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Charles took a series of deep breaths as he followed Erik’s mind down the hall. He hadn’t seen Erik since the fiasco in Washington, D.C. What if Hank was right and the future truly couldn’t be changed? What if they were doomed to fail, to watch their world fall apart regardless of the choices they made?

“We need you to hope again.”

Hope. He hadn’t really much of that since the last of his teachers were drafted and he had to close the school down. But now, now he had no choice. He had to have a bit of faith that they could change the future, could make it better than the nightmares he had seen in Logan’s mind. If he wanted to avoid that pain, that suffering, then he needed to make peace with Erik. They couldn’t afford to continue as they had been, working towards different goals and constantly at odds.

“Hello, my friend.”

Charles looked up to see Erik, offering a kind smile and amicable words. His heart sped though, though if that were the result of nerves or something else, he wasn’t entirely sure. (And how could Erik have such wonderful taste in civilian clothing, but his choice in supervillain costume was...laughable at best?)

He swallowed and offered up a small smile in return.

“Hello, Erik. I’m glad you could make it.”

He tilted his head in the direction of the chessboard, two empty glasses on either side of the board.

“Shall we get started?”

“I have a small kitchen in the back,” Magda said with a nod. “It’s mostly used to prepare the herbs, and some of the ointments I sell, but we can go back there.”

Charles nodded in agreement. He had to admit, he was more than a slight bit curious about what it was that she did. Not even just her mutation, but how she made her living. She mentioned herbs and ointments, as well the tea and the card readings.

“Eisenhardt,” she said, somewhat suddenly. “My name is Magda Eisenhardt.”

Her actual name, the one he’d picked up on accident. A rather impressive display of trust, considering how she’d reacted when he’d unintentionally called her by it.

“You can call me Magda, though it’s been almost five years since anyone called me that. It almost feels alien just saying it aloud,” she continued, and Charles let her say her piece. “When I came here, and had no paperwork, they asked me for my name. I lied. Because someone else.”

He gave a small nod in understanding. While he had no idea what it was like to live under an assumed name, he could feel the fear and the distaste she felt for all that she feared.

“It’s a lovely name, Magda, really. Though, if you don’t mind my asking, was there any particular reason you picked the alias that you did?”

They’d ushered him half-way down the stairs when a sharp presence caught Charles off-guard. It hurt, sharp and dangerous as needles, but it was the most exquisite sort of pain, like nothing he’d ever truly felt before. He leaned against the wall, fingers at his temple as he tried to regain his breath.

“Ah, ah-ah-ha, stop, stop!”

“Charles, are you okay?”

“There’s someone else out there,” he answered, immediately turning to open a nearby door and force his way back up to the deck. Moira might have her uses as an ally, but he’d be damned if he was going to let a mind that stunning get away.

He wasn’t at all disappointed, catching sight of massive chains lifting up out of the water and attacking Shaw’s vessel. A telekinetic? Or a more specific power, perhaps? Whatever the mutation responsible, Charles felt a bit breathless at the awesome display of pure power.

“There,” he intoned, pointing to the sight.

The chains wreaked havoc on the ship, tearing it to pieces with such sheer force that Charles could hardly believe his eyes. The existence of mutants was one thing, but the existence of a mutant so powerful was another entirely. He reached out to the mind, observing it from a distance. A cacophony of emotions of varying intensities: anger, guilt, self-loathing, rage, all undermined by a thin current of love and uncertainty. A bit disappointing, that last bit, but they were all very human reactions.

And the idiot was going to drown himself at this rate. The mutant was going after the submarine (and fuck Shaw very much for having a bloody submarine) but he lacked the leverage or the sheer strength necessary to take down a fully-functional submarine.

“Let it go,” Charles shouted, more out of frustration than actually hoping the words would reach their target. “You have to let it go!”

Charles let out a half-smothered shriek of frustration before he whipped around, shoving past the humans to get to a point where he could jump off and keep the idiot from extinguishing that perfectly beautiful mind of his. He tore off his coat and cardigan and yanked off his shoes before jumping off the boat. Oh, if he could a cold from this, beautiful mind or not, this moron would suffer with him.

He’d timed it perfectly, practically diving in on top of the stranger. Charles immediately grabbed at him, wrapping his arms as solidly around the mutant’s arms and torso as he could manage and plunged into the other’s mind.

You can’t; you’ll drown. I know what this means to you, but you’re going to die. Erik, calm your mind.

As a telepath, Charles was well aware of the true nature of the world. His childhood had been full of false faces and hidden truths, of snide remarks made with the flippant disregard of his family and dark curses muttered under the breaths of the serving staff. Every cruel thought, the sort people would rarely say aloud, was heard as though it had been screamed in his ears. He had never believed his parents’ lies, not when he could hear the truth clearly from their minds. People were petty, vain, selfish, and cruel.

Kurt Marko was the last straw. Kurt Marko, with his easy smiles and perfectly correct words, was an unrepentant scum-sucker of the first degree. His mind was an open book to Charles, who could see all of his true intentions, all of his honest opinions about Brian Xavier and Sharon Xavier...and Charles himself. And Sharon, his lovely, grieving mother, had been taken in immediately by Kurt’s honeyed words. It was disgusting. It was infuriating. And Charles was in no way going to put up with any of it.

So he had reached into his mother’s mind, driving out any idea of marrying the greedy bastard. He did the same to Kurt, driving the man away from his mother and family fortune by inflicting the same amount of intolerable pain as his father had in his final moments. When he’d finished, the eleven-year-old had been stunned by the sheer amount of power he possessed. And really, it had all snowballed from there...

Locating Shaw was simple enough. What Charles hadn’t expected was the presence of another telepath. Emma Frost, he gleaned from her mind mere seconds before her shields slammed up. She was good, he’d admit, but she was also a bit slow. In the seconds it took her to respond to his presence, he’d already pulled most of her life story. So she could turn herself to diamond and her telepathic talents were more defensive than offensive. Oh, she could even extend her personal shields to those around, shutting him off from direct contact with Shaw.

“I’ve lost Shaw,” he reported. He couldn't help but grin at that; he'd never really had much of a challenge before. “There’s something blocking me; someone like me is on that ship."

“Like you?”

“A telepath,” he clarified.

Then she tried to get into his mind. The shielding was a nice trick, one he could honestly applaud, but his mind was off limits. Charles focused his own telepathy, aiming at a single spot in her mental shields, and drove it in like a heated lance. The shields shattered like cheap glass and Charles once again had unfettered access to Shaw.

Twin tornadoes appeared out of nowhere, and the resulting mini panic had someone bumping into in him. For a moment, Charles lost his advantage. Spitting a curse, he immediately went to reassert his hold, but Emma had recovered and was fighting back with far more strength than he’d initially given her credit for.

“Charles, get inside!”

Play along with Moira or take Emma down? Charles bit back a growl of frustration as he lessened his efforts against Emma and let Moira lead him away from the deck. Emma had proven herself a decent obstacle, but he knew what their immediate plans were. Losing them this time would not be a hardship; Moira, on the other hand, he still had some use for and therefore needed to ensure that she was willing to play along with him.

“Please, sit,” Magda said, gesturing to the other end of the couch.

Charles took her up on her offer, settling himself down opposite her. He sincerely hoped she would take him up on his offer; with so few of their kind actually in existence, the instinct to form groups and stick together was strong.

“You’re the second mutant I have met, too,” she confirmed. “I just do not now yet if I can go deeper into this world.”

He nodded in understanding. Magda’s hesitance to so much as acknowledge her own mutation was proof enough in Charles’s opinion that she wasn’t entirely ready to group together. But he was determined to ensure that she at the very least had a friend whom she could contact if she needed help.

“Perhaps we should just start with this afternoon? Would you like to stay for supper? I can cook, and we can talk and go from there.”

Well, as far as he could recall, he didn’t actually have anything scheduled for his conference tonight. There were a few non-compulsory presentations going on, but none of them on a topic that interested him more than conversing with Magda. (The fact that he and Raven lived off of take-out menus and junk food had absolutely nothing to do with his decision making whatsoever.)

“So long as I don’t impose, I would love to stay for dinner.”

Charles could feel the sudden rush of lightheadedness and reached out to help steady her. It had to be a massive shock. Even though he’d fervently believed he couldn’t have been the only one in the world who was different, meeting Raven had been a shock of the most pleasant nature. It was always a shock to meet others of one’s own kind, or learn of their existence, especially when one had been so afraid or so convinced that one had always been alone.

“Hundreds,” Magda echoed, clinging to the wall as she made her way to the couch. Charles followed her, not quite touching her but close enough that he could keep her from toppling over.

“So many,” she said as she collapsed onto the furniture, looking up at him in stunned amazement.

“Well, a few hundred out of around seven billion isn’t really all that many,” he answered with a small smile, “but yes, it’s still a surprising number. And, if my theory is correct, that number is only going to increase in the years to come.”

He could go off on tangents for hours about evolution and the progression of the human genome, about natural selection and the nature of genetic mutation. However, he could sense that Magda was still trying to wrap her head around the fact there there were likely hundreds out there like her. Any of his tangents would probably fly right over her head. Or worse, be the final push to make her pass out from the shock.

He worried his bottom lip for a moment. He’d never been particularly capable of leaving a fellow mutant behind once he encountered them; it was a habit he was unlikely to shake and quite frankly didn’t care to. And Magda was so terrified of discovery, perhaps she could benefit from keeping contact with himself and meeting Raven? They would have to be careful about it, of course, Charles couldn’t guarantee that his dear sister’s lovely blue form wouldn’t shock the poor woman even more than learning that she was far from alone. Still, he couldn’t just leave her hanging.

“Actually, I was wondering—since you’re the second mutant I’ve ever met, aside from myself, that is—perhaps one day you might like to visit Raven and I in Oxford? Or at the very least keep in contact.”

Oh, he hoped he wasn’t being too forward. He’d just given the poor woman the shock of her life. No need for him to acerbate the problem.

“Your sister?”

Charles hummed in confirmation.

“Her name is Raven; she can turn herself into anyone she so desires. It’s wonderful, really! I could watch her shape shift for ages and never get bored; we used to make a game out of it as children.”

He smiled as he remembered those days. She’d imitate the portraits of Xavier ancestors and Charles would try to make her slip up in her act. It had been a tremendous amount of fun until they’d nearly gotten caught. They hadn’t played that game in years.

“You said there were others like you. How many more? I had not thought there would be many.”

Charles shrugged.

“I’m not quite sure how many of us there are currently. My best estimate is in the hundreds. However, there isn’t much data to work with at the moment; this is a rather new area of study.”

He wondered about her own manifestation; how early did it occur for her? If she thought she’d contracted it from a previous lover, then she must have been sexually mature at the time. At least, he hoped that she was. Both Charles and Raven had manifested at young ages, neither of them so much as ten years when their mutations showed themselves. It would be interesting to compare manifestation stories at some point.

Despite what he said, Charles couldn’t handle silence. He’d spent his life with a faint, constant hum buzzing in the back of his mind as a result of his telepathy. Isolation was a terrifying concept for him as isolation would have to mean a dead world. He couldn’t be isolated. Alienated, yes, set apart, but never completely isolated.

(Until Shaw and his helmet came along. Then Charles was confronted with a material that his telepathy couldn’t penetrate. The possibility of addressing someone who had no mind he could sense. It was the stuff of nightmares.)

And so, to end the silence, he sought out a safer topic.

“...You’re certain Kennedy was a mutant?”

Charles remembered every moment of his life with vivid clarity—the result of his telepathy making it depressingly uneasy to forget. He could recall his first experience with Cerebro, the elation he’d felt as his mind was able to stretch out over the entirety of the East Coast, the country, and even well beyond the borders of the U.S. All of that space, and he cannot recall, for the life of him, registering the President as a mutant. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue hadn’t shown up on any of the printouts, either. Had it gotten lost? Mixed up? Had he been so focused on the other mutants he encountered that he never even realized he’d registered the President?

“I know he did not view us unfavorably, but are you certain he was actually a mutant?”

Intelligence could be faulty. Assumptions could be made. Charles’s telepathy never lied, and his memory was not as easily fooled as the memories of others. Or maybe the serum and the alcohol had finally left permanent marks on him.

Hmm, I'd have to say green or blue. I'm more partial to color combinations, though: red/gold/silver, silver/dark blue, grass green/orange, that sort of stuff.

Question: favorite subject?