i.
"Gaaaaah," Erik says, his eyes wild, staggering into the house. Like the proverbial wolf, he'd blown his way into the house, though in this case, by throwing the door open by its hinges.
"Jesus, Erik, what happened?" Charles asks, wheeling at top-speed- well, as fast as you can go in a motorised wheelchair anyway, which probably isn't breaking 2 miles an hour - to Erik's side.
Erik flaps a puffy hand towards his neck, and staggers back aside the umbrella stand. There's a syringe imbedded in the flesh in his neck, the skin around it an angry red colour.
Pietro blinks, and then nips over to his side. "Should I yank it out?" he says, hand reaching towards the needle.
"No!" Charles warns, and Erik flaps his hands again towards Pietro in a shooing gesture. His hands seem to be swollen, like inflated rubber gloves, and his lips too, which explains the whole ineffective-groaning thing.
"Is that- is that a needle?" Alex asks apprehensively, coming down the stairs.
"Shit - Pietro, grab him," Charles shouts, their early warning system as always as Alex tips forward, unconscious.
"There's always one fainter," Pietro says sagely, suddenly holding Alex's limp body up. "Wouldn't have thought it was Alex though."
"Pietro, put Alex down somewhere and get Hank," Charles orders. Erik's eyes widen and he waves a hand in front of his throat, a 'no' gesture.
"Don't put Alex down?" Charles hazards. Somehow this has turned into a strange game of charades, and Erik frowns. Wrong answer. This would be a whole lot easier if he could just read Erik's mind, but of course he's wearing his helmet.
"Don't get Hank?" Pietro tries.
Hank chooses that moment to amble in, and takes in the scene stoically. "Too late for that," he says dryly, "and I think I'm needed here anyway, how did he get a needle-"
"Mmnrrgh," Erik groans, and stumbles backwards in an attempt to get away from Hank, hands scrambling on the coffee table. He latches onto a set of keys and brandishes them in Hank's direction. "Nnnttt!"
"What did I do?" Hank asks, almost sounding wounded.
"Never mind Erik, he's obviously under stress. He may even be hallucinating," Charles says placatingly. "C'mon Erik, let's sit you down at least, and see what we can do about that needle."
If glares could contain swear words, Erik's eyes would be mouthing profanities in Hank's direction right now.
"I guess he doesn't want me to do it," Hank says. "Well, uhh, it's - very simple anyway professor, you just gently remove the needle and wash the area with a saline solution."
"I won't be able to reach his neck from my chair," Charles says.
"Guess I'll have to do it then," Pietro says brightly.
"Urrghrnnnn," Erik tries, shaking his head, and Charles can't blame him.
"Don't you trust me, dad?" Pietro asks.
Erik was probably going to respond by moaning again to that, but they'll never know, because at that moment his eyes roll up and he too collapses forward.
Pietro catches him almost lazily. "If anyone else feels woozy, sit down, okay?" he says, dumping Erik into a chair. "Catching dead weights isn't so fun, though it is so heroic of me."
"Would you put him in the bedroom beside mine?" Charles asks. "And then, look, just go back to bed everyone. We'll sort this out in the morning."
ii.
The next morning, Pietro, Hank and Alex gather in the sitting room, waiting for the inevitable blow-out.
"Can't believe you're afraid of needles," Pietro is saying to Alex when Erik walks in. He's wearing flannel pyjamas - obviously Charles' - and glares at the group at large, a bandage taped to his neck.
"So, what do you remember Erik?" Charles asks, wheeling in after him.
Erik frowns that characteristic frown of his. Sometimes his face looks weird without it. "My memory is hazy, seeing as I was drugged."
"By whom?" Charles prompts.
Pietro fidgets, already bored by this Q&A session.
"Well, if I knew Charles, don't you think I would have opened with that information," Erik says cuttingly.
Charles blinks. "Alright. Well, you were having quite an adverse reaction to Hank last night. Do you know what caused that?"
"Hank," Erik repeats, then shakes his head roughly like he's trying to dislodge the information out from his drug-addled memory.
"This would have been easier if you had simply read my mind last night," he says to Charles.
"Well you were wearing that god awful helmet, Erik, so I couldn't."
"Well maybe you should have taken the helmet off then-"
"Enough," Alex says. "I'm not interested in your squabbling, both of you, so cut it out. Magneto, do you remember anything relevant at all?" Go on Alex, Pietro thinks. Taking charge and all that. Fair play.
Erik closes his eyes for so long that Pietro thinks he may have fallen asleep, which is ridiculous because Pietro has better things to do then watch his dad take a nap.
Then Erik's eyes snap open, the colour of steel, so unlike Pietro's.
"I remember now. There's a rat amongst us," he says darkly.
Pietro zips across the room. "Nope," he says, leaning against the far wall, "unless it's an invisible rat."
"I meant a snitch," Erik says, undeterred by Pietro's addition.
"What makes you think that Erik?" Charles asks.
"I was investigating a lead at the CIA, which led me to detailed drawings of my helmet."
Everyone looks at him. "So?" Hank prompts finally.
"That means the CIA designed it originally, and Shaw got his hands on it through them!"
"I'm lost," Pietro admits. His dad often gets so wrapped up in his emotions that he only spits out the actual facts like an aggravated cash machine that will only give you money one time in ten, and the rest of the time takes your card and then burst into flames.
"Listen," Magneto says, his jaw locked tight, "that helmet is the perfect foil to Charles' mutation. It's almost like it was designed just to resist him. I myself am vulnerable to plastic guns, prisons, and the CIA have used that against me. These things were designed to counter us specifically."
"Okay?" Charles says hesitantly, "but Erik, that's not a great conspiracy, obviously the CIA would want some line of defence against us if things got ugly…"
"Obviously," Erik repeats. "And as for Pietro, and Alex and-," and his voice grows murderous, "and Hank, well what line of defence is against them? Other than Hank's brilliant suppressor that is."
"What are you saying Erik?" Charles asks, his voice level. Hank says nothing, but looks nervous, that particular twitchy kind of nerves he gets when Erik is around.
"I'm saying," Erik continues, "that in hindsight, it's a mite convenient that a scientist would be working for the CIA for years, and for no-one to realise he was a mutant. It's convenient that they would just let him leave without any repercussions, although he was clearly gifted. It's convenient in the space of ten years the same scientist would choose to stay with Charles, when everyone else had left. Why not go to university, or take a high-paying job at any company in the world, Hank?" Erik asks. "Why stay here? But you had a job to do, didn't you. You had to create the suppressor, and keep Charles addicted, keep the world's most dangerous mutant subdued."
"I don't- what, that's not-"
"I have to hand it to you Hank, managing to live with a telepath for years and not being caught is some feat. No wonder you're nervous all the time."
"I never-"
Charles looks at them both, clearly caught between them. Even Pietro is interested at this point. Alex just looks hurt.
"Erik, this is all speculation, you have nothing-" Charles tries.
"Why don't you take a little peek into Hank's mind there Charles, see what you find," Erik says. "Go on."
"There's no-" Hank mumbles, but Charles wheels around in chair to face him.
"If you have nothing to hide man.." Pietro says, and trails off. Hank takes a step back. "Look, it's not what it sounds like," he says weakly.
Everyone promptly goes berserk at this small admission of guilt. Erik stabs a finger in Hank's direction, and Hank is blown backwards by his belt buckle; Alex gapes blanky in Hank's direction. "Why man?" he asks simply, "why?"; Charles squints and both Erik and Hank freeze, and Pietro knows that he's made them stay still; Pietro himself darts upstairs, throws all of Hank's stuff into a bag and runs back down before anyone has even blinked.
"Get out of here, dickwad," he says, chucking the bag at Hank's head.
"Hold on, look, it's not-"
"Hank," Charles says, and everyone shuts up again. "Did you relay information about us back to the CIA?"
"Yes," Hank says, "but-"
"Did you create the suppressor to subdue me?"
"You asked me to make it, don't be like this."
"Hank.."
"Just stop!" Hank yells. "I'm the only one that figured out that the CIA wouldn't rest unless they thought they had a mole in here, okay? So I pretended to spy on you to keep them happy so they wouldn't do anything stupid."
"Pretended?" Erik asks, clearly not buying it.
"Yes," Hank says. "I lied about everything - told them your range on Cerebro was only ten miles, professor; I said that if they built a massive magnet Erik that you would get stuck to it; Alex, I told them that you could only shoot lasers when you're embarrassed so they've been working on ways to do that; Pietro, I've kept them off your back, they don't know you exist, do you know how hard that is with your criminal record?" He breathes heavily for a second and everyone in the room falls silent, waiting. "When we broke into the Pentagon, it was meant to be a trap. Get us all together, doing illegal activity. They were going to arrest us and hand us over to Trask. I convinced them that we were the only ones who could find Mystique; and when we did, I sent them after a child pedophile instead and told them it was Mystique in disguise. That kept them occupied for a while at least. I knew you all wouldn't understand, so I didn't tell you, but I've been trying to protect us all, okay?"
Speech done, he looks shaky now, and bone-tired. Pietro hopes he's not going to faint. He's doesn't even know could he catch Hank, size of him.
"Oh Hank," Charles says, "I shouldn't have doubted you."
Erik frowns at that, and somehow Pietro thinks that he's a little disappointed at this turn of events. Magneto always expects the worst in people, he supposes.
Alex bites his lip and looks away. "Yeah, I'm sorry too," he says.
"Are we all going to hug and make up?" Erik says, his voice like ice. "Charles, you have no proof what he says is true."
"I am a telepath Erik," Charles reminds him. "Hank has done nothing wrong."
"I would call lying to us for more than a decade a wrong," Erik says.
"Leave him alone," Alex says. "He's tried to help us. More than you've done."
Erik regards him cooly. "I see. I'm evidently no longer needed then." He stands stiffly and sweeps out of the room, the flair of it undermined somewhat by the flannel pyjamas that are just an inch too short for him, and flap around the ankles.
Pietro zips away again and unpacks Hank's suitcase apologetically, if you can dump things out of a bag in a regretful manner, that is.
Charles busies himself making tea, and Pietro thinks that, oddly enough, everything is actually going to be fine.
iii.
"Yes," Hank says that night into his earpiece. "Yes, there was a slight confrontation, but nothing I couldn't handle."
"Lehnsherr?" the voice asks. It's a female voice.
"He was the one provoking it, but the others sided with me," Hank says. There's no trace of his usual stutter in his voice now; now he speaks with authority, and in the privacy of his own bedroom, he stands a little straighter too. Now, it's incredible to think that anyone ever looked at a towering mass of blue muscle, this monster with a mind as sharp as his claws, and thought that he was a quivering coward.
"Good. Do you want us to deal with him?" the voice down the line asks. Hank considers it briefly; payback for years of belittling and snide comments, but it's not worth it. "No," he says, "I can handle Lehnsherr."
"Status report?"
"The mutant named Pietro is still with them-" he begins, and tells the voice down the line everything, all the little inconsequential details.
He'll have to be more careful from now on, sure, but for the moment, Hank just smiles. To lie to a telepath straight to his face and not get caught, well that makes Hank feel alive.
And if the others have to pay the price for Hank's exhilaration, so be it. Each man for his own, isn't that what they say?
And standing in the bedroom, talking softly into the mouthpiece, Hank doesn't look like a nervous boy who just loves science. He looks like a dangerous, determined man.