Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

The Time Variance Authority exists outside of time, but also sort of at the end of it. Not so far towards the end of it that chronomonitors and time agents tap dance atop the trap door to the Void, but it’s a near thing. He has the dubious honor of working out of a field office, which puts him very nearly within time, but all the technology is shipped from headquarters and, thus, has the benefit of every scientific discovery from every corner of time, space, and reality.

So why the fuck does it hum like that.

There are so many thick glass screens, gently curved and fitted in enormous frames, all of them flickering with a color cast and quality that simply can’t be the most efficient output for their line of work. And he largely puts up with it, because he is a being created solely for this, a mere slave to He Who Remains’ commitment to aesthetic.

But it doesn’t really seem fair that, as a being created entirely to stare at old TVs, he should be susceptible to tinnitus. Or that those old TVs, which aren’t really TVs at all, should be designed to exacerbate it.

“Sir?” an aggravatingly timid voice interrupts the insipid hum from somewhere on his right. Paradox sighs over the rim of his coffee mug and rolls his neck in a show of frustration before he turns towards the noise. A chronomonitor stares up at him from the bullpen with a feckless vacancy in her eyes. Even this scrap of attention feels like a mistake.

“What?”

“This one doesn’t seem right.” She – Lynda, with a Y – paws her monitor vaguely in his direction. The video feed is so dim that it barely lights up her cubicle. Paradox rolls his eyes, but he still gestures lamely at one of the enormous central screens in command central.

“Let me see it, then.”

Lynda and his assistant wage a small war on their keyboards as they enter commands on both their ends. This, at least, is a more pleasing effect; he’d never admit it, but the senior agent rather likes the satisfying click-clack of the older keyboards. They are sticky and tactile and present.

Eventually, the subtitled UN trial footage he’d originally been watching is replaced by grainy footage of a hard rain, long after nightfall. The silhouette of Magneto is barely visible, though once he picks him out, Paradox scoffs and waves it away.

“Rubbish timeline,” he grouses. There are many Magnetos who mope – his self-pitying melancholy often rivals his righteous fury, Paradox has begun to discover – but this is his least favorite variant. It’s a Lehnsherr, one of Shaw’s making. He lost his Xavier earlier than most and has been wallowing in grief ever since. This Magneto’s intermittent bouts of violence have been the only thing worth watching for amongst several months of alcohol poisoning, one-sided chess matches, and kips on graves. “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

The chronomonitor flounders for an answer, her mouth unable to find words yet moving like a fish’s anyway. Paradox presses his palm hard into his forehead and hooks the pad of his thumb against one temple, his middle finger against the other. He squeezes there, and for a brief moment the world narrows in and he knows relief.

The effect is short-lived, and sound creeps back into his awareness. The hum of a thousand ancient cathode rays. His assistant, slurping coffee somewhere afield. The sounds of another timeline, tinny and streaming too loudly from a monitor’s enormous earphones. Lynda.

“I… don’t know, Mr. Paradox,” she says slowly. Her shyness bothered him moments ago, and now it’s the glacial speed at which she speaks, as if he’s a goddamn child. He was never a child. “I just thought…”

“You didn’t,” he snaps, and his hand flies away from his brow, letting the light hit his eyelids – Paradox hadn’t even realized he’d closed his eyes. “You never think! None of you, ever!” In a spike of rage, he slams his mug down on the control nexus. Irish breakfast sloshes in every which direction, and a surge of orange ripples like television static across the Worst Magneto feed, then throughout the rest of the system. “Our mandate is to fucking watch, or did you forget that?”

Lynda is immediately on her feet and shaking her head. Paradox is on a roll.

“That sad sack killed his Xavier, and unless we give him another, this is just what it’s going to be,” he spat. “Now, if it were up to me, we’d pull the plug on his godforsaken timeline, but upstairs says we can’t make that call anymore, and I’m not going to be the one to fuck with the Time Ripper again after all those goddamn holes were put in it––Ralph, I cannot hear myself think, can you please turn down your feed!?”

Paradox wheels around towards the quiet din of whatever the fuck a half-decent Magneto is up to, and there’s the sweater vested chronomonitor himself, a kitschy mug lifted half to his lips, utterly frozen.

They regard each other for a moment, and everything is still.

An apology is on Paradox’s lips just as Ralph’s fingers are on the dial, but the quiet that he’s shocked the field office into heightens every sound, every thought, every movement. One could hear a pin drop, or spot a paperclip hovering in midair – and it’s the latter that happens that tells the agent that something has just gone horribly wrong.

“Oh, fuck––!”

The groan of metal from somewhere beneath his feet sounds like a death knell. Paradox lunges for the TemPad on his desk, but it shoots out of the way, directly towards the central feed, and there’s a shattering of glass. The ground lurches from beneath Paradox’s slippery soles as the bridge twists horribly. It’s a mess of airborne paperwork, flying sparks, displaced mugs, his assistant’s rolling chair – all thrown, careening into the bullpen.

Paradox’s hands find purchase against the leg of a control panel in time, and something small and fast barely misses his head. He wraps himself around the twisting bridge, clinging for dear life as the field office weathers some unseen assault. Amongst the screams of his employees and the flickering fluorescents, Mr. Paradox’s eyes land on the TemPad he’d thrown himself towards on instinct. Half-embedded in the central screen, it seems to slowly sink into the mechanics behind the fractured glass, like a calf slowly devoured by a peat bog.

Seemingly aware of its extratemporal makeup, the screen isn’t quite thwarted by the impact like a regular television would be. Its screen flickers timedoor orange, then back to its last feed unevenly – pastel neon to dark film grain, then back again. Paradox is transfixed by the sight, even as his feet dangle over a precipitous drop. He catches his breath as he watches the TemPad as it’s slowly sucked somewhere else in space and time, squinting to discern the picture beyond its sometimes-creamsicle glow.

Finally, he realizes that sad sack Erik, Worst Magneto, has his palm outstretched towards the temporal monitoring device. Without his stupid helmet, it’s clear his brow is knit, his eyes focused, his mouth pulled toothy and wide in focus. The TemPad sinks into the screen exactly aligned with the center of that shaking hand.

And then, with a final pop, it’s gone.

Chapter Text

Every day, the sun rose – that remained the same. And every day, the sun set. Also the same. Every morning, Erik woke up, and every night he went to sleep. It was what was in the middle that had gone missing, what was in the middle that was now wrong.

He had been a resident of Graymalkin for mere weeks, and a friend to Charles perhaps a month. He wasn’t sure where the line was drawn, but it was, and the man that had pulled him out of the water with his mind and his hope was certainly not someone what Erik would have mourned.

But now, his life was given over to the act. Wake, wander, drink, sleep. It was a routine that the mansion had evidently known well; Charles had shared that much with him. Really, he’d shared everything with him. Maybe that was what wounded him so profoundly.

When was the last time that anyone had trusted Erik with anything? When was the last time that he cared?

Shaw’s destruction had been his life’s mission. He’d nearly let the telepath come between him and the natural end to that story. But it had come to pass, a fate paid for with litres and litres of blood, and in its aftermath Erik knew no purpose.

He dedicated himself to grief instead. It was mostly Charles. His telepath, his friend, his equal. But his mother was there, too, and more distantly the others he’d begrudgingly let himself love. His father, Jakob, and his sister, Ruth. Some of the women he’d met while hunting Shaw. The little family he’d assembled with Charles, the youngsters they were supposed to shepherd together. He’d left them all, or else they’d left him, and Erik was profoundly alone. So he played chess with himself in Charles’ study, and walked the same route they’d run together every morning, and stared at the satellite dish that he’d taught him to move.

Despite this, Erik knew better. Trying to encase every memory in amber wouldn’t bring Charles back. Nothing would.

Erik had refused to let them move the body that day on the beach.

“My brother!” Raven had shrieked at his bent back. Erik only curled tighter around the body propped over his knees. Charles’ blood no longer poured from him like a torrent; it had all run out. The sand around them had swallowed it all thirstily and lusted for more, but Erik wouldn’t let it take him. He wouldn’t let anyone take him.

Something hard and blunted bounded off his spine as Raven continued to scream at him. She pelted him with anything and everything that she could find between her sobs. Erik didn’t blame her; he couldn’t. All there was left to do was fold himself over what remained of Charles and press some meager warmth into him.

It wasn’t right, how quickly his skin lost its heat underneath the unforgiving Cuban sun.

Someone had restrained Raven eventually, but she continued her tirade. He’d killed her brother. He’d kept her from him. He hadn’t let her say goodbye. She didn’t have a chance, because Erik had killed him.

It's all true. I did, Charles.

After she stopped screaming, they started planning. It was largely conducted in whispers, some fifty feet away, as if they hadn’t realized that Erik didn’t care to listen. He let the sun beat down on his bent neck until it stung. The sea breeze whipped the palm trees like the ocean lashed the shoreline, and Erik lost himself in the yellow stripe up Charles’ chest.

What a stupid thing to die in. What a stupid way to die.

“We can’t just leave him,” Hank growled. Erik felt lightheaded where he knelt, his feet so long asleep that they might have ceased to exist, but he was sure that the mutant didn’t mean him. Some time ago, either a few minutes or a few hours, one of them had crawled close and tugged on Charles’ ankle. Erik had hoisted them up by their buckles and thrown them across the beach, again, and no one had dared to try and take Charles from him.

“Well he’s not coming with us,” Alex hissed, and yes – that ‘he’ was him. The bickering continued. Erik’s head swam and his limbs trembled, but he wouldn’t yield. They’d tossed his mutti in the incinerator when he let her go. They’d throw Charles into a hole and forget him, just as the Nazis had erased her. More blood on his hands, more memories, more regrets. Another slip-up, another dead. And Charles wasn’t the kind of accident he could kill and maim his way out of.

The voices of his fellow mutants continued in harsh, clipped debate until they didn’t. Erik missed the quiet pop of the devil’s teleportation trick, but the steel-toed boots of his companions disappeared in one, even blip.

Except for one pair, tossed angrily into the sand with a pile of clips, buttons, and chains.

Moira had rid herself of every piece of metal she could find in an angry fit, and afterwards collapsed in the sand. That had been hours ago, but she remained exactly there – Erik knew, because she’d forgotten the lines that Hank had sewn into each seam to make the most of his powers. Back when he wasn’t a threat to Charles or his children, it had been a brilliant move.

But in the aftermath, Erik could feel every labored breath that Moira took, and every one that Charles did not.

It was funny, almost. He and Moira existed as threats on opposite sides of the same scale. He was an extremist and a murderer a hundred times over. She was a government agent, complicit in the attack that both the Americans and the Soviets had turned on the mere handful of mutants that had drawn enough hatred to unite them both. They were both collateral damage, and neither could be trusted by the teams that Charles and Shaw had put together.

So they agreed, after all. Humans posed a threat to mutantkind. They always would.

Erik couldn’t say they were the two that had mattered the most to Charles – that distinction likely went to his sister – but they did occupy similar positions in his life. They both smiled at him too liberally, and let their attachment to him color their every motive. They shared in his destruction, too; Moira had been the gun, and Erik the bullet.

Neither had meant for Charles Xavier, the best of them, to end up dead on that beach. But together, they’d managed it.

It was the Coast Guard, eventually, that had picked them up. They came at night, when the stars dotted the sky like the freckles that covered Charles’ arms and shoulders. MacTaggert had been in the throes of sun poisoning, her face flushed and her limbs weak as she struggled to comply with the harsh instruction that wailed at them through a crackling bull horn. They stormed the beach to help her to her feet and pointed their guns at Erik’s prone form. Moira rasped something about putting their firearms away, but he hadn’t suspected it as a plea for his safety. Erik could feel the barrels pointed at him, cold and expertly crafted, but let them be.

He didn’t fight them until they took hold of his biceps and tugged, meaning to wrestle him away from Charles. Erik came to life then, but he was a pile of dried blood and burning limbs. He could only thrash and weaponize his weight as they untangled him from Charles’ body. He didn’t make a sound until Charles was pulled from his lap, and then he wailed.

In another memory, decades past, the rain poured down on his frail body and barbed wire bent in the night. On Cuban sand, the moon shone prettily on Charles’ pale face and the servicemen’s belt buckled fused shut.

All the metal Erik could grasp flew into the air – including all of Moira – and he crawled through the grit as people shouted. His thighs ached, and his hand had just clasped around Charles’ wrist when a dull thump sent him into the sand. A searing pain came next, and Erik spied fresh blood, cast black in the lowlight, in the sand.

The steady drip came from him, he realized. And then the world stuttered into darkness.

Chapter Text

Apparently, Erik had been holding Moira hostage. It was one of his lesser crimes, given that international terrorism and murder were on the docket, but it was the first that was spat at him when he awoke in holding. If Moira had any say in his arrest – and he suspected she did, given the curious lack of metal anywhere in his zone of influence – then she hadn’t tried very hard to dissuade them from the notion that he held her on that beach against her will, presumably by crying.

Erik didn’t attempt to change their minds, either. He didn’t talk at all during his interrogation, which was ultimately fine – they didn’t need him to. He was arraigned quickly and quietly, then left in the glass-and-plastic hellhole that was surely meant to become his final resting place.

In the incredible amount of free time his detention provided him, Erik thought idly about his cage. They must have started it just after Charles and Hank had started Cerebro, just after the incident in Miami. They knew from the beginning that they’d want to put him away.

What was good enough to stop Erik, though, was paltry work for a teleporter.

He had laid stalwart and still on a thin mat when a puff of smoke clouded the air. Erik could see it through his eyelids, the only slight interruption of the glaring white light that had plagued him for weeks. It was a godsend, even as he coughed and choked on the smell of sulfur.

“Zdravstvuite, comrade,” the devil had drawled over his fit. Erik glared at him from between his fingers. There was no metal on him, either. The deprivation had begun to sing to him in the place of his favorite alloys.

“Na,” he grunted in reply. “If you’re here to end me, I suggest you get it over with.”

And then the devil laughed.

He was not, in fact, there to exact revenge on anyone’s behalf. The devil – Azazel, he had been reminded later – had acted on Raven’s behest when he rolled his eyes, yanked him from the floor by his collar, and pushed him through the brimstone dimension back to Westchester.

Of course, Alex had been there, poised to punch him to the ground as soon as his feet hit the kitchen linoleum, but that was as close to vengeance as anyone ventured.

“Get up,” Raven had snapped at him. Erik dropped his head to the cold floor and groaned his discontent. “Make yourself presentable, and get back here in ten minutes.”

They were the Brotherhood of Mutants, those that remained, and their aims were half-baked at best. Erik humored them for exactly one meeting, his largest contribution either his permanent scowl or the constancy with which he held a frozen steak to his face. He became little more than another spectre in the mansion after that first evening, largely confined to either Charles’ rooms or his own.

The funeral had been the exception.

Erik had already begun to build his routines. Drink alcohol. Stare at chess. Walk the grounds, but only ever at night. He’d expected to find Charles’ grave, but never did. He searched the grounds over days, then started over again with the assuredness that he’d missed something – because where else would Charles be? Where else would they put him?

The metallic thrum of an unmarked delivery truck didn’t pique Erik’s interest the way it should have. He felt it as he wasted away in Charles’ bed and dismissed the mystery of it immediately. He forgot it near-immediately, despite the utter isolation that the house had been ensconced in, and only recalled the moment when Raven had shown up at Charles’ bedroom door and demanded Erik let her in – she needed clothes for the body.

She wanted a sweater, but Erik wouldn’t let her take the cowl-necked, navy monstrosity that had been the telepath’s favorite. Raven had only sighed back to her natural blue. She refused to fight him on the matter, despite how desperately he wanted her to. Eventually, it was decided that Erik would dress him in the herringbone affair that he’d spent much of their road trip in instead.

“Erik.” Raven hovered outside the disused dining room, her back pressed against the double doors and her arms looped around their handles – as if she’d need to chain herself there to keep him out. Silently, Erik agreed; the only man who could tell him no was no longer around. Not in spirit, anyway. “If I let you in, it can’t be like before.”

Erik only stared impassively. He didn’t speak much to the living anymore.

“You can dress him,” Raven said slowly. “I want you to dress him, if it means I don’t have to.” Over the last few weeks, the girl that Erik had come to know had ceased to exist. She was out from under Charles’ thumb, and she showed no signs of liking it, but it had hardened her into a woman and a leader. But she was nearly herself again, nearly the girl, as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “But I’ll ask Az if you can’t behave. I’ll only let you see him if you can handle what comes after.”

And Erik wanted to see him. He needed to. So, he sucked in a breath, opened his mouth, and agreed to Raven’s terms. Erik would go in there, and take exactly the time he needed, and then he would leave. He’d let them put Charles in a box, and then he’d issue his consent all over again as they put that box in the ground.

Raven unwound her arms and stepped aside.

Erik held the grey suit and lilac Oxford like a pillow, the shoes aligned neatly atop them like an offering. Heavy oak doors groaned shut behind him, a final warning. Flecks of dust danced in the lowlight and the body bag was laid out on the dining room table, not yet opened. Erik gave it a wide berth at first as he stalked the room. Phantom faces reminded him of the last time they’d been in here, together. The table had been too long, even for their family of seven, so Hank had stacked the far end high with equipment as Charles held court.

Hank, who was missing now from the collection of mutants that Raven had put together in the aftermath.

Charles, who had so desperately wanted to replace the ghosts of his childhood with a brighter, more immediate love.

Erik had smiled with an intensity that made everyone except Charles shy away, and for a brief moment Charles had laid his hand over Erik’s, and Erik had known that he was not alone, not in any facet of himself, because the most beautiful man and the most amazing mutant had made it so.

Pastel neon orange seared like a headache behind Erik’s eyes. He stepped in close and ran his fingers over the typewriter ink that labeled the body bag theirs. Just a slip of card stock, hidden behind a panel of plastic that shone garishly in the gloomy light: Charles Francis Xavier, 9/12/1932 – 10/16/1962. The Department of Defense seal on the opposite flap curled his lips into a sneer, and Erik eased the zipper down with a gentle crook of his fingers.

Floppy chestnut hair spilled from the body bag first, its commitment to untamable independence a factor that had apparently outlived the man. Charles’ bone pale face followed, blue and bruised but peaceful, and those lips still so shockingly red that Erik thought, for just a moment, that looking upon the corpse wouldn’t be so jarring.

He was immediately, viscerally proven wrong as the zipper’s path revealed the rest of him. Underneath the dark waxed cotton, Charles was nude, and the labyrinthian cuts of his dissection unadulterated. Erik had seen bodies of all kinds – the corpses of men who were respected, and the remains of those who were deemed no better than rats. He knew what marks an autopsy left on a body – the Y-shaped incision to open the chest cavity, the tiny scrapings of tissue collected for sampling, the careful removal of the cranium if absolutely required. They were cold and unpleasant, but not necessarily unkind. Pathologists were practical, removed, professional – scientists like Hank, whose objectivity made them unsociable, but not cruel.

Charles had been afforded no such courtesy, because he was not a man at all. He was the government’s lab rat, and what remained of him was a map of their questions. Erik traced them with his fingers, as if his touch could smooth the jagged suture lines away. He tried the line parallel to the jut of his collarbone first, just over his heart, but it did not ease the crude ripple of his skin. He continued over his chest and down his stomach, the traditional path of a pathologist’s scalpel, and then the web of intricate knifework that started at Charles’ wrist and followed his venous system upwards. He tried everywhere that they maimed him, everywhere the government butchers thought they could know him better by slicing him to ribbons. He touched everywhere on him, from the freckles on his shoulders that stood out in terrible contrast, to the crest of his cheek where his long lashes rested. Erik memorized every inch of him, except the delicate bullet hole that had punctured his breast and laid him low – because he knew that already, he’d thought of little else in his plastic prison. He pressed their foreheads together, one last time, and breathed in the formaldehyde, and let his tears choke him at the sensation of Charles’ sutures pressed against his skin.

And then, he went to work.

“I’m sorry.” Erik held Charles’ weight in his arms as the body bag dragged itself away and the utensils from the china cabinet shook and constricted and contorted themselves into unrecognizable orbs. “I did this. I don’t think you heard me, but I did.”

He whispered other things like that as he clothed the telepath. Things he meant, that he was sure Charles knew, like “I never meant to hurt you,” and “I wanted you by my side,” and, “I still do.” Things he’d only thought about, far away from the man who would have been able to pluck them from his mind on a whim, but never did, like the phrase that began with, “We’re…” but certainly didn’t end in, “brothers,” and his most desperate hope, “You knew. You must have. You said you knew everything about me. I hope so.”

Metal danced around the room, lifting Charles’ limbs and brushing back his hair as efficiently as Erik himself. The man might have liked it if he still had eyes to see. Raven found him again when the flatware had taken up quorum for prayer and he stumbled over the little he remembered, “... mazhirim et nishmat Charles shehalakh…”

“You’re done, then.” She crossed her arms and stared at the man laid across the dining table that she, too, had presumably grown up at. “Out.”

The metal minyan dropped to the floor as Erik brushed past her. They only spoke again, later, when he asked for a closed casket ceremony and she agreed without protest or pause.

“We’re leaving,” she informed him bluntly. “Tomorrow morning, right after the funeral.” At another time, he might have admired her impassive candor. If fate had aligned itself differently, he might have even taken credit for it. Instead, Erik stared at her over his rocks glass and frowned.

It didn’t bother him when she turned on her heel and left. He didn’t care when the Brotherhood erupted into action in the moments after, and they buzzed around the mansion with suitcases that had come from Charles’ closet, packing things that had come from Charles’ life. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t invited. Erik didn’t want them in the house, and they didn’t want the spectre of him in their revolution. Erik was Charles’ ghost. The Brotherhood was a mere distraction.

Only Raven was welcome in Graymalkin. It wasn’t Erik’s call to make – it was an overstep in every way, claiming their childhood home for himself – but he said it anyway as he buzzed alongside them. Not packing, but preparing. Erik cooked bland food and covered every mirror in the house. He laid out clothes from his meager collection and supplemented them with Charles’. He shaved for the last time and laid the straight razor aside.

Erik wore his black turtleneck to the funeral. Charles’ students wore their flight suits. Shaw’s telepath, recently rescued from her own holding pen, wore white. The rain pelted down on them with the same intensity that the Cuban sun had weeks before, when they had lusted for each other’s blood instead of the world’s. Erik ground his teeth and tried to shut out the orange as it pressed in from all sides, flickering in his periphery like sunlight through treecover.

“You don’t see that?” he’d asked Alex – Havok, now – just once. They were in the kitchen, just feet from where he’d been decked into the chequered linoleum, and the blonde had stared at him, then the bottle between his fingers, with wide and accusatory eyes. Erik hadn’t mentioned it since.

Maybe this is what happens when a telepath dies, he’d thought. It didn’t make sense – for all their splendor, mutations were science, not magic, and signs of life could not persist after death. Charles’ phenomenal talent had been coded in his DNA, not his soul. Erik’s own powers were just a series of nucleotides, arranged magnificently but mundanely in every cell of his body. 

Perhaps it happened when he died in me.

Charles had spent his last few, gasping moments buried in Erik’s mind. He had felt him stutter into oblivion, that brilliant mind finally collapsing without air or blood to sustain it. Charles could have left some artifact of himself behind, some orange-glowing thing that, once recuperated, set itself on Erik’s mind to drive him mad. It wouldn’t be a ghost, but something akin to it. Some last part of the telepath to cherish until he, too, became nothing.

The devil conducted the service in a terse, Catholic manner that couldn’t have reflected the Xaviers’ upbringing, but Raven shed a few tears anyway. Her final farewell was the longest, followed closely by Sean’s, which rambled and hiccupped until Angel finally cut him off. Six pairs of eyes fell on Erik expectantly, then, who shook his head mutely just as Emma Frost declared, “No, he won’t.”

One white lily and eight handfuls of wet dirt joined the coffin in its grave, and then Erik took it upon himself to fill in the hole as the rest joined hands. He stared resolutely at the plinth and its flickering eternal flame, cast much the same color as the remnants of the man in Erik’s mind by the electric green storm, and flinched not when the pop of Azazel rid him of the metal lines of Hank’s flight suits, but the moment beforehand.

Try not to kill yourself, sugar, Emma had whispered in his brain. It would be a damned shame.

She echoed cold and sharp in his mind long after the rest had gone and the grave was filled, just a patch of mud amongst the pristine and verdant grass of the Westchester estate.