Erik put the knife down, but Mystique still approached him carefully. She was still getting used to this new version of him, feeling out the new boundaries of their relationship. While he had been with Charles – while she had been with Charles – they had both been afforded a certain license. Raven could afford to play the cheeky little sister, pushing Erik's buttons blithely in the total certainty that he would never do her any harm. And Erik had been able to tease and patronize her, like a brother would, like Charles did, to treat her like a silly little girl rather than assess her as the potential power that she was.
Now both of them were being forced to reappraise each other on their own terms; moreover, both of them were having to rediscover themselves as well – the fundamental bedrock of their natures without Charles's ameliorating influence. Mystique wasn't sure yet she liked what she was seeing – in either of them. She had forgotten what it was like to have to be so wary – so calculating. She had thought she'd left that side of her behind, outside the walls of Charles's home over a decade ago. She didn't like how naturally it came to her to be constantly alert to unexpected noises, to changes in body language, to be always watching for a threat. How instinctively she had approached Erik with the silence of a hunted thing – or a hunter. She tried now, not entirely successfully, to reinhabit her old skin, to channel the brash confidence of Raven, Charles's Raven.
"Azazel's gone to bed. But somehow, I don't think we're done yet, do you?" She swung into a chair opposite Erik, leant her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. He hesitated for a moment, and then nodded his head in acceptance, looked into her eyes.
"No, we're not done yet. I wasn't fair to you before. It was just a shock, seeing you here. I never planned for you to get involved."
"Because of- because of him?" Erik's head had come up sharply as she began, but he ducked his head in silent appreciation when she reconsidered, avoided mentioning her brother's name.
"Yes, partly. I know you understand the importance of what I'm trying to do here. But he's already lost so much, Rave- Mystique. I know what that's like. I didn't want to take you from him too. I still don't." He looked at her obliquely, and then seemed to steel himself before saying quietly: "How is he?"
She considered lying, saying something comforting. But that was what Raven would do, a sister, a friend. Erik needed a soldier, someone who he could trust to tell him hard truths. Mystique looked Erik in the eye and said: "Bleeding."
She said it without judgment, without intonation of any kind. But the word still lay between them like a corpse on the table. A muscle twitched in Erik's jaw as he took the word like a blow. He shook his head once, as if trying to shake away a fly, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, then clenched his teeth so hard she heard them click like china plate. There was a long silence, and then he cleared his throat, began to talk of other things, and she knew that this would be the beginning and the end of their conversation about the man they had both left behind. She didn't know if she was frustrated or relieved.
"If you really want to be here, then you have to commit to it, Mystique. There's no going back. I can't afford to lose Azazel over you – to be honest, at this point, he's the only real soldier I've got. Did you know he fought with the anti-Nazi partisans in the Ukraine?" Erik shook his head wonderingly. "And somehow he ended up killing for Sebastian Shaw. I don't know for sure whether he's idealistic and easily led, or just bloodthirsty; maybe both. You'll have to let me know sometime, if you ever work him out. Either one works for me right now."
Mystique decided to change the subject, feeling vaguely embarrassed about how little she really knew about the man who shared her bed. She charged her tone with sarcasm.
"What about all those rescued recruits you were bragging about upstairs, these 'mutant brothers and sisters' so keen to fight for the cause?"
Erik had the grace to look embarrassed himself.
"OK, so I was exaggerating a little. Not about the recruits, or their rage. That part is true enough. But most of them are-" He broke off suddenly, cocking his head. Mystique tensed instinctively, relaxed as he did. He stood up, gestured for her to follow. "Well. Come and see for yourself."
She followed him up the rickety stairs, taking care to step where he did as he trod a jerky dance clearly designed to avoid creaking and rotten spots. They went up two flights and then a ladder to an attic room; the stealth Erik employed suggested to Mystique that the doors they passed along the way concealed other sleeping forms than Azazel's. But not everybody in the shack slept. The higher they climbed, the louder it got – a gentle but persistent moaning, a sound of chronic pain that cut right through the adrenalin of the day and the carapace of bravado she had begun to cultivate, spoke to the bone-weariness and the little girl fear in her and made her want to run away. As they rose through the attic hatch, she tried to steel herself – for what, she wasn't even sure – only knew when she was greeted by the smell of antiseptic and blood and sickness, the tear-streaked face of the mutant girl leaning over one of the cots against the attic wall.
Erik was already beside the girl, who couldn't have been much more than fourteen, speaking to her in a low, reassuring voice. As Mystique, gingerly approached, the girl looked up into his face and Mystique flinched. One of the girl's eyes projected out from her face on a cone of irridescent scales, rotating rapidly to take in Mystique and then look questioningly at Erik. But where the other eye should have been was only a depression crowned by a livid scar. Mystique tried not to stare.
"Cerys, this is Mystique, a friend. She'll be joining us here." The girl nodded distractedly, then clutched Erik's arm, pulled him closer to the cot.
"He won't wake up. I've tried; but he doesn't know me. He just keeps moaning. I don't know what to do any more." Mystique looked down curiously – then spun away, her hand over her mouth to stifle a cry. She looked with growing horror at the occupants of all the other cots – about five – filling the attic. Each contained a sleeping mutant in various states of disrepair – some missing limbs, some scarred, one little body of indeterminate gender who looked almost skinned. Most of them were children; all of them were hard to look at. But nothing compared to the wreck of a body in the first cot. She shut her eyes, shoulders heaving, swallowing bile, listening to Erik murmur to the girl called Cerys:
"It's the fever; he's got blood poisoning. We tried the Prontosil. But there are just too many wounds, too much infection. We knew it was always a long shot, Cerys. It isn't your fault." The girl was silent for a moment, and then whispered harshly:
"He was my friend. He was the only thing in that place that kept me sane-" she gave a single, gulping sob, and when Mystique reluctantly turned, taking care to avert her eyes from the cot, she saw Erik had taken the girl in his arms. Her webbed fingers gripped him tightly, and she was so much shorter than he was that her face was pressed almost into his stomach. He squeezed her shoulders hard for a moment, his face unreadable. Then gently but firmly he pushed her away, let her go.
"Chamelea. Don't cry. You have to be strong now. We'll see a lot of friends die before this war is over."
At the mention of her code name, the girl took a deep, shuddering breath, dashed away the trail of tears trickling from her good eye. She straightened her shoulders and lifted up her chin.
"Yes sir."
He nodded in approval, jerked his head towards the bed.
"Say goodbye now. Then go downstairs and get some sleep. There's nothing more that you can do for him; and you're going to need your strength for what's to come." A flicker of hesitation crossed the girl's waxen face – but then she nodded, leaned over the bed. She pressed her hand to the occupant's ravaged face, bowed her head as she sought to quell the quaver in her voice.
"Goodbye Marcus. I'll kill them one day for what they've done to you. I'll kill all of them for what they've done to us."
And then she stood up and dashed from the room, almost falling down the ladder in her need to be gone from the sick room. The hatch closed behind her with a slam.
Erik was standing stock still in the middle of the room, his eyes closed, his shoulders rigid with tension. Then he took a deep breath, turned to Mystique, beckoned her across to the bed.
She knew that her reluctance must show in her face; but Erik's challenge was as plain in his. How could she claim to be ready to fight their war if she couldn't even look at the casualties? She approached gingerly, knelt down beside the bed, looked long and hard at what was left of what had once been apparently a young man with long red hair. The hair was thick and glossy, gleamed in the dim lamplight, seemed almost ludicrously untouched compared to the rest of the boy. She focused on the hair, then steeled herself and slowly let her gaze pan out: to the battered face that might have once been handsome; the burnt, lacerated torso, patched here and there with laughably inadequate but lovingly cleaned and wrapped bandages; the shattered fingers on the long white hands. She took in all of this, then turned her red eyes up at Erik.
"Why?" Erik shrugged.
We don't know. He must have had some mutation they were trying to figure out – that's why they took Cerys's eye, why they do anything they do. But he never told Cerys what it was. And by the time we got to them, he couldn't tell anyone anything at all."
At first, Mystique hadn't been able to bring herself to look at the boy. Now she found herself unable to look away. She reached her hand out to brush back the hair from his face, bit her lip hard enough to draw blood when his eyes snapped open and he seized her wrist in his broken hand. His grip was surprisingly strong, his fever-glazed eyes registering no awareness of the broken bones slipping and popping under the tight sheath of skin. She couldn't break away. She looked up desperately at Erik, who simply shook his head, his eyes hooded.
The boy's breath was coming fast and panicky; she stopped trying to tear herself out of his grip, instead wrapped her free hand around his.
"Hey, hey, it's alright. It's alright. You're alright." He didn't seem to hear her, to see her. His bloodshot eyes stared blindly past her, stared at horrors only he could see.
"I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home."
The cracked, bleeding lips kept moving even after his breath came to shallowly to form the words; he didn't release her wrist; she didn't let go of his hand. It wasn't peaceful. It wasn't quick.
When Mystique stood up again, when Erik met her gaze, something had died behind it. And something else was blazing into life.