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Charles loved Erik.
His hands were slippery with sweat as they pushed the wheels of his wheelchair.
He loved Erik.
The thought was like a mantra in his head, but Charles needed to repeat it because what he was about to do went against every one of his principles.
The corridor was long and anonymous, abandoned for many years.
Even when the school had been at the height of its success, the house was so large that many areas had been left unused. Charles had thought about turning them into common rooms where the students could release their powers or practice the creative arts, but then Vietnam, and everything that had come with it, had left that idea abandoned in his mind.
Surely, though, he would never, not even in his most macabre fantasies, have imagined using them for that purpose.
The door he was headed to was the last one.
Every meter he covered brought back to Charles’s mind all the contradictory thoughts that had led him to make that decision.
Erik trying to kill his sister.
Erik dropping an entire stadium onto the White House.
Erik threatening the entire human race on live television.
Erik trying to kill Logan, drowning him in the river after turning him into something that looked like a skewer ready for grilling.
It was a series of mistakes so gross that he truly could not find any remedy.
The wheelchair gained speed. If he fell there, he wouldn’t have been able to help him, because Charles hadn’t told anyone.
Hank might have suspected something, but Charles was convinced that, at the White House, his speech had been convincing enough. The boy suspected nothing and still looked at him with that slightly angry condescension of someone who doesn’t understand pity.
A bitter smile escaped him.
If only Hank had known…
But Charles had no intention of telling anyone anything until his plan had become reality. Whether it was because he feared others’ judgment or simply that they might make him change his mind, Charles didn’t know.
What he did know was that this decision went against every principle he had ever applied to his power since he had learned to control it.
But Erik was dangerous, and he had to protect him from the world and the world from him.
Logan’s visit from the future had made him reflect, and in the end, among the thousand hypotheses that had presented themselves, Charles understood that this was the only solution.
Erik had suffered too much.
Charles had thought he could heal him, but the recent events had proved it was impossible, because Erik’s rage and terror could not be defused.
So…
Charles tightened the vial of blue liquid he held in his hand.
The door was right in front of him.
He had reached the end of his journey.
From that moment on, every choice would change forever his future and that of the entire world.
Charles let out a long breath. Now he had to abandon every insecurity and not lose sight of the point.
It was the right thing to do.
Slowly, he pressed the handle and the door opened.
“Hello, Erik.”
The storm was raging outside the window.
Charles watched the water wash the windows with their gothic carvings, unable to go to sleep.
Surely he had skipped some step of his nightly routine, and tomorrow he would pay for it, but in that moment lying on a bed was out of the question.
He had really done it.
He was so nervous he would have wanted to do something to burn off that excess energy. But he was a damned cripple in a wheelchair. He couldn’t run, or drink his own weight in alcohol. His coping mechanisms were all useless.
The serum could have helped him, but he didn’t want to lose his powers. Not that night.
That night he couldn’t tear his mind away from Erik. He couldn’t sleep until he had made sure he hadn’t made mistakes.
He was intelligent. He was fairly sure he had followed all the right procedures.
Hank had always had dominion over the laboratory, because Charles wanted to dedicate himself to other things, not because he wasn’t capable.
His serum was perfectly functional. His rational mind knew it, but his heart still suffered.
What if he was wrong?
He hadn’t had time to do all the necessary experiments. Keeping Erik prisoner had been an endeavor even for someone as powerful as he was. Out of necessity, he had had to cut the time in half.
But what if he really was wrong?
His hands ran to the wheels of the chair. Maybe he could go down to the basement. If he were close, he could do something if something had gone wrong.
God… he didn’t even want to think about it.
Instead he thought about it, all night.
The morning found him with his head hanging, still in his chair, his neck completely destroyed and his mind confused as if he had drunk all the liquor he still kept in the cabinet hidden under his bed.
Panic hit him. He had fallen asleep! He hadn’t resisted and he had passed out.
And Erik…
Charles rushed forward with all the speed his condition allowed. More than once he risked overturning the chair or taking a corner too fast, but by some miracle he managed to reach the last door of the corridor unscathed.
All the anxiety that had made him move so quickly turned into petrified panic when it was time to go in.
Inside, Erik’s mind was exactly as Charles remembered it, but it sounded softer, without the nervous electricity that had characterized it in the past, even in his least serene moments.
It was Erik but…
Charles opened the door.
The bed where Erik had been put to sleep was empty.
And at the center of the room there was a child.
Charles entered slowly, trying not to make a sound so as not to scare him, his mouth wide open in the purest astonishment.
He couldn’t tell the child’s age.
He seemed rather tall, around ten years old, with pale, thin legs left uncovered by the enormous man’s shirt he was wearing. On the bed, behind him, lay a pair of men’s trousers and some socks.
The child was looking around in silence. Charles could recognize the color of the hair, dark brown, and the pale green eyes, which the lack of natural light had made even lighter, almost grey.
So he had done it?
The door hit the wall and the child turned around. He stood still and composed but, Charles felt clearly, his thoughts were a mixture of fear and confusion.
“Hello. My name is Charles Xavier. This is my school. I am glad to welcome you.”
The child almost flinched at the sound of his voice, as if earlier he had believed Charles was only a vision, and not reality.
“Wo ist meine Mutti?” (Where is my mum?)
Charles nervously licked his lips. Here came the hardest part of his plan.
“What are you doing, professor?”
Charles had had, more than once, the impression that Hank possessed an intuition that went beyond the normal sixth sense of a human being.
Maybe his beast form gave him elements of observation that others didn’t have, or perhaps, and this was the hypothesis that annoyed Charles the most, the ten years in which he had acted as his only babysitter while Charles’s self destruction reached enormous peaks had taught him to read him like an open book.
Charles was looking out the window.
The child had remained in his room, in the basement, while he needed to put his thoughts in order.
Hank wasn’t helping at all.
“Nothing, Hank. Charles looked at the park of the mansion. The weeds were everywhere and many trees needed a good pruning. How had he allowed such decay to creep in so much? I was thinking about our school. Now could be a good time to start it again.”
Hank widened his eyes.
The school and Raven were truly his only interests.
“I’m so happy you reconsidered this idea, Charles. Hank’s enthusiasm was so genuine that Charles felt a little sick for deceiving him like that. I’ll run to prepare the documents and make a mapping of the rooms we’ll need.”
Charles saw him walk quickly toward his office.
Now he could worry about the first student he wanted to study at his school.
Erik had gotten dressed.
Charles had recovered some clothes that the students had left before abandoning the school hastily ten years earlier.
They could be enough for the first days. Then Charles would take the child shopping, because he wanted Erik to have all the beautiful things life had denied him.
The child’s eyes were on him immediately as he crossed the threshold of his room.
Now that he was wearing clothes suited to his age, he seemed even younger. Charles was no longer sure he was ten years old.
But it wasn’t the most important thing to determine.
Erik’s eyes ran immediately behind him. The boy expected Charles to be accompanied.
That was the hardest moment. But it had to be done, even if Erik’s heart broke.
If it had been in Charles’s power, he would have been thrilled to give Erik the mother that had been taken from him. But unfortunately this wasn’t possible.
“Mutti?” (Mummy?)
Charles had not calculated the possibility that Erik spoke only German. Obviously it was understandable, but Charles had not thought that the language barrier would be a problem to face.
Charles approached the bed and Erik reached him immediately.
It was so strange. Charles knew Erik’s mind like no one else’s, not even Raven’s or Hank’s. He knew his thoughts, emotions and nuances. He could have reconstructed Erik’s thoughts from every one of his synapses.
This boy, Erik, was completely different from his Erik. He was kind, calm, and had no fear of others.
Even in that moment, he was in a place unknown to him, with an adult he had never seen, yet his mind still overflowed with trust. He was sure Charles would take him to his mother and that his mother was somewhere because she had never left him alone in his whole life.
His mind was so calm, so devoid of all that anger that had always covered Erik’s thoughts, that he could almost be another person.
If Charles hadn’t given the serum to adult Erik with his own hands, maybe he wouldn’t have believed it.
The child’s hand slid onto his own, to catch his attention. It seemed tiny, on his hand, and Erik had always had such large hands…
Then he looked at him again, uncertain about how to proceed.
Could he give him that news in a language he couldn’t understand?
Erik tightened his hand, to catch his attention, and Charles understood he didn’t have much time to decide.
“Erik, can you hear me?”
He didn’t need to hear the reply, because Erik’s eyes lit up and he began looking around, to understand how that voice was echoing in his head. His thoughts weren’t scared though, only curious. Like a child seeing snow for the first time.
"Ich höre dich in meinem Kopf. Wie machst du das?" (I can hear you in my head. How do you do that?)
Charles stroked the child’s little hand with his thumb. He was just a child and yet he was so trusting. Nothing to do with the adult Charles had known. Suspicious. Pessimistic. Angry.
His quiet joy was able to soothe the wound Charles still felt when he thought about what he had done.
“It’s a kind of magic… You can do it too, right, Erik? You have your magic, and I have mine.”
Erik looked at him dreamily, then nodded slowly and moved a finger, making the coins Charles kept in his jacket pocket float.
Erik had never told him the exact age at which it had manifested. He had to be very young, since his control was already so good.
"Meine Mutter hatte mich gebeten, es geheim zu halten. Sie sagte, es sei für alle gefährlich. Du bist der erste Mensch, dem ich es zeige." (My mother asked me to keep it a secret. She said it was dangerous for everyone. You're the first person I've shown it to.)
Charles kept his smile. He had reached the hardest part of his plan. He wasn’t proud of it, but he wasn’t ready to wipe the smile off that child’s lips.
“It’s the reason your mother brought you here, Erik. This is a school, made for people like us. You’ll see. There are many of us. Here you will learn to control your powers and choose what you want in life.”
"Und Mama?" (And Mum?)
Charles pressed his lips together.
“She couldn’t stay. She had to return to your father and your sister Ruth. But she says you will be fine and that she is very sorry she couldn’t say goodbye.”
Oh…
In that moment, Charles was risking everything. If Erik hadn’t believed him, and the Erik Charles knew was extremely mistrustful of everything and everyone, he would have had to find other ways to convince him, because the path he had chosen didn’t allow stops or changes of direction.
"Aber werde ich sie wiedersehen können?" (“But will I be able to see her again?”)
Charles smiled and felt like the most hypocritical person on the face of the earth.
“I will do everything I can to make it happen.”
As he walked away, closing the door again, Charles tried to forget the single tear running down Erik’s cheek. That was the only suffering he hadn’t managed to spare him, but he would make sure it was the last of his life.