp in every way, he tries to find enough softness in himself to make for a decent hug. “It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else to be for the next twenty years.”