"Madeline! I thought that was you I sensed out there but I couldn't let myself believe it. God, it's good to see you!"
With a smile so wide he nearly split his cheeks, Charles held out his arms. Madeline went into them hesitantly, out of politeness more than anything, blindsided by this reception. She didn't know what it was she'd expected exactly, but it sure hadn't been this – the old Charles, as if she'd stepped through some mystical revolving door back into the past, as if her yesterdays when for a brief time she had felt so safe and loved were being offered back to her inexplicably. And the worst part was, she didn't even know if she wanted them back. Not any more.
Charles might not be the psychic force to be reckoned with that he had been, but you didn't have to be a telepath to sense the girl's unease. He released her, patted her shoulder awkwardly, made a hazy gesture towards a chair.
"Please do sit down. You must be tired."
A difficult silence fell, which they both suddenly broke at once, breaking off as they talked over each other.
"I wanted to tell you-"
"I've so wanted to try to explain-"
"I'm sorry, what were you going to-"
"Please, carry on-"
They shared a strained laugh. Then Charles reached out to her mind tentatively, like someone knocking politely on a door.
Shall I go first?
Maddy nodded shyly. Charles huffed out a sigh, and then impulsively reached out for her hand.
"Madeline, I wanted say to you how sorry I am. I let you down so unforgivably, and I haven't got any excuse. All I can do is hope that you can find it in you to forgive me, to believe that I have changed."
Madeline looked up at him, surprised.
"I didn't come here expecting an apology, Charles. But…" she paused, trying to find a way to be honest without being harsh. "But until just now, I don't think I realised how much I needed one."
Charles nodded, shame-faced.
"Until quite recently, I didn't realize how much I owed you one. You and so many others. But a mutual friend of ours drew it to my attention, in his own inimitable way."
She raised an eyebrow quizzically. He waggled his fingers beside her head, and when she nodded, her mind was filled with a sudden unexpected vision of Erik, Erik standing over her furious in a shaking plane, shouting.
"Angel. Azazel. Emma. Banshee. Mutant brothers and sisters, all dead! Countless others, experimented on, butchered!" His face was tense and trembling. "Where were you, Charles?" Suddenly, his hard grey eyes filled with angry tears, his voice thickened with grief. "WE WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT THEM! Where were you when your own people needed you? Hiding! You and Hank – pretending to be something you're not!" And then the grief melted away, leaving only implacable condemnation. "You abandoned us all."
Maddy flinched as the image faded, caught a whisper of Charles's shame as he withdrew from her mind.
"My judgment day," Charles said, wryly. "I didn't want to listen at the time, of course. But he was completely right. I let my people down. I let myself down. And I let you down too, horribly. I'm sorry."
Maddy met Charles's eyes, appalled.
"My God Charles, what's happened to him? He's not well. I knew that when I heard about what he did to Raven. But I didn't expect this."
Charles nodded, sighed.
"I know. I'm worried about him too. But you have to understand, when we first rescued him from the Pentagon I was still so angry – and I didn't have my powers. And so soon after that, he turned against us, got the damn helmet back. I didn't see it coming at all. It turns out without my powers, I'm terrible at empathy. But then you know that. So I don't really know what he's been through these last ten years; not even Raven really knows. Whatever it was, it was enough to make him think he had to kill his only friends to put things right. So yes, I'm afraid for him. But frankly, at this point, I'm just as afraid of what he might be capable of."
Raven nodded, slowly. Erik. Once, he'd been everything to her. But now? She didn't truly know who he was. She was beginning to wonder if she ever had. She shook her head, turned to look sidelong at Charles.
Although he had a new energy about him – as if the light he had lost after the failed procedure had somehow turned on again – his face was shadowed now the conversation had turned back to Erik. He still loves him, she realised. In spite of everything he's done, and still might do. The thought that might be true – that even Erik, after everything he'd done, might still be forgiven – gave her the hope she needed to make her own appeal.
"Charles. You said you let me down. But I let you down too. I'm sorry I just left like that, without saying goodbye. You deserved better than that. And I'm sorry I never came back. But I couldn't, you see. The things I've done, I didn't think could be forgiven."
Charles reached for her hand again, smiled encouragingly.
"And now?"
She met his eyes.
"Now… I still don't know. Let's say I have hope."
He beamed like a sunrise, like the Charles she used to know, and for Maddy it was a little like coming home.
As Maddy approached the lab, she felt a quiver of foreboding. She hadn't had a real conversation with Hank since she had reluctantly rejected his romantic advances almost a decade ago. She didn't think he would be as ready as Charles to forgive and forget her sudden disappearance, or her continuing silence since then. And certainly she was even more reluctant to tell him than she was to tell Charles the full details of what had happened with Jessie and Fiskel in Omaha – never mind everything else. But unlike with Charles, Maddy had no option but to tell Hank at least the bare facts of the first part. Because of what it might mean for Charles, what they might be able to do for Charles with the new knowledge she had gained so painfully from her experience with Jessie. She squared her shoulders and pushed open the door to the lab.
Her old tutor, friend, suitor, was hunched over a lab bench as usual, squinting down a microscope at something or other. He was, she was delighted to observe, back in his familiar blue form, not under the influence of the serum he had derived from her blood to look normal. Maddy shut the door behind her with a deliberate sound, knowing how absorbed he could get in his work and how he hated to be startled. He looked up distractedly – and froze as she stepped forward.
"Hello, Hank."
He blinked hard, put his glasses back on.
"Hello, Maddy. Wow. You're here."
As she'd expected, he didn't seem as enthused as Charles – stunned would be nearer to the mark. She tried not to be hurt by that – they had a lot of ground to make up, after all. But being in the lab together brought everything back – the easy companionship they had once shared, the passion for the work they had been doing with the sick human children, his endless curiosity about the possibilities of her mutation. How had all that good stuff gotten so lost? How could they now be staring warily at one another, like strangers?
She broke the silence first, gesturing at his petri dish.
"What are you working on?"
He shrugged.
"The usual, I suppose you could say – Raven's DNA. She kindly supplied me with a sample. I want to try and work out how Trask's scientists would have developed the Sentinels on the basis of her mutation; I mean, by all accounts, the future is still somehow safe, even though they did get hold of her blood, but even so it's better we figure out what they would have done before they do, just in case-"
"Woahwoahwoahwoah what? The future? What are you talking about, Hank?"
He blinked.
"Of course, you wouldn't know about any of that. It's kind of hard to explain, and even harder to really believe. But I'll try…"
He gave her a methodical run-down of everything that had happened since a burly black-haired mutant claiming to be from the future had punched his way into their lives. By the time he was done, Maddy was agape.
"Wow. Crazy. Where did he go, the time-travel guy?"
"Nobody knows. Raven rescued him from the bottom of the river where Erik left him, for dead."
He looked sharply at her then, almost challengingly. Seeing she wasn't going to reply, he continued.
"But he split after that – nobody knows where. Charles is still trying to decide if he wants to try and look for him using Cerebro or not – says Logan will find us if he wants us. He's really got a bee in his bonnet about the whole 'free will' thing now, seeing as how it seemed to work out so well with Raven in Washington. He wouldn't even deal with Erik properly, just let him go-"
Maddy could see this working up into one of Hank's resentful rants, and she forestalled him. It wasn't that he didn't have a point; both Charles and Raven had raised legitimate concerns not just about Erik's state of mind, but about the very real danger he might pose to others. But Maddy couldn't have that conversation with Hank. His rancor was too deep, his judgment too one-sided.
"Hank, I need to talk to you. I need to tell you about what happened after I left, about what happened with Fiskel and my sister. I think it might give us something to work with – for Charles."
That intrigued him enough to drop the perennial subject of Erik's many sins for a while at least. And now it was his turn to listen open-mouthed as she relived those horrible, nightmarish hours in Omaha for the second time that day. She spared herself nothing, told him every detail from finding her sister dying to drinking her dry, from brutally killing Fiskel to feeding her blood to Jessica. She tried not to look at his face while she spoke, staring instead at her shoes, the linoleum, the tiles on the walls. When she was done, she nerved herself to look into his face.
She was disappointed but not surprised to see disgust writ plainly in his eyes. How could he feel anything else for the thing she was? Raven didn't, a little voice whispered, stemming the tide of self-hatred that Hank's revulsion had released. No, she didn't, the self-hatred replied. But you didn't tell her everything, did you? Liar. Murderer. She shook the voices away, both of them. There would be time for that later. For now she just concentrated on the other emotion suffusing Hank's face – an irresistible intellectual curiosity.
"It really did make a difference, Hank - the way I took her blood and gave it back. My blood didn't just heal her septicaemia, her wounds, like the kids we worked with who had blood disorders. Her own organs grew back, like mine would have done. She was good as new, as if none of it had ever happened. It was as if my blood really was her blood. She wasn't just healed, she was… regenerated. And permanently."
He had started scribbling on a notepad while she had been speaking, some sort of shorthand, the occasional equation. But then he shook his head.
"It does sound… intriguing." His mouth bunched slightly at the word. "But what makes you think it changes anything with Charles? Your sister is a human – as far as we know. Your blood has never been a problem for humans. Alright, it sounds as if this – method of transmission – does have an exponential bearing on the efficacy, maybe even a game-changing impact.
"But it doesn't address the problem of rejection. You were never drawn to mutant blood; Charles's whole system rejected your bone marrow so violently he went into shock, nearly died. These findings don't give me any confidence the same thing still wouldn't happen all over again, and for nothing."
Maddy's shoulders slumped. He was right, of course. All the issues they had come up against with Charles's transplant still stood. What she couldn't tell him, what no scientist would ever countenance as evidence, was the knowledge that had come over her in her trance as she drained Fiskel dry, drained him to death. The blood remembers. My blood remembering his blood. A knowledge that had only grown with all the years since – that something in the way that she synthesized a person's living blood changed both their blood and hers in a way that went beyond even what happened with a transfusion or a donation. The blood remembers. But she couldn't tell that to Hank, the archetypal scientist. Even to her, who knew in her bones it was true, it sounded like the worst sort of mysticism.
She tried another tack.
"OK, I know, it isn't enough to take a chance on. Not yet. But it's worth investigating somehow, surely?"
Hank pushed his glasses up his nose, a thoughtful frown in his face. Then he shook his head.
"No. No, we can't go down that road again. Not after everything that's happened. Charles has finally come to a place where he can accept what has happened to him, where he's chosen his gifts over his legs, where he's made his peace with that choice. I can't be part of anything that undermines that peace."
Maddy winced. It was incredibly disappointing, but she thought she understood.
"Is that why you've given up the serum yourself? Solidarity?"
He shrugged.
"Partly that. And partly because of Raven."
His chin jutted out defiantly at that, and she double-took.
"Raven? Are you and she-"
Hank was shaking his head, his cheeks turning violet.
"No, we're not – I mean not really. I mean not – yet. But we've been - talking - a lot. She's given me a lot to think about. And after everything that's happened, I see she's right. She was always right. We're not going to make ourselves safe by hiding who and what we are. Some humans will always fear and hate us, no matter how hard we try to blend in. So we have to find another way.
"Not Erik's way," he added emphatically. "But something else. No hiding. What is it she's always saying? 'Mutant and proud'?"
And if his tone was self-deprecating, cynical, the glow in his eyes when he spoke about Raven was anything but. Maddy smiled and tentatively put her hand on his arm.
"I'm so happy you feel that way, Hank. I'm happy for both of you. Raven's a lucky girl – even if she doesn't quite know it yet."
Hank's blush deepened, and he patted her hand awkwardly.
"Thanks, I guess. But you see what I'm saying. Things have been bad here – worse than bad – for so long, Maddy. They're only just getting back on an even keel, and that's against all odds. I can't do anything that might disrupt that. Not again. There's too much at stake, too many lives, and not just Charles' and mine and Raven's.
"We have so much work to do here. And Charles is the lynchpin of all of it. He's had some sort of glimpse into the future of our kind, and he's crucial to it – him and the School we'll make here. And not just the School – he's convinced that in time we're going to need an army, of sorts, like when we first came together to fight Shaw. Only Charles has got the vision and moral authority to even try and do something like that without it just becoming another terrorist cell. We need him to lead us. We can't afford – distractions – that might only bring him down again."
Maddy nodded. She was disappointed, but she knew he was right. Remembering the anguished spiral her last attempt to help Charles had sent him down, and all the suffering born out of that, how could she not agree?