gabriel42 – "Heart of Iron" could be understood to mean unshakable or steadfast rather than cold or uncaring, but I really think Xavier was just reacting to the coincidence of Erik having the word "Iron" in his surname.

Duchess – Don't worry; I have not forgotten Raven. Her death continues to have a strong impact on the characters. She will be discussed directly in future chapters.


Charles rolled into the kitchen to see Petra sitting at the table, alternately eating and arranging dry Cheerios. "Good morning, Petra," he said.

"BITE ME SEAN!"

Charles smiled benignly and wiped partially-chewed cereal from his forehead. Then he muttered, "I have got to talk to Alex about that."


Though they were supposedly a school, they were not a terribly educated group. Of the seven adults, only three – Charles, Hank, and Sean – had even obtained high school diplomas. Petra had obviously never attended school at all. Alex had been arrested during his senior year, just after his eighteenth birthday, and had never bothered to finish his remaining classes. Lyle had dropped out of school at sixteen, when his powers had begun to manifest and he had chosen a life of solitude over the threats and stares of the townsfolk. Erik, of course, had never even entered high school, let alone completed it.

They had their talents, clearly, but there were gaps in their knowledge. This was most obvious with Erik, who had not only missed out on formal education, but a great many day-to-day experiences as well. The result was an awkward patchwork of familiarity and ignorance. Erik was fond of animal crackers, but suspicious of Oreos – he insisted on eating them whole, instead of opening them up and eating the crème separately as rationality would dictate. He had heard of quite a few movies, but he had hardly seen any. He knew exactly what Frisbees were, but had never seen a neon plastic water gun. He was excellent with arithmetic, but knew almost no algebra. And most recently, when Charles and Erik were viewing a new invention of Hank's (a device to create 3-dimensional printed circuits) and Hank explained the use of electricity to separate water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, Charles had felt a wave of confusion and surprise. Until that moment, Erik had apparently believed water to be an element.

Charles felt there should be some sort of formal curriculum for the children, but he had no idea where to begin. Hank took most of the responsibility for educating the twins and seemed to be incorporating a reasonable blend of topics. Charles wondered sometimes if he should be monitoring the situation more closely, but the children seemed happy and were certainly getting a better education than they had been receiving before. Abigail had simply enrolled in the local public high school. It wasn't that they couldn't teach high school level material, or even so much that they were unaccredited, but rather that Abby was at an age when same-sex peers were a must. The only other female at the estate was Petra, who was unlikely to provide Abby with the sort of girl talk she craved.

Charles had encouraged both Alex and Lyle to pursue equivalency diplomas. Though neither had been enthusiastic about the idea, he had ordered textbooks and made them available anyway. While the textbooks remained untouched, Charles was pleasantly surprised when Alex asked him if there were books about "people like Petra, how to teach them stuff." Charles knew better than to raise the issue of a high school diploma with Erik. Erik valued knowledge, but certainly would not value the credentialing of that knowledge, particularly if it involved being judged by humans under human standards. Charles was getting better at picking his battles.

There was a single educational requirement imposed on all of the manor's residents: a weekly seminar on genetics and evolution. They were all there because of mutation and they owed it to themselves, he felt, to understand what that meant. (The initial material was far too simple for Hank, of course, but he attended without complaint.) He had started with the most basic information: the difference between inherited and environmental traits, genes as the units of heredity, simple Mendelian inheritance based on dominant and recessive genes.

When he moved on to sources of novelty in the genome, everyone became more interested, especially when Charles pointed out that they might not be mutants at all.

"Wait a minute," said Sean, "neither of my parents have powers and I do, so it has to be a mutation, right?"

Charles shook his head. "I think that's probable, but it isn't the only possibility. Let's imagine there were no mutations in the past fifty years. Every gene you have would exist in someone else on the planet, but your combination of genes would exist only in you. You don't have to invent new musical notes to write a new song; a new combination of notes is sufficient. In other words, you might not be only person to have gene A or gene B or gene C, but you could be literally the only person on the planet to have A, B, and C. It is possible that merely having the right combination of common genes is enough to produce extraordinary abilities."

"Then how come all of Sean's brothers and sisters aren't mutants too?" Lyle returned to chewing on a pencil.

"Remember homozygous and heterozygous? If Sean's parents are both heterozygous for the genes in question, you only end up with special powers if the superpower allele is selected for each gene in both parents. It's like the odds of flipping a coin and getting heads six times in a row: rare, but not unheard-of. Still, incredible ability would be more common in the siblings and cousins of known mutants."

Sean said, "But you think that it's a mutation, right?"

"I do, for a number of epidemiological reasons which are frankly too complex to enumerate fully in this context." He paused, considered the best way to explain his line of reasoning. "Nuclear radiation is a teratogen, a mutation-causing agent. If indeed we are seeing a dramatic rise in the number of individuals with extraordinary abilities that coincides with the rise of the nuclear age, then that is evidence that nuclear radiation has played a role in creating us by causing an increase in mutations. I personally think it is no coincidence that my father was a nuclear physicist."

"But none of the rest of us have parents who were exposed to a lot of nuclear energy," said Hank.

"But there are other teratogens. And it may not take a lot of nuclear radiation, just the right dose to the right place at the right time. And then there are random copying errors, when parent cells simply make a mistake in replicating their genes."

"So if your parents got hit with radiation or something, your brothers and sisters would be more likely to be mutants, but not your cousins, right?" Everyone turned to look at Alex, surprised at the cogent question.

"You're absolutely correct, Mr. Summers, if the mutation was in the parent. But it could also have been in the grandparent or great-grandparent and remained dormant because it required some other gene or some environmental stimulus to manifest phenotypically, in which case cousins would have an increased probability as well." He paused momentarily, marveling at how new and unexplored this field of study was. "Regardless, I do believe we can be confident that full blood siblings are at an increased risk."


Knight to E-5. "Where on earth are we going to get the materials?"

Charles captured Erik's knight with his rook. "Scrap yards."

"You're too eager to take my knights from me." Erik captured Charles' rook with a pawn.

"The real question is what we're going to do with the raw materials. You can rework the metals, but I'm not sure how we're going to cast pieces of glass." Charles studied the board and stirred his drink with his fingertip. "I suppose we're going to have to make some sort of small foundry. Perhaps Mr. Summers can power it."

Erik looked to the library's doorway. "Speak of the devil," he said, "and he shall appear."

Alex looked at Charles. "I need to talk to you."

"By all means." Charles gestured to a well-appointed chair.

"I need to talk to you without him." Alex cast a suspicious glance at Erik.

Charles tilted his head to the side, appearing to consider the matter, but before he could arrive at a conclusion, Erik stood. "We'll finish our game later," he said.

As soon as Erik left the room, Alex took his vacated seat. Though his concern had seemed urgent just a moment prior, Alex now fiddled with the captured chess pieces. "Who's winning?" he asked.

"It can be very difficult to tell. I would say it's anyone's game at this point," said Charles. "May I ask why you insisted on speaking to me alone?"

"I don't like him and I don't trust him. I get that you guys are buddies, but that doesn't mean him and me have to be."

"I see."

There was silence for almost a minute, then Alex spoke. "I have a brother. His name is Scott. He lives in an orphanage in Nebraska. I haven't seen him in years, but I talk to him on the phone sometimes. The last few times I've called, though, they keep telling me he's not around. And, I mean, that's happened some times before, but not a whole bunch in a row like that. And then I was thinking about what you were saying about being a mutant and how it would be more common in your brothers, right?"

Charles nodded. "How old is he?"

"Um...about fourteen, I think."

"And has he ever mentioned anything about unusual abilities? Or anything about threats or danger?"

"No, nothing at all." Alex shrugged. "Look, man, I don't even like this kid. He's kind of a pussy. But, you know..."

"He's your blood and you care for him."

"Aw fuck man, don't go making this weird. I don't care for him. I just don't want him dead or anything."

"Of course."


Charles and Erik lay in bed. Though they had turned the lights off almost an hour ago, both were far from sleep. Erik still wore long sleeves to bed, though he had finally stopped wearing socks.

Everything was all out of order, Charles mused. There had first been a great deal of intimacy, in the non-physical sense, but no flirting. (Charles wasn't even sure how he would have gone about flirting with Erik had he wanted to. His usual standbys with women – poetry, flattery – seemed laughable.) Charles had been aware of his own attraction, but had held back because there was an important mission that required focus as well as because he had strongly suspected that any move on his part would cause Erik to become agitated – the situation was fragile enough already. From his mass-scan of Erik's mind while attempting to rescue him from drowning, Charles knew both that Erik thought of himself as asexual and that this simply wasn't true. Erik had sexual thoughts and feelings for men and it was sad, Charles felt, that he had never before acted on them. So after Shaw was dead and Charles was paralyzed and Raven was- So when Erik returned to Westchester so many weeks after their mission in Cuba, when they were drunk and stoned, Charles kissed Erik and went down on him. The next day, they returned to platonic friendship, Erik unwilling to admit that anything had happened.

Since Charles had moved back into the manor, they seemed to be starting from zero, but here again they were out of order. They had begun to share a bed, but they didn't touch, didn't kiss. Erik wouldn't even look him in the eye while in bed, though he would in other situations.

Then one day, with no apparent reason or warning, while they were sitting in the library, returning the chess pieces to their original places, Erik had announced, "I am going to kiss you," and had done exactly as he said. It had been a brief kiss, eyes and mouth closed, though since then Erik had begun to occasionally tolerate very small amounts of touching, especially if there was no talking, no acknowledgement of any kind.

Charles stretched his arm out across the bed, but Erik rolled onto his side, out of reach.

"So what did Alex want?" Erik asked.

"He's worried about his brother."

"I didn't know he had a brother."

"I didn't either." Charles withdrew his arm, brought it back to his own side.

"So what's the problem with his brother?"

"Maybe nothing. He's been having trouble getting in touch with him, so he's worried that his brother might be a mutant and therefore some unspecified evil may have befallen him."

"That's not much to go on."

"My thoughts exactly."

Erik rolled back across the bed to face Charles. "So when do we leave?"


Regarding Petra's schooling: In the modern United States (as well as in many other nations), there are laws which guarantee disabled individuals the right to an education appropriate to their abilities at public expense. These laws were not yet in place in the first half of the 20th century, so a severely disabled individual like Petra would have only attended school if her parents were quite wealthy. Sadly, this greatly contributed to the likelihood that such individuals would be institutionalized.