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It’s funny coming out here to the edge of the world. It’s so empty. Erik has spent an overwhelming amount of his life is cities, and usually enjoys the tranquillity of a long drive in the Swiss countryside or the quiet of a deep library. But this – this is not a human peace, it is human absence, and he cannot put down his guard. They didn’t see a single car all the way from the last town, though the road was still sealed until they turned off at a little intersection marked ‘SLED TRAIL REST STOP’. They drive agonisingly slowly over a road dusted with an inch of fresh powder. The snow makes the landscape look Venusian, the smooth dips and hillocks clearly the work of meteors and other cosmic debris. This place could swallow them and no one would ever find the car.
Charles, of course, thinks it’s beautiful. He keeps saying so, or rather, gushing about it, every time the silence has stretched on for a while. Erik feels like a ball of elastic bands that Charles is trying to take apart one by one.
“You’ve really never seen snow like this before?” Charles asks suddenly.
“What?”
“Sorry, you were thinking quite loudly. That you’d never seen something like this.”
Erik shrugs. “I didn’t go on skiing holidays as a child like you did.”
Charles laughs. “Fair enough. Oh look, like, a hare!”
Erik squints against the white glare and thinks he sees a flash of motion in the distance, startled by the grumble of the car’s engine, but it might have been nothing more than a glint of the sun. He’s not even sure exactly where Charles was pointing.
“This mutant, he’s another telepath? Like you?” Erik says, resting his elbow against the rim of the door and chewing his thumb.
“Sort of. It’s not easy for me to tell specifics, but Cerebro gave me the feel of a power similar to mine. Weaker, of course,” Charles adds smugly.
Erik watches a frozen lake pass by, just down the bank. He tries to see the beauty that Charles is rabbiting on about, but it all just seems so cold. He says, for conversation’s sake, “Do you think there’s fish in there?”
“Probably, but you couldn’t catch them. They’re hibernating at this time of year,” Charles gives a quick glance at the lake. “They wouldn’t take the bait.”
“I didn’t know fish hibernate.”
“Almost all creatures do in these latitudes. It’s the only way to survive.”
Around the curve of the road, they see a solid, two-storey lodge, probably large enough to house a couple of the sled teams that sign mentioned. There is a thin trail of smoke flowing from the chimney and fresh game hanging on the porch. The car’s wheels spin as Charles parks it with its nose in a bank, the clutch grinding. Charles curses.
“It’s not going to start again in this temperature if we leave it long,” Erik scoffs.
“Yes, I know, Erik,” Charles replies irritably.
Inside the car they had brought a pocket of warmth, but as Erik steps out the cold rushes down the sleeves of his jacket and stabs right through his jersey. He shudders. Charles is donning a thick, thigh-length coat of checker-patterned wool and tucking a hat over his ears.
“I told you to bring more clothes,” he laughs, tossing his scarf and a spare hat over the roof of the car. Erik catches them with fingers already going numb and wraps up as best he can. Charles has even brought gloves, pale blue things that looked like someone’s grandmother knitted them. They’re only walking the twenty metres to the lodge, is that really necessary?
They trek up the steps onto the porch and Charles knocks without hesitation. Snow has already gathered at the lip of Erik’s shoes and is soaking through his socks. He tucks his hands under his arms, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the criss-crossed windows of the door. The hat and scarf are ridiculous. Perhaps not as ridiculous as Charles, who is so bundled up he looks like he would bounce if you pushed him down the stairs.
---
There are footsteps from inside and a figure approaches through the glass and then pulls the door open. The man standing there is younger than Erik, but sporting a thick beard that leaves only his nose, eyes and cheeks exposed. There is a rifle tucked easily under one arm, in a way that is strangely not as threatening as it should be, as if it were perfectly obvious from the man’s stance that out here it is the normal, average thing to do. Bring a rifle to open the door. Perhaps he’s expecting wolves. Except that wolves wouldn’t knock.
“Hello,” Charles says, “I’m Charles Xavier.”
“I’m Erik Lensherr,” Erik rumbles.
“We were hoping we could offer you a position,” Charles smiles, practised and cheerful at this, “to utilise the very unique skills you possess. May we come in?”
The man has neither spoken nor shifted his expression into anything readable, but after a moment he nods. His voice rasps with disuse, “How’d you find me?”
Charles taps his temple, currently covered by his hat. “We’re like you. I have the ability to find others of our kind. We just want to talk, but we’ll go if you’d rather not,” this is not something he usually has to offer so early in the script, so Erik is surprised. Charles must be picking up more hostility from the man’s mind than he is showing in his face.
“And you?” the man asks sharply, looking at Erik.
“I move things with my mind,” Erik says, staying non-committal. “Can we come in? We’re letting the heat out of your house.”
The man lets them in without further reluctance, hanging the rifle on a stand by the door. He leads them through to a large, mostly barren living room where a huge wood-stove is burning low. The windows are small and the air temperature is a comfortable but not excessive warm. There are no couches or chairs, only long wooden benches mostly pushed against the walls. The man pulls one over so that Charles and Erik sit facing him, their backs to the fire. The man’s back, Erik notices, is to the exit. He thinks this loudly, but Charles does not respond.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Charles says, pulling off one glove and holding out his hand.
The man shakes it. “Tom Hawthorn.”
“Pleased to meet you, Tom. Do you have any questions? Were you aware that there were others who had gifts like you?”
Tom shakes his head. His eyes are a deep brown, and don’t seem to express any emotion. Erik hunches over his folded arms, feeling awkward on the low bench with his knees too high and his socks full of melted snow.
“Are you from the government?” Tom grunts.
“Yes, but we don’t serve their agenda,” Charles says quickly. “Our first priority is helping those who have these abilities in any way we can.”
Erik notices he does not say ‘remarkable abilities’, as if he had picked up something sensitive from the stranger’s mind, and is therefore not too surprised when Tom asks, “Is there a way to switch them off?”
Charles shakes his head regretfully, “Not yet. Further research may help.”
At the same time, he thinks to Erik, don’t be alarmed, but we need to leave as soon as possible. I should not have brought us here.
---
Shit. Erik doesn’t react, though his heart begins to ramp up its pace in preparation for a sudden sprint. He keeps smiling blandly and watching Tom’s face. Tom is watching Charles, and finally Erik glimpses something in those dark eyes: despair.
“You want me to come with you, so y’all can study me,” Tom croaks.
“No, no of course not,” Charles says quickly. “We’re not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. I want to help people like us learn to control our powers, but if you’re not ready, it’s fine. We won’t ask anything from you.”
Tom begins to sway a little. His hands are clasped in front of him, elbows resting on his knees. “Do other people know about me? Does everyone know? They do, don’t they? They all know—“
“They don’t, it’s just us,” Charles soothes, leaning forward, and then – dear, sweet Charles, thinking that all anyone needs in the world is a friend – reaches out and puts his bare hand on Tom’s shaking fists. “What happened to Karen wasn’t your fault.”
Tom lunges backwards, shoving himself to his feet so quickly that the bench on which he was sitting tumbles back with a loud crack as it hits the wooden floor. “Who are you? Are you the police?” he cries. “You are, aren’t you? Are they coming for me?”
Charles is on his feet too, and Erik is casting around for the nearest metal, which is the big iron stove. He doesn’t want to toss a hot stove full of embers at anyone just yet, so he doesn’t move it. But he gets ready to throw himself in front of Charles if Tom starts flinging his fists, or worse, gets a hold of the rifle somehow.
“It’s just us,” Charles cries, holding his arms palm-up away from his body in supplication. “Don’t be afraid, Tom, we only want to help.”
“Give me the keys, I need to get out of here,” Tom says, lurching back and then forward again, indecisive, his eyes rolling wide inside their sockets. “Give me the keys! You’re not getting me, they’re not getting me!”
Charles puts his hand in his pocket and holds out the car keys. The expression on his face is twisted as if in pain. “Tom, stop,” he says. “Tom, let me go,” which is an odd thing to say considering the stranger is still standing several feet in front of him.
“I need to go get the kids before that bitch takes them away forever,” Tom says, striding forward and moving to snatch the keys from Charles’ outstretched hand. But Erik, though he still isn’t sure exactly what is happening, grabs them before he gets there and reaches out to take Tom’s shoulder.
“Calm down, Mr Hawthorn,” he says, holding the keys away. But Charles’ voice ripples in his mind, full of panic such as Erik has never heard before, and strangely distorted like a voice heard from underwater. Let him leave, Erik, he can have the car! I’m shielding you from his gift, but don’t provoke him!
“Stop protecting him!” Tom yells at the unmoving Charles. “Go – go jump in the lake, you freak!”
Charles takes a long, shuddering breath and begins to walk. Erik’s mouth drops open as he looks between the two other mutants and he finally, finally gets it. Tom’s gift.
“Don’t move until I’m gone,” Tom snarls.
Erik can’t move. He’s frozen, one hand still on Tom’s shoulder, the other outstretched behind him with the ring hanging from it. Tom ducks under Erik’s nearer arm and snatches the keys from Erik’s immobile grip.
Charles shuffles stiffly outside, glancing back at Erik with wide eyes. He tries to clutch at the doorframe but his hands don’t seem capable of getting any grip. He disappears.
Erik can’t speak. His breath is coming in tiny, shallow gasps, because he can’t move his ribs – only his diaphragm and racing heart seem unaffected by the spell. He watches Tom grab a big fur coat from a pile of clothes in the corner, and then return and pull Erik’s wallet from his pocket, thumbing through the handful of notes there. Dissatisfied, he checks the rest of Erik’s pockets, but Charles is carrying most of their cash. It is sickening to feel him rummaging against Erik’s body, as if Erik was nothing more than a coat stand. He tries to scream, Take it, take it, but let Charles go, don’t let him go to the lake- but it’s hopeless. His muscles refuse to work. His arms, still held out in the positions they were in when he was touching Tom’s shoulder and holding the keys, are beginning to ache from maintaining this exact pose.
Finally Tom walks out. Erik hears the door slam. He is feeling dizzy now, unable to get enough oxygen, and his accelerated heart rate and energy-consuming frustration is not helping. He hears the car start and splutter, the engine already cooled.
Please start, Erik begs. Please start. Please let him leave.
The car splutters again. Erik reaches out to the cold metal, straining to the limits of his ability, brushes his mind against pipes and sparkplugs, and sends a low hum through the whole chassis that transmits to every piece of metal inside. He intensifies the vibration, tuning the frequency lower and lower until he feels the metal begin to warm.
He hears the engine roar into life. There is the squeal of the wheels spinning and then the crunch as they catch on the gravel beneath the snow. He listens as Tom backs the car up, feeling the metal shell moving with his ability. At last, just when Erik thinks he is going to pass out from lack of air, Tom manoeuvres the car into line with the snow-smothered road and drives away.
As the sound fades with the taste of metal, Erik’s chest unlocks. He sucks in a huge breath and crumples, every muscle turning to whipped cream. He hits the cold floor, barely able to put his arms out to catch himself. Black clouds filter through his vision as his brain tries to rebalance its energy needs.
“Get up,” he wheezes. “Get up, you idiot, get up.”
He pushes himself to his feet. It takes effort, but after the brutal helplessness of not being able to move, he welcomes the labour. He staggers to the door, which hangs open. The cold smothers his exposed skin and the sun has come out now, the white expanse blinding him. He squints back in the direction they had come, back towards the lake.
The huge, empty landscape stares back, filled with human absence.
“Charles!” Erik bellows. There is no echo. His voice is soaked up by the snow and the clusters of wild pines, not even disturbing a hare.
There is a weather-beaten table, stained with old blood, where Tom Hawthorn must have sat skinning his game. Erik notices a steel hatchet sitting on the edge, with a blade that looks well maintained. He grabs it and the feel of metal in his hand calm him a little. His muscles still woozy, he plunges out into the sunlight, heading in what he’s pretty sure is the direction of the lake.
---
Erik is used to situations in which he must make snap judgements, but they have always, always involved the unpredictable, fast-moving actions of other people. What is he supposed to do, out here in a world that has eaten his friend? The snow doesn’t feel pain or fear, it doesn’t respond to bargaining or threats, it is huge and alien and he is alone. What if he can’t find Charles? It seems suddenly so easy, without street signs and sidewalks and gas stations, to simply lose someone. What if he gets lost too? He’s already in the scattered trees, and the lodge is growing smaller behind him. The snow here is much thicker, so thick that it supports Erik easily once his feet punch through the fresh top layers. What an ignominious, undeserving way to die, wandering through this faceless, wild world until he freezes.
But then he sees Charles’ footsteps in the snow. Small and scuffed, as if Charles was dragging his feet. Erik chases them like a wolf that has caught the scent. A little further on lies one of Charles’ gloves, the blue wool turned dark, soaked through with melted snow. Erik bolts past it, leaping, figuring out how to run with knees raised uncomfortably high to keep his toes from catching in the snow of his own footsteps.
The ground dips and there at last is the frozen lake, a white dance floor. In the nearest quadrant there is a black, sharp-edged hole in the ice. Erik tumbles in a clumsy sprint down the bank and smashes through a few tufts of tussock poking through the frozen edges.
As his feet thump down on the lake, he hears the ice creak.
He halts, arms spread, and tries to think what to do. You’re supposed to lie flat and disperse your weight, right? Is that how it works?
Erik gets down onto his knees and elbows and begins to crawl towards the hole in the ice. His mind is keeping up a constant litany of, Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Charles? and at last there is a thready, diluted answer.
E r i k . . . ?
“I’m here!” Erik shouts. “I’m right above you, hold on!”
The voice doesn’t reply. Charles cannot project when he is unconscious.
The ice creaks again. Erik pauses and then moves forward, slower this time. He is only a few feet from the hole, and he abandons the hatchet that he clutched all the way here. It is extra weight he must shed, but he still feels ill-at-ease and naked without the comforting taste of metal against his skin. He presses his hands to the ice as well as his elbows as he slides himself forward, and his palms stick to the surface each time he lifts them.
He reaches the hole, a sharp-edged, uneven triangle in which a few shards of ice still float. He takes a breath and stretches his hand over the water, feeling for metal on Charles’ body. He thinks he can sense, very distantly, a zipper and a wristwatch. When he strains to lift them the resistance against the water is too great. After several long moments he slumps, sweat already forming on his forehead and freezing in moments.
There’s no other choice. He shuffles back from the edge a little and toes his shoes off, then the hat and scarf and his leather jacket, with some careful struggling so as not to break the ice beneath him. He takes a deep breath, grasps the edge of the ice with stinging hands – it feels like grabbing a shard of broken glass – and then hauls himself forward and slides down into the water.
The cold hits him so hard it hurts on every inch of his body, particularly his head, and digs in like teeth. The hurt does not go away but intensifies over long seconds of agony. When he tries to swim, his movements are sluggish beyond what would be expected of the water resistance. In a warm swimming pool he can go for more than a mile without a break; here he knows, by pure instinct, he will not survive more than a few minutes before his muscles simply don’t have the energy to continue.
He had hoped the water would be clear, but it’s thick with silt. He blinks against it and surfaces briefly to take a reserve gasp of air. He must not lose the hole in the ice, he must keep track of his direction. He ducks under again and feels with his mind for Charles’ metal.
The ache in his head and ears increases as he swims down towards the pull of the zipper and the watch. He is moving almost without input, practically blind and wearing a skin of numb pain, unable to contemplate directions like up/down or back, only towards Charles. It seems to take a year at least before his hands – which feel like nothing more than chunks of wood trailing from his shoulders – knock against something physically real. He wraps his arms around it, feeling the shape of someone sitting slack at the bottom of the lake, and when he’s pretty sure he’s got at least one arm around Charles’ torso (his body is so numb and exhausted now he could be hugging a damn rock for all he knows) he digs his feet into the thick mud beneath and pushes them upwards.
If he thought finding Charles was hard, pulling him up is so close to impossible that he actually opens his mouth and screams, simply for the sake of it, the madness of viewing a glowing triangle through the silt and being unable to reach it. The sound is distorted and ghostly in his stifled ears. His lungs feel like the alveoli are popping in droves, and he kicks with all the strength he has left, letting go of Charles with one hand to breast-stroke as well. The triangle grows larger and fills his vision.
Their heads break the surface together and Erik sucks down air in heavy, undignified gasps. He grabs for the edge of the ice but is shaking so hard he misses it twice. When he finally gets a hold on it and he tries to lever himself up with one arm, the edge breaks off and he is dunked back into the freezing water. He surfaces again, coughing and ejecting torrents from his nose, and grabs the edge more delicately this time. His teeth clattering and arms numb, he has to look down to confirm the Charles is in his grasp. The man’s eyes are closed and his lips are blue, but he’s present and accounted for. They’re so close to safety.
Erik puts a little weight on the edge of the ice, and feels it creak and strain. He can’t get onto it like this. Even if he keeps breaking it off until it holds, his strength will give out long before that.
“Charles,” he gulps, spitting out muddy water, “Wh-what d-do I d-do,” he stammers.
Charles is silent. Erik is fairly sure he is not breathing.
For a moment, he half blacks-out and comes to still clinging to the edge of the ice. He is so tired and sore, and the water is so smooth. It would be so much easier to let go. He can’t get out. Why resist the inevitable?
“N-no,” he won’t die here without killing Shaw, without avenging his mother. He won’t let Charles die here, both of them lost at the bottom of the lake until spring or maybe longer. Erik grits his teeth and reaches his palm out across the ice towards the hatchet. He can’t reach it, but the taste of metal in his mind renews his determination. He strains for the hatchet and it comes to his call like a loyal dog. In his hand, the metal that should freeze to his touch feels warm. It is vibrating very faintly.
Erik’s mind, so good at improvising and making snap judgements, does a quick calculation and knows what he has to do.
With what coordination he has left he draws his arm back while treading water and throws the hatchet as hard as he can. In his weakened state it should carry scant feet, but it is metal and he throws his power behind it and it whizzes off, spinning like a Catherine wheel. Barely keeping his head above water, his concentration shot to hell, he jerks back the metal of the vanishing hatchet and feels it swoop around like a boomerang and bury itself in the far side of a tree just above the lake.
He takes two seconds to recover, then reaches out once more. Now there is a pull between him and the buried hatchet, the tree acting as an anchor of their invisible towrope. With shivering fingers outstretched, Erik grasps that tentative connection and begins to pull.
Charles had theorised – as he is wont to do – that given time and training, Erik will be able to levitate his whole body, with and perhaps even without the presence of large bodies of metal nearby. What Erik wouldn’t give to be able to levitate right now, but there’s no time to learn such skills. The most he can do is clutch Charles’ lifeless body to his chest and haul himself and the hatchet together. The hatchet can only dig deeper into the solid wood of the tree; but Erik feels his sodden, miserable self pulled slowly out of the water.
He drags them both several feet away from the hole before his connection to the hatchet wavers and then vanishes with his fatigue. He lies gasping, shaking uncontrollably, until he can force his short-circuiting mind to get onto his hands and knees and tug Charles off the ice and onto a flat shore of snow-covered earth.
“W-wake u-up,” he stammers, slapping Charles’ cheek as hard as his numb hands will function. “S-stay w-with me, d-damn you-”
Charles lies as motionless as the snowy hills. Erik tears open the thick woollen coat so he can see Charles’ torso properly, puts his ear down against his friend’s mouth and watches his chest, counting five endless seconds. Nothing. No faint puff of air, no rise and fall of a ribcage.
It was the CIA who gave them the basics in first aid that spring to his mind now. He tips Charles’ head back, locks his lips over that cold mouth, and breaths out everything he has. He feels the heat from his lungs, sitting in the last recess of warmth at the core of his body, pass between them like a thought from Charles’ mind to his. He turns his head to watch Charles’ chest deflate. He seals their mouths together and breaths once more, then measures two fingers from the bottom of Charles’ breastbone, digs the heels of his hands in and executes four chest compressions, putting all his weight behind them.
Rinse and repeat. Over. And over.
You’re not dead, he thinks savagely with each breath. You’re not dead, you hear me? You better be listening in that big brain of yours, Charles. You fucking bastard, you’re not leaving me out here.
Within a couple of minutes his shoulders are aching and the exertion is beginning to fire up the heat inside his muscles. He cannot feel his knees, buried in the snow beside the body, and his mouth tastes of Charles’ – how long has he wanted to know that taste? How can it be fair to finally get the chance as the man’s life ends?
You are not dead, he thinks, shoving the heels of his hands down on Charles’ ribs and visualising the chilled heart inside with every blow. You are not dead. Listen to me. You are not dead.
After ten minutes, his ears are ringing and his limbs are so cold he cannot feel anything from the thighs down. He works mechanically, imagining himself to be metal and clockwork, wound up so tight he will not stop for anything short of God himself. You are not dead, he pushes the thought out with every passing moment.
He breathes into Charles again. And Charles’ lips move under his.
He is working so automatically that he simply shivers to a halt in surprise. One cold hand is holding Charles’ chin up and the other is on Charles’ forehead. He feels the jaw move against his fingers. The cold mouth captures his bottom lip, as if clinging to the heat of it, sucking it in.
Erik sits up very quickly, staring down at Charles’ open blue eyes.
“You’re n-not d-dead,” he shivers. It’s sort of a question.
“I heard you the first hundred times,” Charles whispers.
---
Erik strips Charles' outer wool coat off and leaves it by the lake; it is soaked through and will only weigh them down, and he can always come back for it later. Charles is also bleeding from a shallow graze on his palm, presumably from grabbing branches in his desperate attempts to stop his own body walking into the lake. Erik carries him in a fireman's lift back to the lodge, though it takes him three tries just to stand up. Climbing the snowy bank to the tree line is like a marathon, but Charles' occasional mumbled insistence, "I think I'm okay to walk," makes Erik determined to make it without a rest. It takes him almost twenty minutes to walk back to the house, though it was barely two minutes run on the way over. The blood on Charles' palm has frozen by the time they reach the porch.
Erik staggers through the front door, kicking the worst of the snow off his ruined shoes, and lowers Charles down in front of the stove. He left the door open on his way out and the lodge is almost at the same temperature as the outside air; Erik hurries to shut them in and build up the fire. He finds a spare fur coat to sit on, and then three woollen blankets in a closet downstairs. When he gets back to the living room, Charles is lying on his side and his eyes are closed.
"Hey, stay alert Professor," Erik shakes him until he has his attention. "Whatever you do, you can't go to sleep. Here - give me your hand," he takes Charles' injured palm and curls the fingers in, closing Charles' fist over the wound.
"That hurts," Charles mutters sulkily. Bastard, he projects, unapologetically.
"Don’t pout at me, I meant it to hurt. Squeeze your hand whenever you feel yourself going to sleep."
"I will," Charles immediately tries to lie down again, but Erik forces him to sit cross-legged. Charles rubs his eyes. "Are we... waiting on Moira?"
"Moira's back at the base."
"Thought I saw her," Charles gazes at the flames curling around the fresh kindling. "Outside. In furs, like a wolf goddess." There is a rush of projected lust, clearly from Charles’ mind – Erik has never felt lust for Moira MacTaggert – and Erik realises Charles’ control over his powers is lagging.
He feels a surge of envy that he quickly clamps down on. If Charles is projecting without meaning to, he’s likely receiving as well. "I think you're delirious," he worries.
"I think you're delicious," Charles smiles at him. "Your lips were so warm."
"Er," said Erik, touching his mouth. "We really need to get you out of those clothes."
"Yes please," Charles hums.
"No, I mean because they're wet."
"I meant that too. Didn't I? Your arms are beautiful," Charles reaches up to squeeze Erik's bicep. And there again is that surge of uncontrolled, half-unconscious desire, like a sudden burst of sunlight through clouds – but this time Moira is not in the picture at all. Erik has no idea what to do. He had gleaned the impression, from things Raven said, that Charles might bat for both teams, but he had not even dreamed of acting on this information. Charles would have made it clear by now if he was interested in such things. Erik has no intention of ruining a perfectly good friendship by revealing his own… eccentricities.
He helps Charles get undressed and strips himself, hanging the clothes to dry around the living room as they go. Erik averts his eyes once they are both down to their underwear, but once they are wrapped in blankets and sitting on the wool coat in front of the stove he begins to feel more comfortable than he thinks he has ever felt in his life. Control over fire, he suddenly realises, has to be the most incredible invention in human history. Spectacular. More important than penicillin or guns or democracy. Yes, fire is the best. For a few minutes Erik sits staring dreamily at the flames, safely tucked away behind the thick glass window of the stove. The light outside is turning dusky.
He notices that Charles continues to shiver, though Erik had given him both the extra blankets.
"You can't still be cold," Erik wonders aloud. The air around them, despite the blasting stove, is still cool enough that their breaths mist in front of them.
"I'm freezing," Charles curls over his knees with his head bent low. From his mind crumbles bits of thought, cold and – blue – veins – deep cold – need -
"Food," Erik says decisively, clambering to his feet. Every muscle aches as if it has been trampled on. "I'll see if Mr Hawthorn's left anything in his pantry."
The kitchen, out of range of the heat from the stove, is so cold it sucks the fire-given heat from Erik’s skin. A swift search of the cupboards reveals jerky, oats, dried apricots and some rather stale digestive biscuits. He ties the blanket around his shoulders like a cape to free his arms and manages to convince his stiff fingers to light the gas cooker on the bench. He fills the kettle and puts it on the burner, then carries the food that doesn’t need heating back into the living room.
Charles is lying down on the fur coat again. Erik dumps the food on the nearest wooden bench and falls to his knees beside his friend, rolling him onto his back.
“I told you to stay awake!” he snarls, angry because he’d rather blame someone else than admit how horrifically scared he is.
“I’m sorry,” Charles is shivering worse than ever, breathing laboured. “I’m so tired.”
Erik convinces him to eat two pieces of dried fruit. What else is he supposed to do? Alcohol is supposed to warm you up, isn’t it? He leaves Charles contemplating the biscuits and rummages in the kitchen until he finds a bottle of Old Scotch. The kettle begins to whistle behind him, making him jump, and he takes it off and pours two cups of tea, topping them up with milk powder and lots of sugar. He pours the rest of the hot water into a pot and stirs in the oatmeal before bringing the tea to Charles.
Charles takes the mug with shaking hands, puts it to his mouth and spits the first sip back into the cup. He gives a groan of pain. “It’s too hot.”
Erik takes the cup and sips it. “It’s fine.”
“I can’t, it burns,” Charles’ eyes are roaming around the room deliriously again, and his shaking has grown so intense that Erik doesn’t dare give him back the mug in case he spills it all down himself. His voice is beginning to slur. “I need a shower,” he says, speaking to the wall. “I need… I need to tell Raven…”
Most of Charles’ projected thoughts are not even words anymore, just feelings of bewilderment, but occasionally punctuated by stabs of clarity. Confuzmuddle – Erik’s got no clothes on – should tell Raven how fond I am of him – fuddlebungle -
“Charles, we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Erik can feel his heart beginning to pump again. “Stay here. Stay awake,” he orders, squeezing Charles’ injured hand again.
He comes back with a bowl of unseasoned porridge and the Scotch, and forces a few mouthfuls of liquor down Charles’ throat. He tries to hand-feed Charles some of the porridge, but once again his friend recoils and complains that it’s too hot. Erik puts everything aside and tries to bring Charles back to reality by shaking his shoulders, but his friend’s eyes are unfocused and his head is lolling.
Erik is on the verge on panic. He has not felt like this since the first time he hunted and killed one of the guards from the camps. That was the last time he remembers being afraid for his own life; this time, it is someone else’s life, and that is such a long-forgotten sensation that it makes him almost nauseous with self-doubt. How? How does one care for other people? He doesn’t remember, dammit!
Before he can think about it too much, he drags Charles into his chest, fumbling to cocoon them both in the blankets, and lies down on the fur. He wraps an arm and a leg over Charles’ body, feeling an electric jolt of wanting that he pushes aside roughly. Charles’ skin is cold as stones at the bottom of a deep cave. Shivers continue to wrack his body as Erik tightens his grip, putting his hand over Charles’ damp head.
“Talk to me,” he demands. “Talk to me about genetics. Evolution. Your childhood. Anything. Just do not stop talking, or so help me, you don’t know what I’ll do.”
“You’ll go off and kill Shaw,” Charles sighs into his shoulder. “And I can’t have that.”
“So talk, professor.”
“We don’t know what the ancestor of chimps and humans looked like,” Charles drones, a note of contentment entering his voice at the familiar subject. Erik can feel the hinge of his jaw moving against Erik’s skin. It is wonderfully mechanical, the human body, the perfect machine. “Did they share more traits with the great apes, or with us? If the former, why have we outwardly changed so much more than they in the millions of years since we parted ways? Why does evolution sometimes preserve shapes and forms for endless eons, sometimes race ahead to throw up new bodies and behaviours in a galloping tempo of change?”
“I don’t know,” Erik rumbles. “Why?”
“It’s rhetorical, Erik,” Charles smiles into the skin of his throat. “Nobody knows the answer, or we wouldn’t be asking.”
“Oh. Go on.”
Charles continues to blather on and on, as the dusk outside bruises purple and finally blackens into night. And slowly, with the heat of the stove searing at Erik’s back, Charles’ skin begins to warm.
---
When they don’t check in the next morning, Moira calls the hotel and learns that all their travel bags are still in the room and they haven’t checked out in time to catch their scheduled flight. She has all the details of their destination, at the end of the road marked only ‘SLED TRAIL REST STOP’. Around four in the afternoon the day after Tom Hawthorn stole their car, she and Raven pull up in a new rental with chains on the tires, both of them bundled up in scarves, hats, gloves and thick coats.
Erik waves to them from the window. His clothes have dried overnight and he is dressed, save for his shoes, which are still sitting on the ice of the lake along with his jacket, the borrowed scarf and Charles’ probably-now-frozen woollen coat. They can pick them up on the way back if they want.
There is some fussing from Raven and scolding from Moira, but the ladies assent that the main point is to get Charles and Erik back to civilisation as soon as possible. As they grind their way carefully along the snowy road, Charles immediately starts on questions about what happened to Tom Hawthorn.
“He was the mutant you were looking for?” Moira twists around in surprise and Raven grabs the wheel to keep her on the road. “The local sheriff said a man named Hawthorn was shot in the head by his mother last night. The woman claimed she was protecting her grandchildren from their crazed father.”
Charles’ face goes bleak and distant. “He just couldn’t reconcile his power with the world,” he says quietly. “The grandmother – she had the same power too, I think, very mildly. From his memories, it seemed she was able to resist him when she took custody of the children.”
“What happened to Karen?” Erik asks, and when Charles looks over with a frown, Erik explains, “You told him what happened to Karen wasn’t his fault. That’s what set him off.”
Charles tucks his chin into his chest. “She was his wife. They were having a row and he told her he wished she would go play in traffic.”
A heavy silence follows this, and Charles keeps his eyes on the passing landscape. Erik slides his hand across the foot of upholstery between them and squeezes his fingers. Still looking out the window, the corner of Charles’ mouth twitches into a small smile. He asks, “Do you hate this snowy wilderness more than ever, my friend?”
“Not at all,” Erik says at once, and when Charles glances over with one brow raised, he elaborates. “I thought it was horrible because there were no people. But that made the company I had even more precious-” he shuts his mouth, suddenly hyper-aware that Raven and Moira are listening. He is a globe-trotting murderer, for goodness’ sake, he is not supposed to garner warm, happy feelings and fresh appreciation for human contact.
Mutant contact, rather.
Charles laughs and looks back at the white, empty landscape.