Pain was what woke Erik - a terrible, permanent-feeling pain, like his head had fallen in half. He tried to open his eyes, found it hard. Tried to move, found it impossible. He could taste and smell his own blood. He got a blurry impression of khaki-painted metal, blue sky, and the deafening, agonising roar of a rotary engine, before his view was obliterated by a lantern-jawed, crew-cut face looming over him.

"Holy shit, Cap, he's waking up!"

"What?! Half his fucking skull's caved in!"

"Tough motherfucker, sir!"

"Tranq him. Now."

Erik realised they - whoever they were - were talking about him. He struggled feebly against his restraints, groped uncertainly with his power for the metal that surrounded him. The floor tilted.

"Fuck! Stryker, do it now God damn it! I don't care what the medic says, we can't afford him waking up in here!"

Erik felt a sharp scratch in his bicep, and the angry, voice faded away; blood-red circles pinwheeled crazily before his eyes, until he drowned in them, fell into darkness.

When he next awoke, white light sliced through his mind like an axe. He cried out in pain, and a child-sized man with a thick brown moustache leaned over him.

"More morphine, please, Deanne." Instantly, the pain receded, replaced with a floating, otherworldly feeling, as if nothing very much mattered at all. The little man tutted.

"Really, Captain, you've made an awful mess of him. We'll be lucky if he survives. Was this really necessary?"

"My orders were capture or kill, sir. You know what he can do. We had to take him down hard."

"Hmm, yes, our overreliance on metal as a material for tools - both in your industry and mine - does present certain challenges with this subject. Analysis of pain response and so on will be near-impossible. I suppose a certain amount of damage was unavoidable. But a little finesse next time perhaps? There are plenty of ways to incapacitate a subject without stoving his head in." A fussy cluck of the tongue. "And you weren't able to secure the female subject?"

The second voice sounded embarrassed, defensive.

"No sir. There was another one, the teleporter-" the little man cut him off irritably.

"Please spare me a catalogue of all the subjects you have failed to capture. I'll read it in the report."

The reply came through what sounded like gritted teeth.

"I lost four good men trying to take that thing down sir. And I've got another who won't ever walk again after what that bitch did to him."

"Fortunes of war, Captain. This is a war, you know, or hadn't you noticed?"

The soldier's voice rang with resentment and distaste.

"In a war, we kill our enemies clean, sir. This looks more like some kind of screwed-up science project to me."

Erik tried to pull his thoughts together, tried to take in enough to help him understand where he was, what was happening. But his brain seemed to be made of butter, his thoughts soft and slippery.

"Captain, do try not to be obtuse. In the field, do you not perform reconnaissance? We must understand our enemies, so that we can kill them better. Think of my work with the subjects as a more sophisticated form of intelligence-gathering. Now please don't let me detain you - and Captain, find me the female. Her abilities are extraordinary - I really would like to examine them under laboratory conditions."

Raven, Erik realised through the fog surrounding his mind. He's talking about Raven. Have to protect her... Charles... never forgive me if she's harmed..

He made a confused noise of protest, lashed out with his power. A crash of equipment and a crazy beeping began.

"Ah, no, this won't do I'm afraid. Deanne, sedation please."

Erik bucked on what he now realised was an operating table. Pain tore through his head like fire, and he screamed as unconsciousness claimed him.

He didn't know how many hours or days he spent like this – ratcheting back and forth between oblivion and brief, nightmarish interludes of painful awareness, swiftly terminated by the ever-present figures that poked and prodded at him. These moments of consciousness grew more frightening as they became sharper; time had no meaning, but he knew he was getting stronger. All that poking and prodding was clearly having the desired effect – saving and restoring him - but to what end? Finally, Erik was aware enough and afraid enough to try feebly to escape – this resulted in a blank spell so prolonged that when he woke up, he had a new beard. He was no longer flat on his back strapped to the operating table, but was instead curled up in a corner of a concrete prison cell. He lashed out with his power, felt for steel running like arteries through the concrete, for lead in the frame of the sheet glass panel over his head, for nickel in the buttons of the guards standing silent sentry beyond it.

Nothing.

He couldn't truly believe it. Most people didn't notice it, but to someone like Erik, metal was everywhere. He didn't need much – a paperclip, a ball-bearing was enough, would sing out to him from its hiding place. His power was like a sixth sense – the warm thrum of metal answered its most delicate enquiry into his surroundings, sometimes light and sometimes loud but always there. But now, it was absent. It was like trying to kick something that wasn't there. He felt unbalanced, rootless, like a balloon with its string cut. Except there was nowhere for him to drift to. He was trapped.

Trapped. Helpless.

Erik's chest tightened, his breathing grew ragged. The memories of Shaw's experiments, that he had pushed down inside him and buried with everything he had – his pain, his anger, his love for Charles, his hatred of the humans, his joy in his power – came rushing to the surface and consumed him with a soul-killing terror. A scream pressed against his lips.

Stop. No. Stop. Calm your mind.

For a split-second, he could have sworn it was truly Charles, inside his head. He no longer had the helmet, after all. But no. He would know that sensation anywhere – Charles's sweet, soothing mental presence that somehow felt and smelt of him, tea and toast and tweed and sex and sunlight. This was only the sound of his voice, a ghost of Charles that Erik had internalized, so much a part of him had Charles become.

It was a voice he had had to angrily shake off before now, when he was about to kill a man or destroy a building or teach a child how to turn their power into a weapon. Stop, Erik. Don't do this. There has to be another way, a better way. How he had fought to be rid of that voice. But now, in his need, he clung to it like a lifeline.

Calm your mind. Breathe. Wait.

Slowly, painfully slowly, oxygen filled his lungs, and the spasm in his chest loosened slightly. He stood up, and methodically walked the length of his cell, from left to right, from top to bottom, measuring it in strides, breathing carefully in time with his pace, trying to empty his mind. He kept walking, kept counting, until the worst of the panic attack had subsided, until dread lay like a deadweight at the bottom of his heart instead of strangling him. It seemed to take a long time. He did not begrudge it. Time, it seemed, was the only thing he had now.

And it would remain so, in abundance, for the best part of a decade.