I.

The pickup truck was painted a deep shade of purple, and a cloud of red dust ran out behind it like a cape. Sitting on the bumper of his broken-down Rambler Cross Country, Charles saw it coming from a long way off.

He stood up and waved his arms, and the truck pulled over to the side of the road opposite of him. Charles tried to get a look at the person behind the wheel, but he was blinded temporarily by a flash of sunlight reflecting off the shining chrome of the truck's forked hood ornament.

Wincing, Charles rubbed his eyes and looked back at the truck. He could see the driver watching him from behind the wheel. The stranger had hard eyes and sharp cheekbones under a light coat of stubble. A ratty red ball cap perched on his head. He was frowning with one half of his mouth, but the other half was curled in what Charles thought was a smile, and on that side he could see teeth.

Charles was not particularly good at reading faces. He couldn't decide what that feral half-smile meant, so he reached out and touched the edges of the other man's mind carefully. He found there a potentiality for great violence - even a sort of eagerness for it, a sense of enjoyment at the prospect - but none of that was aimed at Charles, so far as he could tell. The man's higher thoughts were carefully guarded, and Charles did not think that he was skilled enough to be able to explore further without being caught.

Still, Charles was wary of the stranger. He had already tucked his long hair up under his hat as well as he could, but there was nothing to be done about his frayed bell-bottoms or the bright colors of his tie-dyed tunic. He had not been down south for very long without realizing that his clothing provoked an unprecedented degree of animosity: the more rural the local the more extreme the negative sentiments.

It didn't get much more rural than this - Charles was terrifically lost. He had been circling the red hills for hours before his tire had given out, and the driver of the absurd purple truck was the first human being he'd seen in a long time. He hadn't wanted to change the way he dressed, but he was worried that now that he needed help people would be unwilling to render aid due to the way he looked.

And the other man was so much bigger than Charles.

His arm was dangling out the truck's open window, and Charles could see how muscular it was underneath the faded blue work shirt. His nails drummed against the truck door, and Charles watched the scars that covered his knuckles flex with the movement of his fingers.

Charles caught himself staring. He quickly raised his eyes to the man's face and tried to keep them there. He didn't want to make any additional trouble for himself.

It was odd, though, that he could not quite work out what color the stranger's eyes were. When Charles had first looked at him they had seemed to be a steely gray, but now they appeared to be pale blue in color.

"Hello there," Charles said, trying a tentative smile.

"You got a spare?"

Charles threw a quick glance over his shoulder at the Rambler, sitting lopsided on three wheels. "That was my spare."

"Shit," the stranger said in commiseration.

"I'm rather lost, as well," Charles added.

"Yeah, well. I was hoping you didn't come all the way back here on purpose." To Charles it sounded as though there was some sort of implied threat to those words, but while he was still debating the merits of trying to peek into his mind to gage his intent, he added, "You'd better just get on up here."

Charles didn't wait for him to change his mind.

The truck was riding low on its rear axle and when Charles came around behind it he saw that the license plate had been covered with duct tape. Later, he would suppose that ought to have been a clue.

He climbed up into the cab and offered his rescuer his hand. The angle was awkward, but they managed to shake. The other man's palm was rough. "Charles Xavier."

"Erik Lehnsherr." Charles had figured that much out for himself already, but he kept that fact to himself. "What the hell are you doing all the way out here, anyway?" He didn't state the obvious, that Charles clearly didn't look like he belonged here, and for this Charles was duly grateful.

What am I doing here? Charles thought to himself. It was a difficult question, and one that he could not answer even to his own satisfaction. He supposed that the root of the thing was simply loneliness.

He had always been lonely, but when he was younger he had been able to believe that this loneliness would someday be alleviated. He was certain that there must be others out there like himself, that it would only be a matter of finding them, but the years went by and no other Mutants materialized.

It was hard to remain optimistic in such isolation, and for several years during his late teens he simply tried to ignore the reality of his ability, as he ignored his nagging suspicions that he might be a homosexual, and he supposed now that the result of this was an atrophying of said ability, which he believed was not as powerful these days as it had been when he was younger.

Charles built forts out of books and he disappeared into his studies. He told himself that things would be better once he got to university - Oxford had always been the dream - that he would find peers and friends there, whether or not they were Mutants. The loss of his father, his mother's frigidness, the malignant presence of his stepfather wouldn't weigh on him so once they were on the other side of the ocean.

It had not been that way, of course. He made it into Oxford, and things had been different from home there but not especially better, and disillusionment had turned into self-sabotage. He flunked out in his second semester and returned to America, more jaded if not especially wiser.

He recognized in himself a hideous depression, but he did not articulate it to anyone - he kept it on the inside, like everything else - and so it was easy for his stepfather to sell the argument that he was simply lazy and lacking in direction.

It seemed to Charles that his mother and her husband hardly noticed when he was home - the mansion was big enough and their schedules busy enough that he could go days without running into either of them - but Kurt insisted the getting back out into the "real world" would be the cure for what ailed Charles.

His mother was easily swayed. She agreed that it was for Charles's own good and left it to her accountant to see to it that he had adequate funds to cover the costs of a shared apartment and tuition at a junior college a couple of hours drive away.

It wasn't that bad. It was 1967 and everyone was getting politics, so Charles got politics too and that was good because with the politics came an obligation to be social and for others to be social with him, and because it gave him something to focus on other than his own brokenness. He knew the people he did things with weren't really his friends because you couldn't hide as much of yourself as he was obligated to keep hidden and really be friends, but he still liked them.

He let his hair grow out. His wardrobe showed an increasing dedication to brightly colored jeans with flared legs and paisley shirts, to belts with wide buckles and fringed leather vests.

Later, his mother would reverse engineer an explanation for the Oxford debacle - it had been the drugs, she would claim. They had ruined his brain, had turned her bright little boy into a burnout.

In actuality, he only began smoking marijuana after he'd gotten his back on his feet state-side, mostly because everyone else seemed to be doing it, and he never felt that he overindulged.

But once he began smoking he found it to be extremely useful. The grass helped him let go of some of his pent-up inner tension. And it set the funny little bit of his brain that told him what was on in other people's brains clicking again in a way that it hadn't since he was a boy. And he was doing pretty good in his classes.

If he really was a burnout, then it seemed like being a burnout wasn't all that bad. Things hadn't turned out the way he'd expected they would, but he guessed that they had been pretty okay, so why had he gone and thrown everything away again?

Well, it had all started with a rumor, a story he'd heard second-hand or third-hand during a late-night discussion with a few acquaintances. According to the story teller, a friend of a friend had gone on holiday down in New Orleans, and had met a card shark there with red sparks in his eyes and a nearly impenetrable accent. When the card shark had been called out for cheating, there had been a sudden small explosion and the man had escaped in all the confusion. It was not evident where or how the explosion had originated - nothing had been found by a single charred playing card - but the friend of a friend had insisted that the card shark had somehow caused it.

Charles had arranged to visit the city over spring break, and had spent the entirety of the two weeks trying to find the man in question. He received a cracked tooth from a gentleman who had lost patience with his questions so quickly that his thoughts hadn't telegraphed the coming blow, but that was all. The man with the red in his eyes was an invention, or else he simply didn't want to be found.

But one story had led to another, and Charles had gone from looking for the card shark to a frog-man who supposedly haunted the bayou. He hadn't spent as much time as he might have looking for that individual - the bugs had been bad enough but once he began to spot the alligators he came to the conclusion that, as desperately as he wanted to find another Mutant, he wasn't quite willing to get eaten in the process.

There were other leads, and before long the semester had started back up without him. His periodic calls home, always frosty, were being met with a growing wall of ice. Charles didn't need to be able to exercise his telepathy to know that if he didn't get back on "the right track" soon he could expect to be cut off financially, possibly indefinitely.

But he hadn't been able to stop, for all the good it did him. He'd been on the hunt for nearly two months now, without any luck.

Perhaps his search might have been more effective had he made greater use of his ability. But he was wary of it - he'd never had anyone else he could discuss it with, who could explain its effects from the other side, and he was uncertain of how much he could get away with. Charles didn't want to be found out and he didn't want to hurt anyone.

He had not been able to explain his mission to his family and friends - he supposed they all believed he was simply drifting - and he didn't know where to start now, with this stranger. Aside from the risk of exposure, it all seemed entirely too drippy to share with the hard man behind the wheel.

"I was sort of looking for something," Charles said at last, believing incorrectly that this was vague enough to be innocuous.

II.

Erik took his eyes off the dirt road long enough to make a careful study of the stranger in the cab beside him.

He did not want to be inhospitable - his mother had raised him better than that - but he had more to protect than just the load of mason jars in the back of the truck. He didn't have anything in particular against the man, but Charles had come too close to things he didn't have any business coming close to, and that made him a threat.

There were a lot of ways that a threat could be dealt with, though Erik had his own preferences (his scarred knuckles flexed on the steering wheel at the thought), but he would need to be cautious now.

"There ain't nothing up in those hills but things and folks who don't want to be found," he said flatly. "What are you snooping around up there for?"

Erik felt a peculiar sort of tingling behind his eyes. He shook his head like there was a mosquito buzzing in his ear and pulled his ball cap down on his head. The sensation went away as quickly as it had come.

"I'm not with the government, if that's what you're worried about," Charles said. It had come out awkwardly, though he was obviously trying to make a joke out of it.

That had been Erik's main concern exactly, for more reasons than one, and it made him angry that a stranger had cottoned on to it so easily. He felt as though he was being stereotyped, and nothing made him madder.

"I guess I don't sound much like a fed," Charles added, oblivious.

"No," Erik said, drawing his words out with deliberation. "You sound like some smartass city boy from upstate New York affecting a posh English accent." He pronounced 'affecting' as 'ahfeckin',' and that was deliberate, too.

He could have spoken in standard American English had he wanted to. He could have replied to Charles in Charles's own hybrid accent, which he knew, actually, was not so much a matter of affect as a preference.

"I frequently moved between England and New York when I was a child," Charles said, and now there was a hell of alot more England in his voice, and not a little frost.

'Frequently,' Erik thought. Good - now he's het up.

"You still ain't told what you were doing up there."

"I was looking for the Summer's residence."

"You weren't anywhere near them."

"I know that," Charles said. He had given up on hiding his annoyance, Erik noticed with something close to approval. "I was lost, I've already said as much."

"Why?"

"Why did I get lost?" He was, Erik decided, a cute little thing when he was mad, but that didn't change anything.

"Are you ig'nant? Why were you looking for the Summers' place?"

"I had been told," Charles said stiffly, "that there was a... suspicious fire. I simply want to ask the Summers' a few questions about the matter."

"There was a fire - poor folks lost just about every damn thing - but there wasn't anything suspicious about it. It's real easy to explain; their boy Alex is a fire bug. But I don't see why you need to go and bother them about it when it isn't any of your business."

"You're lying," Charles said.

"You're one hell of a little fella to be calling other folks liars."

"You are lying, though." There wasn't the slightest shade of doubt in his voice.

"I oughta jack your jaw," Erik said, glaring at him from under the bill of his cap. He flexed his hands while he gripped the wheel. There were scars along the backs of his knuckles, and he knew the other man could see them.

"You would have already," Charles said, "except that I'm right. That's why you haven't." Erik could hear the smile in his voice; the sumbitch was pleased with himself. "It's okay, though. I don't think you'd be lying if you weren't trying to protect something important."

"Aw hell," Erik said.

III.

They drove on in silence for a while.

Charles was busy slipping around the edges of Erik's thoughts. He didn't learn much; Erik's thoughts were complicated and carefully guarded. Once Erik reached up and took his hat off to knead distractedly at his temple.

He slid narrowed eyes toward Charles. "You feel something weird?"

Charles shook his head, playing innocent, and he pulled back after that. He had a suspicion, but he didn't dare to trust it - he'd been wrong in the past.

"I wonder -" he started to say, and then a deer sprung out into the road and Erik said "Shit," calmly and under his breath, and his arm flew across Charles's chest as the trunk came to a sudden and silent halt.

The deer had already disappeared into the brush.

"Alright?" Erik asked him.

Charles took a deep breath. "I think so," he said. "That was close."

Erik's hand dropped. He slapped Charles on the knee gently before putting his hand back on the wheel, and Charles had the sense that his hand had lingered there longer than was strictly necessary and that this had been intentional and that it might mean something and on top of everything else the idea left his mind spinning.

A charge had run through him when Erik had stretched his arm over his chest. Not a metaphorical charge, not simply sexual attraction (or not only sexual attraction, at least). For maybe two seconds, Charles had literally felt glued to his seat.

"This thing has excellent brakes," Charles said, still a little breathless. He was trying to act natural, as though nothing unusual had happened, and he thought Erik was doing the same.

"Mm-hm."

"Nearly silent," he added. There hadn't been a sound when the truck stopped - no squealing of tires, nothing - and Charles no longer believed that Erik had even engaged the brakes.

"I take good care of her," Erik said, and patted the dashboard of the truck in the same affectionate way he had patted Charles's leg.

Charles felt slighted. He felt as though he had misread things, as he often did, as though he had made a mistake. Impulsively, he hurled himself into Erik's mind, trying to find out -

Erik turned and looked at Charles; he tapped knowingly at his temple with two fingers. "You fiddling around in there, pretty boy?"

Charles didn't know how to answer. He wasn't ready for this conversation - he had been hunting and hoping for years but he wasn't ready. He felt red.

Holding the wheel with one hand, Erik took off his ball cap and sat it on his knee. He ran his other hand through his hair, which was shaggy, and put the hat back on. The movement caused a silver chain to swing out from under his shirt, the pendent that dangled from its end sliding down Erik's chest to where Charles could see it. Later, Charles would decide that all of this had been intentional.

"Oh. What's that?" he asked, latching onto an opportunity to change the topic.

Erik held the charm up for Charles to get a better look, and he saw that it was a Star of David.

"It's real handy," he said, with what Charles was almost certain was feigned casualness. "Folks see this, and I find out real quick who I need to lay out. They just about line up to get their asses kicked." His smile was wide and ferocious. It showed an awful lot of teeth.

Charles could not tell how much - if any - of that was bravado. He wasn't sure exactly what to say, so he settled on asking, "Are there very many Jewish people around here?"

"Some," he said. "More'n you'd think, if go on down to Charlotte." Charles was still badly lost - and come to think, not entirely sure where they were headed just now - but he was fairly certain that Charlotte was a long way away from here.

"It's only silver-plated, see?" he went on. "Silver isn't magnetic, so I have trouble with it, sometimes. But this here is mostly nickel, so I can feel it right here all the time." He let go of the pendant to tap himself on the chest, just below his heart. The star dangled in the empty air, unsupported.

Charles had expected a shock of recognition, when he finally found what he was looking for, but that wasn't exactly what he felt now. There was very little surprise.

"It's important to me," Erik went on, and now there was a note of belligerence in his voice, of defiance. He was watching Charles closely, and Charles was conscious that what he did next would have a decisive effect on Erik's opinion of him. The social norms down here were very different from where he had come from - he understood that much, if not how to navigate them - and even at the best of situations Charles often put his foot in his mouth in the worst possible way.

"I can see that," Charles said at last. He wasn't sure if that was correct; he wanted very badly to say the right thing, but didn't know exactly what that was - certainly he didn't need Charles's approval - but that seemed to satisfy Erik. The chain slid back under his shirt.

It took Charles a little while to put the words together for what he wanted to say next, because he had never spoken them before. It was difficult to do, even now. Erik gave him time, seemed to understand that he needed it. "With me it's telepathy. I'm not as good at it as I think I could be."

Erik's smile was wide and wild and Charles was badly afraid that he would notice how much he liked it. He couldn't say what would happen if Erik perceived that he was attracted to him. He knew from bitter experience that there was no good place to be gay, but he'd always been told that they were inordinately intolerant about that sort of thing in places like this.

He was terribly worried about being hated, that if he did something wrong Erik would turn mean against him.

"Where are we headed, anyway?" he asked.

"I got to make a delivery up to the bar, then I figured we'd head down to Hank's shop and find you a new tire," Erik said. "Maybe I'd ruther do something else now, though," he added, and slid his eyes sideways toward Charles.

"Would you?" Charles said, his voice not entirely steady. He wanted to peek inside Erik's head but didn't dare. He was too obvious, he would never get away with it.

"Yeh."

"What do you mean by that?"

Erik looked at him sideways, in gap-mouthed astonishment. The look wasn't exactly antagonistic, but Charles was quickly getting fed up with it. "Ain't 'specially bright, I guess," Erik said, to himself, shaking his shaggy head in wonderment.

Charles started to answer that, not sure if he should be angry or encourages and by no means trusting his own assessment of the situation, but Erik said quickly, "Hush up."

He was staring in the rear-view mirror but all Charles could see were Erik's eyes - steely gray now - so he slid around in the seat and looked out the back window. There was a sheriff's car back there, gaining steadily on them.

"Ol' John Law," Erik said darkly.

Charles leaned back into his seat rigidly. "Don't get pulled over," he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice, trying to be cool; he knew he should have thrown the grass away when the Rambler had broken down. "I'm carrying."

Erik gave him that look again. "What?" Charles demanded sharply. He was trying to work on his breathing, trying to make it seem natural, and he was tired of being looked at like a monkey in the zoo.

"Bless your heart," Erik told him, in a tone that even Charles could read as meaning, You silly thing, you're just stupid as hell.

"Reach in the dash for me," Erik added.

Charles leaned forward, the seat belt biting into his shoulder, and opened the glove compartment. The was a revolver in there and Charles gave a little squeak and slammed the glove box closed. "We aren't going to shoot at the cops!"

"Course not," Erik said, with a sort of casual ease that made Charles very uneasy. "I ain't going to let anyone get shot. All I wanted you to do was wave that old six gun around a little, scare them some," he added, mildly disappointed.

"You're demented," Charles said, clutching at the door handle. Erik's grin showcased every single tooth he had.

Behind them, the cruiser's lights came on.

"Yeah boy, here we go," Erik said, and floored the gas. The truck rumbled like there was thunder under the hood, and a few seconds later the wail of the cruiser's siren added a counterpoint.

Charles's heart sunk down into his belly and his stomach slid somewhere between his knees. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again he saw that they were out of the hills and roaring past cornfields, and the sheriff was further back then he'd been but still on their tail.

He glanced at the speedometer and saw that they were going well above a hundred miles an hour, and Charles squeezed his eyes shut again, trying absurdly to convert that into kilometers. This seemed terribly important for reasons he didn't himself understand, and now the truck was bumming and bucking beneath him and there was a strange whacking sound so Charles took another peek and saw they were tearing through the corn now, the stalks beating against the truck as Erik drove over them.

"That settles it," Charles said in a voice he didn't exactly recognize, and he shut his eyes and resolved to keep them shut, which is exactly what he did. After a little while the trunk slowed down and the engine died, and Charles felt Erik poke him in the shoulder.

"You can open your eyes," Erik told him, his voice a low hiss. "You did just fine."

Charles did, and looked around in astonishment. They were surrounded on all sides by bales of hay, and out above them were the rafters of a barn. Charles looked over the edge of the loft and saw the sheriff pacing down on the ground level, looking at once mystified and angry. He looked out his window and saw the truck was floating, just slightly above the floor of the hay loft.

He bit his tongue until the sheriff gave up and stomped out of the barn, then he turned to Erik.

"You're completely demented!" he meant to say, but before he could speak Erik leaned across the seat and kissed him, so Charles projected the words telepathically instead, which was something he hadn't known he could do, but Erik must have heard him because he kissed Charles harder and when they finally came up for air, when Charles finally broke away he sat staring at Erik in shock, blinking quickly.

Charles's hands were tangled in knots in his lap. "What -" he started to say, but Erik cut in.

"Aw, don't go and overthink it," he said, but Charles could tell he was worried, though he looked back at Charles steadily. Charles had taken a look at his thoughts - that seemed fair, since Erik had kissed him without asking first, and Erik hadn't shied from the intrusion - and he could see that Erik was more than a little worried that he'd messed up.

Charles let him worry for about half a minute, then he leaned forward, pushing himself upward against the seat with his open hands, to kiss Erik himself. But he turned shy at the last instant, and darted sideways to peck Erik on the cheek instead.

He slipped back, nervous, and watched a wide grin spread across Erik's face while his tanned skin turned bright red. "Aw hell," he said happily, and reached up and touched his cheek.