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Erik rarely wears the helmet, these days.
Frost taught him good enough mental shielding techniques before they parted ways that he can stand against all but the strongest of telepaths, and even Charles’ astonishing range cannot reach him halfway across the world. Still, when he sleeps, he is unable to keep his defenses from weakening, and even though his secrets remain locked down deep, his mind opens itself to attack.
Most days, there is nothing. Most days, he closes his eyes, forces himself to be still, and drifts off to the vague feeling of something that should be there but isn’t, tosses and turns for several dreamless hours, and wakes feeling untouched and unrested.
Tonight, the moment he is relaxed enough for his shields to start to fall, he hears screaming.
It’s an awful, gut-wrenching scream, like a man being torn limb from limb, desperate, and if the screamer had the mental capacity to form words, they would be help, please, oh god, stopstopstop, help, Erik -
Erik’s eyes fly open and his shields slam back into place before he can fully recognize the voice. He sits up in bed as calmly as he can, but he’s shaking, every scrap of metal in the room around him is shaking with him, and from the sounds outside the door, the entire metallic content of the building is doing the same. He forces out a breath, and blinks hard, and when he opens his eyes again everything is still.
He gets to his feet and heads out of the bedroom, down the stairs. The two-floor apartment is more than enough space for their two-person operation, but it’s still cramped, pancaked with identical properties on five sides, like everything in Hong Kong. His shoulders nearly touch the walls as he comes down into the kitchen, stairs creaking underfoot, but he hardly registers it, his whole brain numb.
Raven is still awake, sitting at the kitchen table with a mess of their notes spread in front of her, a desklamp plugged into a far wall with an extension cord. Her hair is blonde, and in loose waves, the tight crimping that she prefers losing focus along with her concentration.
She looks up and catches his gaze like she was expecting him, tired and unwavering. “We’re going to have to move again if you keep doing this, Erik,” she says.
He stops in the doorway, one hand still on the railing. It’s cool, the apartment is cheap and drafty, but even in the dead of night there’s enough illumination from the city lights outside that the entire interior is cast in a contrary orange-yellow light. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” she asks, short. She sounds like she’s on her last leg of patience, and he doesn’t blame her, not after a year and a half on the run, moving every month, looking over their shoulders and not knowing what they’re looking for at all. They’re both on edge. They’re not the same without - well. “Erik?”
“Screaming,” he bites out, his jaw tight. “I heard screaming.”
Raven’s brow creases. “What, someone else in the building? I didn’t hear anything - “
“No, it was - “ Erik cuts himself off, careful. “I think it was in my head.”
The crease only gets deeper, and there was a time when Erik might have felt an urge to smooth over Raven’s forehead with his lips, but that time is long gone. “There must be a new telepath nearby, or something. Someone who can’t control their powers.”
Erik doesn’t say anything for a minute, just breathes and squints out the window, across the alley to the building across from them, feeling like there’s a tidal wave pressing insistently against his shielding. Finally, he says, “You’re probably right. Someone who can’t control their powers.”
He doesn’t say, it sounded like Charles.
When he closes his eyes again, lets his shields fall entirely, his mind echoes with silence.
=
He doesn’t sleep for two days after that, until they manage to make the wrong people in Hong Kong angry and have to steal a car and drive south.
Raven takes the form of a respected member of the Politburo to expedite their passage from China into Laos, and by eleven p.m. Erik is falling asleep behind the wheel, so she makes him pull over and switch, slipping back into her blonde form as she slips into the driver’s seat.
It takes his best efforts to keep awake for the fifteen minutes that he does, but by the time they’re pulling out of the shantytown market where they stopped for food, nestled at the foot of a gargantuan rise of green forest, a tiny spot of light against the darkness, a colorful square quarter mile, his vision is wavering.
Their headlights and the sound of their engine are the only signs of human life once the shantytown falls out of sight, the shadowy forms of forests and mountains looming around them, the road an overgrown one-lane dirt path carved into the side of a slope. Erik leans his head against the window and lets himself drift away.
At first the only thing that he feels is a niggling sense of urgency, of needing to be somewhere.
Then he’s there. He’s standing in a circular room, the walls lined with reflective metal, empty except for a man in white, sitting cross-legged and curled in on himself on the floor in front of Erik.
Charles looks up at him, and Erik feels sick.
His head has been buzzed, and there are bloody flecks in what’s left of his hair. Eyes red-ringed, shoulders thinner than they should be, bony, hands shaking, his lips pressed together like he has to hold them that way to keep from screaming aloud, and when he meets Erik’s gaze a single teardrop escapes down his face -
“Erik,” Charles grits out, and all Erik can do is stand there, numb, like he’s been blown open.
Charles shakes more violently as he talks, like the effort to control even this much is driving him to the edge of his ability. “Erik, you’re the only one who can help. It’s Stryker, Mount Haven - “
His voice cuts out, lips tight, jaw grinding, but Erik hears a tempestuous swell, the screaming again, thoughts tripping over each other to be heard first, ripping through his mind - pleasepleaseplease Erik dear god can’t take much more please Erik ERIK help me can’tdoitalone Erik please Erik theywon’t theywon’t theywon’t stop STOP tower I can’t I can’t tower of can’t tower of tower of tower of dear god ERIK -
Erik slams his shields back up as hard as he can and shocks awake with a gasp.
Raven looks over at him, where he’s hyperventilating in the passenger seat of a stolen Yugo, and says without an ounce of amusement, “The screaming again?”
“Pull over,” Erik demands, harsh, but he doesn’t care. “Raven, pull the fucking car over right now - “
She steps hard on the brakes, and Erik is out the door before the car has even pulled to a halt, stumbling towards the low, decrepit cattle fence that runs parallel to the road. He can’t breathe, can’t even get enough air to form a thought, and he feels sick, fundamentally off-kilter, like he wants to rip someone apart with his bare hands but they’re so weak right now that he can hardly catch himself when he falls to the ground -
He retches, vomiting up the street meat they scrounged for dinner, and keeps going until his stomach is convulsing emptily, until all he feels is the cool sweat on his forehead and the dirt under his fingernails.
“Well,” Raven says, from behind him, “that was dramatic.”
Erik staggers to his feet and turns to face her, her flyaway hair backlit by the headlights of the car. “It’s Charles,” he says, and can hardly make out the way her expression goes deadly serious at the name.
She snaps, “What about Charles?”
“Stryker’s got him.” And he’s torturing him, he’s driving him out of his mind, he’s hurting him, our Charles, and he screamed loud enough two days ago that Erik heard him halfway around the world, but he didn’t listen.
=
Erik has done a good many things that he’s not proud of, even a few things that he might take back, given the chance, but the only thing that he will never forgive himself for is Charles Xavier.
Charles, he knows, was his one chance at salvation.
From the moment he met Charles, all he ever wanted was to protect him, and from the first moment he can remember, all he wanted was revenge. He was stupid enough to think he could have both, greedy enough to try and take both, when Charles would have been enough, more than enough, everything.
They’re on two different sides of a kaleidoscope war, and still the only indisputable constant in Erik’s life is that Charles is the most important thing in the universe.
Even on a nonstop flight, it will take them twelve hours to reach Washington. It’s too long, with Charles in the hands of one of the most notorious mutant slaughterers in history, when the furious spark in Charles’ eyes was already going feral at the fringes when Erik spoke to him, when he’s almost certain that the flecks of blood in his hair were from holes in his skull.
The Bangkok airport is one of the bigger ones that Erik’s seen, and even with Raven wearing the guise of an old woman, both of them protected by the assumption that they are mother and son, and not wanted fugitives, he feels uneasy. He turns to Raven, sitting next to him reading People, and says, “We should - “
“The second that whoever really owns the private jet realizes that it’s taken off without him, he’ll report it stolen,” she says, without looking up at him. “So no, we can’t commandeer one.”
Erik’s leg is bouncing restlessly, and it’s taking a great deal of concentration and self control to keep from bouncing every chair in the terminal, every piece of women’s jewelry, and every suitcase, along with it. A year and a half ago, this wouldn’t even be a conversation. “Azazel - “ he tries.
“Azazel isn’t picking up his phone,” Raven replies smoothly, “or he lost it, or he disconnected the number, or he’s dead. Whatever his deal is, he’s not going to help us. This is the fastest way.”
Erik grinds his teeth and makes himself unfurl until his shoulders hit the back of the seat. He glances over at Raven’s magazine, for lack of something better to do, and sees a face he vaguely recognizes, from some German-dubbed version of an American sitcom, in some hotel room, somewhere.
He breathes out through his nose, closes his eyes, and lowers his shields as carefully as he can.
They can’t, he hears, but it’s calmer, not a scream but a mantra. They can’t make me, they won’t, I’m stronger than them, they cannot have them, I won’t give them up, there is no tower, there is no tower, there is no tower, there is no tower, there is no tower -
He comes back to himself carefully, like surfacing after spending a long time under water.
Charles is twelve hours by plane on the other side of the globe, in a military compound in Virginia, and Erik is here, waiting for his flight to begin boarding, like he wouldn’t eagerly tear through the fabric of space and time to get to Charles, if only someone would hand him the right knife.
He feels Raven’s hand on his arm, cool and steady even as a seventy-year-old woman. Her gaze is knowingly admonishing when he meets it, and she says, “They took him for a reason. They’re not going to kill him before he gives them what they want, and he’s never going to give him what they want.”
Erik swallows, and hopes his face doesn’t give away the animal terror at his core. “They’ll break him.”
“Charles doesn’t break easy,” Raven says, no hesitation.
It’s exactly the thing that he has to hear, that can calm the raging storm inside his skull. Direct all that overwhelming fury towards more effective pursuits. “We have twelve hours to come up with a rescue plan.”
=
They follow his sense of urgency all the way to the Virginia foothills.
Erik drives like a madman until they’re the only car on the road, but Raven doesn’t so much as glance over at him as he edges other vehicles out of the way to make room for them in traffic. Neither of them speak a word, they’ve been over the plan backwards and forwards a hundred times, anything more will muddle it.
They abandon the car off the side of the road when they start seeing signs advising them to turn back, there’s a restricted military area up ahead. Erik covers it with a few pine branches, the black paint unobtrusive enough already, far enough from the road not to be seen but close enough that they can make a quick getaway, when they need to. Raven pulls at her shirt to accentuate her breasts, and smiles at him.
“Good?” she asks. She’s put lipstick on, made her figure a little more of an hourglass than it usually is, pulled her hair down around her face and mussed it up.
Erik offers her a brief smirk. “You make a very convincing damsel in distress,” he says. “Got the tracker?”
She shows him the small black tracker, featureless except for a button on the side and a tiny antenna, and then tucks it neatly away in her bra. “Are you sure you can do this?” she asks. She hasn’t said it until now, but he’s been able to feel since they were wheels up in Bangkok that she’s been thinking it.
The air is crisp, not quite autumn temperature and not quite winter yet. When he looks up, the sky between the treetops is blue, but nowhere near as blue as Charles’ eyes. “I’m sure. Worry about yourself.”
“I have to worry about you, too,” Raven says, “or no one else will.”
Before he can reply, she slips out of the forest onto the road, and starts walking toward the compound, stumbling in six-inch heels that he knows she can walk in effortlessly on her best day. He watches from up the slope, eyes trained on her blonde hair through the trees, to keep from focusing on anything else.
The plan is not the best that he’s ever concocted, but in the limited amount of time that he had to whip it up, with only cursory knowledge of Mount Haven itself, it could certainly be worse. It only takes Raven a few minutes to flag down a helpful soldier, get invited into the cab of his pickup truck, take him out with a dose of barbiturate strong enough to tranq a horse, and drag his body into the trees.
She pulls a u-turn and drives off into restricted territory, wearing the soldier’s face and his ID badge, and Erik settles in to wait, sat on the hood of the car with the tracking reciever in front of him.
Inside the compound, if everything goes to plan, she’ll use the second dose of sedatives to take down the highest ranking officer she can find. From there, she’ll locate where they’re holding Charles as quickly as possible, plant the tracker, and get out without anyone being the wiser.
They’re close enough that Charles’ mayday beacon in his head is a pounding pulse.
Even within Charles’ usual range, Raven can’t hear anything. She tells him that she would usually feel him, even just on the peripheral, while they were this close, but she can’t, now.
Half an hour later, and the tracker starts beeping.
Erik takes a minute to make sure that the location is secure in his memory, a red blip on a linear green topographical map on a black screen, and then he puts the reciever away and starts moving.
Every atom in his body is screaming at him to run, but he makes himself stay slow, low and hidden, gliding through the trees and around all of their defenses, the ones he can feel from a half mile away. Into a shallow valley, up the side of another hill, his feet carry him to the spot without input from his brain.
He drops to his knees, breathes out until his lungs are empty, and opens his senses.
The proximity is enough that he feels Charles immediately, like a tidal wave, an uncontrollable cacophany of pleas, stopstopstop you can’t stop thereisnotower tower of tower of stop you can’t they can’t ERIK -
But beyond it, he can feel the cage. The sleek sphere that they’re keeping Charles in, more tangible than any of the metal around it, buried deep in the rock of the mountain, but Erik knows metal and this metal is stronger than any bedrock. It can make it.
I’m here, he thinks, as steadily as he can, I’m here.
Rage and serenity, he will never forget. The sound of Charles screaming, unreachable halfway across the world, and the curve of his smile over a chessboard. The way his hands were too bony and weak, shaking, the knowledge that someone did that to him - the way his skin feels beneath Erik’s mouth, soft and warm and pliant, the memory of his breathless laugh around Erik’s name, when he kissed his neck.
Every bone in his hands pops. His tendons strain, like he’s physically hauling the cage from the grasp of the mountain, his teeth clench and his eyes roll back in his head, he bites back a yell -
Rocks flood out of the hill above him, kicking up mud, digging into the dirt and piling up, stopped by tree trunks; a small boulder collides with his legs, but this is why he knelt in the first place. More rocks come, and more rocks, forced out in front of the cage, and then finally it emerges.
He sets it down, rougher than he intended. Compared to pulling it out of the mountain, it’s child’s play to crack the thing open, tearing the front away, and then there’s -
Charles, in a pristine white jumpsuit, worse than he looked a mere day ago. He meets Erik’s eyes, and struggles to his feet, but he falls before he can take a step. Erik stumbles up the slope to him.
Charles’ hands fist tightly in the front of his shirt, and Erik doesn’t know whether he says or thinks, Babel.
=
Erik sits at his bedside for three days.
Charles looks unbearably small in the king bed that they’ve put him in, pallid skin and dark circles under his eyes, too colorless against the bright flower-pattern of the bedding. Erik was afraid to take his hand, for a time, afraid to hurt him, but now he finds he can’t let go, can’t give up touching him.
The telepath’s control has always been worse when he sleeps, his mind more readily reaching out to others, but his restraint has gone to hell, now. He’s almost battering past Erik’s shields without even trying, without even being awake, and it’s not the first time that Erik has felt like an insignificant speck in the face of Charles’ strength, not the first time that he wishes he had his helmet with him.
Raven finds him dozing fitfully, in and out of Charles’ whirlwind of dreams and memories as his shields waver, head pillowed on his arms on the bed. She stands across from him with her arms crossed, biting her lip like the sight of her brother’s face is a difficult paradox, and Erik knows that she can hear him.
“We need to know what they did to him,” she says. “We can’t help him like this.”
Erik lifts his head tiredly, enough to look down at his fingers, knitted in between Charles’ limp ones, at the way his mouth is turned down in a frown even in unconsciousness. “He’ll wake up soon.”
Raven shifts her weight the way she does when she has something to say, but is afraid to. “They did something to his legs,” she says. It’s not what she was going to say, he can tell. “Hank’s serum wouldn’t have lasted this long, and he’s not - they’re not even atrophied. They’re fixed.”
Erik has been very pointedly not thinking about Charles’ legs for so long that he has to swallow around a lump in his throat before he can speak. “It could be temporary,” he says, and feels sick. “Something they were giving him to keep him alive while they - “
He can’t say it, can’t say tortured - god no, not Charles - but Raven nods anyways.
“I think they - “ she stops, visibly composes herself. “I think they drove him crazy.”
Erik doesn’t say anything to that, because not Charles, but Raven keeps going. “I can hear him now, too. I don’t know why I couldn’t, before, but he’s - I mean, you can hear him. I get that he’s asleep, and he’s not really thinking clearly, he’s been through a lot, but - his brain keeps misfiring, or something, just over and over again - there is no tower. What does that even mean?”
“He’ll tell us when he wakes up,” Erik says, with more confidence than he feels.
Raven comes around the bed and puts a hand on his shoulder, squeezing. “I’ll sit with him for a while,” she says, and Erik knows that she means it as a kind offer, to give him a break, even though something deep in his chest wants him to fight at the suggestion that he leave Charles. “You should take a walk.”
His eyes drag over Charles’ face one more time, the shaved lines of his skull and the dark smudges of his eyelashes against his cheeks, and then he makes himself stand, his knees cracking. Raven takes his seat.
The house they’re in belonged to an ex-Nazi before Erik slit his throat. It sits on the beach, a few minutes’ walk from downtown Havana, secluded enough that they don’t have to worry about running into anyone they don’t want to, close enough that they could make a run from the port if they have to.
Erik doesn’t go far, he just walks to the edge of the surf and sits down in the sand, pant legs rolled up halfway to his knees. He hasn’t been this close to the ocean in nine years, because no matter how much he wants to, he can’t go back and carry Charles off that beach, instead of leaving him there.
It’s drizzling, the kind of distantly threatenting rain that only ever precedes a downpour, the telltale darkening of a storm on the horizon. Erik digs his feet into the sand and closes his eyes against the water, all of it.
There is no tower, and he’s not sure where Charles’ thoughts end and his begin.
=
Charles is awake, sitting with a cup of tea at the kitchen table.
Raven’s with him, sitting close enough to touch him but very carefully not doing so. The weather outside has taken a major turn for the worse by the time Erik gets back to the house, pouring rain and flashes of lightning out over the surf, the rumble of thunder more an instinctual feeling than a sound. The lights are on, but they’re flickering, they’ll probably go out once the storm is overtop of them.
“The students can’t see me like this,” Charles is saying, when Erik comes in through the back door, “I can’t go back, at least not until the physical wounds have healed. Plus, if the - if my legs relapse - “
There’s a moment of silence while Erik stands, stopped in his tracks in the mudroom, out of sight. Then Raven says hurriedly, “You can stay with us as long as you need, Charles. You know that.”
Charles laughs, and it’s a humorless, distorted sound. But then he says, “Hank and Alex will look after the school while I’m away. Jean, as well - you’ve not met Jean yet, I don’t think - “
Erik kicks his shoes off inside the door and walks into the kitchen. Charles is already looking up for him when he gets there, like he knew he was coming, and Erik is transfixed by his steady gaze, free of the frantic, feral desperation of their last two meetings. “Charles,” he says, softly.
The smallest flicker of a smile steals over Charles’ lips, and then it’s gone. “Erik,” he says, “it’s good to see you, old friend. I do believe thanks are in order.”
Thanks are never in order, not with them, because Erik would race halfway across the world to rescue Charles even if he knew the only repayment he’d get was death. Instead of saying that, he shifts in place, bites the inside of his cheek to keep the metal from shifting with him, and says, “I owed you one.”
That startles a soft laugh out of Charles. “I think you owe me a few more than one.”
Erik tilts his head and can’t help the grin tugging at the corner of his mouth, because there’s the real Charles Xavier, a ray of sunlight in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Raven stands up, scowling at Erik in that mild way that she always seems to be doing after so long in close quarters wtih him, and as if there’s tension to be diffused, says, “Erik. Want tea?”
“No,” he says, taking a seat opposite Charles. There’s a crack of thunder, and the room shakes, the lights flickering. Erik absentmindedly steadies everything, not even a blink of consideration, looking unwaveringly at Charles’ face, the life in his eyes. “What did Stryker want you for?”
Raven sits back down angrily, and leans across Charles towards him, “Erik, for fuck’s sake - “
“You know, a bit of the usual,” says Charles lightly, ignoring her, “contact every mutant in the world at once, act as conduit for something suitably sinister. He kept calling me his - well, you know.”
Erik nods, he can’t look away from Charles’ eyes, and if he doesn’t, it can almost feel like none of that mess ever happened, like they’re evenly matched and unmarred once again, young. “I would have expected you to summon your merry band of superheroes to save the day,” he says, with a lilt of amusement.
But Charles frowns. “I tried,” he admits. “The - cage. It was psionic metal, like the helmet. Powerfully magnetized. As long as they kept me there, the only person I could feel - in the entire world - was you.”
Erik hears I only called for you because I had no other choice. He hears, I can hear you through the helmet, there’s no point to even wearing it, you silly old fuck.
Charles goes on, “I’m sorry to have dragged the both of you into this whole mess. It’s not your war.”
Erik hears, I’ll never want you fighting alongside me, not again.
=
That night, when the storm has washed past, and the island is quiet in the aftermath, he hears screaming.
His body knows that it’s Charles before his mind does, he’s out of bed and moving down the hall before he registers that it’s probably not a real threat, or their perimeter alarms would have gone off. But Charles’ door is already open when he gets there, breeze blowing through from an open interior window, and it’s -
Raven, sitting on the edge of his bed, trying to soothe him, but Charles is just thrashing, twisted in his sheets, shirtless and still covered in sweat, eyes closed but moving under his eyelids like he’s awake, and terrified. His sister presses him back forcefully, shakes him, and he jerks awake like he’s been shocked.
Erik lingers in the doorway, watching as Raven hugs Charles to her, his face in her unbrushed hair. She runs her hand carefully over the back of his skull, the healing holes stark in the moonlight, presses a kiss to his forehead, murmurs soft words that mean nothing at all. Charles’ shoulders start to unclench, he starts to breathe normal, he thanks her, even though -
“Oh, shush,” Raven says, soothing tone contrary to her words, “you don’t have to thank us. That’s what family does, Charles. They take care of each other. Get used to it.”
Charles breathes out heavily, until his lungs are empty, the way he taught Erik. “That was quite an episode,” he says, a mumble that’s barely intelligible. “Jean will have felt that back at the school, they’ll know something’s wrong, now. All those little ones, Raven. I can’t bear to have them living in fear, like we did - “
It’s clearly not meant for Erik to hear. He turns to go, his heart still pounding from that brief moment of panic, but before he can get two steps into the hallway, he hears Charles’ quiet, “Erik.”
If there were ever a time when that voice could not bring him to his knees, Erik cannot remember it. He turns back, but goes no further than the doorway, stuck in the threshold. Raven retreats to an armchair by the open window, frazzled but calm, like the storm-gray ocean outside, and -
Instinct wants him to go further, wants him to climb in bed and offer shelter, only - only.
Charles pins him with a weary, watery look. “Will you come here already and stop lurking?”
Erik goes. Around the other side of the bed, he climbs on top of the blankets, and the berth of space that he keeps between himself and Charles lasts only the few seconds that it takes for Charles to reach out and latch onto him, tugging Erik forward against him. It’s a weak pull, but Erik goes easily, shoulder down on the pillows so that Charles has room to curl into his chest, face pressed to Erik’s shirt.
He feels far too thin under Erik’s hands, skin and bones. Erik wants to strangle the life out of every person responsible for this, but he keeps the urge buried deep down, behind his shields, keeps his hands gentle on Charles’ back, cradling the back of his neck. He can feel the knobs of Charles’ spine under his palm, and he doesn’t want to - he can’t break him again, he won’t.
They stay that way for hours, listening to the wind and the gentle sounds of Raven’s breathing where she’s dozed off sitting upright in the armchair, drifting together until Erik can feel Charles’ stallion heartbeat against his own ribcage, steady as the first time he kissed it.
Charles shifts, his fingers digging in between Erik’s shoulder blades. “They were fond of electrocution,” he says, out of nowhere, like he’s telling a secret. “I’ve no idea what the craniotomy had to do with anything.”
Erik can’t help pressing a kiss to the top of his head, can’t help pulling him tighter against him. “Charles - “ he tries, but it’s like Charles doesn’t even hear him.
“They had - a method of - “ Charles stops, swallows. Erik’s eyes are not damp, his heart is not raging to burst free from his chest like a trapped tiger, he has moved mountains for this man and would do it again, and two of those things are lies. “They had a way of transferring other mutants’ pain onto me. To torture them, the others, and make me feel it. I don’t - I don’t know how - “
“Shh,” Erik murmurs, “I’m here, now.”
Charles says, very small, “I know, I know, but please, Erik.”
He doesn’t know what else to say, so he says, “There is no tower of Babel.”
=
Charles likes to go on walks, and before they leave, he always says while I still can.
He laughs it off, looking a hundred times happier in the too-big hawaiian shirt and board shorts that they dug up from the bowels of the house, but every time he does it Erik feels like a boulder has dropped in his stomach, an indisputable weight. I did that, he knows, watching Charles test out his legs like a baby deer, I took that away from him. Made it so that he has to experience walking for the first time all over again.
They never get very far, Charles still weak from his stay in Mount Haven. It’s a cruel dream, watching Charles wade into the surf, curl his toes in the sand, when every day Erik knows their walk becomes shorter and shorter, Charles tires faster and faster. There has never been anything more important than Charles’ smile, and every time he stumbles, that smile falters, and there is not a thing that Erik can do.
It’s raining again, a steady drizzle, but Charles has insisted on taking the walk anyway, wrapped up in Erik’s raincoat, the hood pulled up. The coat is enormous on him, even more so than it would be usually - he doesn’t seem to have regained even an ounce of the weight he lost, Raven’s efforts fo feed him to no avail.
Erik sticks nearby as Charles goes confidently out into the water, ready to catch him if he should fall. It always starts out this way - Charles going full speed ahead, unafraid, until his legs start to fail him, and he has to limp back to the house with Erik’s help.
“We’ve got nearly fifty students now,” Charles is saying. Erik is more concerned with watching his hands move animatedly than listening to him. “Some of their abilities are like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Erik nods, while some deep part of him threatens to burst with contentment at the sight of Charles pushing his hood out of his eyes, smiling. “And - Jean, you said. She’s a new student?”
Charles doesn’t accuse him of ulterior motives. “Yes, a telepath. She may be more powerful than I am.”
Erik hmms, forces himself to look out at the grey, murky horizon, and Charles goes on, “She’s just a child, though. Eleven years old. Hardly mature enough to understand what she’s capable of.”
“You can’t underestimate children just because of their youth, Charles,” Erik says, thinking of his own childhood, killing droves of men in Aushwitz, under Shaw, and then killing droves of men to get to Shaw.
“I know,” Charles sighs. “I know, Erik. They feel emotions more strongly, they’re unpredictable.”
The only emotion Erik knew, from the time that his mother died until the time that he met Charles, was rage. Charles brought the serenity, taught him serenity. “Every human is capable of terrible things, with the right motivation,” he says. “Children are not excluded from that.”
Charles nods, and opens his mouth to reply, but then his right leg gives out on him. He manages to catch himself, steady himself, but Erik is already there, wrapping an arm around Charles’ waist to take his weight. The soft sound of disappointment that Charles makes is like a knife to his gut.
“Maybe we ought to head back,” Charles says, and Erik’s glad that he doesn’t have to.
They hobble back down the beach together, Erik’s hair plastered wet to his head from the rain. It’s a warm, humid sort of fog that surrounds them, the movement of clouds like gargantuan ships in the sky.
He has to carry Charles up the steps onto the covered porch, eases him down into a wicker chair and then leans back against the railing. Charles’ strength will return with rest, but it will return less than the day before, and less tomorrow than today. Erik can do nothing to help him, he can’t -
“I can go back to Mount Haven,” he says, before his brain can even process the idea.
Charles looks over at him, forehead creased. “Erik - “
“I can get back in and find whatever they were giving you, that helped your legs,” Erik interrupts him. “The entire facility is metal. It’s - I can - you can keep walking, Charles. I can do that.”
Charles shakes his head. His hair is starting to grow back in, still not nearly enough to cover the damage, but enough that Erik could feel the bristles of it, if he ran his fingers through. “You can’t fix me.”
You can’t fix what you did to me. Erik breathes out until his lungs are empty and closes his eyes and hears the ghost of stopstopstop please you can’t please stop Erik Erik ERIK STOP -
He goes into the house, slams the screen door behind him so hard that he has to fix the hinges, later.
=
Erik hasn’t stayed in one place longer than a month in nearly two years.
It’s just barely light out when he gets up to leave, the clock reading eight a.m. but the weather still too cloudy for much dawn sunlight to reach through. Raven’s already left for the market, Charles is asleep upstairs, Erik has condensed his necessary belongings into a backpack, and the only reason he lingers in the kitchen is to finish off the cold mug of coffee that Raven left behind her.
She’s told him that she’s not going to leave Charles again, and he can’t fault her for that, because he would certainly stay if Charles would have him, if they weren’t stuck on two different sides of the war, if he weren’t so beyond forgiveness. As it is, he can’t do anything but grimace at the cold dregs of coffee sliding down his throat, at the thought of the long boat ride to Port-au-Prince that awaits him.
He can’t help lowering his shields and reaching out one last time, to the comforting warm and sleep-addled purr of Charles’ mind. Then he pieces everything back into place, sets the mug in the sink, and turns to go.
A voice says from the stairway, “I always thought we were bigger than all this.”
Erik stops in his tracks, fist tightening on the strap of his backpack, and looks. Charles is standing on the third-to-last stair, barely holding himself up by the railing, the most beautiful thing Erik has ever seen.
Charles swallows, and goes on, “I always thought - the war, mutants and humans, the world, death, all of it. I thought that you and I were meant to transcend all that. That we were the tower.”
Erik knows that there’s a corner of Charles’ mind that’s been driven insane, by all this, but since he was a kid he’s known what that’s like. “You said it yourself,” his voice is low, “I can’t fix this.”
Charles laughs lightly, humorless. “There’s no need to fix us, Erik. All you have to do is not go.”
He can’t believe that, because, “I’ll fuck it all up again. It’s inevitable that everything will go utterly to pieces.”
Charles grins, for real this time. “You’re like a force of nature, that way,” he says. “Turning mountains into piles of pebbles and parting seas, and all you can think about is the people you’re going to swallow up on the way. Well, I - “ his grip slips, but he catches himself. “I never minded being devoured by you.”
Erik drops his backpack to the floor. His hands aren’t shaking, he slept fine before he got Charles back, he couldn’t look away from Charles’ eyes if he wanted to, two of these are lies.
Charles is still everything, and Erik thinks that he knows that, the same way Erik knows before he even reaches him that Charles is going to tangle one hand in his hair and grab a fistful of the back of his shirt with the other, that he’s going to turn all his weight over to Erik and trust him to take it.
Erik kisses him, drops his shields entirely, and Charles’ control is still on the fritz - his mind is projecting a frantic, pulsating cacophany of colors, sensations and words and Erik’s name. His mouth is a lopsided smile against Erik’s, his knees bump feebly between Erik’s legs. Erik licks into his mouth, gentle, and Charles’ relieved moan against his lips is the only sound he wants to hear for the rest of his life.
He presses him back into the wall, and the crazy corner of Charles’ mind goes wild, says, Babel, Babel, oh god Erik finally Erik, Babel, scattered them from there over the earth, we still speak a common tongue -
Erik hums softly, and pulls away only to kiss him again.
He presses in as close as he can get, and he’s not sure which one of them is the one to think it, but it comes through strong: finally.