Madeline jogged alongside Erik, trying not to wheeze. She was finally getting stronger, she decided, as her breathing began to settle into the familiar rhythm. A month ago even, an afternoon training with Raven would have wiped her out. Now she could take the almost pleasant ache suffusing her incipient muscles, could keep pace with Erik's long strides that would have once outstripped her.
They had started running together almost by accident. Raven had suggested a combination of strength training and cardio for Maddy, so she had started running round the grounds every evening. And kept bumping into Erik doing the same.
At first, he had seemed irritated by her presence, and she had done her best to hang back if she saw him up ahead of her - which was a bit futile, as he would then lap her ten minutes later, glaring at her as he barrelled past. After a while, however, she noticed that he was falling into step with her, running just ahead or just behind. She found she liked to hear the echoing crunch of his tread on the gravel, the metronomic huffing of his breath, in time with hers - it was almost companionable.
The one day, he was waiting for her by the kitchen door. They had made that first circuit together in a wary silence, parted without exchanging a word. Gradually, he unbent enough to give her tips on her breathing and pace; she would pass some innocuous remark about the weather or her day, try not to take it personally if he just grunted or didn't respond. And ever so slowly, conversations began to bloom between them as they ran – disagreements about the books that Charles had given Madeline to read; debates about current affairs – after so many isolated years, Madeline was a voracious consumer of the newspapers; and eventually, tentatively, they began to discuss the demons that they had in common – not directly at first, but by oblique reference.
They didn't speak of surgeries, experiments. Instead they spoke of shared dislikes – of feeling trapped; of vaccine shots; of people leaning over them. They spoke abstractedly of loneliness, Erik reluctant to give himself away, Madeline anxious not to push him back into himself. More recently, they spoke about their families – or rather, Erik did. Maddy only had her sister to talk about, which she did with such wistful sadness Erik hadn't asked her about it again. But over time, she learnt about his huge extended family of cousins and aunts. His eccentric bachelor Uncle Chaim, who had owned a fancy restaurant that he wanted Erik to take over when he grew up. His beautiful older sister Rut, who had just got her first job as a secretary when the Nazis came to power. His stern, hard-working father, greatly respected by the Jewish community of Dusseldorf.
And finally, haltingly, he had told her about his mother, Essie. How she had cared for their whole family, had been its beating heart. How when the soldiers came to their neighbourhood, breaking doors down, herding people out into the street like cattle, she had stood in front of Erik, shielding him with her own trembling body. How she had defied them when they tried to tear the two of them apart boarding the train, not even letting go of him when they had hit her with a rifle butt. How she had given him her share of the meagre supply of food and water on the long journey, tried to keep his spirits up, assured him that his father and sister, who had been out at work when the order came to clear the ghetto, must have gotten away (they hadn't, had been shipped off to another camp and killed, as Erik was too later learn). How she had never let him see her cry, until that awful moment at the gate when he'd been dragged away from her, forced to go with the men. How she had been murdered and why.
Madeline had listened as he had described Klaus Schmidt, the crude way he had tried to drag Erik's power to the surface by threatening his mother, how he had tossed her life aside like it was nothing when it had become clear it wouldn't work. She was reminded powerfully of Fiskel – that same cold-eyed pragmatism, that same callous disregard for anything that didn't serve his purposes. She had tried to empathise with Erik's rage, to find an answer for him when he demanded: "Why aren't you more angry about what was done to you? You went through just the same, for longer. Your family taken away, your body brutalised for others' gain. Why is it you don't think of revenge?"
She had given this question the thought that it deserved, sat down atop a fallen tree by the side of the track. He had sat beside her, watching her intently. Finally, she spoke.
"I'm angrier for you, I think. For me, I'm mostly sorry. Before I came here – my life was so thin. So sad. First those young years preparing to be used, hardly any identity at all. Then growing up in hospital – the same four walls, the same bland food, the same vacuous TV, the same three shit books to read for thirteen years – it was barely a life at all, really. But nothing was ever taken from me. I never had a family, a future planned, never lost anyone I loved who loved me because of Fiskel. Well, except Jessie I suppose, but if it hadn't been for him, I would have lost her anyway. I guess, for that at least, I'll always have to be grateful to him." Her mouth twisted around the word, but she went on. "It's not the same for you. You had everything. And Schmidt took it all away. It's no wonder you're angry. You should be." She drew a deep breath.
"But you can't hold on to it forever, Erik. Any more than I can just hold on to feeling sorry for the stunted person that I was. If we do that, then we might as well never have gotten away – we're still as trapped as we were, it's just it's our own minds locking us in, as much as those four walls ever did. It's like my running, my working out with Mystique. I know I'm not as good as I should be; I know that's because I spent the years I should have been out growing - getting strong - strapped to a hospital bed, getting cut on. It makes me so frustrated, thinking of all that wasted time. But I can't let that stop me moving forward; I can't let it stop me being happy, stop me running, stop me fighting – no matter how bad I may be at it. If I do that, I'm just letting him win."
She had said all this in a rush, expecting him to interrupt, to argue, or to simply get mad and stalk away. But he had looked thoughtful, not angry. He had attempted a sarcastic smile.
"Are you sure Charles hasn't parachuted into your head?" he jibed. But she could see her words had affected him.
"You might want to try listening to him. If anything could help you to let go of all that anger, I would have thought it would be him, the very fact of him. I mean, think about it: if the war had never happened; if you had taken over your uncle's restaurant in Germany; if you had never met Klaus Schmidt – you'd never have met the professor either, would you?" Erik had blinked, and she realised this had never occurred to him before.
They had left it at that, and from then on their running chats had dwelt on other, less intense topics. But since that day, she had thought she'd noticed something lighter about Erik, a freedom to his manner with her that hadn't been there before. She knew she'd broken through a wall, that he trusted her now as he didn't trust many people; but she was also aware that the bridges between Erik and the people that he loved were fragile, and she took care not to burden hers with more than it could bear.
Today, for example, she knew that there would be no small talk, no playful quarrelling. She almost wondered why he'd come got her at all – he was clearly unhappy, in a way she hadn't seen before. He ran as if he was trying to punish the ground for being there, and a muscle in his jaw kept twitching. He looked tired, and old, and sad, and so angry it almost frightened her. So she ran silently in step beside him, hoping to just get through the run without him blowing up.
Unfortunately, her hamstring had other ideas. With a sudden cry of pain, she collapsed onto the ground, clutching her left leg to try and quell the spasms in the overworked muscle. Erik almost tripped over her.
"Are you alright?" he asked, alarmed. She nodded, gritting her teeth.
"Cramp," she managed, pulling herself up to a sitting position.
Erik knelt down before her and said brusquely "Let me see." Then he began to massage her hamstring, briskly working the stiffened muscle until it began to soften.
At first all Maddy felt was pain, and then a heated glow began to spread from Erik's strong, capable hands, a glow that radiated through her whole body, settled in the pit of her stomach. She found that she was staring at his hands, trying to disassociate them from the powerful sensation sweeping through her.
She felt like she had the time that Charles had played her some opera – Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, he'd told her, Au fond du temple saint. It was a duet about friendship, he said, two men agreeing to renounce their love for the same woman and remain true to each other. She couldn't understand a word, because it was in French. But as the music had risen up in velvet waves around her, the horns stirring below the voices, the beauty of the sound and the passion of the singers passing through her like some slow electric shock, she had become almost terrified by its physical effect on her. Her heart was pounding, the blood rushed up into her face, her eyes slipped shut to try and hold back tears that started in them without her knowing why.
She had never heard music, real music, before, only the tinny soundtracks of soap operas or melodramatic movie scores. She hadn't known how to handle the wave of foreign feeling that took her over.
And she didn't know how to handle the ripples of alien pleasure Erik's touch provoked in her now.
Maddy's body had never been her own – she had spent her life being poked and prodded, pricked and probed, cut open and stitched up by a cast of strangers. But for all that, she had very little experience of being touched – really touched, for the sake of touching. Kisses, hugs, strokes, hand-holding. After Jessie, before the School, her body had been treated like a tool, like a site, and that is how she'd come to think of it herself – detached from her, the real Madeline. She felt no special love or hate for it – this thin, scarred vessel for her soul. Even her training with Raven and her running worked on that principle – she did it simply to hone the container, to better protect that essential self.
But now the barrier was breaking down, her body overriding her mind just as, when listening to the opera, her mind had overridden her body, making her uncomfortably aware of their concomittance, their inseparability. It was as if Erik were reaching right through her skin and seizing hold of everything that made her who she was, holding her soul between his hands. If she were to give in to it, she was certain, he would be able to read the tumult of her emotions like Braille from her treacherous body. She jerked away.
"Thank you. It feels much better now." He had to hear the panic in her voice, she thought, the high unnaturalness of it. But as she pulled her knees up to her chin and glanced apprehensively at him, she realised that he was so still deeply wrapped up in his own unhappy reflections that he hadn't noticed hers at all. She forced herself to get a grip, pushed her confusion firmly aside and put a hand on her friend's shoulder.
"Erik, what's the matter? You seem so…"
He answered so readily that she realised how much he needed to talk about it. He began pacing back and forth in front of her, spitting his words out as if they tasted bad.
"I just heard that Azazel had to break a seven year old girl out of a high security mental hospital is what's the matter. The girl can see the future, so her parents decided she was insane, checked her into the madhouse, and threw away the key. In Ancient Greece, she would have been a high priestess, worshipped, exalted. In this so called land of the free, this age of tolerance and equality, they lock her up like an animal."
She nodded, understanding. "I heard – how awful. But she's alright now?" Erik snorted.
"Well, they threw her in there when she was just four, so she barely has speech. Her family abandoned her. She's been left to rely on the mercy of strangers, to be rescued and raised by her own kind. So no, Madeline, I don't think she's 'alright'." She shrank back at the venom in his tone. But then he turned to look at her, and she could see that he was clinging to his anger as a shield against despair. "I'm not alright," he admitted, and sank back down beside her with a sigh.
They were sitting at the crest of a low hill behind the house. Madeline sometimes came up here, just to look at the sturdy grey stone building, nestling in the green palm of the grounds like an egg in a nest, so sheltered, so safe. Erik stared at it now as well, but his face evidenced none of the comfort Maddy drew from the sight.
"Sometimes I don't know what we're doing here. Charles goes to Cerebro, looks for suffering mutant kids to give a home to – but it's not enough; it can never be enough. One life here, one life there, snatched from the shadows into the light. What about all the rest of them? Not just the abandoned children, but all of the mutants all around the world, living in fear, hating themselves, afraid of their powers? What about the ones not even born? We should be making the world a better place for them to come into, not just cleaning up the mess of lives the humans make! We should be securing the future for them, for all of us." He paused for breath, exhaled an angry sigh. She had heard him talk like this before, but never so vehemently. It had to be something more than the child, she realised. She waited, let the silence pull his words into it.
"Charles," he finally said, bewildered frustration lacing the name. "He was so damn satisified with himself. For bringing in another waif out of the wind. He isn't stupid; he's the smartest man I know. So how can he not see that we're just fiddling while Rome burns?" The reference escaped her, but his meaning didn't. She opened her mouth, then shut it again, not knowing what to say, who to defend.
She had never made progress on this point, caught between Charles and Erik's views on how the cause of their kind was better to be advanced. By instinct, she was drawn to Charles's… well, humanitarianism probably wasn't the right word. But the gentle, optimistic telepath's idefatigible faith in the possibility of coexistence – of integration, dialogue and peace – was extremely alluring to her. And Erik's confused evolutionary arguments failed to stand up to even the basic biology she had assimilated in her lessons with Hank.
However, when she found herself making Charles's case to Erik, or more often to Mystique, she was finding it harder and harder to patch the holes in the argument, to counter their ever-growing store of evidence that the more humans knew about mutants, the more they seemed to fear, hate and exploit them. And so for once she didn't disagree with Erik. She stared down at the school, bathed in soft, lilac light, and felt chilly tendrils of fear curl round her heart, the seeds of which had been sown that afternoon by Raven with her prophesies of war. Erik pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbed the dark circles under his eyes.
"He just doesn't understand. The danger we're all in. What we're going to have to do to survive. He's always been able to hide, behind his human facade, behind his money. He doesn't know what it is to be marked out, persecuted, hunted down." His mouth tightened, one fist clenching around a clump of grass. "And that's just not good enough, not any more! We need him to lead us, to fight for us. He could do so much – he could win this war before it ever begins. Control the minds of a few key players, eliminate our main antagonists, place our people where decisions are being made - he could do most of it within a week, from his study. But he's too squeamish about the humans' free will to secure our safety. And then he has the gall to act disappointed in me for simply pointing out the truth – that peace is not an option, just a delaying tactic, and that while we bury ourselves out here in the country the humans are preparing to wipe us out!"
Madeline blinked. She'd never heard Erik so openly castigate Charles before. She knew, of course, that their world views were almost diametrically opposed. But that didn't seem to matter when weighed against the steady certainty of their love for each other. You couldn't be long with the two of them without being drawn into it, like a meteor into the gravitational pull of the sun. The way Erik's eyes followed Charles around a room covetously. The way Charles always seemed to hear and appreciate the humour in Erik's acid asides that put everybody else's noses out of joint. The way, when they thought themselves unobserved, Charles would take hold of a fistful of Erik's shirt and yank the tall, forbidding man onto his lap, provoking an undignified yelp followed by rumbling laughter. They way Erik's eyes softened only when they were gazing into Charles's. What did it matter if they argued constantly and furiously about everything from class sizes to the choice of wine to have with dinner? The love that bound them, wrapped around them, seemed stronger than any division could be. Maddy relied upon that certainty, as much as any of the younger children, who gigglingly called the pair "Dad and Dad." And so she was alarmed when Erik repeated "He doesn't understand; not just the way that things are; the way I am. Sometimes I think the only man who ever really understood me, or understood what we are up against, is dead."
"Who do you mean?" she asked. Erik's eyes hardened.
"Klaus Schmidt. Or Sebastian Shaw, as he was calling himself at the time when I killed him."
The air left her lungs as if she had been punched.
Maddy had never revised her initial impression that Erik was a dangerous man. No matter how close they had become, or how much they had in common, she had retained (as usual) a perfect memory of the moment they had met. She knew without a doubt that at the moment he had thought she posed a threat to Charles, he would have killed her without a second thought. And Raven, Hank and Charles had all at times alluded – with defensiveness, bitterness and sorrow respectively – to things that Erik had done. Even so, she was shocked, saddened. But Schmidt? If anyone deserved to die… but wait. What did he mean about Shaw?
"Sebastian Shaw? Raven told me about him – the leader of the Hellfire Club. But he was a mutant! That was Schmidt?" Erik nodded.
"That's how Charles and I met – both of us chasing Shaw, for different reasons. Me because he killed my mother, Charles because he planned to wipe out the whole of humanity. So you were right, that thing you said to me a while ago – if it hadn't have been for Shaw, I wouldn't be here now, with Charles. But equally, if it hadn't have been for what Shaw did to me and mine back when he was calling himself Klaus Schmidt, Charles and I might have been on opposite sides of that fight." He sighed, then shook his head.
"No, I don't really believe that. That might have been how it started, but he'd have gotten to me in the end, damn him, with his eyes and his voice in my head and his bloody goodness. I could never have resisted Charles, not for long."
The tortured tenderness in Erik's tone robbed Maddy of speech. She felt as if she was looking at him naked, felt guilty somehow, as if she was seeing what she should not, what she had no right to. He was staring into the distance, no longer seeing her, almost talking to himself.
"It's funny; we're so unalike. But from the minute that we met, I felt like we had never been apart – like he had always been there, hiding somewhere in the dark at the back of my mind, and someone had just turned the light on. It was supposed to be the two of us – side by side, fighting for our people. But then in one stupid moment, I ruined everything. Now I'm a murderer, and he's in a wheelchair, and I feel like every day we're getting further from that future that should have been ours, walking into this wrong life, becoming the wrong people. I f we could just get back to that moment, before I killed Shaw with Charles's mind inside him, before he stupidly threw himself in front of that bullet to protect me-" He broke off, agitated.
"That's most of what it is, I think. It must be – that he is afraid. He's lost so much, because of war, because of me. He's frightened to lose more. So he pretends the battle can be headed off, that conflict isn't coming for us whether we instigate it or not. I could have persuaded him, in time, if-" He surprised her by suddenly seizing her hand.
"If you could only help him, help us, if your gift can give Charles back his legs, if we could only get back to the start-" He broke off abruptly. He actually covered his mouth with his hand, obviously aghast at what he'd said.
All the blood drained into Maddy's feet, leaving her cold and tingling. Her eyes went round with shock and horror.
Stupid. She had been so stupid.
Erik, looking appalled, gripped her hand tighter, tight enough to bruise. "Madeline, I didn't mean – It isn't what you think. Charles would never – I would never-"
She pulled away from him with all her strength, began to run. She heard him shouting after her in a panicked voice she barely recognised: "Madeline, wait, please!"
But she was gone.