Engel – Rammstein: Sehnsucht (1997).


In Erik's experience, most people were idiots.

It was sort of mind-boggling to him that they managed to live long enough to breed. Like the morons at the Amtrak station. He was a twelve-year-old kid with no supervision and no ticket, but he got on the train by picking a random woman (who didn't even look a damn thing like him!) and following her on board.

Ororo wasn't too bright either, he felt. She was nice, she really had been nice to him, but she wasn't doing a very good job of pursuing her goals – unless of course she had additional, hidden goals, though that seemed unlikely. If she really didn't want him to run, the first thing she should have done when she arrived in Manhattan was take away his shirt and his shoes. No shirt, no shoes, no service, right? Moreover, it made him conspicuous. He could get away with a lot by blending in, and he wouldn't be able to do that if he was walking around shirtless. Sure, he could steal a shirt, but that would actually be pretty difficult. Stealing was all about sneaking and it was hard to sneak when you attracted stares.

And she had yet to pick up on one of his most useful tricks: pretending to sleep. He had actually been asleep for a little while, but he awoke while she was chatting with Tony Stark about how one of her other foster kids had seen the man with red eyes. It took all of Erik's self-control to keep still. The guy's name was Jamie and Tony seemed to think he was crazy. Not the best witness, then, but still. It added weight to his argument. Either the names – Charles and Charlotte – were a coincidence and the royt oygn was real, or Erik and Jamie shared a hallucination by coincidence, and the connection between the names was exactly what Ororo thought it was. Not an infallible argument, but a stronger one.

The bigger question was how had the Enemy found this Jamie Braddock? And why had he sought him out? Charles could tell who was special, who had the right predisposition for what the Enemy wanted. Did this mean that Charles was working with the Enemy now? No, they had sworn to each other that they would work to stop him. But what if the Enemy was making Charles help him? What if he was torturing Charles, or controlling him?

Erik swallowed hard. It was strange and lonely in his head, without Charles there to keep him company. And all these stupid assholes didn't seem to care, weren't concerned that a child had been kidnapped, was being used, mistreated.

He had to get out of here. He had to go rescue Charles.

And the one standing in his way, he realized, wasn't Ororo. It was Tony Stark. Erik realized now that he had gravely miscalculated when he came to Stark Industries looking for armaments. He had assumed that he would have to sneak past or deceive some idiots because that's what most people were, but Tony Stark wasn't an idiot, which meant that if he wanted to move forward, he would have to put some effort into winning Stark over.

They were still talking, Ororo and Tony. Erik risked opening a single eyelid. Stark was showing Ororo some kind of electronic widget. It glowed with two tiny points of red. Erik felt his muscles tighten, his belly seize. He closed his eye.


If Erik wanted to go about gaining the support of Tony Stark, he would have to admit that repeatedly threatening to kill him was probably a tactical error. So now he had to make up for lost time.

But how to go about it? Thus far, Stark had seemed as though he were trying to impress Erik, though Erik couldn't rule out the possibility that Stark was so used to everyone bowing down before him that he was simply stymied by someone who failed to kiss his ass. He had seemed genuinely impressed with Erik's mother, though, and guilty that he had addressed the topic so flippantly. If he had been in a foster placement following his father's incarceration, Stark's mother must have been dead or otherwise out of the picture, so perhaps it was a sensitive spot. That could be a starting point.

Erik put on his sweatshirt. It was a little too big for him, which made him look smaller, weaker, more pitiable. He reached down into his pants pockets grabbed a few short hairs – he didn't have very many, but he would make use of what he had – and pulled hard. Tears came to his eyes. Perfect. He rubbed his eyes roughly so they would be red, then made sure to brush the tears themselves away. The goal wasn't to walk up to Stark crying. Erik had always loathed the kids in the hospital who felt the need to broadcast every little thing they felt. No, the goal was to approach Stark as if he had just finished crying and he was trying to hide that fact. Nothing more pathetic than that, and Stark clearly was the sort of guy who got off on being better and more powerful. Erik pulled his hair again. Good, now his nose was a little runny too.

"Hey, um," Erik tipped his head to the side and bit lightly on the left side of his lower lip. That looked embarrassed, right? "Hey, I'm…uh…I'm sorry about all the…" He shifted from one leg to the other awkwardly.

Tony didn't look up from what he was doing, an impenetrable task which seemed to involve manipulating components on a three-dimensional holographic circuit board. He just waved his free left hand in Erik's general direction and said, "It's all good. Just say no to homicide. And that's my public service announcement for the day. I should keep a running tally of these in case I ever get sentenced to community service. Time served and all that."

Erik sniffled and made that faint whistling sound produced by sucking air between teeth and lips. Not trying to sound like he was crying, trying to sound like he was trying not to cry. "Um, so I was wondering if, um, maybe…" Erik looked down and hunched his shoulders together. Was he laying it on too thick? "I never really understood what my mom was working on. She, she always said she would explain it to me when I was older." He raised his head and met Stark's eyes for just the briefest of moments before turning his gaze to the side. "And you…it sounds like you understand it. And I was wondering if maybe, maybe you would explain it to me?" Flattery plus the chance to take pity on a pathetic little orphan. If this didn't work, Erik was going to have to admit he didn't understand human nature at all.


Steve woke with his alarm at 6:05am. He first felt around blindly to his right in an effort to find his cell phone and silence the buzzing, then he felt blindly to his left. No Tony. Apparently Tony never went to bed at all last night.

"Jarvis," said Steve, "where's Tony?"

"Young Master Stark is in the living room."

Well, that was better than the alternatives, thought Steve. At least he wasn't down in his workshop doing dangerous experiments while half-awake, or doing body shots off of Turkish twins. "Are his guests still here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you tell me when they plan to leave?"

Jarvis's voice changed. "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

Steve sighed. The audio clip was apparently imported directly from 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Why did Tony program you to say that?"

"I'm afraid I do not know why Master Stark does the things he does."

"Yeah, that makes two of us. Thanks, Jarvis. Put yourself on standby."

"As you wish, sir."

Normally, Steve started his day with calisthenics, then breakfast, then a shower, but he wasn't about to go walking around the apartment in his pajama bottoms when there was a lady present. No reason to make this more awkward than it already was. He suspected he hadn't come across very well, even before Tony had decided to interrupt with unbelievably embarrassing (and yes, exaggerated) anatomical commentary. And he never really got to say what he wanted to say, which was simply to thank Ororo Munroe for looking after Tony, because Steve genuinely liked the kid and he was genuinely glad he had made it to seventeen alive and basically intact.

Steve stripped and stepped into the shower and marveled at what his life had become.


"Okay," said Tony, "so imagine you have an iPod with infinite memory. It has every sound in existence stored on it, so can it play every sound? No, because some of those sounds will resonate perfectly with a component of the device and break it, like an opera singer breaking a glass. So there's no such thing as an iPod that can play every sound. And in the same vein, you can never have a system of rules that doesn't eventually contradict itself. That's the layman's version of the Incompleteness theorem."

Erik nodded. "But what's that got to do with those qua…quantum tunnel thingies?" Erik was still playing dumb and pathetic, at least a little bit.

"Well, that was the genius of your mother's work." Tony glanced over at him. "You might not realize this, but she was famous. Scholarly journals are going to print obituaries about her."

Erik felt uncomfortable. He had a vague sense that his mother had been an extraordinary mathematician, but it was odd to think that strangers would be mourning her death.

"At any rate, remember what I said about quantum entanglements? That you can have twin particles and they can apparently transmit information faster than the speed of light."

"And it doesn't violate relativity because it's information, not mass or energy," said Erik, showing that he remembered his lessons. There was nothing teachers liked more than feeling useful and effective.

"Right, so what your mom's landmark paper showed was that Incompleteness, the fact that you can never really fully define a system, was what allows these entanglements to exist. But the real genius was in the later papers, when she showed that by manipulating incompleteness, you could theoretically manipulate the entanglements. Which is the basis for the repulsors. They're non-Newtonian devices that take advantage of Incompleteness in macrophysical laws."

Erik nodded as if Stark were fascinating. "That entanglement thing, you said it can send information, right?"

"Uh-huh." Tony was scanning through his files for a good diagram of a repulsor.

"I wonder if people would ever be able to control it. I mean, brains are made of atoms, right?" This was the key, but Erik couldn't allow himself to look tense. It had to sound like just another question.

Tony stopped and looked at Erik. "Yeah, you can believe whatever you like. Some people get into this mystical crap and act like the Lehnsherr Interpretation means that anything is possible, but it's not magic."

Erik tugged on his short hairs again. A few tears would help this conversation along. "Yeah, yeah, I know," he said sadly.

"Ugh, don't cry. Don't…for the love of god, don't start crying, kid. That's not…look, there's…" Tony grimaced. "Hey, how about this, why don't I search for your friend in some government databases – birth records, school records. All right? Okay? Just don't…" Erik let out one more sniffle. "Just stop crying, okay?"


"See, there's no Charles Xavier born in New York state in the past 20 years."


"Come on, Erik," Ororo held out her hand. "We have a train to catch."

Erik followed in silence. No one had thought to search his backpack. They were all idiots.


"Holy shit!"

Steve looked up from his cereal. "What is it?"

"I knew there was something odd about the birth record interface."

"The what? That's not a public database, Tony."

"Forget that. Come here," he beckoned with a jerk of his head as both hands continued typing. "Look, this is the database as I accessed it today. And this-" he switched screens, "is the database as it was one year ago. It's got an extra name." Tony stopped typing long enough to point. "There it is. The voice in Erik's head. Charles Francis Xavier."


Tony's explanation of Gӧdel's Incompleteness theorem is a modified version of the explanation presented in Douglas Hofstadter's classic Gӧdel, Escher, Bach.