Chapter One
"Take it off."
"No."
"Don't make me do something I'll regret. Take it off. NOW."
"No. Not this time."
The hospital is cool and very, very white. A normal person would say that it's quiet, up here on one of the highest floors, in the private room with the nice thick walls. But Charles isn't a normal person, and this is the first time in three days that he hasn't been sedated. He's stuck in between unconsciousness and full clarity- he's drugged up to the gills, and his control is loose and weak. There's a woman giving birth in the room below him, and a young yellow boy with no hair and hollow eyes dying of cancer on the next floor, and a girl with her bone sticking out of her arm in the emergency room. Their pain is his pain, their fear and anxiety and joy reflecting in him. He wishes they would all shut up. He has his own problems to deal with right now, and he's having a hard enough time already without hundreds of other people screaming in his head.
He goes to curl into a ball, to pull his legs to his chest like he would do when he was a kid, but nothing happens and he remembers. He reaches over to the bedside table, straining until his fingers finally curl around the little orange pill container. It takes him a moment, fingers fumbling and brain fuzzy (and so LOUD), until he can open the lid and gulp down two of his new favorite tablets, blue and round and dry on the back of his tongue.
He lies back against the pillow and screams inside his mind, trying to block the white noise from the rest of the hospital's occupants as he waits to fall asleep.
Footsteps echo through the long empty corridors of the mansion, clacking against the polished wood floor. Moira's dressed professionally in a skirt and suit copied straight from Jackie Kennedy's wardrobe. She stops outside an oaken door and knocks.
"Go away," A voice growls from inside. Moira frowns.
"It's official United States business."
"I'm not an American citizen; I have no duty to your government. Leave."
"It's about Charles."
There's a pause, and then the doorknob begins to turn, the knocker lifting. Moira just has time to step out of the way before the door is pulled open by an invisible force to reveal Erik, arms crossed and glaring darkly. "Speak your piece."
Scowling right back, Moira pushed past him into the darkened room. "I need his files. The ones on Shaw and the rest of the Hellfire Club."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"We've got the three that were on the sub in custody, but we need to know all about them if we're going to contain them properly. We're having a hard enough time with the teleporter as it is. I know the files are here somewhere; don't play dumb, Erik-"
"Mr. Lensherr." He says through gritted teeth. "Only people I like call me Erik."
"Truthfully? I don't care what you want me to call you." Moira's voice is cold as she glances over her shoulder at Erik, pouring a finger of whiskey from the tumbler on his side table into a stainless steel-rimmed shot glass. "And I would prefer it if you didn't like me at all. Just give me the files and hopefully we'll never have to speak to each other again."
The glass flies out of her hand when she goes to take a drink and drops squarely into Erik's outstretched palm. He drains it in a single gulp before it floats away, dropping to the ground with a clatter. "I think you should leave now, Ms. McTaggart."
She strides out angrily, and if her mutant powers were that her eyes could literally shoot daggers, Erik would be a dead man. She pivots on her heel just as she's crossed the threshold.
"Do you think he's going to just let you stay here, after what you did?" There's a note of steel in her voice: metaphorical metal, the only one that Erik can't control. "Even if he does, none of them will trust you. How good is a house divided, Mr. Lensherr? How many lives do you really think you can save with only the fragments of a team?"
He is silent, his face dipped in shadow.
"We can help. We just need this information, please." She's down to her last card. "Isn't it what Charles would want?"
The door slams an inch away from her nose.