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The day after Magneto dies, there are parties in the streets. Charles floats on the buzz of their minds, feels their relief. It's a light, beautiful thing, like a butterfly in June.
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"How can you pity your enemies, Charles, and expect to survive?"
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Without Magneto, the Brotherhood topples.
Mystique is caught next. She stands in the court room so proud, so proud, liked she'd always looked when she cared.
He swears to tell the whole truth, and before a jury of his peers lists her crimes. There is a mutant on that jury – he controls vines. When he looks at Mystique, Charles can feel his disgust. Mutants like her ruin everything we are, the man thinks.
The verdict is guilty.
For only a sliver of a second, Mystique's mind cries out, Charles! It is an instinctive reaction, the way a man who has lost his legs will sometimes still try to stand. At once she quiets her mind and raises her head again, as if she is a martyr.
Outside, someone asks him how he feels. Charles raises a hand to his temple, but of course, he cannot read his own mind.
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"I pity because I understand, Erik. It's not only mutant minds I can read. Humans, non-mutant humans have the same hopes and fears that we do. I can feel them when they see us. They're scared. I can't hate them for being afraid."
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On TV, a woman says, "I was so afraid that they would come to recruit me. My husband is human, I thought they'd kill him." She is holding her husband's hand and she looks –
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"I see only hatred and disgust. And the petty fear of a weaker species that knows its time is past."
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Charles makes himself read the list of Magneto's casualties, or tries. There are too many, and his voice goes hoarse. He drinks a glass of water and reaches out to his students' minds for comfort. Class sizes have shrunk, recently, as normal schools start mutant integration programs. Branches for mutants are opening across the country, and Charles feels –
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"But that hatred can be softened with understanding. That fear can become understanding. Co-existence is possible! It must be."
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Of course, there still are lynchings. But there are less.
In his old age, Charles finds that the distinction matters.
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"Not when they try to kill us. You must realize that one day they'll succeed. No peace is possible when everyday they seek out our destruction. Our extermination!"
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Magneto has a funeral, but there is no body and there are no guests. The funeral is in Charles' mind. He is standing, as if to give a eulogy and on his note card, he has written, "He was my friend. He meant well. I loved him."
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"Yet I believe. And I do pity my enemies."
"You're such a child, Charles."
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But in his mind, looking out onto the minds of the world, the words will not be formed. As easily as Erik has twisted metal, as easily as Erik had changed his name, Charles feels the words he must say against his skull and in his throat.
Magneto was a murderer.
And I can not mourn him.
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There, he'll think hazily, on the cusp of waking and asleep, the rebuttal to the ghost of an old argument. You see, Erik?
I've grown up.
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