Fic: Charles Xavier's Seven Deadly Virtues (1/3)
Title: Charles Xavier’s Seven Deadly Virtues
Author: tzzzz
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Wordcount: ~18,000
Pairing: Charles/Erik
Summary: Charles is on the fast train to sainthood and Erik is finding it increasingly difficult to hang on for the ride. Cannon AU - no beach divorce.
A/N: The Seven Heavenly Virtues are the compliment to the Seven Deadly Sins.
Charles Xavier’s Seven Deadly Virtues
HUMILITY
Time seems to slow down. Part of it is the pain, Charles thinks. Part is the sudden loss of control over his ability. His mind is forced to slow down to think so many people’s thoughts at once.
Oh my god, Charles?
Why did you try to fight him?
I’m so sorry.
I could have stopped this.
It’s what he deserves.
No longer a threat.
What will Shaw’s prodigy do now?
Will the humans fire again?
Should I go kill them?
I’m scared.
We need to leave.
Charles!
A shot to the back. Spinal involvement. Don’t move him.
We need to get to a hospital!
So many voices, but not the one he wants to hear. Charles clamps down on the unruly thoughts, screaming at them to be quite so he can listen to the one person that matters.
That person is speaking, “. . . we want the same thing.”
A proud part of him wants to tell Erik that they don’t - that he could never condone the things Erik wants to do. This is the part that takes refuge in his virtue, that makes him feel magnanimous in his desire to redeem Erik, the lost lamb who the evils of the world have forced from the path. But there’s also the part of Charles that knows Erik intimately, that has been in his mind and seen that they do want the same thing - the safety of their people. Erik doesn’t want to kill humans out of malice or even revenge, but because experience has cautioned him against forgiveness and life has robbed him of faith. To say that they want different things ignores nuance - they want the same thing but cannot bring themselves to agree on means.
A part of Charles also knows that only history will prove one of them right and the other wrong and that there is nothing he can ever do (outside of gross violations of Erik’s mental integrity) to change Erik’s mind. Moreover, he is not so convinced of his own virtue to rob the world of Erik’s point of view entirely.
There is also the part that doesn’t want Erik to see him weak. This part thinks it would be so much easier to let Erik go and begin building their fences as enemies than to let him see Charles's vulnerability. One of the things he loves about Erik is the simple way he glories in the wonder of mutation - the way Charles wishes he could be fearless enough to believe in. Despite all the people who have hurt him for what he is, Erik sees strength in his gifts and others, no matter how much of a threat they may be. Erik loves strength and it was strength that drew him to Charles, that coaxed those words from him at night in Charles's bed. “You are amazing,” Erik had said. “You are a god among men,” he whispered. “You’re beautiful.”
So even though a part of Charles wants to deny that he and Erik can ever be on the same side, there is another part - the part that still smarts from a mother who only occasionally loved him and never comforted him and the step father who beat him rather than wished for him to succeed - that part knows that what he needs right now isn’t pride, but someone to soothe the pain.
“Erik,” he gasps.
He has Erik’s full attention, even more intense than mornings waking up together in bed or afternoons spent daring each other to do the impossible with their powers. Charles doubts he has ever seen another soul look at him this way - as though he were the only thing that mattered in all of existence.
“What is it, Charles?”
“Erik,” the pain in his back is nothing compared to the pain of the admission. “I can’t feel my legs.”
DILIGENCE
The road to recovery seems endless. In some ways it is without end because the doctors say that Charles will never truly recover. The best recovery he can hope for will be to learn to live in his unrecovered state.
Charles knows that he must be patient. He knows that he must mourn what he has lost but also put on a brave face and fight the future. He takes comfort in the memories of others. He looks into the minds of doctors and nurses knowing that they do not pity him - the opposite, in fact, they are happy to have a patient who seems to have accepted his fate. They think about the many others who they have met in Charles's same condition who much later have stopped in with a new wife or a child or just to say thank you, content with their wheel-bound lives.
He has glimpsed into the minds of more than a few of those who have recovered and seen their deep abiding peace with what happened and how little they believed they could achieve such peace when they began. Once he knows what kind of transformation is possible, it’s easy to skip over the hatred and frustration and recriminations and skip straight on to acceptance of his new life. From their minds he has taught his body the skills that it took months for them to learn and he has Hank to help him with technologies that will make his life even more bearable. He knows that he has borrowed on the peace of others, but he is grateful.
Erik, in contrast, is angry. Erik paced the hallways of the hospital like a cat on the prowl and he berated the doctors either for not pushing Charles's recovery or for letting him graduate from their care too soon. Now that they are back at the mansion, he is a silent, brooding presence when he isn’t ripping up the copper piping of the sprinkler system or destroying the danger room.
Charles is grateful to Erik too - for demanding answers from the doctors, for keeping the ragtag band of mutants together during Charles's recovery, for tightening his jaw and turning to Shaw’s mutants on the beach and telling them the one thing Charles never would have thought to say.
“We may not agree about everything,” he said. “But even Shaw agreed that we should not harm our fellow mutants. Come, let us tend to our own, lick our wounds, and then we can figure out how to best build our future.”
Azazel had taken the boys back to the mansion, Angel and Riptide back to one of Shaw’s safehouses and dropped Erik and Charles at a hospital. Later, Charles learned that he had also dropped Raven at various locations known by Moira to dispose of documents and liberated Emma Frost from the CIA in time to erase the memories of those who knew about mutants in any detail. They were too late to deal with what the many crew members of those ships had seen, but she made certain that nobody knew who and what could explain the supernatural events they witnessed that day.
All of the mutants are at the mansion now, though Charles resents the presence of Emma Frost and the fact that Erik wears the helmet in order to guard against her. Erik has somehow earned the command of even Azazel, who is a being much older and more otherworldly than should bow down to the command of any man. The kids are wary of those who they were fighting not long ago, but they are young and will be able to forget.
It’s Sean who finally breaks the ice one day over a tense dinner. Charles eavesdrops on their conversations, usually through Alex’s eyes, because he is still confined to his bed for most of the day. “Did you really think that atomic war was a good thing?” Sean blurts. “I mean, Shaw could eat up the energy of a nuclear submarine, but we don’t all have his mutation.”
Emma laughs. It is a surprising sound coming from her - an awkwardly unfeminine guffaw that she is quick to mute into a giggle. “I don’t think any of us thought Shaw was playing with all of his marbles, Sugar. But he had crowned himself the leader of the mutant cause long before I joined. I figured I’d live the rest of my life in diamond form if I had to. But I knew it would be better to be the rulers of a new world than servants and bogeymen in this one.”
“What about your families?” Sean asks. “Your friends? Every human you ever knew would have been dead.”
“I’ve been inside the minds of many humans, darling. There’s a lot of sickness in there. I’m not saying that there isn’t good, too. But the good is all mixed up in hatred and fear and selfishness and shame and it isn’t salvageable for the human species as a whole. There are only two choices - be the ones beaten down by the sickness or be the masters that rise above it.”
“Mutants aren’t any better,” Alex argues. “Shaw wasn’t better.” Charles isn’t entirely sure that his subconscious isn’t bleeding through into Alex, who is normally taciturn, especially on issues of morality.
“I never said we were,” Emma agrees. “But we have the power to be free and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it.”
Erik is sitting still through all of this, watching the argument with all the feigned passivity of a tiger blending into the brush. Charles doesn’t need to read his mind to know who Erik sides with in this argument, but something holds him silent. Perhaps he wants to gauge how hard it will be to convince the boys.
“So you’re not going to try to blow up the world again?” Raven interjects. She has also been watching Emma intently.
“Niet,” Azazel responds. “Shaw had a dangerous vision.”
“You seemed happy enough killing all of those men when you came to get us that night,” Raven practically spits.
“Insignificant pawns in a war of epochs. I have lived a long time and I will live to see mutants as the dominant species on this planet. I do not hate humans. I do not take pleasure in killing them, but they are a dying breed. Shaw had a dangerous vision to bring their struggle to a swift end but I have waited centuries and I can wait centuries more.”
Charles is fascinated by Azazel and how he came to be. What must life be like for a being so old and with such a fascinating power? Could he have influenced human history? Surely he is not old enough to be the inspiration for depictions of Satan. Charles wishes that the red devil would spend his time by Charles's bedside as the others do. But like with many other things, Azazel only deigns to conform to the will of others when he sees fit.
If Charles were downstairs with the others he would ask Azazel more questions, but he doesn’t want them to know that he’s been eavesdropping. He feels justified, however, considering that he has lost the ability to physically go where he pleases. His legs may be a forgotten numbness at the end of his spine, but he feels like he is finally, mentally stretching his wings.
“Y tú?” Erik asks Riptide. Charles switches over to Janos’ mind in order to translate. “Why did you follow Shaw?”
Charles sees the images before Janos formulates the answer - the sleek metal of an operating table, Shaw looming over a scared child, a lake in the countryside with whirlwinds dancing over the water. “You called him Herr Doctor Schmidt. I called him Señor Santin. He was an associate of Franco.”
Erik gets a familiar look in his eye, a warning look like the sound of a rattlesnake that cautions against scratching the surface of Erik’s own darkness. Raven looks worried and the boys confused. “Did you ever think to leave him?”
Janos shrugs and the cutlery on the table vibrates. Erik’s hatred of Shaw had been so consuming that the last thing he could ever accept is nonchalance. “It was all I knew,” Janos doesn’t seem intimidated. “He made me what I am and he made me better.”
“Do you regret that I killed him?” Erik asks. Raven is gripping his arm now, squeezing until the metal in the room finally stills.
“He was sadistic. He was a bastard. I believe it is fate that his future was not allowed to pass but I also believe it is fate that he met me and that he met you and that we are together now.”
Charles sees a magnificent altar and a young boy kneeling before it, Shaw a smugly smiling guardian at his back. Shaw had evolved, Charles notes, from a man conducting experiments to a man crafting soldiers.
“So we’re all agreed,” Erik says in English. “Shaw was crazy.”
Everyone laughs.
“But we will build a better world for our kind. Together.”
The kids look at the former members of Shaw’s team warily, but they all nod.
“Excellent.” Erik treats them all to his wide shark’s smile. “Now, excuse me, but I promised Charles I would deliver his dinner.”
It is a few minutes before Erik joins Charles, levitating a metal tray loaded with a small loaf of bread and a bowl of broth. Charles is not cleared for pungent foods at this point. He is lucky to still maintain control of his bowels, but his doctors insist on caution while his healing continues.
“You overheard our conversation, I presume?” Erik asks as he uses his mutation to adjust Charles's hospital bed to allow him to sit up for dinner. The unwieldy brace on Charles's back is also made of metal, so Erik manages the motion so smoothly that Charles feels no pain from the movement. Erik would probably hate to know how good a nursemaid he makes.
“Thank you, my friend.” Charles tells him, but he doesn’t know how to reach beyond his English politeness to show Erik how truly grateful he is for his support. Charles digs into his bland broth, trying to be enthusiastic about it, but failing.
“I know you were listening,” Erik continues. “Ms. Frost has a constipated look on her face whenever you’re lurking in a mind she hopes to spy on.”
Charles barely registers Emma brushing up against him anymore - the way subway travelers become desensitized to the haphazard touch of strangers. She is ruthless in her use of telepathy. She cannot passively read the surface thoughts of an entire room at once the way Charles can, but she reads everyone she focuses her attention on without regard for their privacy and she digs as deep as will satisfy her interest. Charles doesn’t blame Erik for wanting the helmet when he’s around her.
“Her diamond form gives her stronger shields than I think I could ever build - almost as though her mind has been encrypted into a different species entirely, like trying to read a pigeon or a dog. But when it comes to active telepathy, it has become quite clear that I am the stronger telepathy.”
“So very modest, Charles,” Erik comments, but he’s grinning.
“You can take that bloody thing off now,” Charles indicates the helmet. “If you have my attention, she won’t be able to touch you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to remove it,” Erik teases. “I think it makes quite the fashion statement.”
“I suppose you liked the yellow jumpsuits as well,” Charles rolls his eyes, but he is becoming increasingly more nervous. Perhaps Erik doesn’t want to take the helmet off. After all, Emma Frost was not on the beach in Cuba. Erik had first put it on in order to keep Charles out.
Erik shrugs. “Fashion isn’t really what matters when you are trying to stop a madman. Though I could see the appeal of a good costume for intimidation reasons.”
Erik still hasn’t moved to take the helmet off, but Charles knows that they have to address the elephant in the room - what Erik had been saying on the beach, what he’d been doing with those missiles before Charles was shot, the sentiments that he’d echoed at dinner.
“I don’t disagree with you,” Charles preempts him. “I don’t think we should be fighting each other. And it was a brilliant tactical move on your part to get our new recruits to admit that they are not harboring resentment over Shaw’s death in front of the others.”
Charles had already verified their intentions as soon as he’d been weaned off painkillers. They’d all volunteered to let him do a telepathic interrogation. Though with Erik around, volunteerism and coercion tended to be well acquainted.
“But if that’s the only common ground we have, then we’ll both have to compromise a great deal.”
Erik sighs. “I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten the moments leading up to your injury. I hear that going into shock can sometimes cause memory loss.”
Charles chuckles. “You made quite the figure, holding those missiles at bay with just a raised hand. It would be a shame to forget a marvel like that.”
Charles surprises himself with the geniality of his tone. If he closes his eyes he could almost imagine them chatting over chess and scotch. They’ve played chess a few times since Charles had been clear headed enough to manage it, but alcohol was out for the foreseeable future.
“Well, it’s not stopping the missiles that were about to kill us that’s the problem. It’s what I did afterwards.”
“Tell me that it was a moment of rage. You’d just killed Shaw, a man who’d tortured you and whose assassination obsessed you for most of your adult life. I can understand being confused and emotional after an event like that. Tell me that it was an irrationality that you regret now that you have had the time to think clearly.”
Erik grimaces, bowing his head. “I regret with all my heart that you were hurt as a result of my actions. And, seeing how things have turned out now, I admit that we are in a superior strategic position than we might have been if we’d announced our presence to the world by decimating a significant amount of the naval forces of two superpowers. I’m also happy that we are all together - which we might not have been if I had succeeded in destroying those ships. But if you’re asking if I still think it was the right choice morally to kill those who fully intended to massacre us or if I would not regret killing men who were just following the orders of evildoers, then you know the answer.”
Charles hadn’t expected Erik to have changed his moral position. In fact, he’d made it known long before the beach. But Erik has been evolving since he’d been suicidally chasing after a submarine. Rage no longer consumes him during battle and, now, he is willing to admit that just because something is morally justified (under his own logic) it isn’t necessarily the wisest choice. This is probably the biggest concession Charles can hope for from Erik. Now he must decide whether he is satisfied with it. Can he live and work with a man who sees nothing wrong with killing humans so long as it protects mutants? Can he trust Erik to navigate the slippery slope between self-defense, preemptive strike, and total disregard for human life?
Want not, he thinks. He has to accept that people can only change so much, even when presented with the obvious.
Erik is hunched in on himself, looking small rather than filling the room with his mere presence as Charles is used to seeing him. Charles wishes he would take the helmet off so he can know what has made him so insecure.
“What I said before is true, Charles. I want you by my side. But I can also understand if you can’t accept the things I believe in.”
There is a line somewhere in between their two ideologies. Charles knows that if Erik ever crosses that line, as he was about to do in Cuba, then there is no hope for them to work together as a team. But Charles doesn’t know exactly where that line is. He’s already accepted that Erik has done many things (and Charles has seen them) that fall outside of the moral code that Charles holds himself to. But there are acts so heinous that they would be nothing short of a betrayal of the love Charles still feels for Erik.
“I can accept that we must act in self defense if we are attacked.”
Erik nods.
“I could also see very narrow circumstances under which a preemptive strike of appropriate scale would be acceptable.”
“What kind of circumstances?”
“Undeniable confirmation of intent, exhaustion of all other recourse, a concrete, imminent threat, a reaction on a scale that could stop the threat with the smallest application of force possible.”
Erik chuckles. “You sound as though you’re read those criteria in a philosophy journal or a treatise on the law of war, perhaps.”
“You haven’t been fully acquainted with my academic side.”
“I admit I am intrigued, Professor.”
“Yes, well, there is one thing I cannot accept. I cannot accept gross disregard for human life. I’ve listened to thoughts my whole life. I’ve been a voyeur in the minds of many humans and, now, quite a few mutants and other than our gifts, we are all the same. We have the same basic wants and desires, the same temptations to evil, and the same capacity for good. There are humans with a will to power that breeds evil, like Hitler. And there are mutants who are the same, like Shaw. But even Hitler and even Shaw had complex lives with hopes and dreams and fears and small acts of charity. Their lives were not valueless and though I am glad, for the good of mankind, that they are both dead, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t mourn the loss of a life, any life, even if the capacity of that individual to perpetuate evil acts means that they must be put to death.”
Erik’s eyes flash angrily. Charles's bedside lamp flickers from the metal in its frame vibrating. “You’re not telling me that you mourn the death of my torturer and the man who mass murdered my people.”
“I’m saying that I accept the idea that sometimes one life must be sacrificed for the greater good, but I must insist that no life is insignificant. Even the lives of mass murderers have some value, though that value is dwarfed by the atrocities they commit. I understand that there was no way we could have incapacitated or permanently imprisoned Shaw - that he needed to die. I can even understand how your emotions drove you to kill him. That’s not what concerns me. What truly worries me is that you seem to think that human beings who have done nothing wrong have no moral standing. I could understand that if you didn’t have a choice - if you had to pick between saving us and saving the people on those ships, then I would accept if you chose to save those of us who were innocent and not the ones firing the missiles in the first place. But you had full control and you knew that a few men on that ship wanted us dead and probably still do, but there were thousands there who had no idea about the orders or that we were even on the beach. And even if many of those men did know the circumstances, they certainly didn’t have an opportunity to object. What concerns me is that you value those lives so little that you would destroy them for revenge on the guilty few.”
“Those that fear and hate us are all guilty. They are complicit.”
“I was inside those minds, Erik. Most feared death, but it was fear absent malice, fear laced in confusion. I did not sense the thoughts of evil men.”
What Charles doesn’t say is that he is well acquainted with evil. Being in Shaw’s mind had been like poison - so full of cool hatred, a burning apathy towards the lives of humans. It was a mind that delighted in pain and deplored compassion. Like Azazel, Shaw was old and to him, the end of the short lives of humans felt inevitable. Despite his flaws, Shaw was also wise - he knew how to control and manipulate with a precision that only a telepath could hope to match. Possessing such insight made it easy for him to see those around him as mere pawns in his own game. Charles had not felt that kind of evil in the step-father who beat him or the step-brother who resented and taunted him. In them, he recognized sickness, not apathy and though sickness could be equally dangerous, it existed intertwined with love and guilt and fear, and did not exclude compassion. Kurt Marko’s last act had proven that.
“What evil men have in common,” Charles continues, hating himself for having to say these things that will undoubtedly hurt Erik, but nonetheless need to be said, “is that they have no regard for the lives of others. The genocide of your people happened because evil men decided that as a group, you had no right to live. The Jews were perceived as holding back a so-called superior race and because Hitler saw you as lesser, he thought he was justified in committing genocide. His callous disregard for your lives is what made him a dangerous, evil man. I don’t want to think of you as a dangerous, evil man. But if you think that human suffering and human death is something to be taken lightly simply because the human race is inferior to mutants, then you too will be a dangerous, evil man, and that I cannot accept.”
Erik stays silent for a long time. His hands tremble and he has a thoroughly stricken look in his eyes, but he meets Charles’s gaze without anger.
“I am a dangerous man,” he finally whispers. “Shaw made me into a weapon and I don’t know how to be anything else. I’ve killed a lot of people, many of whom were more complicit than guilty. I don’t feel any guilt and I didn’t feel compassion. I don’t think I have the capacity to forgive. I,” he chokes up, finally burying his face in his hands, wiping away a few stray tears that even the helmet cannot hide. “You have no idea how much it hurts me to know that you might think that I am evil. But there’s a chance that, under your understanding of the word, I am exactly that.”
“Oh, my friend,” Charles reaches out, hating his stupid injury and the fact that he can’t just go and embrace Erik. “Don’t you understand? You have a choice. Our lives aren’t static. We are all, humans and mutants alike, capable of great transformation.”
Erik stands, making his way reluctantly over to Charles's bedside. “I could hurt you,” he murmurs when Charles asks him to sit down on the bed.
“You like to pretend you’re a sociopathic killing machine, but you do feel things deeply. You haven’t lost the capacity to feel compassion or to love. There’s so much good in you.”
Erik shakes his head, giving Charles a significant look. “No, I haven’t lost the capacity for love.” He leans down, brushing a soft kiss against Charles's lips.
The helmet pokes into Charles’s jaw uncomfortably. “Now will you please remove this bloody thing.”
Erik pulls back a little. “I would, but maybe I should go. You need to rest.”
“Are you desperate to keep that thing on or are you just determined to treat me with kid gloves? Because honestly, I think it would help my recovery much better to know with certainty that I don’t have to worry about us.”
Don’t you trust me? Charles projects, knowing that Erik can’t hear him. Talking to him with the helmet on is like speaking to a walking corpse. It unsettles Charles and he’s had more than one nightmare about it.
“You know you’re spoiled, right?” Erik teases, already pulling the helmet off. “The rest of us never get to know anything about other people with certainty. We walk around making noises at each other hoping that they convey what it is we’re feeling, wondering if we’re understood or if we’re being lied to. We’d all be paranoid men if we didn’t occasionally act on the faith that people are being honest to us.”
“Hmm,” Charles murmurs, already relaxing into the rich depths that make up Erik’s mind. Because he had permission, Charles has dug around deeper in Erik’s mind than he has with most anyone in his adult life. Erik’s thoughts are sharp and clean, directed, ordered, intelligent. There are layers to his mind, complexity that gets more fascinating as each layer is pulled back. He is beautiful, but always wary. “I suppose you know all about being a paranoid man.”
Erik scoffs. “See, Charles, there’s a difference. I was never paranoid. I admit that I can be antisocial, but I’ve seen more than enough of the world to trust my interpretation of their intentions and my valuation of the truth in their words. Like you, for instance. I know you are a good man, if naive. I can trust in your word without question. What is more difficult,” he admits, “is all the things you don’t say. All the promises I never dared ask for.”
“What are those?” Charles asks.
Erik is an eminently physical and precise man, in perfect control of his body. But that doesn’t stop the way his mind flinches at the thought that rises nonetheless.
“You don’t want me to read your mind,” Charles responds for him. “I am hardly in need of telepathy to gather that, Erik.” He looks pointedly at Erik’s abandoned helmet. “I’m not a stranger to the desire for privacy, Erik. But I assure you that you have nothing to be ashamed of. There is no need to hide from me, my friend.”
“I know you believe that. I want to believe it too. That’s why I dare not ask for that promise.”
What a charming, deadly creature Erik must make, Charles thinks. His body deceives so fluently and with such unflinching charisma. But his thoughts belie that calm exterior. Don’t let him find out. Erik’s surface thoughts say. He is practically chanting it.
Charles flinches.
He knows. I shouldn’t have taken it off.
“What do I know?” Charles asks. There’s no use in feigning ignorance.
An image comes, unbidden. Charles knows that he could close down their mental connection, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
“How is he?” Raven asks. She is in her blue form, standing anxiously next to Azazel just outside the front door to the mansion.
Erik sighs. “They think this is the last surgery. He woke up incoherent, but he’s no longer projecting his thoughts.”
Charles grimaces. He remembers Emma, freshly retrieved from the CIA, in his head telling him that he needed to stop projecting or risk her needing to memory wipe everyone in a few mile radius.
”Alex and Emma are with him now. Once Charles is more coherent, Emma can go with you to do more memory wipes. How is the document retrieval working?”
“Good,” Raven reports. “We were able to find the secretary responsible for distributing classified material on the mutant issue. We used her lists to track down the people with knowledge of the program and we now know exactly how many of these documents are out there. It’s going to take time to track them all down and modify everyone’s memory.”
Erik nods. “I think we need to consider that there may be some whose memories we shouldn’t modify.”
Raven scowls. “You’re the one who thought secrecy was the best course of action.”
“For now,” Erik corrects her. “I see the strategic advantage of controlling when and how humanity finds out about us. But I didn’t mean that we should let a few people run around with information in there heads that doesn’t exist elsewhere. I was suggesting that there are some who are dangerous now and will be just as dangerous later on when do make ourselves known to the public.”
“You want assassination?” Azazel asks.
“Targeted, yes. Not so many as to be conspicuous. Emma and I have already put together a short list. These deaths need to look accidental. You made need to do some lengthy impersonations for this,” Erik says to Raven.
Raven, Charles’s poor baby sister Raven, gulps but holds her head high, determined not to disappoint her new leader. Charles can see by the seriousness of her gaze that she already respects Erik far more than she ever respected her older brother.
Charles dives out of the memory with relief. He is still holding onto Erik’s wrist, feeling his pulse beat wildly beneath Charles’s fingers. “Did they accomplish it?”
Erik nods.
Charles is disappointed, but he understands that a man who used to revel in clever speeches to the victims of his vigilantism isn’t going to suddenly change without a lot of hard work.
I don’t want to disappoint you Erik’s mind cries out. I stand behind my conviction that sometimes violence is the only way. But I want to be the better man when I can afford to do so. I just don’t know how.
Leaving aside the fact that Erik sees morality as a kind of luxury that is only afforded to some, Charles focuses on what progress they can hope to make. There are philosophy papers and law of war treatises on this subject for a reason. You’re not alone in struggling to find balance between what emotion demands and what is right.
“Then help me.”
“Let’s start with a simple rule: no unnecessary killing.”
“Targeted assassination shows restraint.”
“Restraint because if you killed too many you’d endanger your other strategic purposes, not because you wanted to spare unnecessary death. You were afraid I’d see that memory because you know that you didn’t need to have those men killed when you could have had Emma make them forget.”
“The people who made a deal with their greatest enemy because they’d rather kill us aren’t going to change. It’s not a preemptive strike if they’ve already committed an act that damns them.”
“We can’t take an eye for an eye, lest the whole world go blind. If you can admit to yourself that you are capable of being more than what Shaw made you, then these men, too, were capable of change. You robbed them of that opportunity.”
“It’s too risky to pin our survival on the hopes that others can make radical changes.”
“But aren’t the humans asking the same question about us? They saw us control the most powerful weapons of war they possess with nothing but our bodies. Is it too risky for them to pin their survival on our decision to use that power for good, not evil?”
“You have a good point. I don’t doubt that humans have reason to fear us. But they are not our people and their race is not the future. You said it yourself in your own thesis: the extinction of the neanderthal was inevitable in the process of evolution. You don’t believe that we are morally superior to humans, but a part of you knows that we are the superior race and that we need to protect each other.”
Erik pulls away, settling the helmet back on his head as he stands. Charles misses him immediately. “I’ll always protect you, Charles. Don’t doubt that.”
Part 2
Author: tzzzz
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Wordcount: ~18,000
Pairing: Charles/Erik
Summary: Charles is on the fast train to sainthood and Erik is finding it increasingly difficult to hang on for the ride. Cannon AU - no beach divorce.
A/N: The Seven Heavenly Virtues are the compliment to the Seven Deadly Sins.
Charles Xavier’s Seven Deadly Virtues
HUMILITY
Time seems to slow down. Part of it is the pain, Charles thinks. Part is the sudden loss of control over his ability. His mind is forced to slow down to think so many people’s thoughts at once.
Oh my god, Charles?
Why did you try to fight him?
I’m so sorry.
I could have stopped this.
It’s what he deserves.
No longer a threat.
What will Shaw’s prodigy do now?
Will the humans fire again?
Should I go kill them?
I’m scared.
We need to leave.
Charles!
A shot to the back. Spinal involvement. Don’t move him.
We need to get to a hospital!
So many voices, but not the one he wants to hear. Charles clamps down on the unruly thoughts, screaming at them to be quite so he can listen to the one person that matters.
That person is speaking, “. . . we want the same thing.”
A proud part of him wants to tell Erik that they don’t - that he could never condone the things Erik wants to do. This is the part that takes refuge in his virtue, that makes him feel magnanimous in his desire to redeem Erik, the lost lamb who the evils of the world have forced from the path. But there’s also the part of Charles that knows Erik intimately, that has been in his mind and seen that they do want the same thing - the safety of their people. Erik doesn’t want to kill humans out of malice or even revenge, but because experience has cautioned him against forgiveness and life has robbed him of faith. To say that they want different things ignores nuance - they want the same thing but cannot bring themselves to agree on means.
A part of Charles also knows that only history will prove one of them right and the other wrong and that there is nothing he can ever do (outside of gross violations of Erik’s mental integrity) to change Erik’s mind. Moreover, he is not so convinced of his own virtue to rob the world of Erik’s point of view entirely.
There is also the part that doesn’t want Erik to see him weak. This part thinks it would be so much easier to let Erik go and begin building their fences as enemies than to let him see Charles's vulnerability. One of the things he loves about Erik is the simple way he glories in the wonder of mutation - the way Charles wishes he could be fearless enough to believe in. Despite all the people who have hurt him for what he is, Erik sees strength in his gifts and others, no matter how much of a threat they may be. Erik loves strength and it was strength that drew him to Charles, that coaxed those words from him at night in Charles's bed. “You are amazing,” Erik had said. “You are a god among men,” he whispered. “You’re beautiful.”
So even though a part of Charles wants to deny that he and Erik can ever be on the same side, there is another part - the part that still smarts from a mother who only occasionally loved him and never comforted him and the step father who beat him rather than wished for him to succeed - that part knows that what he needs right now isn’t pride, but someone to soothe the pain.
“Erik,” he gasps.
He has Erik’s full attention, even more intense than mornings waking up together in bed or afternoons spent daring each other to do the impossible with their powers. Charles doubts he has ever seen another soul look at him this way - as though he were the only thing that mattered in all of existence.
“What is it, Charles?”
“Erik,” the pain in his back is nothing compared to the pain of the admission. “I can’t feel my legs.”
DILIGENCE
The road to recovery seems endless. In some ways it is without end because the doctors say that Charles will never truly recover. The best recovery he can hope for will be to learn to live in his unrecovered state.
Charles knows that he must be patient. He knows that he must mourn what he has lost but also put on a brave face and fight the future. He takes comfort in the memories of others. He looks into the minds of doctors and nurses knowing that they do not pity him - the opposite, in fact, they are happy to have a patient who seems to have accepted his fate. They think about the many others who they have met in Charles's same condition who much later have stopped in with a new wife or a child or just to say thank you, content with their wheel-bound lives.
He has glimpsed into the minds of more than a few of those who have recovered and seen their deep abiding peace with what happened and how little they believed they could achieve such peace when they began. Once he knows what kind of transformation is possible, it’s easy to skip over the hatred and frustration and recriminations and skip straight on to acceptance of his new life. From their minds he has taught his body the skills that it took months for them to learn and he has Hank to help him with technologies that will make his life even more bearable. He knows that he has borrowed on the peace of others, but he is grateful.
Erik, in contrast, is angry. Erik paced the hallways of the hospital like a cat on the prowl and he berated the doctors either for not pushing Charles's recovery or for letting him graduate from their care too soon. Now that they are back at the mansion, he is a silent, brooding presence when he isn’t ripping up the copper piping of the sprinkler system or destroying the danger room.
Charles is grateful to Erik too - for demanding answers from the doctors, for keeping the ragtag band of mutants together during Charles's recovery, for tightening his jaw and turning to Shaw’s mutants on the beach and telling them the one thing Charles never would have thought to say.
“We may not agree about everything,” he said. “But even Shaw agreed that we should not harm our fellow mutants. Come, let us tend to our own, lick our wounds, and then we can figure out how to best build our future.”
Azazel had taken the boys back to the mansion, Angel and Riptide back to one of Shaw’s safehouses and dropped Erik and Charles at a hospital. Later, Charles learned that he had also dropped Raven at various locations known by Moira to dispose of documents and liberated Emma Frost from the CIA in time to erase the memories of those who knew about mutants in any detail. They were too late to deal with what the many crew members of those ships had seen, but she made certain that nobody knew who and what could explain the supernatural events they witnessed that day.
All of the mutants are at the mansion now, though Charles resents the presence of Emma Frost and the fact that Erik wears the helmet in order to guard against her. Erik has somehow earned the command of even Azazel, who is a being much older and more otherworldly than should bow down to the command of any man. The kids are wary of those who they were fighting not long ago, but they are young and will be able to forget.
It’s Sean who finally breaks the ice one day over a tense dinner. Charles eavesdrops on their conversations, usually through Alex’s eyes, because he is still confined to his bed for most of the day. “Did you really think that atomic war was a good thing?” Sean blurts. “I mean, Shaw could eat up the energy of a nuclear submarine, but we don’t all have his mutation.”
Emma laughs. It is a surprising sound coming from her - an awkwardly unfeminine guffaw that she is quick to mute into a giggle. “I don’t think any of us thought Shaw was playing with all of his marbles, Sugar. But he had crowned himself the leader of the mutant cause long before I joined. I figured I’d live the rest of my life in diamond form if I had to. But I knew it would be better to be the rulers of a new world than servants and bogeymen in this one.”
“What about your families?” Sean asks. “Your friends? Every human you ever knew would have been dead.”
“I’ve been inside the minds of many humans, darling. There’s a lot of sickness in there. I’m not saying that there isn’t good, too. But the good is all mixed up in hatred and fear and selfishness and shame and it isn’t salvageable for the human species as a whole. There are only two choices - be the ones beaten down by the sickness or be the masters that rise above it.”
“Mutants aren’t any better,” Alex argues. “Shaw wasn’t better.” Charles isn’t entirely sure that his subconscious isn’t bleeding through into Alex, who is normally taciturn, especially on issues of morality.
“I never said we were,” Emma agrees. “But we have the power to be free and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it.”
Erik is sitting still through all of this, watching the argument with all the feigned passivity of a tiger blending into the brush. Charles doesn’t need to read his mind to know who Erik sides with in this argument, but something holds him silent. Perhaps he wants to gauge how hard it will be to convince the boys.
“So you’re not going to try to blow up the world again?” Raven interjects. She has also been watching Emma intently.
“Niet,” Azazel responds. “Shaw had a dangerous vision.”
“You seemed happy enough killing all of those men when you came to get us that night,” Raven practically spits.
“Insignificant pawns in a war of epochs. I have lived a long time and I will live to see mutants as the dominant species on this planet. I do not hate humans. I do not take pleasure in killing them, but they are a dying breed. Shaw had a dangerous vision to bring their struggle to a swift end but I have waited centuries and I can wait centuries more.”
Charles is fascinated by Azazel and how he came to be. What must life be like for a being so old and with such a fascinating power? Could he have influenced human history? Surely he is not old enough to be the inspiration for depictions of Satan. Charles wishes that the red devil would spend his time by Charles's bedside as the others do. But like with many other things, Azazel only deigns to conform to the will of others when he sees fit.
If Charles were downstairs with the others he would ask Azazel more questions, but he doesn’t want them to know that he’s been eavesdropping. He feels justified, however, considering that he has lost the ability to physically go where he pleases. His legs may be a forgotten numbness at the end of his spine, but he feels like he is finally, mentally stretching his wings.
“Y tú?” Erik asks Riptide. Charles switches over to Janos’ mind in order to translate. “Why did you follow Shaw?”
Charles sees the images before Janos formulates the answer - the sleek metal of an operating table, Shaw looming over a scared child, a lake in the countryside with whirlwinds dancing over the water. “You called him Herr Doctor Schmidt. I called him Señor Santin. He was an associate of Franco.”
Erik gets a familiar look in his eye, a warning look like the sound of a rattlesnake that cautions against scratching the surface of Erik’s own darkness. Raven looks worried and the boys confused. “Did you ever think to leave him?”
Janos shrugs and the cutlery on the table vibrates. Erik’s hatred of Shaw had been so consuming that the last thing he could ever accept is nonchalance. “It was all I knew,” Janos doesn’t seem intimidated. “He made me what I am and he made me better.”
“Do you regret that I killed him?” Erik asks. Raven is gripping his arm now, squeezing until the metal in the room finally stills.
“He was sadistic. He was a bastard. I believe it is fate that his future was not allowed to pass but I also believe it is fate that he met me and that he met you and that we are together now.”
Charles sees a magnificent altar and a young boy kneeling before it, Shaw a smugly smiling guardian at his back. Shaw had evolved, Charles notes, from a man conducting experiments to a man crafting soldiers.
“So we’re all agreed,” Erik says in English. “Shaw was crazy.”
Everyone laughs.
“But we will build a better world for our kind. Together.”
The kids look at the former members of Shaw’s team warily, but they all nod.
“Excellent.” Erik treats them all to his wide shark’s smile. “Now, excuse me, but I promised Charles I would deliver his dinner.”
It is a few minutes before Erik joins Charles, levitating a metal tray loaded with a small loaf of bread and a bowl of broth. Charles is not cleared for pungent foods at this point. He is lucky to still maintain control of his bowels, but his doctors insist on caution while his healing continues.
“You overheard our conversation, I presume?” Erik asks as he uses his mutation to adjust Charles's hospital bed to allow him to sit up for dinner. The unwieldy brace on Charles's back is also made of metal, so Erik manages the motion so smoothly that Charles feels no pain from the movement. Erik would probably hate to know how good a nursemaid he makes.
“Thank you, my friend.” Charles tells him, but he doesn’t know how to reach beyond his English politeness to show Erik how truly grateful he is for his support. Charles digs into his bland broth, trying to be enthusiastic about it, but failing.
“I know you were listening,” Erik continues. “Ms. Frost has a constipated look on her face whenever you’re lurking in a mind she hopes to spy on.”
Charles barely registers Emma brushing up against him anymore - the way subway travelers become desensitized to the haphazard touch of strangers. She is ruthless in her use of telepathy. She cannot passively read the surface thoughts of an entire room at once the way Charles can, but she reads everyone she focuses her attention on without regard for their privacy and she digs as deep as will satisfy her interest. Charles doesn’t blame Erik for wanting the helmet when he’s around her.
“Her diamond form gives her stronger shields than I think I could ever build - almost as though her mind has been encrypted into a different species entirely, like trying to read a pigeon or a dog. But when it comes to active telepathy, it has become quite clear that I am the stronger telepathy.”
“So very modest, Charles,” Erik comments, but he’s grinning.
“You can take that bloody thing off now,” Charles indicates the helmet. “If you have my attention, she won’t be able to touch you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to remove it,” Erik teases. “I think it makes quite the fashion statement.”
“I suppose you liked the yellow jumpsuits as well,” Charles rolls his eyes, but he is becoming increasingly more nervous. Perhaps Erik doesn’t want to take the helmet off. After all, Emma Frost was not on the beach in Cuba. Erik had first put it on in order to keep Charles out.
Erik shrugs. “Fashion isn’t really what matters when you are trying to stop a madman. Though I could see the appeal of a good costume for intimidation reasons.”
Erik still hasn’t moved to take the helmet off, but Charles knows that they have to address the elephant in the room - what Erik had been saying on the beach, what he’d been doing with those missiles before Charles was shot, the sentiments that he’d echoed at dinner.
“I don’t disagree with you,” Charles preempts him. “I don’t think we should be fighting each other. And it was a brilliant tactical move on your part to get our new recruits to admit that they are not harboring resentment over Shaw’s death in front of the others.”
Charles had already verified their intentions as soon as he’d been weaned off painkillers. They’d all volunteered to let him do a telepathic interrogation. Though with Erik around, volunteerism and coercion tended to be well acquainted.
“But if that’s the only common ground we have, then we’ll both have to compromise a great deal.”
Erik sighs. “I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten the moments leading up to your injury. I hear that going into shock can sometimes cause memory loss.”
Charles chuckles. “You made quite the figure, holding those missiles at bay with just a raised hand. It would be a shame to forget a marvel like that.”
Charles surprises himself with the geniality of his tone. If he closes his eyes he could almost imagine them chatting over chess and scotch. They’ve played chess a few times since Charles had been clear headed enough to manage it, but alcohol was out for the foreseeable future.
“Well, it’s not stopping the missiles that were about to kill us that’s the problem. It’s what I did afterwards.”
“Tell me that it was a moment of rage. You’d just killed Shaw, a man who’d tortured you and whose assassination obsessed you for most of your adult life. I can understand being confused and emotional after an event like that. Tell me that it was an irrationality that you regret now that you have had the time to think clearly.”
Erik grimaces, bowing his head. “I regret with all my heart that you were hurt as a result of my actions. And, seeing how things have turned out now, I admit that we are in a superior strategic position than we might have been if we’d announced our presence to the world by decimating a significant amount of the naval forces of two superpowers. I’m also happy that we are all together - which we might not have been if I had succeeded in destroying those ships. But if you’re asking if I still think it was the right choice morally to kill those who fully intended to massacre us or if I would not regret killing men who were just following the orders of evildoers, then you know the answer.”
Charles hadn’t expected Erik to have changed his moral position. In fact, he’d made it known long before the beach. But Erik has been evolving since he’d been suicidally chasing after a submarine. Rage no longer consumes him during battle and, now, he is willing to admit that just because something is morally justified (under his own logic) it isn’t necessarily the wisest choice. This is probably the biggest concession Charles can hope for from Erik. Now he must decide whether he is satisfied with it. Can he live and work with a man who sees nothing wrong with killing humans so long as it protects mutants? Can he trust Erik to navigate the slippery slope between self-defense, preemptive strike, and total disregard for human life?
Want not, he thinks. He has to accept that people can only change so much, even when presented with the obvious.
Erik is hunched in on himself, looking small rather than filling the room with his mere presence as Charles is used to seeing him. Charles wishes he would take the helmet off so he can know what has made him so insecure.
“What I said before is true, Charles. I want you by my side. But I can also understand if you can’t accept the things I believe in.”
There is a line somewhere in between their two ideologies. Charles knows that if Erik ever crosses that line, as he was about to do in Cuba, then there is no hope for them to work together as a team. But Charles doesn’t know exactly where that line is. He’s already accepted that Erik has done many things (and Charles has seen them) that fall outside of the moral code that Charles holds himself to. But there are acts so heinous that they would be nothing short of a betrayal of the love Charles still feels for Erik.
“I can accept that we must act in self defense if we are attacked.”
Erik nods.
“I could also see very narrow circumstances under which a preemptive strike of appropriate scale would be acceptable.”
“What kind of circumstances?”
“Undeniable confirmation of intent, exhaustion of all other recourse, a concrete, imminent threat, a reaction on a scale that could stop the threat with the smallest application of force possible.”
Erik chuckles. “You sound as though you’re read those criteria in a philosophy journal or a treatise on the law of war, perhaps.”
“You haven’t been fully acquainted with my academic side.”
“I admit I am intrigued, Professor.”
“Yes, well, there is one thing I cannot accept. I cannot accept gross disregard for human life. I’ve listened to thoughts my whole life. I’ve been a voyeur in the minds of many humans and, now, quite a few mutants and other than our gifts, we are all the same. We have the same basic wants and desires, the same temptations to evil, and the same capacity for good. There are humans with a will to power that breeds evil, like Hitler. And there are mutants who are the same, like Shaw. But even Hitler and even Shaw had complex lives with hopes and dreams and fears and small acts of charity. Their lives were not valueless and though I am glad, for the good of mankind, that they are both dead, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t mourn the loss of a life, any life, even if the capacity of that individual to perpetuate evil acts means that they must be put to death.”
Erik’s eyes flash angrily. Charles's bedside lamp flickers from the metal in its frame vibrating. “You’re not telling me that you mourn the death of my torturer and the man who mass murdered my people.”
“I’m saying that I accept the idea that sometimes one life must be sacrificed for the greater good, but I must insist that no life is insignificant. Even the lives of mass murderers have some value, though that value is dwarfed by the atrocities they commit. I understand that there was no way we could have incapacitated or permanently imprisoned Shaw - that he needed to die. I can even understand how your emotions drove you to kill him. That’s not what concerns me. What truly worries me is that you seem to think that human beings who have done nothing wrong have no moral standing. I could understand that if you didn’t have a choice - if you had to pick between saving us and saving the people on those ships, then I would accept if you chose to save those of us who were innocent and not the ones firing the missiles in the first place. But you had full control and you knew that a few men on that ship wanted us dead and probably still do, but there were thousands there who had no idea about the orders or that we were even on the beach. And even if many of those men did know the circumstances, they certainly didn’t have an opportunity to object. What concerns me is that you value those lives so little that you would destroy them for revenge on the guilty few.”
“Those that fear and hate us are all guilty. They are complicit.”
“I was inside those minds, Erik. Most feared death, but it was fear absent malice, fear laced in confusion. I did not sense the thoughts of evil men.”
What Charles doesn’t say is that he is well acquainted with evil. Being in Shaw’s mind had been like poison - so full of cool hatred, a burning apathy towards the lives of humans. It was a mind that delighted in pain and deplored compassion. Like Azazel, Shaw was old and to him, the end of the short lives of humans felt inevitable. Despite his flaws, Shaw was also wise - he knew how to control and manipulate with a precision that only a telepath could hope to match. Possessing such insight made it easy for him to see those around him as mere pawns in his own game. Charles had not felt that kind of evil in the step-father who beat him or the step-brother who resented and taunted him. In them, he recognized sickness, not apathy and though sickness could be equally dangerous, it existed intertwined with love and guilt and fear, and did not exclude compassion. Kurt Marko’s last act had proven that.
“What evil men have in common,” Charles continues, hating himself for having to say these things that will undoubtedly hurt Erik, but nonetheless need to be said, “is that they have no regard for the lives of others. The genocide of your people happened because evil men decided that as a group, you had no right to live. The Jews were perceived as holding back a so-called superior race and because Hitler saw you as lesser, he thought he was justified in committing genocide. His callous disregard for your lives is what made him a dangerous, evil man. I don’t want to think of you as a dangerous, evil man. But if you think that human suffering and human death is something to be taken lightly simply because the human race is inferior to mutants, then you too will be a dangerous, evil man, and that I cannot accept.”
Erik stays silent for a long time. His hands tremble and he has a thoroughly stricken look in his eyes, but he meets Charles’s gaze without anger.
“I am a dangerous man,” he finally whispers. “Shaw made me into a weapon and I don’t know how to be anything else. I’ve killed a lot of people, many of whom were more complicit than guilty. I don’t feel any guilt and I didn’t feel compassion. I don’t think I have the capacity to forgive. I,” he chokes up, finally burying his face in his hands, wiping away a few stray tears that even the helmet cannot hide. “You have no idea how much it hurts me to know that you might think that I am evil. But there’s a chance that, under your understanding of the word, I am exactly that.”
“Oh, my friend,” Charles reaches out, hating his stupid injury and the fact that he can’t just go and embrace Erik. “Don’t you understand? You have a choice. Our lives aren’t static. We are all, humans and mutants alike, capable of great transformation.”
Erik stands, making his way reluctantly over to Charles's bedside. “I could hurt you,” he murmurs when Charles asks him to sit down on the bed.
“You like to pretend you’re a sociopathic killing machine, but you do feel things deeply. You haven’t lost the capacity to feel compassion or to love. There’s so much good in you.”
Erik shakes his head, giving Charles a significant look. “No, I haven’t lost the capacity for love.” He leans down, brushing a soft kiss against Charles's lips.
The helmet pokes into Charles’s jaw uncomfortably. “Now will you please remove this bloody thing.”
Erik pulls back a little. “I would, but maybe I should go. You need to rest.”
“Are you desperate to keep that thing on or are you just determined to treat me with kid gloves? Because honestly, I think it would help my recovery much better to know with certainty that I don’t have to worry about us.”
Don’t you trust me? Charles projects, knowing that Erik can’t hear him. Talking to him with the helmet on is like speaking to a walking corpse. It unsettles Charles and he’s had more than one nightmare about it.
“You know you’re spoiled, right?” Erik teases, already pulling the helmet off. “The rest of us never get to know anything about other people with certainty. We walk around making noises at each other hoping that they convey what it is we’re feeling, wondering if we’re understood or if we’re being lied to. We’d all be paranoid men if we didn’t occasionally act on the faith that people are being honest to us.”
“Hmm,” Charles murmurs, already relaxing into the rich depths that make up Erik’s mind. Because he had permission, Charles has dug around deeper in Erik’s mind than he has with most anyone in his adult life. Erik’s thoughts are sharp and clean, directed, ordered, intelligent. There are layers to his mind, complexity that gets more fascinating as each layer is pulled back. He is beautiful, but always wary. “I suppose you know all about being a paranoid man.”
Erik scoffs. “See, Charles, there’s a difference. I was never paranoid. I admit that I can be antisocial, but I’ve seen more than enough of the world to trust my interpretation of their intentions and my valuation of the truth in their words. Like you, for instance. I know you are a good man, if naive. I can trust in your word without question. What is more difficult,” he admits, “is all the things you don’t say. All the promises I never dared ask for.”
“What are those?” Charles asks.
Erik is an eminently physical and precise man, in perfect control of his body. But that doesn’t stop the way his mind flinches at the thought that rises nonetheless.
“You don’t want me to read your mind,” Charles responds for him. “I am hardly in need of telepathy to gather that, Erik.” He looks pointedly at Erik’s abandoned helmet. “I’m not a stranger to the desire for privacy, Erik. But I assure you that you have nothing to be ashamed of. There is no need to hide from me, my friend.”
“I know you believe that. I want to believe it too. That’s why I dare not ask for that promise.”
What a charming, deadly creature Erik must make, Charles thinks. His body deceives so fluently and with such unflinching charisma. But his thoughts belie that calm exterior. Don’t let him find out. Erik’s surface thoughts say. He is practically chanting it.
Charles flinches.
He knows. I shouldn’t have taken it off.
“What do I know?” Charles asks. There’s no use in feigning ignorance.
An image comes, unbidden. Charles knows that he could close down their mental connection, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
“How is he?” Raven asks. She is in her blue form, standing anxiously next to Azazel just outside the front door to the mansion.
Erik sighs. “They think this is the last surgery. He woke up incoherent, but he’s no longer projecting his thoughts.”
Charles grimaces. He remembers Emma, freshly retrieved from the CIA, in his head telling him that he needed to stop projecting or risk her needing to memory wipe everyone in a few mile radius.
”Alex and Emma are with him now. Once Charles is more coherent, Emma can go with you to do more memory wipes. How is the document retrieval working?”
“Good,” Raven reports. “We were able to find the secretary responsible for distributing classified material on the mutant issue. We used her lists to track down the people with knowledge of the program and we now know exactly how many of these documents are out there. It’s going to take time to track them all down and modify everyone’s memory.”
Erik nods. “I think we need to consider that there may be some whose memories we shouldn’t modify.”
Raven scowls. “You’re the one who thought secrecy was the best course of action.”
“For now,” Erik corrects her. “I see the strategic advantage of controlling when and how humanity finds out about us. But I didn’t mean that we should let a few people run around with information in there heads that doesn’t exist elsewhere. I was suggesting that there are some who are dangerous now and will be just as dangerous later on when do make ourselves known to the public.”
“You want assassination?” Azazel asks.
“Targeted, yes. Not so many as to be conspicuous. Emma and I have already put together a short list. These deaths need to look accidental. You made need to do some lengthy impersonations for this,” Erik says to Raven.
Raven, Charles’s poor baby sister Raven, gulps but holds her head high, determined not to disappoint her new leader. Charles can see by the seriousness of her gaze that she already respects Erik far more than she ever respected her older brother.
Charles dives out of the memory with relief. He is still holding onto Erik’s wrist, feeling his pulse beat wildly beneath Charles’s fingers. “Did they accomplish it?”
Erik nods.
Charles is disappointed, but he understands that a man who used to revel in clever speeches to the victims of his vigilantism isn’t going to suddenly change without a lot of hard work.
I don’t want to disappoint you Erik’s mind cries out. I stand behind my conviction that sometimes violence is the only way. But I want to be the better man when I can afford to do so. I just don’t know how.
Leaving aside the fact that Erik sees morality as a kind of luxury that is only afforded to some, Charles focuses on what progress they can hope to make. There are philosophy papers and law of war treatises on this subject for a reason. You’re not alone in struggling to find balance between what emotion demands and what is right.
“Then help me.”
“Let’s start with a simple rule: no unnecessary killing.”
“Targeted assassination shows restraint.”
“Restraint because if you killed too many you’d endanger your other strategic purposes, not because you wanted to spare unnecessary death. You were afraid I’d see that memory because you know that you didn’t need to have those men killed when you could have had Emma make them forget.”
“The people who made a deal with their greatest enemy because they’d rather kill us aren’t going to change. It’s not a preemptive strike if they’ve already committed an act that damns them.”
“We can’t take an eye for an eye, lest the whole world go blind. If you can admit to yourself that you are capable of being more than what Shaw made you, then these men, too, were capable of change. You robbed them of that opportunity.”
“It’s too risky to pin our survival on the hopes that others can make radical changes.”
“But aren’t the humans asking the same question about us? They saw us control the most powerful weapons of war they possess with nothing but our bodies. Is it too risky for them to pin their survival on our decision to use that power for good, not evil?”
“You have a good point. I don’t doubt that humans have reason to fear us. But they are not our people and their race is not the future. You said it yourself in your own thesis: the extinction of the neanderthal was inevitable in the process of evolution. You don’t believe that we are morally superior to humans, but a part of you knows that we are the superior race and that we need to protect each other.”
Erik pulls away, settling the helmet back on his head as he stands. Charles misses him immediately. “I’ll always protect you, Charles. Don’t doubt that.”
Part 2