Chapter Text
00
Ultimately, there were two paths Erik could have taken that moment he heard his mother's last breath, saw any hope of a normal life dissipate before him.
He could hold on to that grief, let it fester and grow into rage, a thirst for revenge. It would become his life's mission, to set right all errors of men. To stop an infection that stemmed from the ignorance of humanity. He would become a lone soldier with a single, impossible goal.
There was blood on the ground, his fingers trembled. One second, and then another. One breath, then the next.
In another place and time, he tried to take the gun away and couldn't. He could do nothing at the gate and was forgotten. He lifted the coin and became the face of reformation. Another place, another time, a different choice. Not this one.
At that moment, heartbeat pounding in his ears, Erik saw two things. The lifeless corpse of the woman to whom he owed everything, and the man with the pistol that took it all away. Slowly he turned his sight away. He still saw red.
One heartbeat to the next. He could not close his eyes. Terror fled him, a new wave of emotions ready to replace it.
There was a choice. The man before him, the anger and hatred, the desire to burn the world down until it was nothing but ashes.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry, but he could still hear her. The memory of his mother, warm and smiling in spite of the ill-fitting clothes and armed soldiers. Her last words resonating with the loud pounding. “All is good.”
Let go.
He could be stronger, he would not cry. These men would not get what they wanted.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
The world sang to his rhythm – endless twittering of steel knives, cold rumbling of an iron poker displaced from fire, the sporadic interruption of brass buttons. The blood flowing through his veins the conductor of an orchestra.
The guns, the bullets, the coin.
Erik finally closed his eyes.
01
Erik is not a bad man.
That said, Erik isn't a good man either. Some days, he did not feel like a man at all – he feels like a floating thing, a single cog of a great machine, a small part of a larger collective conscious.
Those days he was usually high.
It did not help that Erik Lehnsherr is a man who can actually float. It also did not say good things about the company he kept that no one has yet notice anything unusual about a floating Erik. He wasn't even quite sure if they truly believed that there were nice little elves repairing all their dented metal appliances or if they rationalized it as technology advancing so far that even kettles were self-repairing.
That said, the company he kept left much to be desired, rationality and cleanliness among them. It was fine, another week or two and he'd find somewhere new.
Today is a floating day. The sun is no longer visible but the sky is still a soft blue edged by majestic purples and muted oranges. A pair of girls, lazy and dark, sit comfortably on the bare ground in front of an aborted attempt at a campfire. Several other people milled around the peripheral, Erik notices a fleck of golden blond at the edge of his vision before that too fades back into the hazy scenery. Everything was doing that, being pulled into the forefront of his mind before sinking again. He was getting some interesting ideas, if only he weren't too stoned to find a pencil to write them down.
There was an idea for time travel somewhere in there. Maybe if he stretched everything a bit and slipped though the gaps... that would probably send him somewhere out there with no air though. Maybe if he walked backwards. Or floated backwards, there would be no ground to walk.
Even to his drug addled mind, the idea was making less and less sense the longer he thought about it. Time travel would be a terrible idea anyways, even if he succeeded in going to the past there would be no way to go back into the future. Can't go to a place that doesn't exist yet, it was only logical. Ever expanding universe and all that.
What he's really searching for is an anomaly. He's felt them ever since that day his powers manifested. An itch at the back of his mind, the strange tingling spreading from his shoulder blades. The unaccountable knowledge that something else was supposed to happen and an uncomfortable awareness that he doesn't belong. As if being able to control metal with his mind didn't make that obvious enough.
What he's really searching for is a different universe.
Probably.
The thought disperses.
Erik loses himself, enjoying the cool breeze, heavy with smoke. Maybe it would make more sense if he could stretch the space around himself so that when it snapped back, he'd be somewhere else. Like a rubber band.
That could work, rubber bands made sense. Erik conveniently notices a rubber band laying harmlessly on the gravel. It was a sign, rubber bands will work. Erik reaches to scoop it up and wrap around his pinky, a reminder.
This maneuver caused his already fragile sense of balance to abandon him completely, leaving Erik floating around upside-down. His hair no longer fell all over his face and he was surprisingly comfortable.
The girls are puzzled.
“You are not right,” one of them says with a heavy Russian accent. Her head is tilted and her hand twists the air, strange and sporadic, trying to convey Erik's lack of upright posture.
“You are not wrong,” Erik replies, confusing them further. Neither comment on the fact that Erik is floating.
Erik really needs to get out of here soon.
02
Sober, Erik immediately sees a major flaw in the “rubber band plan,” as he has taken to mentally calling it.
The fact of the matter is as much as he had gained clarity and insight to the inner workings of the universe, none of it makes sense to him when he's not completely baked. Taking another floating day doesn't help, all the perfect sequences escape his fingertips as soon as he starts feeling stable.
There is only one solution – he has to learn physics.
This is how Erik finds himself in the Radcliffe Science Library a week later with too many rubber bands decorating his wrists as makeshift bracelets. The more he reads, the less likely it seems that anyone would be able to survive the rubber band plan. Unless something was already traveling faster than the speed of light, accelerating it to the speed of light would already require an infinite amount of energy.
That sounded like there was a good chance explosions were involved. That or the universe collapsing on itself.
Regardless, he'd need a giant battery. The rubber band plan was put on the back burner for now.
Instead, Erik is on the verge of adopting a new plan to punch a hole though spacetime. He's pretty sure causing a local distortion is within his abilities, even if he wasn't quite sure about the logistics of it yet. He'd need to do more research on negative mass. There's also a problem of precision.
Erik was good with big things, things like contorting steel I-beams and moving large vehicles. He was even decent with small things like fusing back loose wires in radios. What he needs right now is on a scale so small and exact, he'd have to be able to manipulate the electrical signal input of the speakers of said radio so that it played a completely different sound. In addition he would need to be able to control exactly what sound came out, otherwise who knows where the other end of the rift in spacetime led to? It could be anywhere in the universe.
What he needs is a guitar.
03
Musical instruments were apparently quite expensive. Fortunately for Erik (and unfortunately for everyone else), Erik excelled at petty theft. Locks were useless at keeping him out and he had a natural sense of how valuable certain items tend to be. He paid for his overpriced and barely serviceable flat though petty theft.
Thus Erik was now the proud owner of a steel-string acoustic. It's body was a flamed maple stained dark red and Erik didn't understand any of the specs the salesperson kept rattling off but it looked amazing. Guitar couldn't be that hard to learn, it felt like every other person he met knew how to play one.
Erik could feel the steel hum beneath his fingers.