A/N : From a reader prompt in which Erik figures out who our favourite speedster is before Peter himself does. A welcome return to Dadneto after the absolute git he was in 'Silver-Grey'!
1.
The monotony isn't so bad really. It certainly makes a change from chaos and noise and the buzz of foreign tongues and the crack of broken bones. The silence, too, is sometimes a blessing, but only sometimes. At times it gives him space to marshal his thoughts, to meditate upon the evils of the world and to consider a possible solution to them. To think of the world he could create were he only given time and a handful of metal to do so. At other times, silence creates a void into which memories flood, and without distraction he cannot push them away. Buckled iron gates, the man who smiled as he shot his mother, the invasive wrench of a telepath whose power equalled his own yanking at his mind. Begging voices, helpless tears, and above it all the stench of burning human flesh from vast ovens, rendering his kind to anonymous ashes and fragments of bone.
The smell of frying meat will always remind him of those days the furnaces would be lit. A greasy, hanging smell that got into clothes and hair so that when at last he lay down to sleep he would gag at the odour of rendered flesh on his ragged coverings. The smell makes him think of sifting crumbling red-brown chunks into a fine powder, searching through for gold teeth which their murderers had missed.
That smell was in the air on the November day which led him here. Drifting from VW vans with the sides popped out to hand hotdogs and burgers to the assembled crowds, seeping from the broiler ovens of carts that lined the packed street. He has seen history made before, and always it is accompanied by throngs of humans flocking to be part of it. That day, however, the sweaty press of bodies also contained many of his own kind, all of them eager to see the man who could save them.
Kennedy isn't open about his Mutant status, but Erik knows his own. So many of them know that he is a hero to a mass of unchampioned silent voters who know, just know, that if he remains in the White House he can change their world for the better. Work to end the discrimination, educate humanity, finally bring some light into the dark worlds they hide in. They don't know his gift, though many suspect it to be charisma, but they know what he is. They have come here to see him because they want to be in the presence of someone who could save their world. Erik has long ceased the believe in saviours, but he has come anyway, because his admiration will not let him keep away. Because he understands that if he knows, if many know, then someone with less pure intentions than to simply be part of this great event will know as well. He is here because, as always, he does not trust humanity not to cause trouble.
When he hears a shot, he knows he was right. Standing in the shade of a single oak that grows beside an old unpainted wooden fence, out of place in this bright and festive plaza, he knows he must act, but the wounded man is too far away. He feels for the copper and lead in the little projectile, but the panic rising in his throat makes his control shaky, and he succeeds only in pulling it off course, driving it out of the victim's neck and through the chest of the man in front. In terror he pulls again. Even from this vantage point, he sees pink-red-yellow-grey splash across the interior windows of the limousine. He knows that colour. In a moment he is watching as a soldier beats a prisoner's head in with the butt of a rifle, and then he is back here in Dealey Plaza on an unseasonably warm November afternoon, and Kennedy's blood and brains are running down the windshield of the car. Everybody is screaming. He has failed.
In his ten years beneath this glass and concrete prison, he does not know about the numerous theories which have sprung up. He knows nothing of Magic Bullets, or that where he had been stood when he had desperately tried to save the life of the man who could save them all was now called the Grassy Knoll, capitalised and immortalised in American history forever as the place where the country's greatest traitor may have stood. He knows nothing but weak electric light and white and silence and the faint hum of an air-conditioning unit. Knows no more than this for a decade, until one day his lunch tray had come with a note.
Mind the glass!
Childish handwriting, he thinks, with loops and curlicues that seem designed to add a touch of class to the scrawl. Looks up at the toughened glass ceiling above him and sees the first friendly face that he has set eyes on in ten years.
It is a youthful, pale face that looks ridiculous in the peaked cap he wears – not a new guard, Erik knows instantly. He is far too young, and even from here he can see that there is a tucked-up loop of long hair escaping from under the cap. All his guards are Marines – crew-cut and experienced, not dimpled youths with sparkling eyes full of mischief. Rising from his narrow cot, staring up at the window in his silent white world, watching as the boy up there carefully places both palms against the glass ceiling. What does he think he's doing? It's toughened glass, for goodness sakes! Even if he's super-strong, and by the strangeness of his white skin and silver hair and that indefinable something that gives them away, Erik can see the boy is a Mutant, he'll never push through it. He watches what he assumes to be an exercise in futility, confused, until he realises that the glass is shaking. A few moments more, and he forgets to mind the glass.
A hell of an introduction, Erik thought as he covered his eyes from the fragments.