Wednesday

Erik woke up suddenly. His face was pressed into the countertop and his head felt like a herd of elephants had trodden over it. It was daylight outside and he could hear the ominous sounds of people stirring out of their beds.

He raised his head. The evidence of last night was scattered around him in the form of far too many empty bottles, and Charles was slumped opposite him, his cheek against the kitchen surface and his hand still wrapped around a half empty whiskey bottle. He was somehow managing to drool and snore at the same time.

Erik recalled, briefly, one of them singing the American national anthem. He rubbed his head in the hope that it might alleviate his headache a bit, then struggled off the barstool and to the sink to pour himself a glass of water. He turned around, gulping the water, to survey the damage. There was an upturned cutlery drawer on the side and all the cutlery was scattered everywhere. He vaguely remembered attempting to make the forks dance with the knives.

Charles snorted loudly, then mumbled something and turned his head on the work surface, leaving a trail of drool behind him. Erik smirked. "You look lovely, darling," he said, which was when Raven came charging into the kitchen. She took one look at the chaos, grinned with malevolent glee and then shouted, "Good morning!"

Charles opened his eyes with a barely disguised shriek. Erik briefly imagined as many different ways of killing Raven as he could.

Charles groaned, pressing two fingers to his head. "Erik, stop it," he said. "And Raven…I hate you."

Raven's grin only got wider. "I thought I could hear shouting last night," she said. "And did someone sing the national anthem?"

Erik rolled his eyes with as much dignity as he had left to him. "I'm going out for some fresh air," he snapped.

"Oh," Charles gasped, "Sean and his flying! Hank!" And he leapt off the barstool and ran out of the room, for all the world as if he hadn't drunk several bottles of whiskey only a few hours ago.

Erik turned on Raven. "Does he get hangovers?"

"Nah," Raven said, shrugging. "Something about the excellent control he has on his mind."

Erik clenched his jaw. "I'm going to kill him."

Erik stood outside for a while and stared at the satellite dish. It refused to move, but his headache got worse. After a few more failed attempts, he gave up the exercise in favour of slumping against the stone balcony and wishing he was dead.

"Hey," said a voice nervously. Erik glanced over. Alex was approaching him, looking about as wrecked as Erik felt. "Hi," he said. "Um. I need to ask you something."

Erik scowled. "I'm not in the mood to be asked things."

His foul attitude was treated the way it was treated by everyone in the house – ignored completely. Alex said, "Yeah, that's lovely and all, but I need to know if you have some."

Erik frowned. "What?"

"If you have some," Alex said. "Because I really need some, I've tried not to want it but I can't hack it anymore, I have to have some. And you seem like the sort of guy who would have a stash."

Erik stared at the boy in complete and utter astonishment. "You think I'm a crackhead?"

"What?" Alex spluttered. "No! I was talking about cigarettes!"

"Oh!" Erik said. And then, "Right."

"Did you think I was on drugs just because I've been in prison?" Alex accused.

"What?" Erik snapped. "No, of course not."

They glared at each other. It occurred to Erik that he and the boy had an alarming amount in common. Too much life experience and not enough trust in other people.

"C'mon," he said. "I've got a few packs in my room."

Half an hour later found them sitting on the steps of one of the more hidden back doors, working their way sneakily through a pack of cigarettes. Alex was complaining about his training. He was surprisingly open about his feelings considering the kind of lifestyle he'd been leading when they'd met him.

"It's all about control, the Prof says," he muttered, lighting another cigarette with the end of his last one. "Well that's all great if you know how to gain control, but I just…I just stand there and it happens." He glanced sidelong at Erik. "How do you get control?"

Erik thought about submarines and satellites, and his complete inability to control either. Instead he said, "My way of controlling my power won't work for you."

"Oh yeah?" Alex retorted. "Why not?"

"Because mine is based in rage," Erik said flatly. "Real rage. Years and years of it. And you don't have that."

Alex bristled. "I might do. I was in prison, you know. A lot. And alone. My family did nothing about it, they wouldn't even visit me."

"My family is dead," Erik countered. "I loved them. I could have done something to stop their deaths and I didn't. You want to know what real pain is, experience that."

Alex fell into silence. Erik got the impression he had once more gone a bit too far. He studied the end of his burning cigarette.

"It still wouldn't work, even if you had that rage," he said. "You aren't naturally predisposed to violence. You're peaceful. You want to help people, not destroy them. So being angry wouldn't help you control your power."

Alex stared at him. "Then what would?!"

Erik flicked his cigarette away. "Probably some sort of emergency." He picked another cigarette out of the pack. "One where you have to control your power or face killing people."

Alex sighed. "Great," he said. "So basically I'm not going to know if I can control myself until I'm in the bloody battle itself."

Erik glanced sidelong at Alex. He was fundamentally a good guy, Alex. It was most unfortunate. Because that meant even though they had so much in common, all that life experience, all that knowledge of what humanity was really like at its dirtiest and darkest, Alex would never see Erik's side of things. He wasn't flawed from the start like Erik. He still had happy memories, people he loved. That sort of thing pulled you away from the kind of horror Erik existed in. It stopped you wanting to destroy people and meant you wanted to help them instead.

Alex, Erik thought suddenly, was who Erik might have been if he'd met Charles a bit earlier in life.

There was a flicker of consciousness at the edges of his mind and suddenly Charles's voice said, Erik, are you smoking?

Shit. All that musing about Charles must have accidentally drawn Charles's mind to his. Erik tried his best not to think about Alex.

Wait, is Alex smoking?! Charles snapped. Erik, did you just give my underage student cigarettes?!

Double shit. Erik flicked his cigarette away. "Time to run," he said. "Charles is on to us."

"Crap!" Alex leapt to his feet. "Which way?"

"Uh." Erik stood up too, trying to work out where Charles had been when he'd spoken to him. "I think he was outside, coming around to back of the house."

Alex took off, Erik right behind him, but they'd barely got to the edge of the house before a flash wearing a grey tracksuit and glasses shot out of nowhere and tripped them both up. They fell face down on the gravel with a groan. When Erik glanced up, Charles was standing in front of both of them, tapping his foot, his arms crossed menacingly. Hank was standing next to him, barefoot and grinning.

"Sodding Bigfoot," Alex groaned.

Charles yelled at them both, a lecture peppered with mental images of their lungs blackening and decaying, then confiscated Erik's cigarettes ("I'll be able to tell if you try and keep any aside, Erik, I'm a telepath") and sent them to the windows to go and watch Sean's first attempt at flight from a first storey window.

Sean fell straight down into the bushes. Erik laughed so hard he thought his ribs would crack.

It turned out that Erik laughing was more terrifying to the others than any of his threats had been, and most of them shot each other alarmed looks before fleeing the scene. Charles merely sighed and went downstairs to help Sean out of the bush whilst Erik leaned on the windowsill and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

They set up the chessboard in the evening and played several sleepy games of chess. Erik was more chatty than he'd been all week, and more mischievous than he'd been in a long time. It was more than a little disconcerting for him. He combated it by drinking more whiskey (hair of the dog and all) and irritating Charles with his chess moves.

"You can't do that, it's an illegal manoeuvre," Charles said at last, after Erik's latest move.

Erik raised an eyebrow. "Yes I can."

"No you can't," Charles insisted, his obsession with being right coming to the fore. "The queen can't go there if - "

"I can," Erik interrupted, "Because I'm me."

Charles glared up at him. He was wearing the expression of a petulant five year old. "Being Erik doesn't mean you can just break the rules!"

"Yes it does," Erik retorted, and was rewarded with a further child-like scowl. He tried not to grin.

Charles sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. "Okay then, what rules can I break?"

"None of them."

"That's not fair!"

"Life's not fair."

They watched each other, poker-faced.

"Fine," Charles said at last, and then, without looking down, moved one of his pieces. "Checkmate," he announced.

Erik stared down at the board. Charles's knight had toppled his king. He couldn't stop his jaw dropping.

Charles sat back smugly. "See? Breaking the rules doesn't always mean you'll win."

Erik tore his eyes away from the board and glared at him. "Is this another lecture about the cigarettes?"

At that, Charles actually threw back his head and laughed. It was so rare to have Erik make Charles laugh that he found himself almost breathless at the sight of it.

"No." Charles said, a broad smile on his face which, suddenly and for reasons Erik couldn't understand, seemed to fade away as Charles looked at him. He turned to take another sip of his own drink - brandy this time - and by the time he'd turned back to Erik, he was smiling again. "You're enjoying it here, aren't you?" he said.

Erik blinked. "No."

"You laughed today," Charles pointed out. "You never laugh but you laughed today."

"Yes, at someone falling out of a window, Charles," Erik found himself snapping. He hated people telling him what he was feeling. "Hardly a nice reason to laugh."

Charles's smile gentled. "Baby steps, Erik. Rome wasn't built in a day."

Erik rolled his eyes. "Spare me," he said, which made Charles laugh all over again.

Erik lay awake for a long time after the chess games, turning over the problems of Alex and Sean in his mind. He needed them to be the best they could be by the time Shaw's next move became obvious to them, and he knew it wouldn't be long before that happened. If he was going to be stuck in a team, he was going to make sure they were good enough not to ruin everything for him. And that meant solutions for both those kids needed to be found. For Erik's own good.

And then he thought about Sean's eagerness at being able to fly. He thought about Alex's desperation to gain some control of himself. He saw their faces clearly in his mind.

Perhaps, he thought with some wonder, his motives for helping them were not as selfish as he'd first thought.

That night, Erik dreamed of one of Shaw's 'experiments'. One he'd often done in their early days. He'd drag two prisoners out of the camp, stand them in front of Erik and fire two bullets, one for each head. If Erik could stop the bullets, they'd live.

At the beginning, Erik very, very rarely stopped the bullets. One day, Shaw had repeated a failed experiment again, with two more prisoners. And then again, and then again, and then again, all day long until there was a pile of bleeding corpses in front of them.

He'd theorised that fear was what could unlock Erik's power as well as anger, fear of people dying like his mother had. Once Shaw had set an example with Erik's mother, he was sure Erik would learn from it and be doubly terrified of others dying. Because Shaw had thought Erik was that human. But something had happened to Erik, some thread of empathy inside him cut clean once his mother was gone. It was only when he turned the experiment around in his head, swapping his fear at the prisoners' deaths for anger at Shaw's existence, that he'd been able to stop the bullets at all. But that had taken many months and many lives.

Erik woke up, hours later, in a curled, shaking ball of nerves. There were gunshots in his head, and he had been screaming and crying, but not out loud. It was young Erik, still lingering in his memories. Young Erik had been wild with helplessness for years and years. At least Erik wasn't that anymore. He wasn't helpless. He wouldn't be, ever again. He had decided that a long time ago.

He was shaking properly now, instead of calming down, and with barely suppressed rage. He wanted to find Shaw, he wanted to find him and give him that ultimate of deaths, the death he'd always dreamed of, he wanted that man's blood on his hands –

Charles said suddenly in his head, Erik, shh. A wave of calm flooded his mind, leaking into every hate-filled thought. Calm your mind, Charles said.

Charles had said that before, the first time they met, when they were up to their ears in freezing cold water and Shaw was in his submarine getting further and further away. Erik had been able to sense it, that huge hulk of uncontrollable metal carrying his chance right out of his increasingly panicky grip, and he wanted to kill him –

I said, Charles interrupted more sternly in his head, calm your mind. Another wave of calm swept into Erik's head, followed by one of reassurance, and Erik felt his muscles loosen, his thoughts unravel. He was dimly aware of Charles's mind curling around his, for all the world as if his body was curling around the back of Erik's. Erik could feel the warmth seeping round his back to his front, vivid enough to make him shiver. It was like a drug, this peace in his head, like morphine.

"You can't just do this to people's minds, Charles," he said out loud, though his voice sounded thick and heavy in his ears. "I want to stay angry."

Save it for training, said Charles's voice, and rest.

"You can't do this to my mind," Erik argued, but he could feel all his coherent thoughts skittering away from him, like insects into dark holes. He melted into the grip of Charles's mind as if he were melting into arms around his chest.

Shh, said Charles simply, and Erik faded back into unconsciousness.

Thursday

The first thing Erik saw the next morning was the satellite dish outside his window. He sat up abruptly. Dawn was barely on the horizon and the room was grey with what little light there was, but Erik was wide awake. He swung his legs out of bed and made his way to Charles's room.

Charles's room wasn't locked, which Erik wasn't quite sure how to take - it indicated such a high level of trust that he felt quite confused. Charles had been in his head, had seen the things Erik had done, all the people he had killed in his life, and yet still kept his door unlocked. It was unthinkably stupid.

When he ventured inside the room all the curtains were closed and there was a hunched up figure in the ridiculously huge bed, snoring lightly.

"I've had a great idea," he announced.

The figure twitched, then groaned. "Erik, it's still the middle of the night."

Erik strode over and sat down rather boisterously on the bed. He heard a sigh of resignation, and then Charles peeled back the duvet covering his face. He was looking distinctly dishevelled, his face very pale and eyes very blue in the pre-dawn light, and Erik's stomach dropped dangerously at the sight of it.

"If it's about Sean, I've already had that idea," Charles said tiredly.

"We need him to jump off somewhere higher," Erik persisted, ignoring him. "Somewhere like – "

" – the top of the satellite dish, yeah, I know," Charles finished. "And if he can't do it, you'll be able to guide him with his belts and buckles and the metal of the satellite dish. So he won't fall at all." He grinned at Erik's put-out expression. "I'd already thought of it, sorry. Can I go back to sleep now?"

Erik hesitated. "I've had another idea about something," he said. "But I'm not sure if you'll like it."

An extremely un-Charles-like expression flickered across Charles's face. It was only momentary but it was there, and Erik recognised it as fear. Charles never showed fear, even if he felt it. He had the courage to grasp hold of it and use it to his advantage. It was something Erik liked about him.

"Oh," Charles said. "Right. Um. What idea is that?"

Erik shifted closer on the bed without really thinking about it. "It's something that would take a lot of trust if it's going to work out. Because it could be very dangerous, and - well pretty inadvisable to be honest."

"Uh," mumbled Charles. "Uh huh."

Erik sighed and swung his legs up on the bed, settling down on the pillows and looking up at the ceiling in an attempt to find the right words. He was distantly aware that Charles, lying next to him, had gone very still. "I think Alex needs to practice on humans," he said.

There was a brief pause from Charles's side of the bed and then he said, "Alex? You want…you were talking about Alex?"

Erik blinked. "Well, yes. I was thinking about how he could gain control of his powers." He glanced over at Charles. "What did you think I was talking about?"

"Nothing," Charles replied instantly. "Nothing at all." He looked, for want of a better word, relieved. All that fear had gone. "So," he said. "Alex. Um. Sorry – practice on humans?!"

Erik sighed. "I knew you wouldn't like it."

"That's unbelievably dangerous!" Charles spluttered. "He's been bad enough about shooting dummies, now you want him to try on people?"

Erik turned his face to Charles. "It's fear," he said.

There was a long pause, and then Charles propped himself up on one elbow, the duvet dropping to his waist. He wore a rather shabby grey t-shirt to bed which shouldn't have been attractive at all. "This is about your dream."

Erik decided not to ask how much of the dream Charles had seen last night. Instead, he replied, "Alex panics about hurting people. Okay? That's why he can't control his power, because he's anxious that he will hurt someone, and that makes him lose control even more. But if we put him in a situation where he is forced to control himself or risk lives, that is how he'll learn that control. Through fear of the consequences."

Charles was searching Erik's eyes and, most likely, his mind as well. "The experiment that Shaw tried on you and that didn't work," he said. "Fear of killing people leads to control of the weapon you're using. But that line of thought didn't work on you and that's part of the reason why you think you're monst – "

"Look, do you think it's a good idea or not?" Erik snapped, jolting up off the bed. "It doesn't have to be as extreme as – as – "

"No, no, I think it's good," Charles interrupted hastily, also sitting up. "No, I think it's good Erik – I think it's good."

Erik paused, halfway across the room and practically ready to flee the place completely. "Right," he said. "Good."

Charles, sat up in the bed, watched Erik with an unreadable expression. "I think I should tweak the idea just a bit though. Make it more about not wanting to hurt people he cares for, people who trust him, rather than making him afraid of killing. Alex has got a good sense of team loyalty, once you get past the bravado."

Erik half shrugged, feeling himself close off from everything he'd been opening up to. "Whatever you like."

"Okay," Charles said, still with that odd expression on his face. "Good."

"Good," echoed Erik, and fled, Charles's eyes following him as he went.

Erik wandered the house aimlessly for a bit, then found Raven lifting weights in the gym in her silly blonde disguise. Feeling irritable for a host of reasons and also not really any of them, he sniped at her about her disguising herself. It had been infuriating him for a while, much like the general idea of hiding away had been.

He'd spent his childhood hiding from Shaw in cupboards and closets and dark places. He never wanted to hide again, from anyone. One day he wouldn't. He would be everything he wanted to be, and no amount of psychological warfare that a certain 'professor' waged on him was going to change that.

Charles was in disguise too, as an innocent, seemingly harmless idiot. He was not any of these things, and it would damage Erik's chance at revenge not to remember that. Erik was here to use these people and get his vengeance at last, that was all. He was not here to help others in distress or allow himself to be mentally influenced by interfering telepaths. He had to remember that.

Restless, he went out into the gardens and tried to turn the satellite dish for a while. He had enough rage bubbling inside him to move planets, he was sure, but the dish stayed firmly in place. He was doing something wrong. Somehow the darkness, which had always been enough previously, wasn't enough for this one task. He had to be better than this. He was sure he was. Always so sure in his abilities even if he was sure of nothing else…until now.

A bit later, when it appeared to have suddenly turned into the afternoon and Erik was leaning exhausted on the stone parapet, Alex appeared behind him. He was flushed and excited from a clearly successful session in the basement.

"I'm not giving you any more cigarettes," he growled.

"What?" said Alex, high on victory that Erik, with his non-moving satellite dish, could not share. "No, man, I wasn't coming for that. I wanted to say thanks."

"Thanks." The word tasted flat in Erik's mouth.

"Yeah," Alex said. "The Prof said you were behind today's task. So I wanted to say thanks."

Erik blinked. He had never been thanked for anything in his entire life. "I wasn't…it wasn't just me. I had the idea we should add people into the mix. I wanted to bring out your fear. Charles was the one who suggested appealing to your compassion instead."

"Oh what, with the whole 'I trust you' thing?" Alex laughed. "Yeah, that was a nicer approach, I guess. We can count on the Prof to be nice though, huh."

Erik turned back to the satellite dish.

"You know, you're not a total dick," Alex added after a pause. "I know people are scared of you and stuff – "

Erik let out a bitter laugh before he could stop himself. "What people? Certainly not you lot. Moira keeps threatening to knit me a hat!"

Alex grinned. "Yeah, but," he persevered. "You're not as bad as you think, you know." He shuffled around in the gravel for a bit and then said, "Just thought you should know."

Erik didn't know what to say. He wanted to ask, did Charles put you up to this? but he didn't want to seem paranoid. And Alex was nice. He liked the kid.

The problem was that he was starting to suspect nice people were not his people.

After dinner, Raven caught all of them with glee and corralled them into the living room. "No chess tonight," she said firmly. "For now is the time of Monopoly."

"Oh no," Charles said and tried to back out of the room, but it was too late – Raven had him in a firm grip. Erik swapped a glance with him but there was no point trying to resist. They ended up crowding the living room together, Raven and Hank perched on one sofa (Hank blushing in an excited tizzy), Sean curled up in an armchair with his arms around his knees, Moira and Charles lounging on the other sofa. Erik sat on the floor near Charles and was unsurprised when Alex immediately copied him opposite. It said something that the two most wary people in the room were the ones who were less inclined to laze about on armchairs and sofas and instead stay close to the ground and out of the line of sight. He flashed a quick glance at Alex and got an almost unbearably wide smile in return. They didn't have to be telepaths to know what the other was thinking.

Raven set up the Monopoly board with a single-minded focus, and Erik recalled what Charles had said about Raven being unnervingly good at the game. This, he thought, could be interesting.

"Right," Raven said. "Everyone choose a playing piece. Erik?"

Erik blinked at the little metal playing pieces in front of him. He'd played Monopoly a few times in his childhood, when some of the Nazis had 'liberated' a board from a charity gift to some prisoners of war in the camp he was in, but he only remembered the basics.

"Battleship," Charles piped up. "Erik'd be the battleship. Obviously." And then, before Erik could glance up at him, he felt Charles's hand land casually on the back of his neck. It was just a light spread of fingers, nothing more, but Erik felt his skin immediately tighten at the touch. He tried to ignore it, but the irritability that had been present in him all day was already sharpening into something worse. He took a breath to calm himself, then silently tugged at the metal of the little battleship playing piece, calling it to his hand. It sat cold and bright in his palm.

The others picked their pieces. Charles was the top hat because "it's the most British piece there is" and his hand did not leave Erik's neck once. Erik got the unshakeable feeling that Charles was skating over his thoughts, using the contact between them to have more control over him, and once he'd got the idea in his head, it wouldn't go away. It was doubtful whether Charles was reading any of his mind at all, but he couldn't understand why else Charles would be touching him like that.

The game started moderately calmly and got more raucous as it went on. Charles and Hank made sensible, boring decisions occasionally tinged with genius moves, Moira played excellently until she got bored halfway through and let it slide in favour of flicking through some paperwork on the desk nearby, Sean only seemed intent on getting the squares of places in London he'd been to, Alex kept gambling away his money on risks that didn't pay off, and Raven trounced them all with no small amount of glee. Erik, who had been trying to play well whilst remembering the rules at the same time, was singularly impressed.

"You have the killer instinct," he said, when Raven, instead of demanding his payment for landing on one of her squares with a hotel on it, insisted that he pay her in properties he owned so that she could have more control of the board. "It's commendable. Most people don't have that. See, you could have the most destructive power imaginable, but if you don't have that killer instinct, it means nothing. It's not all about the power, it's the personality as well." He paused to roll the dice and moved two spaces along, thankfully into one of his own squares. "Of course, Shaw has a destructive power combined with a brutal will, so he'll probably beat us despite our best intentions. Well," he considered this briefly, "I'll survive. Probably Raven will too, if she uses her abilities to their fullest extent. Charles might if he decides to grow a spine, but I doubt he will. The rest of you are more than likely to die on our mission."

There was a long silence. Erik glanced up and realised, firstly, that he'd been speaking his mind out loud and secondly, that what he'd been saying was even more inappropriate than talking about killing useless CIA agents. Only Raven was looking at him, and with a glowing admiration. The rest were staring at the floor or the Monopoly board.

Charles's hand fell from the back of Erik's neck, and suddenly Erik didn't have the courage to look up and see his expression. "Erik's talking about going on the offensive," Charles said at last, breaking the silence in a deadly calm voice. "That's not what we're doing. We're going on the defensive. Our motive isn't about the 'killer instinct' but about saving lives. And I know all of us have the strongest motivation to do that, otherwise you wouldn't be here today and you wouldn't be training as hard as you are." He didn't say so ignore everything Erik just said but it was keenly felt. A couple of the kids started to look a bit more hopeful.

Erik, silently, passed the dice to Moira who was next, and she rolled them. "Damn, Hank, I landed on your square," she said, too bright and cheerful in the silence, and they all lapsed into a relieved squabble about how much she owed him.

After a few rounds, just as the atmosphere in the room had warmed again, Charles stood up. "I think I'm done for tonight," he said. His voice was still perfectly steady. "Raven, you can have my squares – you've got most of them off me anyway."

Raven glanced up at him, concerned. "If you're sure…"

"Sure." Charles smiled, but Erik was sure he wasn't the only one to see how it didn't reach his eyes. "Night, all."

There was a rather disconsolate chorus of 'night' and Charles left the room. He hadn't looked at Erik once.

"Wow, Erik," Raven said, once the door had closed firmly behind him. "I think you've really pissed him off."

Erik half shrugged and pretended to be more interested in wrangling Mayfair back off Sean, but in truth his insides were squirming.

It appeared he had a real dislike for disappointing Charles.

The game ended not long after that, once Raven had, for want of a better word, monopolised the Monopoly board, and she and Erik wandered back to her room together.

Erik was angry with himself - by telling the others how likely they were to die, he was jeopardising his own mission to get to Shaw. If they felt like they might die in the attempt they might drop out and then how would he defeat the man? He needed them. He needed to be more cunning than he was, and yet for some reason he was being impossibly stupid. Why was he warning them?

Raven, in comparison, was more cheery than he had ever seen her, brimming with potential.

"Do you really think I've got the killer instinct?" she asked. The fact that she was asking this with such excitement, Erik thought, answered her question for her.

"Doesn't really matter what I think," he said, more offhandedly than he meant. "That sort of confidence can only come from you."

Raven considered this, then smiled, a broad stretch of lips. "I'll start properly training tomorrow," she promised. She was so earnest that Erik couldn't help but smile in return.

"Good," he replied simply.

Raven paused. She appeared to be waiting for something, though Erik couldn't work out what. "Well," he said, "Good night."

He turned on his heel and marched back in the direction of his own room. Raven's voice said distantly behind him, "Good night, Erik."

That night was one of the worst nightmares, because it was one involving pain. He was strapped to one of the examination tables, the metal cold against his back, and he was focusing on holding an axe just above his throat with his powers. Shaw was plunging needles into his legs one after the other and sometimes in wounds made previously, and Erik was screaming but furiously focusing on that axe, trying his hardest not to let it drop never mind what agony he was, because if it dropped it was all over, he would die, but pain was just pain and he would concentrate through the pain, he would –

Erik! shouted his mother in his head and he woke up screaming, a loud, long scream that only stopped when he regained enough power over himself to clap his hand over his mouth.

He lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of his scream echo into silence. He was lying straight on his side on the very edge of his bed and shivering from head to toe. He could still feel the axe hovering over his neck, he could feel it –

The bedroom door opened, but Erik didn't turn around - he was still shaking so hard he barely had control of his senses. He waited for Charles's inevitable intrusion into his mind, but it didn't come. Instead the bed dipped slightly and Erik was suddenly aware of a very familiar body lying very close to his, the warmth noticeable on his back and yet not touching, and with no one speaking.

Erik took in a quick breath, and another, trying to find the voice to say something, anything, but then an extremely tentative hand reached around and settled on the side of Erik's waist.

Erik managed to stop breathing altogether. Then, slowly, he recovered himself and continued to breath in and then out, feeling the hand on his waist rise and fall with every inhale and exhale. There was a warm tingling all along his side.

After a while it was clear the hand wasn't going to move without his permission, so he took the initiative and grasped hold of it, dragging the arm over his waist. He felt Charles shift towards him so that the front of his body was lined up with Erik's back, his arm securely tucked around Erik. Erik could feel the warmth of him all over now.

Charles let out a little sigh but said nothing, and yet this was somehow enough to unlock Erik's voice.

"Sorry," he whispered, though he was not sure whether he was apologising for waking Charles up again or for what he'd said earlier in the evening. Actually, now he thought of it, he had a lot to apologise for. "Sorry," he said again, for good measure.

He expected Charles to say something, either in his head or in his ear, but Charles said nothing at all. His hand squeezed Erik's though, very tightly.

Erik squeezed back, suddenly aware that his breathing had returned itself to normal.

Not long after that, he fell asleep.

A/N: Fun fact, the Brits actually used to send Monopoly boards to prisoners of war in Nazi camps as 'charity gifts', and these Monopoly boards would have gear in them to help the prisoners escape, like a compass and real money tucked in the fake Monopoly money, things like that. I've always loved the idea so I had to put it in the fic somewhere!

Thank you so, so much for all the reviews and favs, and please continue to do this if you are enjoying the story!

Also this will now be a 4 part story, not a 3 part like I said before. Next chapter in a few days! (already written, just need to edit)