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Charles
My hand fits perfectly in Erik’s. The birds sing in the trees, the wind rustles the leaves overhead, and the squirrels skitter about, scaling branches in search or food or an ideal hiding spot. This particular nature reserve has a paved, wheelchair-accessible hiking path. Erik was actually the one who found this place, and even though it’s over forty minutes away, this atmosphere and the peaceful expression on Erik’s face makes it all worth it.
I look over at him to the left. He’s gazing into the trees, an easy smile on his face.
He notices me staring at him. “What?”
“Nothing. Just watching you. You’re gorgeous.”
Erik’s smile grows larger. His eyes reflect the twinkle in the sunlight, and he leans in, pressing his warm lips against mine. He buries his hand in my hair, stroking it a few times before stepping away. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” I grab his hand again and use my other hand to control my wheelchair. We continue along the paved path, bathed in dappled shade. “Should we do something in town before we go back home?”
“We could. What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know. Dinner? Or stop for coffee or something?”
“Yeah, that sounds great. It’s a weekend, we technically don’t have to be back until this evening. We can do something.” He gives me a sidelong glance. “Dinner on me?”
“Perfect.”
“What do you want?”
I shrug. “Anything, really. I just want you to be there.”
“How about…maybe Mexican food? There’s a place in town.”
“My mouth is watering already.”
Erik chuckles. “All right. Mexican, it is then.”
We lapse into silence. We come upon a gentle curve in the path and the trees get thicker, the amount of leaves obscuring the sun for a moment. The rustle of brush echoes from nearby. Probably another squirrel.
My wheelchair crunches to a stop. I look down to find a hefty rock wedged between the wheel and the ground. There are many other rocks, so I’m thinking there might’ve been some sort of dust up. I reach down to push the rock away–
I hear a whiz and a sharp, hot stab of pain jabs into the right side of my neck. I flinch with a muffled cry, my hand flying up to my neck on instinct.
“Whoa. You all right?”
My fingers brush up against some sort of elongated object sticking out of my neck.
“Oh.” Erik chuckles, unaware of the situation. “The bugs have been really bad this year.”
I remove the object from my neck, a searing pain throbs where it made contact, and I bring it into the light. It’s a long, giant dart, almost fashioned like an arrow. The inside is hollow, as if it had held liquid, and there’s a thick, scary needle on the end. My blood glints on the needle.
Erik finally sees what I’m holding. “Wait, what the hell is that?”
My tongue is all of a sudden too thick for my mouth and the forest spins around me in slow motion. Whatever the dart pumped into me is taking effect, evidenced by my vision getting increasingly more blurry.
“Charles?”
His voice sounds far away, like he’s calling from across a room.
I say something akin to his name.
A dark figure appears and kneels in front of me. Erik’s face doesn’t focus, and his voice is muffled:
“Charles! No, no, no, stay awake.” He holds my head up with his hands, and I let him because it’s getting too heavy to keep it upright. “Stay awake, love. Please.”
I can’t, I really can’t… My thoughts move slowly, my grip on my consciousness lessens, the light dims… I send a telepathic distress call out toward the school…
“Charles, no. No, no, no, please.”
My head falls forward onto my chest and then the darkness swallows me whole.
Charles
The first thing I hear is the eerie drip of water echoing in a cavernous space. My chin scratches against my clothes and I drag my eyes open. My vision focuses a bit, enough to reveal myself sitting upward in a chair. But…it’s not my wheelchair. My wrists are bound to the arms of the chair by metal chains, and my chest is tied to the back. I thrash around, testing out the strength of the bindings. The chains– oh, they’re spiked– slice into my wrists and I let out a hiss of pain. Blood surfaces on my wrists.
“Charles? Oh, thank God…”
I snap my head up and I find myself in a chamber.
The chamber is small, circular, and the entire thing is awash in a sickly greenish-grey light. One singular bulb dangles from the ceiling, swaying from side to side with a treacherous, rusty squeak.
“Charles!”
I glance around frantically until my eyes land on a cell in the wall across from me. Erik is crouched by the bars, gripping the metal rungs. I frown. “Erik? What happened?”
“I don’t know. I woke up here and saw you in the chair. That was…I don’t know, an hour ago.”
“Shit…” I crane my neck to look around. There’s a warm sensation thrumming on my head, and for the first time, I notice something wrapped around it. It almost feels like a trap, a cage, and a hard surface presses against certain areas of skin. There’s a faint buzz coming from it. “Erik.”
“What?”
“What’s on my head? I can’t see.”
“I don’t know. It’s some sort of device.”
“That’s probably not good,” I whisper into the shadows. I try to reach out with my mind and I hit a mental wall. “I…can’t use my powers.”
“Neither can I.”
I squint at him. “You can’t?”
“No. They pumped me full of some sort of serum. I can’t move anything.”
I grit my teeth and inhale to speak again when a latch whines nearby, a door slides open, and a large man stalks into the room from the hallway to the right. He lifts his pudgy fingers up to his face and adjusts his tiny glasses. His head is peppered with short, greasy hair, and messy stubble spots his face.
He stops in front of me, facing me, eyeing me like a predator scouting for prey. There’s a dangerous, unhinged look glittering in his eyes.
I glare up at him, putting all the fire I can muster into my gaze.
“Hello,” he begins. “My name is William Stryker. Pleased to meet you.”
“Go to hell,” I snarl.
“Oh!” His eyebrows curl upward. “So defiant already.” He kneels in front of me. “I’ve heard of you. The great Charles Xavier. Professor X. You hold quite a reputation.” He reaches a grubby hand up toward me and holds my face, tilting it from side to side. His nails scrape at my skin and his fingertips are rough and leathery.
I try to pull away, but he tightens his hold on me.
“Don’t touch him!” Erik barks from his cell. “Get away from him!”
Stryker continues as if Erik isn’t there. “I’ve heard of your prestige, Professor. Let’s see if you live up to the world’s adulation.” He lets go of my face and strides to the other end of the room. He ignores Erik completely and turns to face me. “I need your help, Professor.”
“You abducted us. Hardly an appropriate way to ask for a favor.”
“I want you to tell me the location of your quaint, little school.”
My heart plummets into my stomach. “That’s what this is about? Don’t you have better things to do than question someone about a simple boarding school?”
“Oh, but it’s not just any school. You’re mutants. You have…gifts.” He sneers, his teeth gleaming yellow. “And I’ve found ways to suppress them. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, that little device on your head blocks your telepathy.” He points to Erik, finally acknowledging his presence. “Your friend here– .”
“Boyfriend,” I clarify.
Stryker pauses. He places a hand on his heart, whining, “I’m so sorry. My mistake. It’s terribly amusing that you think I give a fuck.”
I grit my teeth.
He taps his chin for a moment. “Oh!” Stryker digs around in his pocket and pulls out a tiny console the size of a slice of bread. “Almost forgot.” He hits a button.
The device on my head buzzes and a spike of pain flashes through my head. I flinch with a tight grimace.
Stryker chuckles. “See, now that wasn’t bad. But that’s only a fraction of what this beauty can do. That was at a low level. I’m being awfully gracious given what you’ve said to me so far.” He pulls up a squeaky chair and sits a few yards across from me. “I would love to use the higher levels, test your endurance, see how strong the great Professor X really is. But that’s up to you and how well you cooperate.”
“Why do you want to know about the school?”
Stryker crosses his arms. “You have students there, yes? Young children, adolescents? Fresh, bright minds?”
I narrow my eyes at him, unsure of his motive.
“Mutants are an abomination. The only way to cleanse the world is to exterminate those who have corrupted it. And why not start with the very place where they are taught to harness their powers?”
My gaze flicks over to Erik, whose expression is one of equal alarm. “You want to kill them?”
“No, I want to set an example.” He strolls over to his chair and plops into it. “So. Where is the school?”
“You’re gonna have to do better than that. I have no reason to help you.”
Stryker hits another button– burning pain– and a harsh cry rips out of my mouth. He chuckles. “That’s your reason. That was a three, if you’re wondering.”
Sweat is starting to glue my clothes to my skin.
“Where is the school?”
I don’t answer.
“Where’s the school, Professor?”
I shake my head, scoffing. “I will never give them up.”
“We’ll see how long that lasts.”
“You’ll be waiting forever.”
He folds one leg over the other and places the console in his lap. “I’m a patient man.”
I fall silent and let my mind wander, hoping that my thoughts will keep me occupied. After a while, I end up focusing in on the droplets of water nearby. It’s a steady, but slow rhythm. Drip, drip, drip.
Forget counting sheep.
One, two, three, four…
Charles
Four-hundred-and-fifty-four, four-hundred-and-fifty-five, four-hundred-and-fifty six…
I give up. There are no windows, I have no idea how much time has passed. But the grumble in my stomach and my dry throat cue me in to the fact that it’s been at least an hour or two.
I look up at Stryker, who’s still sitting in his chair. Outwardly, he seems to still be nonchalant, but I can see his foot twitching, his jaw grinding. I open my mouth and break the silence. “You got anything to pass the time?”
Stryker blinks slowly at me from the darkness, toying with the remote in his hand.
I scoff. “Other than counting water drops, that is. I got to 456, if you can believe it. That might mean a leaky pipe or something though, so you might want to take a look at tha– .” The vowel lapses into a cry as pain snaps through my aching head.
Stryker stomps forward and looms over me, his large frame blotting out the light. “I’m done playing games, Professor.”
“Really? What game are you playing? I can’t tell. Is it…Battleship? Scrabble? Something else?” I cock my head to one side. “You don’t seem like a board game kind of guy though. Still, I’m a big foggy on the rules, could you maybe elaborate on the– .”
Stryker rams his fist against the side of my head, my jaw cracks. Stars flash in my vision at the same time as the pain, my brain bounces around in my skull, and the chamber wheels in a dizzy circle.
When I can see again, Stryker’s boots are planted in front of me. He towers over me.
Blood fills up my mouth, warm and metallic. The sour taste makes me nauseous and I gag into my lap, a steady stream of blood trickling out of my mouth. A cut stings on my cheek as well, and upon further scrutinization, I see a fat ring on Stryker’s meaty finger.
He brings his face inches from mine. “Save your bitchy comments and sly remarks. Where is the school?”
I raise an eyebrow and smile mockingly at him.
“Where’s the goddamn school?”
I rest my head against the back of the chair, enjoying his rising anger.
Stryker growls under his breath. “I have the leverage, I can put you in unimaginable pain. Does that not scare you?”
“It’s terribly amusing that you think I give a fuck.”
Stryker’s face hardens and his eyes shadow. He stares at me, his face morphing into a barely-subdued fury. After a pause, he whirls around and crosses the distance between me and Erik’s cell.
Erik doesn’t back away at all. “You’re a fucking coward,” he spits.
Stryker presses another button. Pain like lightning crackles through my head, another cry springs from my mouth.
Erik inhales sharply. “Please, stop. Don’t hurt him.”
“Oh?” Stryker leans in towards Erik. “I suppose you’ll be more cooperative then, I trust?”
Erik swallows hard. His eyes dart over to me.
“Don’t look at him. Look at me.”
Erik glowers at Stryker. “What are you going to do if Charles doesn’t break?”
“They always do. Eventually. Pain and the threat of pain are wonderful motivators. And you would know.” He gestures to Erik. “Don’t think I haven’t heard of you either. Magneto. Your reputation reaches even those in the shadows.” He shrugs “And with your…boyfriend…on the line, you have a reason to speak.” Stryker flips the console in the air and catches it with one hand. “So speak.”
“No.”
“Where’s the school?”
“Not telling you.”
“That’s unfortunate.” Stryker sighs melodramatically. “I suppose you require more incentive aside from simple intimidation.”
“I’m not scared of you. You’re a pathetic man and you’ll never– .”
Stryker cranks up a little knob on his console and–
Beep.
This is the first flush of pain that prompts a full-body scream. It grates against my throat, echoes in the chamber, clenches my whole body. The worst of the pain quickly falls away, and my scream dies. I go limp against my bindings, gasping for breath.
“Charles!” Erik yells across the room. “Oh, God, no…”
I peer through blurry vision at Stryker’s silhouette. My vision blurs more and more, the darkness closes in…
A quick, sharp zap to my brain snaps my head up and jerks me awake. The darkness dissipates at once and the pain continues.
Stryker stands there with his finger on the console, and he grins wickedly. “Yet another wonderful thing this device can do. You see, a common response to extreme, severe pain is to pass out, lose consciousness. Sometimes, it can be quite relieving, as it gives the person in question a break, if you will, from the suffering of the present. But…you need to be awake in order to be of use to me. So whenever you start to slip away…” he taps the console, sneering, “I’ll be your alarm.”
I purse my lips, the tang of blood still on my tongue. Shit.
I fall into deliberate silence. My head now pulses with a steady, constant pain, and it grows worse every time Stryker zaps me.
But the children are worth every bit of this.
Charles
I reach about six hundred with counting the drops, then Stryker’s expression sours. He springs to his feet and stomps over to me, swallowing me in his shadow. A hand zips forward and snaps around my throat, his fingers putting pressure on my jugular veins.
“Hey!” Erik yells from his cell.
Stryker leans into my space. “I’m growing impatient, Professor.”
I manage to force words out through his grip. “I thought you said you were a patient ma- ?”
He tightens his grip, blood roars in my ears, and my vision gets fuzzy. I grimace, barely able to breathe.
“Get the fuck away from him!” Erik’s voice bounces off the walls.
Stryker squeezes my throat tighter still, I get dizzy, my eyes roll back–
He lets me go and I slump against the bindings, coughing and choking. My hearing is muffled, but I can hear Erik talking.
“Don’t fucking touch him. When I get out of here, you’ll be dead before you can take your next breath. But lay one more finger on him and I’ll– !”
“You’ll what? You’re powerless in there. Without your powers, you’re nothing more than a disgusting human.”
“Look who’s talking.”
Silence. I’m still trying to get the room to clear and I hear the beep of the console.
The pain is hot and instantaneous, and I snap back against the chair with a sharp cry. My arms jerk with my movement and the spikes on the chains sink deeper into my wrists. The worst of the pain in my head disappears, but what I’m left with is horrible throbbing in every muscle and–
Oh, shit: Wrists that are actively pumping blood. The arms of the chair are stained with it. With every movement, the spikes shift inside my flesh.
Wrists bleed heavily when cut. If the pain in my head doesn’t kill me, the blood loss will.
“Charles!”
Wait, Erik’s talking to me. Has he been doing that this entire time? I can’t seem to get my neck to carry the weight of my head, so I listen as Stryker seethes out his next sentence:
“I could fry his fucking brain with this thing, I could kill him. You don’t want your beloved boyfriend to die, right?”
“Erik, don’t!” I force out. But my words slur and my consciousness slips away…
The zap through my skull snaps me back into awakening. I grimace and blink hard a few times.
Stryker turns to Erik. “Where is the school?”
I shake my head at him.
Erik glances at me for a second, but that is a second too long.
Beep.
The next wave strikes me dumb, my vision goes black, and then I’m shrieking into the void again. But the pain doesn’t stop, it keeps going and going, and I scream so long I run out of breath and have to inhale just so I can scream again. Erik might be screaming too, I can’t tell.
When the stab fades into the background, I slump in my chair with a sob. Tears flood my eyes, tears I can’t control, and they spill down my cheeks, cold and harsh.
I start to pass out. Stryker wakes me up again. That in itself is starting to drive me crazy because now my entire body is in a constant state of mind-numbing pain and dear GOD I wish I could just black out…
Erik says my name somewhere nearby, or far away.
I breathe in, intending on answering him, but the pain leadens my tongue and all that comes out is another broken sob.
A dark shape blots out the grimy light from above. Stryker’s sinister voice tickles the air. “Are you afraid to die, Professor? Would you beg for your life if I was going to kill you?”
I haul my chin up and stare him down. “Go ahead. My death would rally an army, not silence them.”
“Then I’ll have to prepare my troops.” Stryker leans down to show me the console. He hovers his finger above the number eight. “Level ten will kill you, but level eight has also proven to do the same to others. Let’s see how strong you really are.”
Erik slams himself against the bars of the cell. “Stryker, stop!”
“We’re far past that, Mr. Lehnsherr.”
He plunges his fingertip into number eight.
The pain splits my skull open and my scream skins my throat raw. Sweat courses down my face, soaks my clothes. Stryker releases me for a moment. I double over as much as my bindings will allow, choking on my sobs. My jaw has not stopped bleeding, and bloody saliva dribbles from my mouth. Sweat and tears and blood and spit all collect in my lap, and I can’t do anything about it. To add to it, I feel the warm trickle of blood running from my nose.
Stryker cranks it up to nine.
My voice fizzles out and dies halfway through screaming, so my uncontrollable sobs carry me through it.
Stryker keeps it going for a few more everlasting seconds, then switches it off.
I go limp against the bindings, chest shuddering with sobs. The room grows darker, darker…
Once again, Stryker snaps me back into consciousness.
“Please…” I whimper, my voice raspy. “Let me pass out, please…”
Stryker scoffs. “Impressive. People typically start begging much earlier than a nine.”
Every breath rattles in my chest like an overworked door hinge. My fingertips prickle with pins and needles and it spreads further into my hands. Warm blood pools below my wrists, sliding down the legs of the chair. Come to think of it, the skin of my hands is lot paler than it used to be…
The world moves in slow motion, drifting lazily around in a blurry circle. My breathing is quick and shallow, and I’m guessing it probably has something to do with the tingling in my hands, the weakness in my bones, and the fact that my heart rate is slowing more and more by the minute. The arms of the chair are covered in a steadily-growing amount of blood, and the term hypovolemic shock echoes in my head.
Voices are almost entirely muffled, I can’t make out any words, but it’s definitely Erik yelling, and he sounds furious. Another sound merges with the rest, a strange, metallic, cracking noise, and unintelligible voices that aren’t coming from Stryker or Erik. The voices grow louder, closer. It sounds like…a middle-aged man, a slightly familiar one. Then a younger female, and…a few others ones, I don’t…I don’t know…
CLANG!
A broken chunk of metal– a door– shoots into the room from the side hallway and plows into Stryker, knocking him to the ground. It pins him down and the console flies from his hand. A group of people flood into the room, and even though my mind is only half-present, I recognize the blurry figures:
Hank, in beast form, Jean, Scott, Kurt, and Jubilee.
I’m too out of it to feel much relief, and honestly, the pain ripping through my skull is robbing me of pretty much everything. And I’m still bleeding. How long have I been bleeding? My hands now sit in a warm puddle, and my face is grimy with saliva, sweat, tears, and blood. I need a shower, I need a… Wait, where am I again?
A burst of red, Scott’s lasers. Two shapes move around in front of me, one of them lowers themself down into my line of sight. Jean. She looks…horrified, and it’s only then that I realize that I’m hyperventilating, but my breaths are short and thin, not healthy ones. Blood loss, probably.
There’s a light zap from above me and I recoil with a weak cry. But instead of another burst of agony, the heat from the device vanishes and headpiece is removed. Jean hovers her hands over the chains and breaks them. They don’t fall, and it takes me a moment to put together that the spikes are deeply embedded in my wrists. Jean delicately peels the chains away from my hands. Even through my fading vision, I see the spikes emerge from within my flesh, releasing what little plug there had been in my wounds. Thick blood spills from open gashes in my wrists and pours down my arm. I can feel the blood leaving my body, leaking out of me like shower water spitting down the drain.
Another CLANG, and a few metal beams fall to the floor.
Jean and Jubilee move out of the way to make room for another figure, who drops to his knees at once and places a hand the side of my face. Erik. His mouth moves, shaping my name with his lips, but I’m underwater, I think. I am? Maybe. I can’t hear him very well.
The hand moves to the back of my head, one wraps around my side, and then I’m being lifted.
Erik cradles me in his lap, one hand under my head, buried in my hair.
“Erik?” I mumble deliriously. Then the pain and the exhaustion and the mental strain all catch up with me at once and I start crying again. “Erik…” I whimper, my voice wavering. Tears squeeze out of my eyes and run diagonally down my face, my body heaves with tortured sobs. “Er-Erik…” His name is the only thing on my lips, and I keep whispering it like it’s my last tether to the world. It may as well be. Everything else fades out around him, my vision darkens at the corners and I feel dangerously close to passing out. But I can’t, he’ll zap me awake, I can’t black out, I don’t want that pain again…
“Charles?”
Oh, wait, I can hear him. Barely.
I don’t have the energy to look at him. His palm brushes against my dirty cheek.
“You can pass out now. It’s okay. No one’s gonna hurt you anymore.”
The darkness is blissful, and I fall into it gladly.
Erik
The hour that it takes to get Charles back to the mansion and to the lab is way too long. Charles’ skin is chalk-white and cold, and the cuts in his wrists are spewing blood. Jean and I try our best to plug the wounds in the jet on the way back, but he’s still losing a lot of blood. When we get back to the mansion, we rush him downstairs to the lab, deposit him on a bed, and Hank gets to work immediately, hooking him up to IVs, getting him a blood transfusion, and doing a rapid scan of his brain. He hurries about at an almost superhuman speed. He grabs his tools and gets to work stitching Charles’ wrists up. The blood still coming out of them doesn’t seem to faze Hank at all.
My mind fills with Charles’ screams and I can still picture him thrashing and writhing in the chair. My hands ache from clawing at the jail bars and I definitely tore a nail or two.
I bring myself back to the present to find the kids staring at me, a dark question in their eyes.
Jean is the first to speak. “What happened?”
I press my lips together and take a trembling breath. “We were ambushed in the woods. Drugged, knocked out. We woke up in that chamber. That man who Scott fired at, his name was Stryker. He was using that device on Charles’ head to torture him. It blocked Charles’ telepathy and Stryker could control the pain levels.”
Scott’s voice is grave for once. “What did he want?”
“The location of school. He wanted you. To kill you, to kill everyone.”
Whatever levity is left in the room gets sucked out at once.
Jean gapes at Charles’ body on the lab table. “He…endured all of that…for us?”
I nod and wrap my arms around my chest, rubbing my shoulders to self-soothe. “If that isn’t a testament to his strength and how much he loves you, then I don’t know what is.”
Erik
I stay by Charles’ bedside as much as possible. I eat, I read, I pace, I sleep, I do everything in that one room, desperate to be there when he wakes up.
My insistence is rewarded at 4:43PM the day following the ambush.
I’m slumped in the uncomfortable hospital chair, creeping closer and closer to nodding off when his heart monitor picks up speed.
I jerk to attention. Charles stirs on the bed, his arms twitching. His eyes flutter open and I don’t even get a word out before he starts hyperventilating and glancing around with wild eyes. He starts to get up–
“No, no, no, Charles!” I sit beside him, gripping his shoulders gently. “It’s okay, it’s okay! You’re safe.”
Charles examines my face, as if determining it’s real, before saying anything. “We’re home?” he rasps, his eyes filling with tears.
“Yeah.”
“We’re-we’re safe?”
I scoot closer to him and lay a hand under his jaw, stroking his cheek with my thumb. “You’re safe with me. He’s gone, he can’t hurt you anymore. You’re safe, Charles.”
He stares for a long moment, catching his breath, and his entire body trembles.
I can’t tell if he believed me or not, so I repeat it. “You’re safe, love. You’re safe here, we’re all here. We got you out. You’re gonna be okay.” I enunciate every word. “You are safe here, I promise.”
Charles averts his eyes into his lap.
I lower my hand to his shoulder. “Charles?”
A moment’s pause. Charles’ trembling starts up again, his breath quickens, and he shivers with hiccuping sobs that are getting increasingly louder.
“Okay, okay, come here.” I steer him toward me and he falls against my chest, breaking down into tears. I gather him my arms and rock him back and forth. The gnarly stitches on his wrists catch on the fabric of my shirt, but I pay no mind to it. I stroke his hair back and run my fingers through his brown locks, loosening every knot. “It’s all right. You’re okay, you’re safe, you’re gonna be fine. I’ll take care of you.”
As Charles processes his trauma through tears, I shelter him in my embrace, and I wish I could block out the demons, the memories, however I only have an iron fist and a lifetime of rage. A day may come when I seek out Stryker and torture him the same way he did to Charles, but right here, now, hugging Charles and whispering consolations… Right here, now, this is enough.