Thank you all so much for your reviews! I am turning into a review-junkie. Seriously. Checking my email constantly.
ETA: Oops, no wonder this seemed so short! I only uploaded half of it the first time, since I have kind of a different update schedule on LJ. :o
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vi.
The stairs were an efficient cage; unless, of course, Charles was willing to fall down them in his pursuit of freedom. Although, if Erik's unsolicited cure actually worked—provided he hadn't installed additional safeguards by then—Charles would simply be able to walk out. So far, however, he had gained only a deep and abiding ache at the base of his skull.
The rooms Erik took him to, chair moving almost gracefully under the man's power, were embarrassingly lush and had clearly been prepared for Charles well in advance. There were no carpets to foul his wheels, no shelves too high for him to reach, and plenty of books and softly glowing lamps. There was more than one room, and Erik took him around to see them eagerly. It practically smelled of Erik's fussing.
It did not escape Charles' attention that there was a rail along the edge of the bed so that he could pull himself in, and similar fittings in the washroom; he also noticed that Erik did not comment on them, and that his eyes in fact glanced past them deliberately. Still, he was glad for their presence, and while Charles was not a religious man, he paused—as he did daily—to thank any god that might be listening that he could still control his bodily functions.
Finally Erik brought him back to the sitting room, parking Charles by a dark leather couch that Erik sank into with evident contentment. He raised his hand and summoned a metal box tethered to a thick cord, directing it to Charles' hands.
The telepath caught it and turned it over; there was a single large, black button on one side. The whole affair was rather inelegant, and didn't really fit with the rest of the room. "What is it?" Charles asked obligingly, keeping his fingers well clear of the button.
A small, tight smile squeezed in between the edges of Erik's helmet. "It's a surprise. Nothing all that extravagant, just a… Small token of my trust, and perhaps a promise as well."
Now Charles really didn't want to press the button. He didn't need a new luxury to pile on top of all the others.
Erik didn't quite roll his eyes, but he leaned forward, slid his hand between Charles', and depressed the black rubber himself. "Really, Charles; you're becoming paranoid. It's just a little thing." Then he reclined back into the cushions again, watching Charles with expectant satisfaction as the telepath sat awkwardly with the heavy box in his lap.
After almost a minute had passed, Charles opened his mouth to ask what they were waiting for, and was interrupted by the sound of the door opening. He turned to look, saw a nurse standing there—and gasped, despite himself, fingers flying to his head reflexively.
She wasn't wearing a helmet, and for the first time in—oh, god, it's been forever—Charles felt almost whole; he didn't plunge in deeply but in a matter of moments he knew more than he could have learned over months of rolling around the manor.
Her name was Beth—short for Elizabeth, never Lizzie—and she was thirty-four, had four children (three sons, one daughter, one of the sons had died) and was a mutant; nothing too extreme but she could turn slightly translucent and two of her children were in the mutant military. Most of the mansion staff were mutants as well, but rather more of them than Erik was probably aware of were humans passing as mutant. The situation in the rest of the world was worse than what made it onto the news, characterized by constant fear and hunger, but Beth was glad that she…
Charles extricated himself from her mind with difficulty, trying to ignore Erik's smug appraisal of his reaction, and settled his hands back into his lap. He smiled unsteadily. "Yes, thank you, Beth; Erik was just showing me the call system. I don't need anything right now, but I'm sure I'll make your acquaintance later."
She nodded, curtsied quickly, and left.
Once the door had closed Charles turned back to Erik. "I can't feel her anymore." It was an unasked question.
Erik's eyes glinted out from beneath the brim of his helmet. "The entire manor is telepath-proofed. You're welcome, by the way; there's one of those in every one of your rooms should you require assistance."
"You've gone through a lot of trouble to keep me contained," Charles observed dryly.
A weary grin crossed Erik's face, and he chuckled. "Not everything is about you, old friend. There are other telepaths out there I'm more worried about. All I've done since you arrived is to instruct my staff to keep their helmets on more firmly. That can, of course, change, if you prove yourself capable of coexisting peacefully with us."
Charles nodded mutely, quietly shaken under his nonchalance, reeling from the rush of finally being able to look at someone and understand. For a moment, he wondered, How did he know I wanted that so badly?
But that was silly; in a world come to be characterized by deprivation, the only things Charles had lacked over the past few years had been stimulating conversation, sex, and the comforting presence of minds surrounding his. The first he could no longer legitimately complain about, and the second—while, thank god, still technically possible—seemed more distant all the time.
That left only the last thing, and Erik had, for all that Charles said it first, practically invented the phrase "mutant, and proud."
Erik's soft smile suggested to Charles that he wasn't hiding his feelings quite so well as he'd hoped, but the other man didn't say anything about it, only—bizarrely—leaned down to Charles' feet, picking each one up by the ankle and setting them in his lap.
Charles watched in wordless bemusement, not entirely sure how one went about asking the necessary question, when Erik's soft voice answered his unspoken inquiry. "I'm just going to test something. You don't need to be afraid of me, Charles."
The telepath cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, it's just that I was pretty certain those were mine."
In the middle of untying Charles' shoes, Erik glanced up and replied, "So they are, but I assumed you would refuse if I asked. You know I've never… Intentionally hurt you. I'm not going to start now."
Charles looked for a place to set the call button, and placed it on the end table, where it clunked rather loudly. "Perhaps you wouldn't try to hurt me, but that doesn't change the fact that your actions have not only lead to injury, but to genocide. Something's changed about you, my friend, and I don't know that I can fix it."
Erik frowned intently at Charles' socks before stripping off the offending garments. "I don't need to be fixed, Charles. None of us need to be fixed. If the rest of the world could have accepted that…"
"You never gave them that chance," Charles pointed out as Erik's hand vanished into his clothing and reappeared holding a modestly sized steel ball.
The sphere contorted and oozed into the shape of a finger-width rod. "We couldn't afford to let them make the wrong choice," Erik countered, and ran the tip of the rod up the bottom of Charles' bare feet, one and then the other. Charles felt nothing, and Erik didn't look at him. "Which I knew they would," he concluded.
"What does that mean?" Charles asked, referring now to his feet, which Erik had wrapped his long fingers around as if to keep them from being chilled. Then again, now that Charles was in the state he grew up in rather than on the other side of the continent, he could appreciate the unseasonably cold weather, and few things froze faster than uncared-for toes.
Erik met his eyes, finally, making a good show of absent-mindedness. "It means you're paralyzed," he explained flatly. "You can't expect results this soon."
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vii.
Charles never did get to see the research, but Erik waved it off, pulling Charles' socks back on and tucking his feet down onto the chair. "Our trials suggest that it should take about a week to see improvement," Erik told him.
"So soon?" Charles couldn't help but be impressed.
Erik's lips curved up very slightly along the edges. "It's the physical therapy you're going to kill me for," he replied.
Charles didn't match his playfulness, and said, "If this works, you have an obligation to make this procedure available to the rest of the world. You know that, right?"
To this, Erik huffed a laugh. "Oh, my old friend, there are bigger problems I have to solve first."
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viii.
The next day saw the clock moving with excruciating slowness. Charles traveled around his rooms, opening drawers full of unfamiliar clothing that might well have been something he'd wear, and reading the first few pages of several books on biology and history before setting them down and wishing Erik had provided him with novels.
That evening Erik brought a slim briefcase with him to show Charles. It was full of papers, which he spread out in two neat piles on top of the desk in what he'd referred to as Charles' office.
Charles flipped through them absently, the numbers blurring before his eyes. "I studied genetics, Erik, not law," he reminded the other man, who half-sat on the edge of the desk.
Erik nodded and explained something about budgets, expenditures, and programs, jabbing at the papers emphatically, until finally Charles stopped him mid-word with a touch of his fingers to Erik's arm. The sudden silence was in its own way too loud, so Charles coughed to clear his throat.
"Just tell me the short version," Charles recommended. "That, or take off your helmet."
Erik's eyes glinted wary and thoughtful in the shadow cast by the lamp. "I'll take you to the next meeting," he suggested instead, and then bade Charles to follow him back to the couch in the sitting room. There, they talked about Raven—Mystique, Erik called her now—but only about her changing tastes in food and faces; nothing about what she'd been doing.
As he spoke, Erik gathered up Charles' feet again, stripping them bare all while recounting some of Raven's more dramatic dealings with men, running the steel rod over Charles' soles without pausing for breath. Charles could understand this hint, and smiled politely at Erik's stories without remarking on the fact that, yet again, he couldn't feel a thing.
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ix.
His rooms were stifling after four years of being able to merely glance to one side and see mountains sprawling into the sky. Charles found that he never used certain areas of his rooms, wondered why, and eventually realized that he'd been moving from window to window. They were a poor substitute; each of his five windows looked into the courtyard, providing a view only of Erik's mansion, his mind caged by a complex tracery of flaws within the immovable glass.
Charles began to watch the people below; they seemed unreal, illusory without the hum of thoughts to prove their existence, seen from too far away to catch the subtler clues of their emotional states. He assumed that most of them were mutants, however, and once that thought occurred to him, Charles watched their activities with the intensity of a hawk, waiting for some revealing tell.
So it was that he finally caught a glimpse of blue and red below.
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x.
"I saw Raven earlier," Charles told Erik.
The other man looked up at him; he had abandoned his usual spot on the couch in order to lean against the paneled walls. "Nothing to say about the meeting?"
Charles shook his head, lips pressing together. Needless to say, good impressions had not been made. "Do I get to see my sister, or is that something else you'll be holding hostage to my good behavior?"
"Tell me, was I lying when I told you that I'm the only person keeping our own government from descending into chaos?" Erik leant his head back against the wall, staring with hooded eyes and crossed arms into the darkness of Charles' bedroom, opposite.
Charles paused, picking at a thread coming loose on his pants, and insisted, "My sister?"
Without so much as moving his head, Erik flicked his attention back down to the telepath. "You know the answer, Charles."
"Why?" Charles asked. "Why bother playing this game? If you don't trust me, then why did you bring me here?"
Erik exhaled slowly, pushing himself off from the wall so that he could walk near to his estranged friend. "Be patient," he urged, laying a hand onto Charles' shoulder. "You inspire a certain enviable loyalty in people that I think you're well aware of." Perhaps he noticed the dark glare Charles directed at his fingers, because he quickly moved on.
"You seemed to get along well with everybody," Erik remarked, changing tactics. He picked up one of Charles' abandoned books, flipping through the pages to see which corner had been folded over.
Charles winced; for the most part the other mutants had been polite at first, and then after introductions they pointedly ignored him. They knew who he was, of course; one man, his voice crackling with electricity, had taken the time to observe that Charles had once been the only thing holding back mutant supremacy, and now would you look at him?
There had been some people he'd recognized. Most of Shaw's old crew were still around, although it seemed that the young man who could create the vortexes never ventured this far north during the colder months. Azazel had been polite, had seen the slender headpiece Charles wore over his hair and commiserated, through his thick accent, "Ah, that is too bad. I cannot teleport within these walls, either; it is so boring, always having to walk."
It went without saying that the vast majority of the mutants in the room then proceeded to prove that they were every bit as capable of corruption as their human counterparts, shamelessly arguing for more money to put into programs that always managed to remain under-funded, no matter how much money was thrown into them, or advocating certain human rights violations.
"You got along well with Ms. Frost in particular, I thought," Erik continued, an amused gleam in his eye. "Young telepaths in love, perhaps?"
At this, Charles shivered, just a little; it had felt so wrong to have her in his head without being able to read her in turn. And the way she'd returned his cautious greeting with a glance down to his legs, a slow, malicious smile creeping over her face—
Misinterpreting Charles' reaction, Erik chuckled wryly. "How ever did you survive for all this time without being able to use your bad pickup lines on unsuspecting women?"
Charles tore the stray thread from his slacks and scoffed. "By thinking about you, mostly," he grumbled. He looked back up at the other man and saw that—that oh, he'd made a mistake.
He'd intended to get a rise out of Erik, to offend him, but the sharp way Charles found himself regarded now, by dark, considering eyes, reminded him of something he'd known once but evidently forgotten: a huge important tiny detail that had somehow been lost in the intervening years of pain and betrayal.
He'd forgotten that Erik had been in love with him.