Title: Erik Lensherr’s Seven Heavenly Sins (1/7)
Author:
tzzzzRating: PG (this chapter), NC17 (overall)
Pairing: Charles/Erik
Summary: Erik is no saint, but he makes things work anyway. Sequel to
Charles Xavier's Seven Deadly VirtuesChapter Summary: Erik bites off more than he can chew when it comes to liberating a camp of Chinese mutants.
GREED
Erik wakes with a moan. He tries to open his eyes, but the light is too bright and he feels nauseous. He’s not even sure he’s properly awake at all. His body feels distant. All he hears is a dull murmur of voices, smells a clean, pure smell that reminds him of a hospital. It reminds him of Shaw. His eyes flash open, but all he sees is blue. It’s then that he realizes that he can’t feel any metal.
His head is lying on something soft. A warmth soothes the ache as he tries to push himself up, only to collapse back down onto the soft surface when he feels something in his chest pull how it shouldn’t.
The voices stop. Then a hand brushes through his hair, soft and gentle. “Shh . . .” a voice says.
“Charles?” he asks, before memory snaps back into place. Charles isn’t here. Charles doesn’t want Erik any more. He claims that he forgives Erik for paralyzing him, but he’s giving Erik exactly what he deserves - taking away the best relationship Erik could ever hope to have.
Erik can’t move his torso, with strong hands holding him in place, but he can tilt his head up to see Mystique’s relieved smile. “Finally,” she says, ignoring his plea for Charles in the way she’s been ignoring his brooding these past five months.
“How long?” he coughs out, grabbing his ribs against the fire that action sets in his chest.
“Four hours,” another female voice answers from behind him, muffled somehow. He can tell by the agitated flutter of wings that it’s Angel.
“What happened?” Erik ignores Mystique’s protests until she helps him to sit up, propped up between her legs as she leans against the wall. He hates to admit it, but he needs the support. The last time he’d felt this way had been in the camps with Schmidt, after a rough beating from the guards. He hadn’t even been able to move himself off the damp floor. He would have died if Schmidt hadn’t brought him back to his own bedroom to suffer the indignity of his torturer taking tender care of him, among other, worse indignities.
“Do you know where we are?”
Erik squints. His mind is jumbled. He must have a concussion as well. “China?” he guesses. He doesn’t know exactly when, but he remembers standing in the war room, tired after five months of barely sleeping in his empty bed, telling his people that unlike the Russian and American mutant programs, which they had succeeded in taking down from the inside out, what the Chinese were doing couldn’t be modified for their own purposes - it had to be razed to the ground. Erik felt vindicated when Frost had agreed with him. He’d been so angry lately that he was beginning to doubt his own objectivity.
It is only him, Mystique and Angel in the cell - actually it resembles a log cabin more than a cell. Erik can even hear birds chirping outside. Angel is separated from them by two rows of thick wooden poles and she as some kind of mask on her face. Erik is being generous, thinking of it as mask, when it more resembles a muzzle.
“Typical Chinese, low tech, but highly effective solution,” Erik remarks. If he focuses his power, he can feel the faint traces of metal in the soil that are present everywhere, but less than he is accustomed to in the harsh granite soils of the United States or Europe. Erik wishes he had devoted more time to working with these trace elements - there just aren’t enough.
“Emma did say that she had suspicions that the Chinese had information on us,” Mystique remarks. “This confirms it.”
Erik had been greedy. He fully admits it. They could have taken their time - let Emma find out the Chinese information source and stamp it out before attacking, but after finding out what was being done to these children, Erik hadn’t wanted to wait. He knew that the repressive communist government wouldn’t be the first to leak news of mutants to society at large, even under a full-frontal assault, and he’d wanted to act. He admits, he’d been bored with Charles’s stupid compromise - one that he’d made under the assumption that they’d actually be executing it together. He had wanted to attack the humans and China had provided him with the chance.
“We couldn’t let them go on this way,” Erik snaps.
The flutter of Angel’s wings increases in speed, becoming erratic. “At least I’m glad we hadn’t waited until those children had been fully grown.”
“Huh?” Erik asks. He remembers a building, rows and rows of rooms like cells, most of them empty. The others, bunk beds filled with children with their hollow, determined eyes. It’s a flash and then it’s gone.
“You don’t remember it?” Mystique asks. “That little girl. You tried to help her and she created an explosion from nothing? It brought the whole building down?”
“That’s why I feel like a building just fell down on top of my head.”
“You shielded yourself and the girl using what metal you could find, but something got through.”
Erik struggles, agitated. He remembers the girl now, the sparkly lights she created. She couldn’t have been more than six years old - an innocent, for all the hurt she’d obviously caused him. Erik thinks about Will and Simon and the kind of monsters they might have become if raised by their monster of a father. He remembers one of the few times he’d returned to the mansion after deciding to move out. He’d needed to ask Charles about the D.C. work and had ended up walking in on Charles with his wheelchair pushed right up to Will’s bed, holding what must be a first English edition of the Little Prince in one hand and cradling Simon in the other as he read out loud. He’d looked up at Erik when he reached the part about the fox being tamed, a kind, ironic smile on his face.
“What happened to her?” Erik asks.
Mystique smiles sardonically, running her fingers lightly over the sticky patch of Erik’s hair where something must have hit him. “You’re turning into a bleeding heart, just like my brother.”
Erik grits his teeth. “If you only knew the things I did when Schmidt had me and I was just a child.”
That wipes the smile off Mystique’s face and she flushes a deeper blue in embarrassment. Sometimes Erik forgets that, despite how much she’s grown since he’s known her, Mystique is still so young. “She . . . um . . . they came and took her away.”
“And where were the two of you when all this was happening?” Erik accuses. Mystique doesn’t appear to have a scratch on her and Angel is uninjured.
Mystique flinches. He knows he’s being too hard on them. That was why he and Charles worked so well together - good cop, bad cop. Of course, there’s a part of him that always thought of their roles as more like mother and father.
“I was keeping watch from the roof, like you told me,” Angel says, looking defiant. “They had another mutant. At least, I think it was a mutant. It was like a cloud of white smoke. I thought maybe there was a fire and I went to check it out. Then it made itself solid somehow. It grabbed me and it was like I was freezing. I tried to fly away, but it held me down. It could float in the air, but it was solid.” She shivers. “When it had me on the ground, it held me until the guards could put this stupid thing on me,” she spits. “It’s plastic, so my acid can’t erode it. The building exploded as they were dragging me away.”
“So you saw where we are.”
“We’re on an island in the middle of a rice paddy. Which is in the middle of nowhere. The guards all have Chinese characters painted on their chests and every five minutes they sing a different damn commie song, with each guard singing a line in order. They haven’t repeated the same song since we’ve been here, so even if she could somehow get out of here, there’s no way Mystique could impersonate one of them for long.”
“Is that how they got to you?” Erik asks Mystique.
Her hands clench in Erik’s hair in rage, but stop when she catches his wince.
“After you opened all the doors to let the children out, a lot of them wouldn’t come. You left me and Emma to try to convince them to leave while you and Azazel went to look for documents and, I assume, more people to kill.” Mystique’s tone leaves no room for doubt - the initial attack on the building had been bloody. Erik wishes he could remember it. These past months he’s felt his anger festering like a wound, suffering under the torture of being Charles’s better man, without a single reward for his efforts. “That’s when the next wave came. Emma’s not like Charles - she can’t freeze that many people at once. Even in her diamond form, she couldn’t stop that many people from putting one of those stupid helmets on her.” Erik reaches for his own helmet, but of course it’s long gone. Emma had mentioned that the helmet was made for Schmidt by the Russians. It stands to reason that they might have given one to their Chinese allies as well. “I blended into the crowd of guards until they sung their dumb song,” Raven pouts.
Erik groans, his head falling back against Raven’s lap. His ribs are throbbing, he can barely keep his thoughts straight, and like every waking moment for the past months, he misses Charles deeper than a physical pain. “The god damned Chinese. So they have Emma too. They must be keeping her somewhere else, presumably so I won’t be able to remove the helmet for her. What about Azazel?”
Raven bites her lip. “I don’t know. He was with you. The guards had me, Angel, and all the kids outside when the building blew. Azazel wasn’t in the wreckage. But if he’d gotten away clean, he would have come back for us already.”
Erik wracks his brain trying to remember, but there’s nothing but a blank fuzziness there when he reaches for the memories. “Damnit!” he slams his bruised, bloody hands down into the dirt. “We should have just grabbed the information and gotten out. They were prepared for all of us.”
Mystique pets him again, as though he’s a child in need of soothing. Soothing is the last thing Erik needs, however. What he needs is to get the hell out of here. And after that he needs to come back for all these kids before Mao breaks them, the way Schmidt broke Erik. They deserve the chance to be more than just soldiers or tired, empty men who let vengeance consume even the best things in their lives.
It’s Angel who snaps, “Fine, we should have been more cautious. But what were we supposed to do? You were right about what this facility is. They were grabbing any kids that showed any promise of special physical or mental abilities, or kids of parents with unusual abilities and started brainwashing them on the off-chance that they might be mutants. They live in basically cells with six beds each, eat in a cafeteria, do nothing but train and be ‘reeducated’ out in the countryside. They don’t get to see their parents and the only love they ever receive is as a reward for their mutant talents. They even had a nursery! You were right, Magneto.”
The light in Angel’s eyes reminds Erik that finally, after she’d allied with Charles and then with Schmidt and now with Erik, Erik is the only one who had finally managed to make Angel a true believer. He’s not sure how he feels about having that power. It somehow seems more dangerous than the power to bend metal to his will.
Mystique nods at Angel’s words. “Great. Now that we know we’re right, how are we going to get out of here?”
Both of them are looking at Erik with such anticipation that it’s almost painful. They look up to him and he’s about to let them down. He’s injured and there’s not a drop of metal anywhere near them. He can’t get them out of here.
“We wait,” he sighs.
Angel and Mystique deflate. In the background, their guards are singing.
***
They wait a long time. Erik glances at the muddy marks left against the wall of their wooden prison. It’s been nearly a week of sleeping in the mud, staring at each other’s blank features. The Chinese haven’t bothered to do anything with them yet.
“They’re not trying to break us,” Erik remarks. He’s recovered from his concussion, but in the cold damp of their little hut he has begun to develop a terrible cough. Mystique suspects pneumonia, from being unable, due to his broken ribs, to cough and expel the phlegm that is building in his lungs. “It would be wiser to kill us. No, what they want to do is study us, but they haven’t developed a way to control us yet.”
They aren’t children just getting used to their powers. And obviously there are no Chinese mutants like Schmidt who are at least impervious to attack from Erik. “I bet they’re trying to break Frost,” Erik muses. “If they had their own telepath, they would have us under the microscope already.”
“Or maybe they’ll breed us,” Angel whispers. The guards have been shoving wooden bowls of rice into the cell for Erik and Mystique, but they don’t want to risk taking the muzzle off to feed Angel. She has been getting weaker by the day.
“C’mon, Angel, that’s gross,” Mystique complains.
“I makes sense,” Angel protests. “Why else would they keep us all together? They must know that isolation is better to break a person. And they haven’t bothered to do anything else with us. They must know that we’ll never fight for them, but if they get their hands on a child, they can brainwash it just like all the rest!”
Erik just grunts in acknowledgement, shivering. Mystique wraps her arms tighter around him, though he can tell she’s more uncomfortable doing it after Angel’s statement. “Don’t worry,” Mystique whispers. “I learned a long time ago not to play with Charles’s toys.”
Erik grimaces. He’d suspected that Mystique had been aware of their relationship, but it had never been confirmed.
“I’m not Charles’s toy,” he sighs.
“Fine, his boyfriend, partner, one true love. Whatever. I know not to mess with it.”
“I’m not his anything anymore,” he growls.
Angel looks speculative, but Mystique just looks sad. “Oh, Erik.” He politely ignores her use of his first name. Any other time he would argue with her, but right now he’s more interested in her as Raven, sister-to-Charles, than as Mystique. “You will never be nothing to Charles. He doesn’t love easily, but once he loves you, he’ll never give up on you.”
Erik has to raise his eyebrows at that. Charles is the poster boy for the whole touchy-feely, lovey-dovey, there’s good in everyone movement.
Rave swats at him gently, careful not to jar his ribs. “He doesn’t! Look, Charles wants to be kind to everybody. He loves people, generally, much more than you do.”
“Obviously,” Angel interjects.
“But before you came along, I was his only friend. Charles never lacked for bar buddies or random floozies to warm his bed, but the same telepathy that makes it so easy for Charles to love people generally makes it hard for him to love people specifically. In minutes he can know everything about a person - so much that he probably knows thousands of people better than most people know their own spouse. He seen so much that he’s jaded. Don’t you see, Erik? You’re special enough that even after he saw everything about you, he still fell in love with you.”
Those words hurt more than the broken feeling in Erik’s chest. They hurt more than anything Schmidt ever did to him. If Charles truly is in love with him, then why did he push Erik away? If what Raven says is true, then Erik managed what he never thought possible - the love of a truly good person. Erik thinks it’s crueler to have that love and then lose it than to never have had it at all.
“He doesn’t love me anymore.”
“C’mon,” Raven rolls her eyes. “It’s obvious he’s moping over you. Charles just loves playing the martyr. He thinks he’s being noble and setting you free. If you don’t want to be with a cripple, fine. Or if you’d rather concentrate on the mission, that’s okay too. But if you truly want Charles, you can’t let him push you away. You have to fight for him. You’ll fight to the death for everything else that means something to you. Why not fight for Charles?”
“Because I have to respect what he wants!” Erik isn’t about to tell Raven that her brother’s paralysis has left him uninterested in sex.
“Charles doesn’t know what he wants!”
Erik gulps. Raven has known Charles practically her whole life, even if their relationship has been strained at times. Maybe she’s right. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
***
Just when Erik thinks he’s going to break under Raven’s probing stare, Erik hear a familiar high-pitched shriek.
“Sean,” Raven breathes.
Erik struggles to push himself up, readying for battle. They don’t have to wait for long before two inhumanly strong figures are lifting one of the huge wooden tree trunks away from the wall. Erik isn’t surprised to see Piotr, but the other guy . . . .
“Take a picture, bub; it’ll last you longer.”
“Last time I saw you, you were telling me to go fuck myself.” Erik winces as Raven wraps one of his arms around her to support him out of their cell and into the daylight. Piotr tears the muzzle off and scoops Angel up into his arms easily.
The guy, James, if Erik remembers correctly, just shrugs. Charles said that the man’s mind was incredibly difficult to read, so he’s not sure what his power is. Whatever it is, Erik is grateful that James doesn’t bother to try to carry Erik, despite how much he stumbles.
It’s not long before Sean drops out of the sky, with barely a stumble on the landing. “Come on, Wolverine. We need to go. There’s some kind of commotion at the facility. The Professor has the humans locked down, but he can’t control some of the mutants. Piotr can drop these guys off at the jet.”
“Charles is here?” Erik growls. In a wheelchair, Charles is a sitting duck for anyone he can’t control with his telepathy.
“Erik, you’re obviously injured, man. We’ve got this under control.”
“Like hell you do.” There is no way Erik is going to leave Charles’s safety in the hands of these children. Children and what appears to be a logger with an attitude. He glares at this Wolverine guy.
“Don’t look at me, bub. Do I look like I care if you want to kill yourself by fighting injured?”
“Wolverine,” Sean complains, but the guy just starts off towards what must be the facility at a jog, but not before dropping an iron diver’s weight at Erik’s feet. There’s no way Erik can run in his condition, but it’s easy enough to shape the weight into a disc and ride.
“I’m going to fly,” Sean remarks, already halfway up a tree in order to take off. “The Professor sounded like he was in trouble.”
“Take Angel back to the jet,” Erik orders Piotr. He doesn’t bother to ask Mystique whether she will be following.
***
The facility where they’re holding Frost is different than the training dormitory that Erik’s team assaulted a week ago. Though obviously not the best environment to raise a child, at least the training facility had high ceilings (keeping the ample windows well out of reach) and even some wooden floors in parts of it. Brick walls meant that there was a lot less for Erik to work with when it was falling down around him. Frost, on the other hand, is being kept in a bunker. Concrete means steel rebar, not to mention the heavy metal doors and the bars guarding cell after dank, dark cell.
The doors are already open when they walk in. The human guards are slumped against walls or curled up in the corridors - obvious evidence that Charles has been here. What scares Erik are the familiar scorch marks on the walls: despite his newfound control, the fact that Havoc had to use his mutation at all is evidence that Charles could not subdue everyone.
Erik, quickly, a familiar mental voice invades Erik’s brain. In retrospect, he should have expected it, but the presence makes Erik stumble. He brushes off Mystique’s attempts to help him regain his balance. Erik has forgotten how much he’d missed that voice in his head.
Charles sends his location with a flash of knowledge. Fuck his injured ribs, Erik takes off at a run down a long corridor. According to the images that Charles is sending, Charles and Alex barricaded in a side room. Charles is keeping all of the humans and most of the mutant children asleep while Alex battles something that looks like the white mist creature that Angel described. Alex’s skin is glowing red, his whole body alight with his mutation to prevent the freezing cold coming of the creature from melting into his bones.
But that’s not a problem that Erik can deal with. Even more critical is the battle going in the corridor. Erik hears it before he dares approach. Sean is screaming: not the scream that has people bending and covering their ears, but the one that actually killed quite a few poor lab animals when he was testing it out. It’s not fatal from a distance, but Erik stops, pulling everyone into another side room when he gets close enough for his nose to bleed.
“Whoever Sean is screaming at is being incapacitated by something that should be fatal,” Erik explains. “And I can sense some strange metal.” Erik had only tasted this metal once. He’d been trying to cross the border into Russia in order to track Schmidt and there it was - a metal that seemed to sing with perfection, calling out to him like a siren’s song even when it was too far away for him to manipulate. It’d been buried deep withing Elmendorf Air Force Base, so Erik had forced himself to forget about tracking it down - the last thing he needed was to attract the attention of the US Government.
That perfect metal is in motion, but Erik still can’t figure out its purpose. He needs more information.
Charles? he tries to project, the way Charles taught him. But before he can get an answer, Wolverine rumbles, “that scream’s not fatal to me.” Before Erik can stop him, he’s yanking the door open and running.
“I’m starting to hate that guy,” Erik tells Mystique.
Mystique rolls her eyes. “Yeah, he’s the only one here who would ever go running into a dangerous situation half-cocked.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re implying, but . . .”
“Moira told me all about Russia,” Mystique says simply.
Erik doesn’t hate the Wolverine quite so much when Sean’s scream stops and is instead replaced with a shout. “Magneto, get down here!” When Erik left, Sean had just been starting to work on using his vocal muscles to shout words rather than scream. Erik can’t help but be impressed by how much progress Charles had managed to make with him.
Erik and Mystique arrive to a scene that would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly terrifying. Wolverine is battling what appears to be a twelve-year-old girl and he’s not exactly winning. She is wearing a bright red full body leotard and she is dancing around a guy that looks like a cage wrestle willing to rip his opponent to shreds. Wolverine hits her hard enough for her to go flying across the room, but she gets up without a scratch, leaping back towards him. It isn’t until she’s climbed up onto Wolverine’s chest to punch him in the face that Erik realizes that the strange metal is inside of her, just in time to see what appears to be knives slide out of the tips of her fingers. Erik doesn’t have time to act before she jabs them down into Wolverine’s chest. Erik feels that same moment of horror, the bottom dropping out of the world, that he felt when he failed to deflect the bullets in a way that would keep Charles safe. He’s already halfway to blaming himself for Wolverine’s death when the man grunts, grabs the girl’s wrists and yanks them free, snarling. The wound appears to heal within seconds. Erik must admit that its and intriguing mutation.
“Magneto!” Sean shouts, shaking Erik out of his fascinated reverie.
That’s right, the girl has metal inside her body and Erik can manipulate metal. Now it’s his turn for a feral grin.
“Tsk, tsk,” he shakes his finger at the girl, pinning her to the wall with her own metal claws.
When he turns back to Wolverine, he’s surprised to see that he too has claws, but these are rough and made of bone. The slide out of the skin of his knuckles, to point at the girl’s throat.
“I have her,” Erik commands. “Take Mystique and find Frost.”
Erik rips the metal door off the sideroom easily, finding the exact scene that Charles sent him.
The room is scorching now. Charles’s fair skin is already tinged red where he sits, perfectly still, in his chair with his fingers pressed to his temple. Erik yanks the metal of the chair towards him, knowing that without Charles in the room, Alex can burn brighter and maybe even kill the white apparition that’s engulfing him.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Erik murmurs, knowing full well that Charles is too deep in a telepathic trance to hear him.
The metal door of the room they were just in is starting to melt. Erik uses his power to keep it in place, but the exhaustion of his injury and subsequent illness are taking their toll. He really hopes that the damn Wolverine won’t have to carry him out of here.
The door is glowing molten hot, now. Erik is getting ready to just grab Charles and make a run for it before Alex goes nuclear when a sudden grin appears on Charles’s face. The heat stops and Charles is in Erik’s mind again, enfolding him in comfort and complexity, and yes, love. Raven was right.
“Erik,” Charles whispers, leaning forward in his chair to wrap his arms around Erik’s waist, gentle in deference to his ribs. “I was so worried.”
“It’s okay. I’m fine,” Erik pats Charles’s hair awkwardly. Maybe if they were still together, or maybe if Charles could still stand and they were eye to eye, they would kiss. But that isn’t Erik’s life. Instead he contents himself with resting his palm on Charles’s sunburnt skin, feeling the soft strands of his hair brush against his fingertips. Charles’s mind embraces Erik much tighter than Erik’s body could stand from a physical hug. Charle’s relief is overwhelming, as is his unbridled joy at finding Erik relatively intact. But something else stirs in the depths - maybe regret, or perhaps even saddness.
“Charles,” Erik begins. He’s not sure if he wants to berate Charles for taking on such a dangerous mission or tell him he still loves him or beg him to let Erik come home, but before he can finish, his concentration slips and the door he’d been keeping from liquefying splashes to the floor with a his.
“I take it they found Emma,” Alex says, still glowing a bit as he steps over the remains of the metal door.
Erik lets out a small whimper when Charles’s mind pulls back, leaving Erik feeling bereft. But then those bright blue eyes are fixed on him, even though Charles is answering Alex’s question. “They did. Together we were able to restrain the mutant you were fighting. The apparition is a kind of projection, rooted deep in the mutant’s psyche, but capable of physical manifestation. What you witnessed was most likely just the tip of the iceberg of what this child will be capable of as an adult. It took both myself and Emma to subdue him.” Erik files that information away. Even though Erik is willing to fight to the death for the survival of their kind, he is aware that some mutations can be exceedingly dangerous. If they manage to convince these mutants to come with them, he’ll have to watch this one.
“Did they find Azazel too?” Erik asks, still transfixed by the look Charles is giving him - like he’s the most amazing thing Charles has ever seen.
“Azazel transported himself to the mansion yesterday. He was incoherent, badly injured. Apparently he’d transported himself away from the scene, but hadn’t been strong enough to get back to Westchester right away. It took us a day to find this place without him. We need a new policy. Next time you do something like this, you have to leave at least one person behind, whether myself of a member of your team, who knows exactly what you’re doing in case you need rescue.”
Erik nods, feeling like child being scolded. He finds, however, that he doesn’t really care, still riding high on the knowledge that Charles still loves him.
Raven is right. He’s going to be greedy and selfish and all the things Charles is not. He’s going to win Charles back.
A/N: I randomly decided that Angel’s acid-balls are made from hydrofluoric acid. I also decided the only two Chinese xmen characters I was able to find - Jubilee and Black Shadow/White Shadow were kids in Maoist China in the 1960s. Also, even though I know that all Asians are not the same, Lady Deathstrike is Chinese, not Japanese in my universe (but then again, she’s Chinese in the movie). The whole Chinese mutant soldier system is loosely based on how China supposedly raises its Olympic gymnasts.
Next Chapter: Envy (coming soon!)