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i.
Erik can’t help liking the interviewer the very moment he sees her. Her kind is vicious and ruthless, especially when it comes to his person – waiting for the first sign of wavering to push him down, swarm him and leave nothing but plucked of flesh bones behind.
And yet, Erik can’t help liking the unashamed grace of her scaly blue skin, the amused curl to full red lips and even the predatory gleam (vultures, the lot of them) in her bright yellow eyes. Her tone is a perfect balance between friendly and respectful, questions flowing off her tongue with ease that for a moment deludes even him into believing this to be simply a conversation, in forgetting about microphones and lamps and cameras. Raven Darkholme, the voice of mutants all over their disturbingly small world.
“The debate on tip of everyone’s tongue today is prolongation of the National Project for another five years,” she offers with an apologetic quirk of lips. “The public is greatly concerned that with the Project’s success, research of the genophage cure will suffer— funds-wise.”
“Research of the genophage cure has been and will stay our priority. There will be absolutely no withdrawing of funds – quite the contrary: I plan to increase the budgeting the following year. But just as much as we need the cure, we need children. For all that the National Project is a temporary measure, it is necessary.”
She approaches Erik after the cameras stop rolling – Raven Darkholme, gorgeous, single, ultra-left and suspected of ties with three pro-human terrorist groups.
“May I offer my congratulations on your fatherhood, sir?”
ii.
Once, when the twins are four and the budget of the genophage cure research is cut in half, Erik dreams of their mother. He has never paid much thought to the woman that offered her body for what the leftists dismissively call “breeding”.
He dreams of a woman with wavy brown hair – just like Wanda’s; just a couple of shades lighter than his mother’s – and kind understanding eyes. She laughs and turns, soft blue fabric of her dress flowing around her knees. And—and there are flowers, those white little things: dandelions, they are all around her, dandelion snow.
He dreams that the woman holds out her hands and takes him in, tells him of her love and Alles ist gut.
Erik wakes up with his eyes dry, and remembers Doctor Essex’s words as he passed the twins:
“I’m sorry, Mister Lehnsherr, but the promise of full anonymity is the reason the number of participants in the Project never dwindles. I’m sure you understand.”
Deep down, in some tiny dark corner of his mind that Erik refuses to acknowledge, he despises the woman that gave him children.
iii.
The streets of Brussels are empty when Erik rides from the airport to the UN headquarters in a bullet-proof limo. He doesn’t understand the necessity: surely, it would have been considerably more convenient and safer for him to be teleported right in. What is the goal of this ridiculous display? He knows that humans hate and mutants worship him, knows that the number of the latter is ridiculously small, statistics burned into his eyelids as afterimages of war.
After Erik addresses the session and makes a quick call home to inquire about the twins’ health, comes the time for confidential talks.
They solemnly discuss how scientists all over the world start to think that the genophage cannot be cured. How they begin to lose hope.
iv.
Raven Darkholme’s arrest tips the public into outrage. Every day since the rumor of the world’s darling being locked up spills out of the Department’s dungeons, her fans paint faces blue and picket every government building in Hammer Bay.
“Miss Darkholme,” Erik says, “you are a mother. How could you participate in something as horrific as an attack on a National Project facility?”
She holds her head high, lips twisted into a mocking sneer:
“Don’t you dare to equate me with yourself!”
Erik doesn’t allow her words to get to him, however truthful they are. Raven Darkholme, blessed by her shapeshifting powers, is immune to the genophage. Unlike him.
Unlike the majority of mutants.
“Proud father,” she spits, “did you cut your parasites out of the host’s body with your own hands?”
Erik longs for nothing more than to strangle her with her own handcuffs. He leaves the room with a nod to the investigation bureau officers gathered outside.
She disappears from her cell two days after that. Chief Intelligence officer on the case, good old Azazel of the Shaw’s gang, teleports her out. Darkholme’s son, little Kurt, pops into Pietro and Wanda’s nursery the same evening, bringing with him a scrap of paper with a hastily scrawled Take care of him, Lehnsherr, for old times’ sake and on the other side, with a different hand, Project Black Womb.
v.
Wanda and Pietro are both gorgeous. Were Erik prone to sentimentality, he would have called them little angels.
They all are – children of the Atom Age, born in spite of the plague humans had unleashed upon the world. The number of mutants is so small that with the genophage they are destined to die out in two generations. Homo superior, a victim of human arrogance and hate, side to side with dodo in Madame Tussauds.
Every cell in their little bodies carries the X-gene – intertwined with the genophage. Just as every cell in Erik’s body.
When Wanda and Pietro are four and ask about their mommy, Erik shows them a photo of Magda and tells them mommy died in a terrible, terrible accident but it’s alright because she watches after them from the stars.
He doesn’t think about Magda’s soiled body hanging from the ornate chandelier in his office, doesn’t think about the stillborn daughter that had rotted in her womb for a week. Doesn’t think about the accusatory glare of her dead eyes. Doesn’t think about finally succumbing to Essex’s endless pleas about donating genetic material.
Or maybe he does.
vi.
Doctor Nathaniel Essex is a genius of questionable morals.
Mister Sinister, they call him, for all that the National Project labs all over the world work day and night to give children to mutants infected with the genophage.
It sounds so simple: human women offer their reproductive organs for in vitro fertilization (full anonymity, generous recompense, reclamation of certain civil rights) and mutant families get their healthy mutant kids. Only, has life ever been as simple as it sounds?
Back then, shortly after Magda’s suicide, Erik came to Doctor Essex’s laboratory for a “donation” to find him in unusually high spirits, listening intently to a radio broadcast.
“…not my son, she screamed, this is human spawn,” the radio cried in an anguished male voice, “take it away, I don’t want to see it. She said the genophage was incurable and we were really raising a cuckoo’s child. What am I supposed to do now?”
Doctor Essex laughed with abandon.
vii.
“Project Black Womb is nothing but smoke and mirrors,” Emma Frost says with a huff and a puff. She’s taken up smoking a week after turning up to office flat-bellied and hollow-eyed. “A myth – a horror story, if you will. Something to scare little green lab techs.”
“And yet?” Erik presses, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed.
“If you insist. Once upon a time, a group of very curious and very daring scientists went mucking with babies in unsuspecting women’s stomachs. You see, they believed they could make the babies special. These scientists believed that in every human there is an itty-bitty lock that hides marvelous, unimaginable powers, and all you have to do is pick that lock,” Emma smiles mockingly and strides to the window, eyes distant. “Prepare yourself: the story is about to get interesting. So, one of these dashing young men unexpectedly falls in love and gets married to a beautiful young girl. Indulging in acts of unprotected but society-approved sex on their marriage night, our hero realizes that he has the perfect opportunity to muck with a baby from day zero. From day minus one, if you will.”
She trails off, watching the snowflakes dance in the lamplights outside.
“And what happened?”
“Nothing, of course,” she snorts. “It was in the thirties, they couldn’t make a decent pair of fake tits, and you expect successful gene manipulation? The girl gave birth to an absolutely healthy normal human baby – a wonder, really – and the idiots left it alone. Almost all of them died in the Second War, or during the Uprising, who knows? Ask your resident creep, if it interests you so much.”
It takes Erik a moment to reconcile resident creep with Mister Sinister with Doctor Essex.
“Why should I ask him?”
“Well, it was his early project. Thank whatever gods were listening, you didn’t allow him to participate in publicity. National Project sounds rather… dignified; who knows what title Essex would have chosen. Black Womb, really.”
And Erik thinks, Black Womb, really.
viii.
It’s a peaceful Sunday evening, and Erik is trying to put everything out of his mind – just for a couple of hours. Wanda is lying on the floor, alternating between staring at him and furiously scrawling in her drawing book. The result looks disturbingly like a cross between a rhino and crucified Jesus. Pietro is putting his power to use, running around the room at an alarming speed, toy airplane in hand.
And it is precisely the time Raven Darkholme and her merry band of terrorists decide to seize the TV station she used to work at.
Salvadore bursts into the nursery with her face contorted in pure horror, and Wanda drops her crayons and starts wailing at the top of her voice. Nannies rush in as he follows Salvadore to his office, where Darkholme rages on:
“…been lied to. The genophage cure has been found years ago. The government wants your genes for their experiments. They abduct people – human and mutant alike – and torture them…”
“Why is it still running?” Erik asks calmly.
“The Department has been trying to cut the translation, but one of Darkholme’s people can control electric circuits, apparently, and…” Salvadore trails off at the look on his face, hand falling limply from her earpiece.
“Do I need to personally turn her off?”
“We thought our battle was over, we thought we were on the way to radiant future and we never noticed how one tyrant replaced another…”
“This is quite pathetic,” Emma notes, entering the office in quick strides. “Did she not write the speech in advance? It’s rather lacking in rhetoric; I’d have expected better.”
“Lehnsherr and his lapdog Essex are our enemies, and…” blissfully, the translation is cut off in an explosion of white noise.
Everything goes downhill from there.
ix.
There is something decidedly unlikeable about Doctor Essex, Erik has to admit. It’s not anything consciously particular, more like a general resonance, or rather, lack thereof.
“I’m afraid, all National Project activities will have to be suspended until the review is finished,” Doctor McCoy says, fumbling with his papers under Essex’s intense glare that doesn’t lessen as McCoy goes on, increasingly nervous. In the end, he literally flees Erik’s office.
Essex fiddles with his beard appreciatively, making no sign of leaving Erik’s office.
“How about another couple of kids?” he asks, and, startled, Erik can only stare back at him. “I had this brilliant idea for a new fertilization method last night, and I absolutely have to try it.”
“And what do I have to do with that?” Erik’s voice is steady, he mentally sneers at the shiver that runs down his spine.
“Oh, but you’re special, Mister Lehnsherr! The first person infected with the genophage, Subject Zero – it adds a certain excitingly sacrilegious flare to the whole childmaking business.”
“No, Wanda and Pietro are quite enough, thank you,” and: “Tell me about Project Black Womb.”
“Black Womb? Goodness, somebody remembers it still?” Essex laughs excitedly, his face lit up with fondness as he thumps his knee with a fist. “Oh, those were good, glorious times.”
“So you did participate in human experimentation,” Erik says hollowly. In his mind’s eye are iron gates and Arbeit mach frei, but a hard voice inside his head – not Emma’s, not another telepath’s, his own voice – says, ‘don’t pretend you didn’t know’ and ‘don’t pretend you wanted to know’.
“Oh, my Charles… he was such a darling child. I still wonder how somebody as mundane as Xavier could give life to something so perfect. In every imperfection – a walking delight, really. I wish he was still… Are you sure you don’t want more sprogs?”
“Absolutely.”
“Pity, really,” Essex is a moment shy of pouting when he pushes his gangly body out of the armchair and walks towards the door. He’s almost over the threshold when Erik calls out:
“What happened to that boy, Charles?”
Essex’s face lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree, and he purrs:
“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know.”
Salvadore slips into the room, her face a mask of calmness, but her fingers are stark white with the force of her clutch on the datapad.
“Clear my afternoon,” Erik decides abruptly. “Call Emma in, and get me a helicopter to Lab #01. I want to personally oversee the cure research progress.”
x.
After Darkholme’s escape and subsequent terrorist attacks, Erik personally saw to Lab #01 being proofed against teleportation. Creating new alloys – what an unbefitting task for the person who changed the world.
When Erik’s helicopter lands, there’s no one guarding the perimeter. Harsh wind from the bay blows dust and papers across the empty tarmac, and Alex Summers tenses, circular pad on his chest wheezing quietly to life.
“Unexpectedly amateurish,” Emma remarks, drawing the lapels of her white coat closed.
They stalk across the tarmac in close formation. The post that’s supposed to guard entrance to the underground facility is just as deserted, and when Erik tries to activate the security pad, it doesn’t respond.
Salvadore’s hand flies to her earpiece as she stutters out, obviously distressed: “I could contact the supervisor…”
Erik shakes his head and forces the elevator mechanisms to life.
He doesn’t know what to expect down there, in the lab. Scientists turned to flesh-eating monsters by their own foolish tinkering with genes? Remnants of the lab destroyed by a terrorist attack?
Erik could’ve expected anything but the reality: empty offices devoid of staff and equipment, not single sign of activity, present or past.
Nothing.
xi.
Hank McCoy of the governmental review board is an awkward young man with a small shrine to Raven Darkholme in his apartment. He blinks owlishly at Erik when told to switch from the National Project review to genophage cure research.
“But the Chamber of Justice ruled that the National Project should be suspended…”
“The National Project review will go as planned,” Salvadore interjects, the smart black jacket rippling where her wings, tucked closely to skin, strain in nervousness. “But you, chosen personally by the President, shall complete your own review of the genophage cure research. Infiltrate the labs or get help from Mossad if you will – we need to know the truth of the research progress.”
When McCoy leaves, bewildered, Salvadore uncertainly asks: “And what will we do when Darkholme contacts him? Arrest her?”
“No,” Erik shakes his head. “No, we need her free and active.”
He feels decidedly off his ground. It’s not his place to play spy games. He wants, yearns even, to shuck the uncomfortable suit he wears and run off in search of the enemy that dares to play with his people’s hopes, with their future. But Erik brings himself to line by thinking of Wanda and Pietro.
“Call Emma,” he decides. “I need her to find out everything about Essex. He’s been left to his own devices far too long.”
xii.
Three days later Azazel appears in the nursery in a cloud of sulphur, waking up the children and Erik.
Kurt teleports out of bed into his father’s hands with a squeal, when Wanda and Pietro share a positively devious look and begin wailing in synch.
“You fathered two little demons, Lehnsherr,” Azazel groans, burying his face in Kurt’s hair. Wanda chokes on her cry and sends a jolt of stinging red towards the man, Pietro following suit with a wooden doll. Kurt snatches the doll out of the air and with another smelly burst he appears in Pietro’s bed, mid-swing.
“Madame Pompadour!” Wanda screeches and lunges across the room with a blood-curdling war cry.
“Whoever their mother is,” Azazel mutters with a bemused shudder, “it’s a she-demon, no doubt.”
Erik sets down the book of fairy tales he has been reading before dropping off, and stretches.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Oh, this and that, really,” Azazel waves his hand. Then, in a sober tone, “forget the cure. Forget your pretentious official ‘reviews’. Take Essex by the balls and make him spill everything.”
“What exactly is he supposed to spill, old friend?” Erik rises, his voice deceitfully calm still.
Azazel retreats several steps with a nervous flick of tail. “Don’t tell me you have no idea. I know you’re not stupid. You put it at the back your mind, Lehnsherr, because you believe in that drivel about means and ends. Stop being such a coward.”
In complete silence Azazel takes three steps to Pietro’s bed where Kurt tugs at Wanda’s braid and Pietro gnaws at his blue tail, and drops a kiss at the top of his son’s head.
“Start with the Hammer Bay facility.”
xiii.
After they return, Salvadore excuses herself to the restroom where she retches violently for good ten minutes. All that time Emma sits on the windowsill, lighting up one cigarette after another, flicking ash on the floor and staring out the window.
Erik…
Of course Azazel was right – Erik would have been a fool to not suspect anything. Poor Darkholme. Did she think her tip about Project Black Womb was a Revelation?
Erik thinks of the bewildered look on Essex’s well-groomed face as Alex Summers handcuffed him. Why are you acting as if you care? he seemed to ask. And really, Erik personally saw that after the world was brought back to heel humans were stripped of the majority of their civil rights. Pushed other countries to follow suit, argued that after the genophage treating the humanity as anything other than slaves was undeserved mercy. Jedem das Seine.
Salvadore enters the office with a stack of papers, Summers and Munoz hot on her heels, each carrying a box.
“This is everything Doctor Essex had on subject X-001,” she says quietly when Erik nods at her questioningly. Emma turns from the window with a look of vague horror on her expressionless face.
“Why?” Erik asks hoarsely. He knows the answer. He doesn’t want to know the answer.
“We thought… I thought you might be interested,” Salvadore says quietly. “Subject X-001 gave birth to your children.”
xiv.
In the end, Erik vetoes publicizing the whole affair. He doesn’t say “for the greater good”, but he sees the words reflected in others’ eyes, and they nod and agree and think him a monster, blissfully happy he was the one to make the decision and take the burden off their shoulders.
Erik takes a car from the Parliament to the state prison. He spends the entirety of the trip staring out the window, watching the people of Genosha. Watching the children of Genosha.
Children of torture, of torment and anguish. Figures and letters, in neat stacks of papers. Bones and flesh of their mothers in mass graves, covered with fancy words: full anonymity, recompense, reinstatement of civil rights.
Erik absentmindedly rubs his forearm where under expensive clothes his own number is etched into his own flesh. Should he tell his people that their children have been borne by their mothers against their volition and torn out of their bodies without ceremony? Should he push Emma to seek out Scott and Jean and tell them the truth? Should he… should he tell Wanda and Pietro?
He arrives to see Doctor Essex all too soon.
“What is the meaning of this?” Erik asks the man. On the table between them lies a paper taken out of subject X-001’s file.
Essex leans back with a kind smile.
“I know you can divine the meaning behind those pesky little scribbles we call words.”
Erik takes a deep breath.
“Your papers say that my children were born by subject X-001,” and another, “but according to this, subject X-001 is… a man.”
“Oh, and isn’t it amazing?” Essex sing-songs. “Did you read everything?” Yes. No. He didn’t want to, not after the first few pages, when even the unfamiliar terminology couldn’t dim the atrocity of descriptions. “Oh please, please do! This is my masterpiece, the absolute pinnacle of my career…”
Erik can’t. He feels acrid smoke and smell of quicklime tickle at his nostrils and he just… he can’t. He turns to leave – to flee, to go back to Wanda and Pietro, hide himself in his stifling love for them and never emerge.
“What happened to this man?” he makes himself ask in a steady voice. “Who is he? Where is he?”
Essex laughs happily: “Oh, dear. Wouldn’t you like to know.”
xv.
Erik tears out the black-and-white photograph of an exhausted-looking man with wavy dark hair and kind eyes and frames it.
Hank McCoy’s eyes drift to it curiously every other time he pauses in his report.
“It took me a while to wade through all the documents, but ultimately – that is, leaving out numerous intricate details… ah. Essentially, Doctor Essex has taken over the cure research labs in Genosha seven years ago.”
Erik wants to tear his hair out. Leftists paint him a dictator, hell-bent on absolute control and this shy of thought policing. How come his loyal intelligence horde never reported what this young man found out in less than two months?
“Lab #01 was relocated right after the installation of teleport dampeners,” McCoy shuffles the papers. “Judging by the electricity consumption charts, a significant number of experiments took place prior to—just before that. So I do not think that the research was actually shut down. On the other hand, the probability that official reports had been falsified… there’s no doubt about that. A considerable number of the equipment supposedly had never been used and at the same time it was regularly replaced due to wear. Good news is, I think I might be able to trace the equipment to its current location. There were some installations that send off a very strong signal on the astral plane, and…” McCoy coughs, drawing Erik’s attention from the frame on his desk, “if you don’t mind that I acquire help from external sources, I’ll be finished in a couple of days.”
Erik looks back, where Emma is perched on the windowsill.
“I’ll supervise,” she offers calmly and Erik nods.
“Go on then.”
Those papers on subject X-001 that Erik couldn’t read past the first few pages – Emma finished them. She has been sending him pitying looks since then.
Erik doesn’t want to know.
xvi.
Erik might say that he never expected Raven Darkholme to have the gall to come see him in broad daylight, but he thinks back all the way to their first meeting and mentally laughs at himself.
“Azazel says Kurt is looked after,” she pronounces defiantly after shedding Salvadore’s look.
Erik tilts his head to the side and shows the barest hint of teeth in his smile, enjoying a brief flash of fear in her eyes.
“People say I am an exceptional father.”
“Exceptional” is a curious word,” she drawls mockingly. “It implies honorable achievements, but doesn’t exclude certain fallings… like not even once inquiring about the children’s mother.”
Blood runs cold in Erik’s veins. How does she know? He did everything to stop the news from spreading, nobody out of his closets circle of confidants knows—
“Essex is very eager to speak of his research,” she ventures, “especially with you. It makes me wonder why you never asked.”
Silence stretches between them, Darkholme looking more and more uncomfortable as seconds tick past.
“Do you even plan on announcing the truth?” she snaps, finally. “Or do you have some neat cover-up that will make you—“
“What do you expect to happen when I “announce the truth”?” Erik asks. His tone is not mocking, merely tired, but Darkholme’s face tightens. The scales on her skin shift majestically – an entrancing sight. “Do answer. What do you expect?”
“I expect you to be hanged, drawn and quartered, for once,” she offers.
“That is a rather obvious outcome,” Erik shrugs. For a second he wonders what happened to Salvadore. Nothing, probably. “But beyond that, have you ever wondered?” Oh, but she didn’t, poor thing. Just over the rainbow, where the oppressor’s toppled body lies, is your ever after. “Don’t wrack your brain. At worst, there will be another uprising, one that will undoubtedly end in humans’ favor. The balance between our societies is fragile; to shatter it one needs something considerably smaller than news of kidnappings and medical experiments conducted in mutants’ name. I don’t need to open your eyes on the number of mutants that will gladly surrender their mutant identities and fight alongside with humans against their kin? At best… at the most opportune and improbable outcome, if we do manage to pin the fault to Genosha only and end with me and my accomplices in a Gaskammer-- forgive me, - hanged, drawn and quartered… in that case, what do you think will happen to the seven million mutant children all over the world?”
Darkholme starts and sneers.
“What will happen to them then?”
Erik leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers, eyes intent. He hates her, he realizes suddenly. Her and everything she represents: entitled naiveté bought by blood of others.
“They’ll lucky if happy parents strangle them in their beds.”
Erik doesn’t care if Darkholme came to recruit or kill him, he stares at her beautiful face contorted in horrified disgust and thinks how he’d rather let his people take care of themselves and run away with his children.
xvii.
No telepath is able to penetrate Essex’s mind, to find out about the lost equipment or—Charles Xavier. But in the end, it’s surprisingly easy for Hank McCoy to bring him several addresses, including one in the United States – and what a joke, legally belonging to one Nathaniel Essex.
They drive out of the New York embassy in the dead of the night, like in a cheap novel.
Erik stares out of the window, dark patches of forest flashing silver under the moonlight. There is a surprising numbness spreading in his chest – or maybe not as surprising, after all. That man, hidden away, tortured beyond nature’s wildest call… he gave life to Erik’s children, supposedly. Erik is rushing to save him, laws and borders be damned, ready to swipe him away to a faraway land, like a princess.
Half a year ago Erik took Wanda to see “The Sleeping Princess” and now he—
The forest steps aside, giving way to a clearing, iron-wrought gate standing ceremonial guard in front of manicured lawns and a gingerbread castle of a house enveloped in midnight fog.
The gate swings before a conscious thought forms in Erik’s mind and the car rolls towards the front porch, gravel crunching under the wheels.
Erik gets out of the car, without exchanging a word with his entourage. Behind him, Munoz and Summers shift uncomfortably, used to guarding him but unsure if they should interfere. Without a passing thought Erik lunges up the steps, locks turning open and hinges groaning with the force of the doors flung open.
He stands at the bottom of the stairs, short and pale, in ratty old pajamas, and stares at Erik with confused and curious, kind, kind blue eyes.
“Charles.”
xviii.
“Are you lost?” Charles asks uncertainly, eyes widening as Emma, Munoz and Summers at her sides, enters the mansion and closes the door.
“We came for you,” Erik replies quietly.
“Oh,” Charles pauses. “In that case: would you like some tea?”
Down empty and dark hallways he leads them to the kitchen – a ghost in an abandoned old house. This is an accurate impression, Erik thinks absently, in more ways than one: according to all records Charles Francis Xavier passed away shortly after the Uprising, leaving considerable fortune and the family mansion to his late father’s friend and colleague.
In the kitchen Charles busies himself preparing tea, seemingly unconcerned with four strangers invading his home in the middle of the night.
“I take it, this is somehow connected to Doctor Essex’s recent imprisonment?” he breaks the silence only after the cups – fine china hand-painted with yellow and pink daffodils – are set on the table. “And it’s probably useless trying to pretend I didn’t recognize you?”
Erik doesn’t know what to say, and doesn’t know how to say it. He remembers the time after the camps liberation vaguely, his brightest memory is dim and muddled. The only people he had ever opened to are Wanda and Pietro—
“Oh well,” Charles puts down his cup and rises. “Follow me, then.”
They follow him to a study on the second floor.
“I’m afraid I can’t offer much,” he says with an apologetic shrug, “but the largest part of my research was taken away with the equipment. There’s only so much I could reconstruct from memory…” folders pile up on the desk, and one distant part of Erik’s brain hysterically realizes – this is about the genophage cure.
Erik’s body moves on its own volition, hand reaching out shakily.
“Charles…” he whispers. “I was your— donor,” and then, ashamed, mouthing the words, but with almost no sound, “Your sperm donor.”
xix.
The memory of a dream, now ridiculous and distant: a woman with wavy brown hair – just like Wanda’s; just a couple of shades lighter than his mother’s – and kind understanding eyes.
On the plane back to Genosha Erik dreams of falling to his knees and kissing Charles’ hands, skin dry and cool under his lips, stretched taut over the knuckles and soft on the mounds in his palms. He doesn’t know if he’s begging for forgiveness or acceptance. He shakes the dream off with a shudder, eyes seeking out the other man but meeting Emma’s hard stare.
She jerks her head sharply towards the salon entrance and when he rises and walks there, Emma follows him and draws the curtain closed.
“Are you out of your mind?” she hisses. “I hope to God you don’t plan to—“
“Emma,” Erik cuts her off. “Don’t finish that sentence.”
She stares at him for a moment before her face begins to crumble, skin and muscle reasserting itself into translucent rainbow hardness and back.
“The things I’ve seen in Essex’s mind, Erik… God, I wish I didn’t. Please… just—just don’t. Don’t make it worse.”
He shakes his head, not knowing what to say, and walks back to his place.
Charles is curled in his seat, sleeping, but he opens his eyes when Erik brushes past him and smiles.
“Stay out of my head, Emma,” Erik thinks.
xx.
McCoy stares at Charles with something akin to God-worship, eyes bulging and mouth working soundlessly.
“I—I never even thought—oh my God, this is pure genius,” he stutters, leafing through the folders. “The treatment will allow to re-establish fertility in three-four generations.”
“Considering the advances in medicine and science in the years to follow,” Charles smiles, “probably faster.”
McCoy’s fingers caress the papers with reverence he might have shown Darkholme were they ever to be together.
xxi.
Erik eases the door to the nursery open, letting in just a sliver of light.
Charles doesn’t step forward, lingering several steps behind, eyes screwed and balled up fists shaking.
“I can’t,” he whispers hoarsely. “I just—“
“Papa?” Pietro’s sleepy voice floats into the corridor through the crack, followed by a shuffle of blankets and slap of feet on the floor.
Erik looks back helplessly, and Charles’ eyes are wide and scared when the twins slip into the corridor. Pietro looks up with a toothless smile and hugs Erik’s knees, muttering something unintelligible – I missed you – into the fabric of his pants.
Wanda’s doesn’t take her eyes off Charles as she takes several measured steps and offers her hand.
“It’s alright,” she says, “I always knew you weren’t dead.”
xxii.
Several weeks later Erik spends his rare free time on another visit to prison. He steps out of the car and lights a cigarette.
The sky is ridiculously blue over the building crowned with barbed wire, and Erik gazes up, mind blissfully empty for a change. He puts the fag out and orders to drive him back to the city, where he finally picks up the folders on Subject X-001.
In the evening, when the twins have been put to bed – Pietro regards Charles as another nanny, surprisingly not angry with Wanda’s obvious adoration – Erik leads Charles back to his office, now dark and empty, with a chessboard set between two armchairs.
“I read some of Essex’s files,” he confesses after a while. “About you.”
Charles sighs in reply.
“I spent a ridiculous amount of time wondering what was the root of his obsession with me. It is horrible, but the years of the Second War, when Essex was in Europe, were the happiest in my life.”
“Did you ever ask?”
Charles shakes his head and takes Erik’s recklessly unguarded bishop.
“No, but for a long while I entertained the idea that he had some feelings towards my mother. She was a beautiful woman.”
Erik nods, castling his king. Twice damned: where Essex lost sight of the Xaviers during the Second World War, he found them in the wake of the Uprising. At the time Charles was rising his step-sister alone after their mother’s death (a scribble in the margins of Essex’s reports: mine?) and – ha! – writing a thesis in genetics.
Erik wants to say: mea culpa, but instead he asks, quietly:
“Where is she now? Your step-sister?”
Charles lowers his head, hair and dark shadow obscuring his face.
“Here,” his hands rest on his lower stomach. “Essex is an admirer of Mengele’s… “work”. He believes that the compatibility of transplanted organs is higher when the donor and recipient are relatives.”
The next day Erik orders Salvadore to call a news conference and announces that he is leaving office.
xxiii.
In late spring Erik takes Charles and the twins to his summer house.
It’s a ridiculous affair all around – with Azazel and Darkholme (the latter running for his former position, of all things), Salvadore and her new ginger-haired boy, and even Emma, with Summers and Munoz silent but not at all menacing behind her back. Gathered around the table on the verandah, they look as friendly as a pack of sharks, but for once Erik doesn’t care one whit.
In front of him Charles stands in the field of dandelions, looking around in amused confusion, as if it’s the first time he’s seen as ridiculous a flower.
Pietro, Wanda and Kurt laugh at him when Charlez sneezes, and Erik can’t even step forward before Pietro dashes off at superhuman speed, white fluff exploding in the air like summer snow, and Charles sneezes again and laughs with abandon.
Erik covers the remaining steps that separate them, taking in Charles’ instantly more cautious expression and the ringing silence that spreads over the field. Heedless, he falls to his knees and bows his head.
“Forgive me,” falls from his lips in a litany, “forgive me.”
Erik doesn’t expect forgiveness. God knows: he would never grant one. Somewhere deep inside, deeper than the raw bleeding schism in his heart, he doesn’t even want it.
But in the deafening silence of chirping birds, clatter of teacups on the verandah and Wanda’s screeching laughter, Erik feels a press of dry lips to his forehead.