Chapter Text
“This time, just watch.”
It is an order given to a still-broken, still-bleeding Paradox in the 24th Street Station. In light of the carnage in every direction, he knows better than to fight the command, so instead, he sniffs angrily. The sharp breath has the unfortunate side effect of disturbing the delicate ecosystem of his broken nose, and the resulting coughing fit only earns him an eye roll of minimal sympathy and his assignment, neatly printed and outlined in detail, thrust into his bloody hands.
Another anchor being, powerful enough to have multiple universes in the balance and threaten them all, is his to babysit. That’s, quite frankly, unwise, but whatever. Paradox only reads the first line of the dossier before considering a bullet to the brain.
Charles-fucking-Xavier must be his anchor being.
It’s funny, really. It has to be, he has to make it so, or he’ll be eating lead. Not twelve hours ago, Xavier’s deranged baby sister palmed the back of his brain and gave his sinuses a good scratch. Now, it’s Paradox’s life work to babysit the telepath’s on-again, off-again boyfriend.
MAGNETO, the paperwork reads in a tastefully uneven typewriter typeface.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“You are my creator.”
He growled this horrific truth as an iron crossbeam threatened the structural integrity of his ribs; he couldn’t deny it if he wanted to. The bloodshed, the pain. They were what made him, what forged him into a weapon of steel and anger. Erik was a monster of Shaw’s own making, a post-modern Prometheus destined to rent his maker limb from limb. This was the villainy that he taught, that Erik executed.
With a single coin, he bettered the instruction.
Don’t do this, Erik. The panic of Charles’ internal voice cut off as he donned the gunmetal helm. “Please, Erik, no!”
The slow, tearing, fatal pain that ended Shaw’s life left no shred of evidence on the villain’s face as Charles held him still, his own voice ragged as he screamed for mercy. Would he have begged the same for his own life, had he the chance?
I’m sorry, Charles.
The thought would go unheard, trapped in the sleek metal bucket of Shaw’s making. Regardless, he had to know. They’d stumbled their way into this friendship at an impasse. They’d stared wordlessly at each other from Miami to Washington, to Russia and back, to New York, to Cuba. They’d stayed their curious hands and aching hearts for this reason – Charles could not commit himself to murder, and Erik could not relinquish his need for vengeance. It had not stymied the emotions that pressed fresh pain into Erik’s chest now, but nothing ever would.
You should have left me to drown.
“Today, our fighting stops!” Erik lied. “Take off your blinders, brothers and sisters. The real enemy is out there.”
The crumpled corpse of Shaw splayed out on the sand like a sacrifice made to their future, and only Charles slipped to walk astride him, to reason with him. He walked with ragged breath, his ridiculously blue eyes red-rimmed with tears. His head drooped with a weight that looked like pain, but he kept apace with Erik as they fronted the gently rolling waves and the twins fleets beyond. Partners, as set apart by the Americans and Soviets both.
“The Neanderthal is running scared, my fellow mutants,” he declared. “Go ahead, Charles. Tell me I’m wrong.”
With Erik’s gentle insistence, the telepath lifted two fingers to his temple. His answer came not in words, but in the expression of something shattering, in his labored breath, in his shock, in the tears he let fall in time with his hand. Those worried eyes darted first to Erik’s – always, first to him – and then to Moira, who took off at a quick clip.
God, if only I was.
Erik didn’t extend his awareness to follow the buckles on her flight suit. It was too late. On the edge of his awareness, the satisfying clatter of firing mechanisms primed, then locked into place with beautiful, mechanical efficiency. He breathed in the moment, shuttering down all but the peace that Charles had gifted him.
And then the bombardment began.
American and Russian missiles alike, loosed from their warship cannons in percussive succession, polluted the sky with their chemtrails. Erik watched the projectiles streak high and dive hard towards them, penetrating the outer extremities of his control, then pushing far beyond. The world narrowed in as he focused on them, the baseline thrum of all-metal going dead silent as he focused and waited, perhaps for too long. Only Charles stood fast with him, heels planted in the sand with either an unshaken faith in the man beside him or an unerring will to die.
Deathly focused, Erik finally extended one arm to catch them in a magnetic field. Even without the tendrils of Charles’ peace in his mind, just one outstretched palm would be enough, he was sure. Like a film reel stuttering, the missiles froze, their onboard rockets fizzling out one by one as they drifted in midair.
For a breathless moment, Erik was sure he could feel the hope rolling off Charles in waves. Then, with a shaking turn of his wrist, the warheads pivoted sharp noses back towards their creators.
“Erik, you said yourself, we’re the better men,” Charles pleaded. His voice was firm, wavering but strong. It barely betrayed his desperation. Erik might have heard him out, might have listened to his bid for peace over the overwhelming hum of metal, if it hadn’t been for that final, horrendous mistake.
“They’re just following orders.”
His voice hitched as he said it, like he knew even before it left his lips, like he couldn’t keep it in. Erik’s face, before tight with anger and concentration, fell into a dangerous impassiveness. That was it, then. His decision made for him.
Thank you, Charles.
“I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders.” Finally, he looked away from the hundreds of missiles to the panicked ocean of his telepath’s eyes. “Never again.”
The blood rushed in Erik’s ears as he pulled his fist back and hurtled all of his energy with it, a spear-like thrust into the sky that rockets followed, tugged back into violent life. Charles shouted at him, something lost to the tensing of his jaw and his narrow focus on momentum, thrust, power, hate, revenge. Then, there was a pained bellow, and Erik felt the breath leave him, his focus spent, as he and Charles tumbled to the ground.
His hips ached something terrible, and Charles was on him all at once. Limbs in every direction, writhing, clawing, the telepath may have vibrated with energy out into multiple men, not unlike Shaw as he grasped and growled and clambered for the helmet that locked him out of Erik’s mind. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Erik warned, even as he drove an elbow into Charles’ cheek, knocking him supine into the sand. “Don’t make me!”
Erik crawled atop him no more gracefully, his weight a weapon to use against the smaller man as they fought for lives – albeit not their own. Explosions rattled the air as they clawed at each other, clinging as much as they pushed away. The red wash of terror glossed over Erik’s eyes and gripped his heart like a vice until Charles’ high cheekbones and doe eyes became unrecognizable beneath him. His hand closed around a throat and squeezed. The red ‘O’ of a mouth, shocked, set in otherwise too-pale skin was routine in the haze of kill-or-be-killed until Charles’ voice wheezed from it. “Erik, stop.”
He punched the invocation off Charles’ face and stumbled to his feet.
Erik reached out, desperate to catch the missiles that remained. Of the hundreds fired at them, half remained, and he urged them onward, reveling in the air that they soared through as if it battered his own skin.
Suddenly, the sharp ping of a bullet ricocheted off Erik’s stolen helmet, and he turned, stunned, to find the grey-beige-brown shape of Moira advancing on him, gun poised. His head swam, and he blinked to focus on the steel of the gun and the titanium of the dog tags that laid atop her heart. The overreach ached, but he pushed himself to focus in every direction until the warmth of her finger on the trigger became as clear as if she held his hand, and the sear of gunpowder on the second bullet felt like touching a pan straight from the oven. Erik cast his palm before him, deflecting the second shot away and into the sand, and then a third that followed, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh––
He felt it immediately, the near-molten metal hitting not dull, unyielding dunes, but something hotter, slicker, more pliant. He didn’t need to read the shock on Moira’s face, nor hear the wet, rattling gasp behind him to know what had transpired, what she’d done. The world seemed to stutter into slow motion, and then it stopped altogether once he turned on his heels, because there – there was Charles, cast in a spray of crimson, plummeting to the sand.
Erik ran, stumbled, slid to his side immediately as the world started up again, only to narrow into nothing but Charles and the tiny ball of metal within him, lodged wet and warm in his chest. Erik pulled him onto his lap immediately, cradled the back of his neck, and pressed a firm palm against the front of his flight suit. He’d dreamed of holding him before, but not like this. Blood gurgled unevenly from his chest like a fountain, running out of him in rivulets, onto Erik’s knees and beach below.
The bullet came out easily, offensively small and coated bright red as Erik threw it aside. His helmet joined it in the sand as he bent over the telepath and pressed their foreheads together.
“I’m so sorry,” he gasped. Hot, iron-laced breath panted between them as Charles’ breath took up a panicked staccato. They were too close to meet each other’s eyes properly, but Erik could see Charles’ tears. He could feel his own, just as surely as he felt the metal in the blood that bubbled over Charles’ lips. “Stay,” he begged. “Please, stay.”
Charles’ mouth moved, gurgling without words, and a startled sob escaped Erik’s chest. With shaking, blood-soaked hands, he pressed Charles’ cool, pale fingers to his temple.
Erik.
“No, no, no,” he sobbed. Footsteps in the sand, steel-toed boots meant to protect his teammates and keep them in the back of his mind. The smallest, the closest, Mystique's. “I said back off!”
Raven, blue-and-red, with tears in her eyes and an accusation in her frown, stopped in her tracks. Still, Moira stumbled closer.
“You did this,” Erik wheeled on her, and with a wave of his hand the necklace over her frantic heartbeat twisted up into a makeshift garrote. A startled gasp escaped her, and then no more air was permitted to pass. Erik wasted precious seconds to watch her stretch onto her toes and paw helplessly at the chain.
Please. Charles’ voice was soft even in his mind, fading like the last moments of daylight after a sunset. She didn’t do this, Erik. You did.
The chain choking Moira fell limp, and she followed it to the ground. “Charles, no,” Erik croaked. His hand still held Charles’ palm to his face, and without pressure on the wound its flow had become a torrent. Everything about him was blue now, except for the river of red that poured from such a small, subtle wound. His eyes reflected the clear afternoon sky, his skin was blotchy, bloodless, and pale. Beneath the bright shine of blood, Charles’ lips were beginning to purple. “Please, please, no!”
His eyes didn’t move to follow him as he pressed their heads together again. His voice didn’t brush warmly up against the terror of Erik’s subconscious to shake away that last, awful accusation. His chest still tried for a few more ragged breaths, but his fingers no longer fought to dig into his temple. Erik knew what death looked like, and it had come.
She didn’t do this, I did.
Once-gentle hands clawed at Charles’ body, digging fingernails into his nape, his palm, the unyielding fabric of his uniform. Erik sought purchase but never found enough, he’d never find enough, not if he followed the bullet’s path to his heart and held it until it began to beat again. He pressed his face to his chest and let the blood he spilled paint his cheeks. He felt the warmth leave Charles’ body and tried to press his own into it, clinging until the sun fell and the moon rose and the stars screamed their blame down upon him.
The cry that Erik answered them with was not one of war, but immeasurable loss.