I.
Erik Lehnsherr did not pause to considered the ramifications of his actions in full.
It was not fear, exactly, which seized him when he realized that Stryker intended to use Charles and the counterfeit Cerebro to snuff out their people, nor was it rage. Fear and rage were old and familiar companions to him, but he did not believe that they were with him in that moment.
In actual fact, he felt absolutely nothing. Perhaps a there was a feeling of confirmation – unwanted, unsought, but in the final estimation undeniable. He'd known this was coming for decades, after all. So there was no sense of surprise.
He wondered briefly what Charles might have said to him, had he woke from whatever drugged daze Styker had placed him in to find that he and Erik were the only ones left. That all of the others were gone. Dead. Exterminated. What could there possibly have been to say?
Erik had prevented that from happening, but it had been too close a thing.
So he acted; he reversed the roles, and when it was all over, when he was looking down from the window of the jet on the funeral pier of mankind, the black smoke rising from the dead cities, he told himself that he was not sorry.
More to the point, Erik told himself that it was not his fault and that he was not to blame. That his hand had been forced. They had set the terms of engagement, and he had only responded in kind.
And because he didn't really believe that either, he then simply told himself that it didn't matter, that done was done, and that now there was nothing to do but discover what shape the future was to take from here.
He did not at first realize that, in ending the existence of humanity, he had also placed Mutantkind in grave peril.
II.
And when Mystique landed the jet to refuel, she watched Erik stagger from the plane like a reanimated corpse.
She had understood, of course, when she whispered poison into the Styker boy's ear, that what they were about to do would effectively destroy Erik. But then, they had both long ago come to terms with the concept of acceptable causalities.
Mystique had known for a long time that she was doomed and damned – had been, irrevocably, since the day she'd come into the world with blue skin. The point had been to hit back, to make them feel a little bit of the same hurt they inflicted on you before they dragged you down.
It never occurred to her that they might actually win.
She'd believed that the fighting would only end for her when she died. During the flight away from the flooded military base, she sat blinking behind the jet's controls, trying to work out what all this meant for the future. There were a thousand paths open to her now, each completely uncharted, when for decades there had been only one.
It was only when she glimpsed the green-haired girl through the terminal window that Mystique began to recognize their miscalculation.
The girl was sitting ridgedly on a bench in the terminal, among the litter of bodies. She only looked passed them with a thousand mile stare when Mystique and Erik approached her. There was, Mystique noted, at that moment a very similar look in Erik's eyes.
She was unresponsive. In the end, Mystique had to pries the Mutant girl's fingers from the dead man's hand and carry her back to the jet.
III.
The error, as Erik saw it, was that he had not stopped to consider what a necessity human parents were to the majority of young Mutant children.
He had, up until this point, thought about these individuals only in the terms of the almost universal damage they inflicted on those children when they actualized as Mutants. Erik's own mother had been decent, yes – she had, in fact, loved him more than her own life, and he had loved her and depended upon her love – but he had long ago realized that she was an aberration. There was little common ground between his life's work and Charles's, but one thing that they had in common was that so much of their time and effort had gone into helping Mutants whose entire sense of self had been ripped to shreds by their birth families to pull themselves back together and to learn to live with the scars.
But when Erik did what he had done, his mind could not have been further from the memory of his mother, or even from the worst examples of human parents with Mutant children. He had thought only to liberate Mutants from an existential threat, to end this game once and for all on the terms that the humans had themselves set.
Until he saw the girl sitting there alone with her dead parents, he did not realize that he had created a planet full of orphans.
IV.
Kurt Wagner understood his soul to be heavy with sin. A fraction of this taint might be bled out, exorcised with the blade of a knife, and in the past he had been able to keep things manageable in that way.
He was a creature of sin, but ultimately his greatest sin had been that of cowardice. Had he overcome his fear more quickly, had he delivered Jean into the Cerebro chamber even thirty seconds sooner, all the deaths might have been avoided. So, at it's root everything that had happened was his own fault.
Kurt's first impulse when his realization had come to him had been to cut more deeply than ever before. There was not enough blood in him to pay the debt he had run up, but he could think of no other way to even begin to fix what had happened.
It was Jean who made him stop. She had burned herself out like a phoenix bird in saving the rest of them when the dam had burst, and everyone said that she was dead and gone. Therefore, when he heard Jean's voice speaking inside his head, Kurt understood it to be the voice of an angel, and it was incumbent upon him to follow the directions of one of God's messengers.
He needed to be an angel now, too, she told him, but not in the same way that she had become an angel. Not by dying.
The world was now full of lost little lambs in desperate need of shepherds. God's children were scattered everywhere, abandoned and alone, and each of these little ones needed saving, both in body and soul.
So Kurt followed the angel's instructions, and put down the knife, and went to Xavier for guidance on what to do next.
V.
From inside the mansion's Cerebro unit, Charles Xavier tracked the approach of his sister. He also noted the strange girl who was with Raven, though he could glean nothing more than a low catatonic buzzing from her brain.
Charles could not tell if Erik was with them; Charles had been on Cerebro for five hours at that point, and during that time he had been unable to locate Erik, which presumably meant that he had not at any point removed his damned helmet. This was probably the only intelligent thing Erik had done in quite some time.
At that point, about ten hours had passed since Erik Lehnsherr had used him as a tool to murder roughly six and a half billion men, women and children.
He was all alone in the mansion. He had sent all of the others – even the youngest students – out into the world with coordinates from Cerebro. Right now, time was of the essence; they would have to save as much of what was left as quickly as they could.
Once, many years ago, Hank had presented Charles with an invention of his own making – a completely plastic gun which fired plastic (but, Hank had assured him, deadly) rounds. Charles had not asked for any such weapon, but he had accepted it for the sake of reassuring Hank. At the moment, the gun was sitting locked in his bank vault, so that was all the good it did him now.
Erik was there when Charles opened the door, along with Raven and the unknown girl, and Charles was astonished to find that the other man had the audacity to meet his eyes. "Charles," he said, and there was nothing in his voice or his face that Charles could read. Charles felt his lower lip curl.
He turned his head quickly to Raven, and watched her as she look right through him.
That was nothing new. Some time ago, Charles had simply ceased to matter to her, and exactly how and why this had come about remained a mystery to him. For a long time, Charles had tried to blame Erik for whatever had gone wrong between himself and his sister, had in fact accused Erik of poisoning Raven against him.
The last time they had rehashed this old argument had been less than three months earlier, when Charles had gone to visit him in his plastic prison cell. Erik had heard the accusations with a faint smirk playing at the edge of his lips, and when Charles finished Erik looked up from his hands and spoke.
"My old friend, don't you know your own sister better than that?" he'd asked. "Don't you understand that Mystique's never allowed herself to be led anywhere she didn't already want to go?"
When Erik said that, a disturbing thought had struck Charles; he had wondered for the first time how much of the Liberty Island plot – including the poisoning of Cerebro – had actually originated with Erik. He had found that it was easier to deal with the fact that his sister had been willing to hurt him that badly if he could view Raven as a pawn rather than a planner.
There had been a mockery which was almost fond in Erik's face and voice when he said this (though Charles was not sure if he himself or Raven was the source of this fondness) but there had also been exhaustion there, and something that was beaten and broken in his eyes.
Charles realized now that Stryker had by then already been torturing Erik – as to why Erik had not informed him of this was another painful mystery – but at the time Charles had looked at the bags under Erik's eyes and the shuffle that had gone into his step with sadness... but with relief as well. He's gotten too old, Charles remembered thinking, and the fight's finally gone out of him. It's over. He won't try anything else now.
But Charles understood now that he had been wrong about that – and too much else besides. And maybe he was the one the one who'd gotten old, because he realized with a start that he'd been sitting there for quite too long a time, woolgathering.
Charles had not slept in quite a while. He wasn't at all sure if he would ever be able to sleep again.
"I can't imagine what you were thinking," he said slowly, picking out the words carefully, acid hate welling up in his throat as he spoke, "in coming here, but I want you gone immediately. We are done. I am finished with you."
And because he wanted to be understood absolutely, he turned to Raven and added, "I am finished with the both of you."
Raven said nothing, but she cocked her head at him. The thought he picked up from her then was not ambient, but rather projected at him; he was meant to hear it. Fine. I was done with you a long time ago, she told him.
"You know why we're here," Erik said, which was, after all, true. "Give us what we need."
"Take the bloody helmet off," Charles told him, and Erik reached up and lifted it from his head. He tucked the helmet under one arm, and then stood up a little straighter.
Even before Charles had been in the chair, Erik had always had a way of looking down his nose on Charles when he believed that Charles was in the wrong and he was right. And infuriatingly, that was exactly what Erik was doing at this moment.
Stiff-necked, Charles thought disconnectedly, before he delved into Erik's mind. That's the term for what he is.
He felt like a swimmer forced to dive in filthy water. He withdrew from Erik's mind quickly, after only a cursory scan, perhaps sooner than he ought to have. It was the pity that repelled Charles, even more than the lack or guilt or shame that he found there, because that pity was directed not at Erik's victims, but at Charles himself. He can't see it, he heard Erik think. He can't understand why it was necessary.
"You are pathetic," Charles told him. "And your mind is a dung heap."
Erik raised no argument against these assertions.
"I ought to simply switch your brain off," Charles said. At Erik's side, Raven tensed as though readying herself to spring. Erik lifted two fingers, and she paused then took a nimble step backwards, releasing the tension from her muscles. But her eyes tracked him like a snake contemplating its strike. He tried not to show how much that shook him.
"Except that would be too easy, wouldn't it?" Charles went on. "I should send you into a screaming, internal hell. I should make you hurt, and I should make it feel like forever."
"But you won't," Erik said, with a voice that was infuriating in its reasonableness. "At least not for the time being. You need our help."
"This is how it's going to be," Charles said, taking from his front pocket a paper which he had placed there before coming out to meet them. On the paper was written the rough location of four Mutant children under the age of two years, which Charles had found via Cerebro. "You will find these children, and then you will bring them back here immediately, and then you will go out and find more."
"Certainly," Erik said. "That was my entire intention in coming here."
"Raven will stay here," Charles went on.
She made derisive sound. "I'm not going to be your little hostage, Xavier," Raven said.
Charles was seized by an almost nostalgic urge to roll his eyes at her. Raven had always been given to posturing, but that was absurd even for her. 'Xavier' – Right, as though they hadn't shared the same last name and summer holiday and each other's secrets and everything else for almost two decades...
He did not understand how she could still be playing her games now, and he turned his head sharply toward her and snapped, "When did you become a stupid girl, Raven? I don't want a hostage, for God's sake – I need some help around here. Do you have any idea how many children are going to be coming through these doors directly?"
"My name isn't 'Raven' anymore," she said. Charles supposed she intended her voice to be defiant, but it came out sounding more or less sullen. "I've told you that already."
Charles didn't bother to answer. He turned his chair around, and wheeled back down the hallway.
Behind him, he could hear Erik and Raven arguing. "We don't have time for this," Erik told her. "Just do what he says."
Raven followed him inside.