This Time Tomorrow

Summary: Ten years in prison and nothing had changed. X-Men: Days of Future Past Charles/Erik

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters and I do not intend to make a profit off of this story. The characters within belong to their respective creators.

Warnings: There are graphic descriptions of violence and suicidal thoughts and attempts in this story.

I don't remember how I got in my prison cell. I simply woke up there.

There was a bright light boring down into my eyelids from the ceiling. I was lying down on top of a wooden cot that had a scratchy grey wool blanket, dirty white sheets, and a lumpy pillow. The other side of the room had a small alcove with a toilet and sink. A towel had been laid on the edge of the sink. The rest of the room was white, a mind-numbing white that was hard to look at for long. The ceiling was a multi-paneled window that let in the light from the room above it. I could see figures standing around watching me through it.

When I tried to move everything started to hurt. Brief snatches of my capture replayed themselves in my mind. They'd managed to find me out in the desert sitting under a dead tree dehydrated and delirious. Once they had me they didn't hold themselves back. I bore the brunt of their anger. My vision was still doubled and when I moved I had to give myself time to let it settle.

Some of the figures overhead shifted in the light, casting shadows down on me. I wondered what they were waiting for. When I'd woken up before I'd even opened my eyes I'd instinctively reached out with my powers searching for metal. There was none. The frame holding the window up was thick plastic, none of the people above me were wearing watches or wedding rings, there was nothing to grab on to. Even the air felt like it was different. It made the world feel so empty. One of the figures above moved closer to the window and I got a brief glimpse of his face. But if I should have been able to recognize it I didn't. He could have been one of any number of faceless men in suits in my life.

A disembodied voice came from the other side of the room. "How do you like your new quarters Erik?" Examining the ceiling revealed a small chute barely large enough to fit a hand through. One of them was kneeling by it speaking down into it.

I shrugged. The action made my shoulders ache where they'd beaten me with batons. I tried to keep a neutral face and not give them anything to work with.

"Well get used to it. You're going to be staying here for a long time," the voice said. Some people laughed. "After what you did to the President you deserve it."

They all filed away and left me alone.

I got off of the cot and tried to find my footing. The floor was solid concrete and didn't have any give. I walked along the borders of the room with my hand on the wall hoping to find something that I could get hold of with my powers and use. There wasn't anything.

Finally I went to the sink and filled it with water. While there were two taps it only came out lukewarm with a bitter aftertaste. I saw a brief glimpse of my reflection in the water's surface. I had two black eyes and my right cheek was swollen. I wiped at myself helplessly with the water and all it did was turn the water pink. My knuckles were covered with bruises and scabs. I must have tried to fight back at one point.

There was a clatter of something coming down the chute. I half-expected it would be a bomb and they would blow me away. It turned out to be a plastic cafeteria tray with a clear plastic lid. The spoon and knife were plastic as well. I opened the tray and looked at the food inside. Even though I was starving I wasn't sure if I could force myself to eat it. The food was moldy and the little bit that looked edible looked like someone had spit on it. When I looked up through the chute there was a guard staring down at me with hate in his eyes. "Fucking freak," he snarled before walking away. If I thought things were going to be easy at all here it was obvious I was mistaken.

I poured a little of the water from the sink into my hand and drank it. It went a small way toward calming the emptiness in my stomach. Finally I decided to walk the perimeter of the room again to see if there was anything I had missed. Right next to the toilet there was an indentation in the wall. I traced the edges with my fingernails and it revealed a sliding wooden panel that led to a dumbwaiter. There was a rope behind a clear plastic panel that would move it up and down. It was too tight to fit into, though I tried. I closed the panel and sat on the floor next to the toilet. The toilet was plastic and all of its pieces were either covered with concrete or made out of plastic. For a moment I toyed with the idea of flooding the room but decided against it. They probably had a shut off valve or else they'd let the room flood so I could drown.

The cot was put together with wood and plastic, even if I took it apart I wasn't sure what I could do with it. Making a spear would have only been helpful if I had an easy way to get at the guards. The blankets and sheets didn't tear easily but I knew if I really wanted to I could have torn them to shreds. The light above me was blinding when I looked up. It was impossible to tell where I was but it had to have been below the ground. Some of the walls were wet when I touched them and there was a dank basement feeling in the air.

I sat down at the edge of the room and unfastened the prison uniform I was wearing. The uniform, such as it was, was made of sturdy fabric, my shoes were made of a similar material.

There was a number sewn on the left breast. I didn't know if that meant there were others imprisoned down here with me or not. I figured the chances were low. I took the jacket off and then peeled back the undershirt. The bruises on my chest were dark purple. If I moved my hand near them they throbbed. There were stitches on my side under my ribs that I wished I could remember getting. I wondered what they'd taken from me now. There wasn't much left to give.

My mind went back to the events leading to my capture. In the scheme of things they weren't that important but as time passed they became more significant in my memories.

"The President is a mutant," Emma said one morning as if it was nothing, as if it was an obvious fact. She was sitting at the table reading a newspaper and eating a soft-boiled egg out of an egg cup. Her hair was immaculate and she was wearing clothes in the latest fashion that she'd picked up on her last trip to civilization. All white of course. She never let us being in hiding change how she acted. For the most part I let her keep up with it all, she was the one who provided most of the funds and thought she did most of the planning. If she wanted to wear designer clothing while we were in a bunker deep underground who was I to stop her?

"How do you know?" Mystique asked. Lately she had started challenging everything Emma and I said. I welcomed the change, it was better than having her mope around about what had happened on the beach and then what had happened to Azazel and Tempest. The three of them had been close. She and Tempest could relate to each other and they had often spent a lot of time with each other when we didn't have to do things as a group. Azazel was almost over-protective of them in a way that he never was with the rest of us. I knew that Mystique had asked him lots of questions about how he dealt with his appearance and its effect on other people. Emma and I were a poor substitute. Mystique had only recently started coming out of her room again.

"Our families moved in the same social circles. We've talked a couple of times." Emma tapped her forehead with a white-gloved finger. "I found out some things."

"What kind of mutant is he then?"

Emma turned the page of the newspaper, savoring all the attention she was getting. "Something with charisma. He can attract people to himself, convince people to do things." She cracked the top off of another egg neatly and started to delicately eat the inside.

Mystique shrugged her shoulders. "So he's a mutant. Why does it matter?"

Emma smiled slightly, obviously enjoying herself. "I have intelligence that says an anti-mutant group is planning to assassinate him."

I usually tried not to play into her mind games. She was useful for her resources and her ideas but as a person she was only out to protect her own interests. I didn't trust her enough to not wear my helmet when she was around. "And what was the source of this intelligence?" I asked after it became clear she wasn't going to elaborate.

"I have contacts close to anti-mutant groups. They say that there is a plan in place to assassinate the President when he visits Dallas this week." She stared at me. "We could stop it if you wanted."

Mystique instantly started laughing. "Based on some information you claimed to have gotten from a source you won't name?" She slammed her fist on the table. Bits of egg dripped over the side of the cup and landed on the table. "Isn't that how Azazel and Tempest died, based on information you thought came from a trusted source?"

My hands clenched and I would have torn the bunker to pieces if I hadn't pushed the emotions back down. Azazel and Tempest had been trying to escape from Project: Wide Awake after they'd gone on a scouting trip at one of their secret locations. They'd never returned and we assumed that they'd been killed. The whole incident had been written up in the newspapers as a action by an anti-American group. It said that the attackers had died. The anger and guilt I felt at their deaths was still raw. Mystique had cried in her room for days before emerging with a strong face to rival Emma's.

Emma set down her spoon gently and clasped at her wrist to stop the diamond from overtaking her skin. "Don't mention those names again," she snarled. "They gave their lives for us." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before turning to me. "President Kennedy is supposed to be giving a speech on mutant rights and greater acceptance for our kind. I suppose the question is do you want him to make that speech?"

After resting for a while I resumed exploring the boundaries of my new home. They had to have put me in here somehow, there had to be a secret doorway or a hallway that would appear if only I pressed the right spot on the wall. I tried tapping and banging on likely sections of the wall. Nothing.

Then I looked up.

The window that they observed me through looked thick. It was completely sealed into its housing. I still pushed the cot underneath it and ran my fingers over all of the edges. There were no visible seams, there were no signs that any of it had ever been open. When I beat my hands against it there was no give to it. It was inches thick.

I started to give myself over to the fear that was slowly taking over. No matter how much I reached out with my powers there was nothing there. That was impossible. There was always something metal there, there was always some scrap of metal that they forgot to take away. They couldn't possibly have been so thorough that there was nothing out there.

I beat my hands against the window half in frustration and half in desperation. My hands started to pulse with pain and some of the scabs burst open. It was all stupid and pointless but what else was I supposed to do? I couldn't sit here and wait forever.

I packed my clothes and got ready to head to Dallas. There wasn't really all that much to pack. A change of clothes and my helmet was pretty much the extent of it. I knew that my chances of ever coming back were slim at best, especially if I failed. I said a perfunctory goodbye to Emma, who barely looked up as she gave me a neatly typed sheet of paper summarizing all of the intelligence that her contact had given her. I folded it up and put it in my pocket. We didn't say anything to each other.

Mystique was outside the bunker sitting by the area we used to train. It wasn't used very much now that there were only three of us. Emma generally declined to take part and Mystique and I had been working together so long that at the most we just needed a quick refresher before going off to do our various jobs. The trees that ringed the sides of the training field were gnarled and old and they cast twisted shadows down onto the forest floor below.

She barely looked up as I sat down beside her. "You don't need to go. You know it's probably a trap," she said. Mystique and I had become friends more out of necessity than anything else. She liked me because I didn't try to change her. I didn't want to alter the things that were an integral part of who she was. Charles always acted like he was ashamed of her in her natural form. I was one of the few who accepted what she was and wanted her to grow from that. Once she'd joined the Brotherhood and spent more time with other mutants who dealt with similar issues she didn't have the same sense of shame about her powers as she had.

"He's a mutant and he's in trouble. Isn't that reason enough?" The more I worked with the Brotherhood of Mutants the less I wanted to let down mutants in need if I could help them. Everyone had a story about how humans had hurt them and pushed them away. It weighed heavily on me that I hadn't been with Azazel and Tempest when they died.

"You don't even know for sure that he is. You could be risking all of this for something that's not true." She pulled her knees up to her chest.

"Maybe I'm tired of hiding and pretending there isn't a problem." All of our actions up to this point had been behind the scenes. After Cuba most of our efforts had been directed at information gathering and trying to see how we could best direct our resources. Up until now we'd mostly been in the shadows. Now I felt it was better to do something visible-show the world that mutants were out there and we protected each other. "This could be our chances to get more followers."

The look she gave me was poison. "I'm not going to be here when you get back," she said. "I can't work with Emma." That much was clear.

"What are you going to do?" I wasn't surprised she was leaving. I was more surprised she had stayed for so long when everyone else she was close to was gone.

"I'm going to follow up on some leads that I found about other mutants in trouble." There was a long pause where it seemed like she was trying to figure out something for herself. She smiled and held out her hand. "Good luck."

"Same to you. Maybe we'll meet again someday." I shook her hand and then headed off into the forest. I didn't look back.

I had escaped from dozens of prison cells before I came to this one. After my trial, the farce that it was, they tried to hold me in any number of cells specially designed to contain me and my powers. It became a welcome pastime to figure out the best way to escape. They never thought of every possibility.

At the beginning the guards were easy to manipulate and I could gain their trust easily. They let me have books, a razor, a chess set, pen and paper, any number of things that became weapons or tools in my hands. While waiting for my trial I wrote dozens of letters to previous contacts trying to get their help and let them know what was going on. I wrote to Mystique and sent her a coded message with the location of another bunker she could use if she needed to. I even wrote Charles a long letter trying to explain what I'd done. I don't know if the letters ever made it. I'm sure the guards pored over every inch of them looking for hidden messages and secret codes.

I tried to be a model prisoner and observe all of the rules and regulations. That is until I would make my inevitable escape. I never made it very far. The last time I'd gotten out and wound up in the middle of a desert. They found me wandering and dehydrated a day or so later. Each time they caught me they felt the need to demonstrate why humans should be replaced as the dominant species on the planet. My collection of scars and injuries continued to grow.

At the beginning of my imprisonment it was easy to tell that time was passing. Sometimes there was even a window. And they always gave me a newspaper with the latest news about what was going on in the country at large. Still the years passed and I could feel myself losing all trace of who I was. The only thing that made it all bearable was trying to escape.

Here it seemed like time stood still. They kept the lights on at full brightness all day. At the beginning I tried to keep track of when they fed me but the intervals weren't regular, just when I thought I had it figured out they'd change it and throw off my whole system.

Once a week (if it was even a week), they'd send a ceramic razor and some soap down in the dumbwaiter. I didn't understand why they even cared about my hygiene, the food they gave me wasn't ever anything approaching edible. After I'd finished shaving they'd blast the room with an alarm until I put the razor back in the dumbwaiter. Sometimes I thought about slitting my wrists just to escape the banality of it all.

Since time was so unknowable eventually everything I did started to run into each other. I wouldn't have been able to say if I had been in the cell for hours or for months. My wounds healed but I couldn't tell if they were healing slowly or quickly. I tried to meditate or sleep as much as I could but they liked to wake me up with the damned alarm or turn the brightness of the lights up until it became impossible to do much of anything. Even if I'd wanted to ask for anything I wouldn't have been able to. The guards must have been instructed not to linger, they dropped off their cargo and practically ran away from me. I lived in a bubble.

At the beginning of my imprisonment I'd asked one of the guards if they considered what they were doing to be cruel and unusual punishment. He'd justified it all by telling me that I wasn't even human. I was alive, what else could I possibly want?

After everything went to hell in Dallas I'd thought I had more time to get out of town than I did. I'd rented a room in a small motel on the outskirts of the city. I paid with cash and checked in with an assumed name. When the clerk was checking me in I tried to keep my face always in profile so she wouldn't be able to remember me. And maybe that would have worked if someone hadn't taken a picture of me standing on the grassy knoll.

I raced back to the motel room and tried to get all of my belongings together so I could get back to the bunker and lay low for a while. In retrospect I should have left everything I'd brought with me there and skipped town. I hadn't left anything that was irreplaceable. Clothes and information could be replaced, my freedom could not.

My failure weighed heavily on my mind. It probably would have been better if I hadn't come here at all. It wasn't as if my actions influenced the outcome one way or another. The President was still dead and no matter what I'd tried to do I couldn't change that.

I barely had time to react before the bullet hit me in the chest. Apparently my brilliant disguise of sunglasses and a leather jacket hadn't worked, the motel clerk had been able to recognize me when they showed my picture on TV. I'd been sloppy and I wasn't paying as much attention to my surroundings as I should have. I fell to my hands and knees on the floor. Blood was spurting from my chest and I had to push down hard to keep some control over myself.

Maybe if I hadn't been shot before I could react I might have been able to escape. Even after what had happened in Cuba my powers were still a matter of emotion versus rational thought. When I was angry I could move whatever I wanted, but I didn't have any true control over my powers. Right then my reaction time was erratic and the bullet took away the rest of the concentration I had. I could hear voices outside the room. There had been a sniper across the parking lot. They were yelling something about making sure to take me alive.

I still fought back. I had little choice. I pulled the electrical wiring from the walls, ripped the screws and pipes and everything I could out of the hotel room. The men outside ducked for cover as I launched the objects at them. I couldn't aim as well as I wanted to with just one hand and most of the projectiles missed. No matter how much I fought back it couldn't stop the blood loss. My vision started getting dotted with black until they finally broke down the motel room door and pinned me to the ground. That was when I realized there would be no escape.

I'd been careless. I'd let my emotions about failing to save the President overrule my own sense of self-preservation.

I don't remember much about the trial that wound up sending me here. I do remember that in a decision made out of hubris I decided to represent myself. Not that they would have given me a competent lawyer in the first place. I was guilty in their eyes as soon as I bent the crow bar with my powers in front of them in the court room. They didn't need to hear any further testimony. No matter how many times I tried to explain that I'd been trying to stop the bullet from hitting the President they wouldn't listen. Even with evidence that I hadn't been the only one involved that day they seemed content to let me take the blame. It would have been too much effort to find out what really happened. If I hadn't already been disgusted with humanity this would have pushed me over the top.

Days bled into one another. The only thing I had a lot of was time. I tried to imagine a chess set and played imaginary games with myself. It was never very satisfying, there was no element of surprise. When there was nothing else to do my mind would often bring back memories of the past. Most of the time they were bad, the kind that I would run to the ends of the earth to escape, but sometimes they were good ones.

The good ones were sometimes about life before I met Shaw, but those had started to fade. The memories of my parents before the war were hazy and indistinct. It was hard to remember what my father had looked like, his face had disappeared with the passage of time. However I could remember the day my mother died with perfect clarity. The closest things I had to happy memories were the few weeks I had with Charles and the others getting ready to take on Shaw. When we had been together we had been a team. There had been camaraderie, there was a common goal. I had tried to emulate that feeling with the Brotherhood of Mutants but that didn't last long and once the members started dying we were only bound together loosely by a shared hatred of humanity.

The other thing that loomed large in my memories was spending time with Charles. Our relationship, such as it was, started off as mutual admiration and over time turned into something more physical. We'd only been able to do something the night before we left for Cuba. The memory was both a painful and a happy one as the chances of us being able or wanting to do something like that again were small.

One day the lights above me started to flicker and dim. This never happened. The whole system that kept me imprisoned here was all on back up generators and I assumed that no matter how bad the weather got outside the power would stay on. The lights would still shine down on me. I looked up.

I shouldn't have.

Autopsy photos were covering most of the window above me. Mutants torn open and ripped apart in the name of science. Most of them I didn't recognize but as I looked closer I started to see familiar faces. Azazel, Tempest, Riptide, Banshee...and Emma. They were all torn apart and sewn together crudely. I remembered talking with them, laughing with them, living with them. They had all been my friends to some extent. I had lost people before, sometimes I thought my whole life was about loss, but getting revenge for this wouldn't be a matter of tracking down one man. This would require destroying society as a whole.

I howled in anger and threw whatever I could get my hands on up at the window. It bounced off impotently. I knew I was giving them a show but I was long past caring what anyone thought about what I did.

They left the photos there until they were almost burned onto the back of my eyelids. I didn't sleep much here and now when I did my dreams were full of visions of all of them clawing at me, asking me why I hadn't helped them. The dreams they brought up were worse than the dreams I still had about that day on the beach.

Then, almost as soon as they'd been put there, the photographs were all gone.

Emma did try to break me out. It was the third cell they'd tried to keep me in and I think it might have been the one I had been stuck in the longest. I'd almost given up hope. The cage they'd put me in didn't have any obvious weak spots and they'd cut off most contact with the guards except when they brought me food. The guards were instructed not to look at me or talk to me.

Then one day she came in dressed in an army uniform with a bright smile on her face. I'd never been so happy to see someone that I knew before. When she saw me smiling her grin widened. A blank faced guard followed her, the keys to my cell in his hands. "Magneto, fancy meeting you here," she said brightly. "You look like you've seen better days." She reached out and touched my cheek. They hadn't let me shave ever since I'd used a razor to slice a guard's neck open.

"Why are you here?" I asked. If anyone was going to come rescue me I would have thought it would have been Mystique or Charles. Not the woman who stood on the other side of the bars. There was a thin coating of grime on her skin and dirt underneath her fingernails. The uniform was big on her and she was almost falling out of it. I tried to convince myself it was part of her disguise.

"Who else would come for you?" She gestured to the guard and he unlocked the door. It swung open with a loud creaking sound and for a moment she looked nervous. "You rescued me once," she said finally, taking my hand with hers. "I couldn't let you rot down here with them." I let her hold my hand. She was shaking. Moments of human contact were rare and sometimes I was desperate for anything I could get. Instantly I regretted it as I could feel her reaching out with her powers. I pulled away.

"What about Mystique?" I asked as we ran through the hallways trying to find the exit. She must have done something to the guards because I didn't see anyone else. There were other cells and they looked like they were occupied but I didn't have a chance to stop and see if any of them were mutants.

"I haven't seen her since Dallas. I've been working on my own." That surprised me, she never liked to work without having someone who could take the blame if things went badly. She gave me a quick appraising look. "You've lost weight."

"Prison food will do that to you." She was showing a lot more emotion that she usually did and she definitely hadn't tried to hold my hand before. I wondered what the catch was. Surely she wasn't doing this out of the goodness of her heart. "What do you need?"

Emma laughed. "Who says I need anything? I'm repaying a debt." There was a nervous quality to her laughter that made me think more was going on than I thought. Maybe she was doing this out of guilt. Maybe she was escaping too and she needed me to throw the guards off her trail.

Whatever her true motives were she didn't share them with me. We split up after we got outside. Her momentary loyalty to me only lasted as long as it took for her to get to a car and drive away. I wasn't angry with her. She gave me a fair chance. It was my own fault for getting captured again before I got very far.

And now she was gone forever.

I had been through worse than this before. I'd gone through months of being terrified that I was going to die at any moment. I'd been in unending agony and never sure what was going to happen next. I'd seen people that I loved murdered in front of me. I was used to being viewed as a test subject and a curiosity. Every day I tried to keep telling myself that being locked in here by myself was something I could handle.

This denial of all communication with the outside world was somehow worse than anything I'd gone through before. Even when I was imprisoned by Shaw there was a chance he'd come by and lecture me about the future of the mutant race instead of torturing me. Here there was nothing like that. After they took away the autopsy photos away the only human contact I had was if I chanced to see the guards as they came and went to and from the chute. They didn't talk to me and they didn't react to the abuse that I sometimes yelled at them. Sometimes I wondered if I was even saying anything they could understand. I wasn't given anything to ease the boredom. The only thing that marked the passage of time was when they decided to feed me. I wasn't sure if they were drugging the food. My thoughts were growing more and more unfocused.

I tried to meditate to center myself. However I was never able to distract myself enough from everything racing through my head. My thoughts and memories were a worse torture than actual physical pain. The only good thing I could hold on to was that I hadn't seen any pictures of Charles or Mystique. They at least were still free and hopefully still alive. With nothing else to do and no possible escape on the horizon I went somewhat unhinged. I'd never seriously considered killing myself before but the idea of spending all eternity here staring at these white walls was slowly changing my mind.

The day I finally snapped there wasn't anything in the room that I could have used to get out. I would have broken the cot to bits and tried to impale myself on the pieces but there were no guarantees that I could get the angle right. There was no way of telling when the next time they'd send a razor down would be. I'd tried breaking the toilet and sink before and the plastic was unyielding and solid. Drowning was out, they turned the water off after it reached a certain level in the sink. There wasn't anything to attach a noose to that would have worked. All that was left was my body itself. Finally I started banging my head against the wall. The pain was something that I could use to distract myself from feeling anything else. I ran into the wall over and over until my vision started to blur and my forehead started to bleed. I could hear the alarms start to go off and then it all went dark.

The last good memory I had of Charles was the night before we'd gone after Shaw. We'd fought about how to deal with him and both had said some things that we regretted. Then we decided to mutually ignore it in favor of enjoying our last night together.

He'd looked at me with eyes that were heavy with an emotion I couldn't identify. "I don't want to spend our last hours together fighting."

"I suppose you want to spend them with Moira," I said, biting back what I really wanted to say. We'd been practically inseparable ever since he'd rescued me from going down with the submarine. It had been a long time since I'd had someone I felt like I could actually talk to as an equal. He made me forget about revenge if only for a moment.

"I'd rather spend them with you," he said, leaning forward and kissing me. It wasn't like kisses I'd had before, harsh desperate kisses grabbed in between jobs. This was long and gentle as if he was trying to pull something out of me. There had been a tension between us ever since we'd met. We circled around each other testing each others' barriers and trying to find weaknesses. Something drew us together and it took the threat of death to bring it out.

I liked to think that I was above needing any kind of human companionship. Getting close to other people was weakness, they could be used against me. They had been used against me. When I was on my own occasionally I'd find someone who was willing to spend the night with me but that was all I could allow. I couldn't let my guard down with anyone or else they would destroy me. And yet I let him do it.

Charles made it so easy for me to trust him. For the first time in a long time I started to let down some of my barriers. He made me hope again, made me think that there might be a future after all of this was over. My dreams and aspirations only stretched as far as seeing Shaw's corpse. Most of the time I thought I would probably die with him. Frankenstein's monster taking out the man who made him.

I'd never done anything with someone who had powers. Charles' mind and mine snarled together just as our bodies did. I couldn't hold my control over my powers as close as I would have liked. All of the metal in the room seemed to hum with a desperate energy. He couldn't control his powers either, as things got more serious I could feel them tearing through my mind, I could feel what he felt. It was almost as if we were blurring together. I hoped it was contained between the two of us. I didn't want to think about the possibility that he'd been broadcasting what we were doing together all through the mansion.

Afterward we stayed in bed together knowing this could be the last time. I propped myself up with a pillow behind my back. He laid on his side facing me. I could feel his breath against my arm. His bed was surprisingly small for someone who had so much money at his disposal. He'd been almost embarrassed by how small and messy his room was. We'd had to clear a path through random piles of papers on the floor just to make it to the bed. Neither of us wanted to sleep.

"I'm going to open a school once this is over." He stared at my hands in my lap. "I want there to be a place for mutants to go where it's safe, where they can learn without having to worry about the outside world." He risked a quick glance up at me. "You could teach there if you wanted."

I had to bite back a laugh. My attempts at training the people he'd brought together to form his team hadn't been well-received. But as I thought about it the idea didn't seem so bad. Once this was done I was going to need something to do. Revenge wasn't a profession with a bright future. "What would I teach?"

"Whatever you wanted. Self-defense, French, history. . ." he trailed off. "It was just an idea." His eyes were so far away, staring at points in the future neither of us could reach. We both knew that there was little chance that we'd even get back alive, let alone be able to set up a school for mutants that would last.

"I'd like that," I said. While we were talking about impossibilities I thought I might as well play along. "It's been a long time since I've had a place to call home that I could actually go back to." My childhood home was long gone, bombed to oblivion and lost to the annals of time. And after the war was over I never stayed anywhere long enough to consider it a place to settle. It almost seemed like a betrayal.

"I'll make sure there's always a place here for you," he said. His expression was serious.

I couldn't keep the smile off of my face. He could be so idealistic. "Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?" For a moment I didn't have to think about what I was going to do after we found Shaw. There was something waiting on the other side.

How quickly it all got twisted.

I woke up alone in the cell. There was a bandage on my forehead and on the inside of my elbow. As I started to come to my senses my head began to pound. Moving was a chore and it took what felt like a long time to get to my feet. I was weak and I wasn't sure how long I'd been unconscious. My vision was blurred and when I tried to take a step the floor seemed like it moved beneath me.

I lost my balance and wound up on my hands and knees next to the cot trying to keep myself from throwing up. The room was spinning and I knew it had to be from more than my self-inflicted head injury. They must have given me something while I was out. And taken something, if the twin puncture wounds underneath the bandage on my elbow were anything to go by. I had no doubts that they had used the opportunity to take samples of my blood while I couldn't resist them.

In my fumbling around on the floor I found a piece of paper set against one of the walls of my prison. I had to hold it a few inches in front of my face in order to get my eyes to focus so I could actually read it.

"YOU'LL NEVER ESCAPE." Someone had written in bold block letters. The other side of the paper was blank. I wasn't sure what I was expecting to find, it's not like I would have been able to figure out who it was if they'd signed it.

I started to laugh. As threats went this was pathetic. It certainly wasn't something I was going to take seriously. I realized that no matter what I did they were going to find a way to bring me back and make me serve out my sentence. If that was true then I might as well make them regret it.

I was going to have to find a way to escape.

I didn't expect that escape was going to come to find me.

When the teenager in the ridiculous clothing freed me and took me up in the elevator I thought it was another scheme they'd cooked up to break me. The entire time we were riding up to the surface in the elevator I thought that they would let me outside for a moment and then recapture me. They'd let me have a taste of freedom before snatching it away again. I'm not sure what I would have done if that had been the case.

As we got closer and closer to the surface I started to feel the metal around me again. After so long without it I had to close my eyes to gain control of myself. It was as if a piece that had been missing had finally been found and slotted back into where it belonged. It took all I had to keep control over myself. I'd never let them put me back in that box again if it meant taking me away from all of this.

I never imagined that Charles would be behind it. And walking. My mind flashed back to the last time that I'd seen him on the beach. There was little of that man in the person standing in front of me. He looked different than I thought he would. His hair was longer and he had facial hair. There was a weariness about him that hadn't been there before. It was harder to picture this man preaching harmony between humans and mutants. It seemed like he might have given up. For a moment all of the hope that I'd been holding back came to the surface. I was truly glad to see him. The guilt that I'd been keeping bottled up inside about what had happened to him started to dissipate. Maybe he'd been able to recover from getting shot. Maybe he'd been able to forgive me.

And then he punched me.

Charles and I really didn't get to talk to each other until we were up in the air. On the car ride over he'd been silent and let Logan and Hank do most of the talking. I listened without comment to their convoluted story about how Mystique was going to mess things up in the future by killing someone at the Paris Peace Accords. While they were busy arguing amongst themselves about the best thing to do I came to a conclusion on my own. If Mystique's powers were the catalyst to all of this then maybe the only way to prevent it all from happening would be to remove her from the equation. Her powers were what made all of it possible in the first place. Charles never would have agreed. No matter how jaded he'd become he still didn't believe in taking the logical solution to things. I didn't really want to kill Mystique but her death would be the only thing that would guarantee the future they were talking about didn't occur. Once we'd shook hands and wished each other luck that was the end of our responsibility to each other. If the positions had been reversed I would have expected her to do the same thing. I would have fought back but I liked to think I would have understood.

As soon as I took off the prison uniform and changed into regular clothes it was as if a switch had flipped in my mind and I was no longer the man trapped in prison, I was free and I could do what I wanted. Charles glowered at me from his seat. It was obvious he was angry at me for something but it would have been hard to pinpoint what the reason was. I'd been such a disappointment to him. He'd spent so much of his time trying to get me to put aside the anger that had defined me for so long and I'd failed. Anger was one of the few constants in my life now. It constantly simmered beneath the surface waiting for a chance to show itself.

"You abandoned me," he snarled, getting up close to me. The idea was so ludicrous I almost wanted to laugh. Everything always came down to that day on the beach. For a moment I was stuck in the past remembering Moira cradling him in her arms as I'd left with Mystique and the rest. Of course all he would remember would be me leaving him all alone. No matter how much easier it might have made things I hadn't been able to do that to him. After we left I'd been the one who made Azazel teleport me to one of the ships and get them to send rescue boats to the beach. I'd made sure that he made it to a hospital. I'd been the one to look after the students he couldn't keep. I'd been the one who buried the ones he couldn't save.

As Charles continued listing off my faults as if I was a disobedient dog I couldn't keep the anger at bay. Now that I actually had something I could manipulate around me I almost relished it. The plane twisted and crumbled with the force of my rage. There would be no serenity. Here my anger actually meant something more than just emotion. Here my anger was power. And so I let out the rage that had lingered beneath the surface.

I said their names. As I did I could see the pictures of all of their lifeless bodies plastered to the ceiling of my cell. I could hear their voices calling out for help. The plane was breaking apart and I couldn't hold it all together anymore. I couldn't stop thinking about him sitting in safety at the mansion while the rest of us struggled to keep going as they hunted us down."You abandoned us all." I said, finishing it all off. When I'd last seen him all he could talk about was humans and mutants coexisting peacefully together. Now in person it turned out he hadn't done any of that at all, there hadn't been any progress. All his idealism hadn't changed anything.

While I'd been in prison I'd had lots of time to think about what I'd say when I finally saw him again. This wasn't how I'd wanted it to go. Even though I knew it was unlikely I'd wanted us to talk to each other like we'd never been apart. I hadn't wanted our first meeting to be an airing of grievances, a comparison of how much pain we'd gone through without each other. But he seemed to want it to be that way.

We retreated to opposite ends of the plane and spent time observing each other.

On a long plane ride there was plenty of time to reconsider life decisions. It would have been easy for us to go our separate ways and continue being angry with each other if we didn't have to spend ten hours together hurtling through the sky. For whatever reason he'd brought a chess set with him. Maybe it was standard equipment but it was different than the chess set we'd used to play with. Here the pieces had metal components. I held them down against the board as I walked over to where he was sitting and set it down in front of him. The look he gave me was full of anger and betrayal. When he began talking about how I'd killed the President I started to wonder what else he was mad at me for. I almost felt like if he could have blamed me for the war in Vietnam he would have.

I really couldn't handle it. There was a bottle of something on the table. I poured myself a glass and took a drink. It had been way too long without it. He watched me drink silently. This had been how our evenings had usually started when we'd been together before. A drink, a game of chess, and conversation. How quickly we all slipped back into the same roles. "It's been ten years since I've had anything like this," I said quietly. The emotions on his face shifted and he didn't protest when I sat down across from him. Maybe he hadn't remembered that I'd been locked away. "I was trying to save the President. He was a mutant." I kept my sentences short, there was less chance he'd misinterpret what I said. "I tried to deflect the bullet. Someone stopped me." Even now I wasn't quite sure what had happened. One moment I had control, the next I didn't.

Charles stared at me for a while, trying to figure out if I was lying or not. I would have almost welcomed feeling him try to get inside my head and discover the truth. It would have been better than wondering what conclusions he was drawing on his own. Eventually he must have come to a decision and his whole body relaxed. "When did you last see Raven?"

"Before I left for Dallas." Our eyes met. "She said she was going to strike out on her own." I took another drink and savored the slow burn. After years of bland food and water it was hard to remember that other tastes existed. "She took losing the others badly."

He winced and didn't say anything for a while. "I couldn't take hearing the voices anymore. When Hank said he thought he had a treatment for my spine but it might take away my powers I jumped at it. I never thought of them as a curse before but all that I could hear was people suffering and I couldn't do anything about it." The glass in front of him was empty. I took the bottle and filled it. He smiled sadly and took a drink. "It seemed like a small price to pay."

I could never imagine voluntarily giving up my powers. It had been torture living without them for so long, as if they'd cut off one of my arms. But my powers didn't deal with other people and expose me to their pain. It had been hard enough to live with my own pain, it would have been impossible to deal with everyone else's on top of it. "I tried to protect them," I said finally. "I tried to keep them safe."

He closed his eyes and nodded. "I know you did." We sat like that for a while not moving and not speaking. We each finished our drinks and poured another. The alcohol made it easier to forgive him for thinking the worst of me. Finally he gave me a weak smile and gestured at the chess board. "Anyway, it's your move."

I laughed and moved a piece with my powers. It had been a long time since I'd played against anyone other than myself and I wasn't sure if I was in any shape to be playing against someone else without embarrassing myself.

He shook his head and moved the piece back. "No powers." I shrugged and picked up the piece again and put it back down where I'd intended. My hand sat on the table between us. He made his move and before I could even think about making mine he put his hand over mine. Our eyes met again. There was a sadness in his behavior almost like he was thinking about what might have been. I savored the feeling of his hand on mine for a little longer and then pulled away and made my next move. After that it was almost as if we'd never been apart.

Up in the air anything was possible. Once we landed it could all go to hell. My mind entertained the thought of never landing, of stopping time so we never reached Paris. Tomorrow would never come. Charles and I could play chess forever and never have to think about the world below. It was unrealistic but for a moment it was a comforting thought.