Erik walked through the crowd with his head down, walking fast as was his way, revelling in the anonymity of a truly patriarchal-looking beard and a grey hat pulled down into his eyes. The lowering dark of evening did its part, pulling shadows up out of the Rhine and wrapping them around the Festweise, the daubs of darkness only deepened by the strings of glowing lights and the spangled glitter of the bunting flags. It was July, and the pinnacle of the Dusseldorf calendar, the Größte Kirmes am Rhein, was in full swing.
The slender excuse of a connection to the city's patron saint, Appolinaris (Erik suspected even those nominally Christian would struggle to remember either who he was or what he had done to warrant his beatification) having been appeased with a duty visit to mass, the whole city was now converging on the city park to eat, drink and be merry, with the almost industrious abandon that the habitually austere German people reserved for festive ocasions.
Erik watched with detached amusement as steins were drained and sausages devoured with no fear of stereotype, and children darted like overexcited puppies from stall to stall and ride to ride, granted licence from a life of good manners, waiting their turn and doffing their caps to men like Erik who, in his good suit and carrying an umbrella without the slightest expectation it might rain, was obviously respectable for all he was a stranger. Now they bowled across his path with the most slapdash of "Entschuldigung!"s, keen to partake in the wholesome pleasures of the fair.
Their enthusiasm contrasting with his own diffidence made Erik wonder what he was even doing here. Although since Maddy's visit he no longer spent his evenings getting outside as much whisky as he could, he was far from given to this kind of frivolity.
He usually walked the streets once dusk had fallen until the early hours, his rhythmic tread an almost hypnotic distraction from his thoughts. He had found this ritual aided a dreamless sleep as well as drinking did, most of the time. With that and the resumption of the meditation he had taken up in prison to hold the tattered remnants of his sanity together, he was regaining something resembling equilibrium. But he still felt half unreal, like a ghost. He spoke to no-one beyond the handful of civil words necessary to move through the world, "Bitte"s and „Danke"s enough to board a tram or buy a pint of milk. He had no job, no role, no mission. No-one to know or care if he lived or died.
Sometimes he wondered why he had survived the last battle, the Bay of Pigs, even why he had bothered to claw his way to freedom after the camps. He had always been so filled with certainty, so sure he had a purpose in this world. At first, to end Sebastian Shaw – Klaus Schmidt – to execute the man who murdered his mother. In the course of accomplishing this task, he came to know with a pure righteous certainty the he had lived, survived, and was born to love Charles. When that blew up spectacularly in his face, he had made meaning of his obligation to mutantkind, to bring them together and give them the leadership his lover had neglected to provide.
Now even that was gone; but life, like Dusseldorf, seemed to hold him in a state of abeyance – he had neither reason to stay nor impetus to go. His own ability to tolerate this inertia only reaffirmed what he already knew – the man he was, the life he had had, was gone. And in its place... what?
With these thoughts revolving in his head he had fallen almost automatically in with the sruge of people making their way through the city streets towards the fair. And now he was here there was some nostalgic comfort to take from watching the innocent folk of this prosperous town where he had grown up indulging themselves at an event that in his youth he had looked forward to for weeks, counting off the days in squares of paper threaded on a yarn by his mother, each removed at the end of the day and thrown into the fire until the final square, usually a bit of spangled foil, was joyfully removed, and he and his sister would scamper out into the lowering evening light and head towards the candy-coloured glare of the ferris wheel.
He was stood at its foot now, gazing up at the revolving faces of excited teens and awestruck, slightly terrified children as they rose up over the crowd, swinging jerkily in the little semi-circular nests that hung from the framework of the rolling wheel. Almost robotically, he reached into his pocket for some small change to hand to the man manning the gate, who tugged his hat then drew back the rail, allowing Erik to scramble into an empty carriage as it trundled past the platform on its way back up the wheel. He sat down and stared forwards as he was lifted up high into the sky, overlooking the silver river and looming buildings a they sunk beneath his feet.
Very beautiful, he heard a voice say in his head, and jumped. Suddenly Charles was sat beside him, an absurdly large cloud of absudrly pink cotton candy in his hand.
Erik's shoulder hit the corner of the carriage ahrd as he leapt backwards, causing it to sway alarmingly. Charles looked at him reproachfully.
„I wish you wouldn't look like that. I'm not a ghost, you know. And you must know that I'm not here to harm you, my friend. If I wanted to do that, I'd hardly make a parlour piece of it like this would I?" he asked rhetorically, gesturing to his astonishingly real-seeming body as Erik's pounding heart began to settle down. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, trying to decide if he was just shocked, or happy, or indeed angry. Reverting to type, he decided to settle on the latter approach.
„I don't know what you're doing here, Charles, and frankly I don't care. We've said it all, and we're past it now. I've no immediate intention to harm anyone. You have no business here."
He was slightly shocked when Charles looked hurt. How was it possible, when Erik had tried to murder him not two months ago, that he could still be wounded by a brusque dismissal? Sometimes Erik thought that if he knew Charles for a hundred years, the younger man would never stop surprising him.
„I don't have business, no," said Charles, with dignity. „This isn't actually a business call. How are you, Erik?"
Erik's mouth fell open again. What kind of a question was that? Charles, either inferring or actually hearing the thought for all he knew, inclined his head in acknowledgment of it.
„Yes, I know, it doesn't seem quite adequate, does it? But nevertheless that's what I'm here to ask. I think a mutual friend of ours may or may not be heading your way; or possibly has already found you. And I realised that what I would have liked to characterise as impulsiveness on her part was really just the courage I've been lacking on my own. I realised I had to see you, just once, just to know, well, just that really – how you are. If you're alright."
Erik realised he was staring at Charles' eyes, his red lips moving, the brown hair falling sloppily over his forehead and curling by his ears – marveling at how real the man seemed, even knowing he could put his hand out now and it would pass right through that radiant beauty. He gave himself a mental shake and looked away, staring back out over the cityscape rising to meet them as the carriage descended.
„I'm fine. There's no need for you to check up on me. And for goodness' sake if you must be here, get rid of that ridiculous candy floss stick – it's no more real than you are. This isn't a play, Charles, you don't need the props. Why can't you just be in my head anyway? Why do you have to be here?"
Charles shrugged, and the cotton candy evaporated into the night air.
„As you wish. Just trying to get into the spirit of the thing, you know. I'm surprised to find you at a fair, you know. Doesn't seem your scene at all."
„It's not," said Erik, curtly. „So would you be so kind as to let me get on with not enjoying myself in peace?" Far from having the chilling effect he had intended, his words made Charles snort with amusement.
„Oh dear, you really are doing everything you can to get this off to a bad start aren't you? What are you so afraid of Erik – that we might actually not hate one another as much as you'd like? It would make everything so much simpler for you wouldn't it? Hate and anger. Those comforting, familiar modes of thought. Well I'm sorry, my friend, but in spite of everything and try though I might I do not hate you. Quite the opposite in fact."
Erik stiffened. Not this. Anything but this. He could have resisted anything else. But if Charles asked him to come home, here, now... even knowing how doomed it was, right from the very start, he wasn't sure he had the strength to turn away. He shut his eyes, trying not to see what he was so scared to be offered – a home, belonging. Loss. Betrayal. No.
„Nor I you, my friend", he managed at last. „But it isn't that simple."
„Bloody right it's not", said Charles with some heat. „In the past year you've tried to kill me and pretty much everyone I care about, not to mention the President of the free world – suffice to say there's trust to be rebuilt. And I don't know if I can do it, Erik, I'll tell you that right here and now. I don't know.
„But I am willing to try. I'm willing to at least try, because I know in my bones that what we had – and might have had – is not the sort of thing that happens twice in any life, and I am not willing to go to my grave knowing that I came so close to it and didn't try everything before accepting that it could never be. Because I'm not like you Erik; when things are hanging in the balance I can't take comfort hunkering down to certainties I know, however mean and bleak; I have to reach out to the possibilities, no matter how remote they are or how treacherous they may prove to be. I have to have hope Erik; because without it I wither and die. I've been without it almost 10 years, so don't think I am saying that lightly. And seeing you that day in the Pentagon – along with making me angrier than I think I have ever been with anyone, I might add for context – seeing your face after all those years reminded me that that is who I am. Who I will always be. Because..."
Charles paused at last, and gave a sigh.
„Because you are the other half of me, Erik. You are the shadow to my sunshine, the tactics to my strategy, the courage to my cowardice. You blamed me for not being the leader our people needed; and I blamed you for trying to be and taking them down such a dark path. But don't you see, my friend? It isn't you, or me. It is the two of us. We are the leader that our people need. Not either one alone, but together – fighting each other every step of the way if that is what it takes. We need each other, dragging each other forward and holding each other back. And inch by painful inch, we'll get our people where they need to go, and it will be the right place – not the easy place that doesn't have to be fought for, or the exciting place, that sounds good in the speeches, but the right place. We won't get them there with clean hands, but we will get them there with souls still intact. This is what only you and I can do, Erik. We were born to do it. And if you leave me to do it on my own, it will be your fault when I fail them!"
Charles's voice broke on that, and he pursed his lips and looked away. Erik sat stunned, no longer hearing the creak of the wheel or the shrieks of the crowd, just hearing the passion of Charles's words – not a plea, or a command, just the truth, naked and raw. Erik said nothing for a moment, giving the younger man time to regain his composure, then spoke softly, without a trace of his former brusqueness.
„Are you talking about our people, Charles? Or about us?"
Charles turned to look at him, his eyes great blue pools of innocence, and sighed. Oh, such a sigh.
„I don't know."
Erik held his gaze as long as he could stand, then dropped his eyes down to his hands folded in his lap. The moment broke, and the sounds of the fair came rushing back in; as they swooped past the boarding platform for the who knew how manyth time, he realised he was getting glared at by the operator who clearly didn't think the handful of Marks he'd received from Erik warranted the latter's taking up a seemingly permanent position on the wheel. Charles had also noticed, and gave a wry smile.
„And everyone always says you get me into trouble." Unable to help himself, Erik felt a sharky grin flash across his face. Then he passed a hand across his eyes and sighed.
„I can't come back Charles. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The mission? I agree with you, it is ours, it always has been, and I feel like everything we've both been through has brought us as close as we ever will be to being able to meet it together. But us? Charles, nothing has changed. I will always live with the guilt of what happened to you that day in Cuba. And that will always twist everything, no matter how I try to make it stop. That's what really pushed us apart, not mutantkind, or Madeline, or anything else, not really – I couldn't bear living everyday knowing what I stole from you, knowing there's nothing I could do to make it right. That day I saw you standing up in the Pentagon – Charles, even when you punched my face my heart felt lighter than it had in years. But it was an illusion; and the irony, that for you to get back the thing I took from you cost you everything that made you able to love me in the first place..." He sighed. „Whichever path you chose, I'd be looking at you knowing you were half the man you should have been, because of me. And I can't live like that Charles. We tried. We failed."
Charles listened to this increasingly soberly, then pulled himself upright.
„Well never say never. While we're alive, there's always... possibility. The main thing, you idiot, is not to continue this ridiculous exile from everything. You don't have to commit your life to the future of our species... or to me," he added with a tight little smile. „But you could call once in a while; you could visit. Raven's getting married to Hank next week-„ Charles broke off as Erik choked and began coughing uncontrollably.
„She's doing what?" he managed eventually. „Has she lost her mind? Has he?"
„I'll be sure to pass on your most heartfelt congratulations," said Charles very drily, but with a twinkle in his eye that told Erik his opinion wasn't far from agreement. „But better yet, why not give them in person?" Erik stared. „It's just a party, Erik. You wouldn't be committing yourself to anything. Just wear a suit, bring a gift, and come and say hello. It would at least constitute some sort of start."
Erik shook his head. „Charles, I really don't think so. There wouldn't be any point. Besides which, I'm not sure at all what the form is when the last time you saw the happy couple you were bludgeoning the groom and the bride tried to shoot you in the head."
Charles shrugged.
„Ah well, what family doesn't have their ups and downs?"
Suddenly Charles pt his hand on Erik's neck, and the metal bender's whole body thrilled to the unexpected touch. He marvelled that every nerve could spark at the sensation, which felt so intensely real even though his rational brain knew that the man who appeared so vividly to be sitting beside him in Dusseldorf was actually sat in Cerebro thousands of miles across the Atlantic.
„Just think about it. That's all I ask. It's on the fifth, just us, just mutants. You'd be safe, you have my word. I'll be waiting for you, Erik. And if you don't come... well then I'll still be waiting. I won't give up hope. Goodbye, my friend."
„Charles, wait-„
Erik reached up to sieze the hand that lay against his neck – but it was gone.