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The United States Justice System, in its infinite mercy, allows Erik to choose his method of execution.
He chooses Charles Xavier.
Charles’s hands, on Erik’s head, shutting down his brain. He is very specific, making them think that Charles's power has this limit. That he can't kill them all from miles away, without lifting a finger.
(Even now, I don't give up your secrets, he thinks. There are other ways to get revenge.)
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They strap him down to a heavy wooden seat, his wrists and ankles buckled with leather restraints. It’s a modified electric chair with no electricity, lest he rip the wires out of the wall and kill with impunity. They haven't allowed lightbulbs, either: instead, tubes of glowing liquid are strapped to the walls. It makes Erik feel as though he's underwater.
His captors wouldn’t know the symmetry of that, but Charles does. They push him in on a plastic wheelchair, and his face is perfectly calm even though he hates being pushed. There are waves on his tie, ink on his fingers, and he knows what Erik is thinking about but he doesn’t say it.
Instead he looks from Erik to the observation window and back again.
“If you were hoping for a rescue, you should know that we’re currently being monitored by people stationed a mile away.”
“You’re the one who always looked for hope, Charles,” Erik says. “Not me.”
If he could have chosen where to die, he’d have picked somewhere outside. Where he could still feel the metal in the earth.
Not a forest. There are too many dead, in the forest.
But maybe a beach. With a clear view of the horizon.
Charles's fury is just barely visible in the set of his mouth, the twitch of his eyebrow. “So why bring me here?”
“You think I was going to let humans kill me?” If he has to die, he will die by mutant hands, and there are no better ones than Charles’s.
“If you wanted to die by mutant hands you could have damn well used your own.”
“And if you could condemn me, you can damn well see it through.” Charles could have killed him in free air, a year and a half ago, before they went through trials and hearings. Charles could have put a bullet in his gun. Charles could have told his heart to stop beating.
“So this is a punishment.”
“You gave me to them.” Erik would spread his hands dramatically, if they weren’t locked to a chair. (He’d do so many things, if he weren’t locked to a chair.) “Maybe I want to make sure you never forget that.”
Because he knows when it’s over, and it’s over. He is doing his best to die with dignity, but in the end, his body will be dumped in an unmarked grave. Perhaps they’ll check his paperwork, and bring a rabbi in to say a hasty Kaddish. If the rabbi is lucky, they won’t tell him whose body is under the dirt.
Erik is broken, but he’ll break Charles too.
“As if I ever could have.” Charles looks again at the observation window, takes a deep breath, and rolls up his sleeves. You could have appealed. There’s that anger, for Erik’s mind alone. There’s Charles Xavier, under that serene mask. Why the fuck didn’t you appeal? Death penalty cases go on for years. You should have taken the damn lawyer.
He could have. He could have done more than sit in court and look like he was plotting something. But he’s been waiting here a year and a half: eighteen months in which the only metal he can feel is faint bits of iron in the blood of his guards. If he has allies, they’ve had plenty of time to make themselves known. And he would not permit a human lawyer to go through his life, his history, looking for something to dangle in front of a judge. Oh, but he was tortured by Nazis. Oh, but he watched his wife and daughter die. Oh, but he’s insane, your honor, have mercy and simply bury him alive. Let him live like this for the rest of his miserable life.
No. Perhaps once he’s dead, other mutants will see the injustice and rise up. Perhaps once he’s dead, Charles or Mystique might have an occasional fond memory of him.
“Well?” he says aloud, because if he sits here too long, he’s going to go from maudlin to… something worse. “They’re waiting.”
“I hate you.”
Does that mean Erik won, or Erik lost? “Yeah.”
Charles rolls forward. He fumbles with the edge of Erik’s chair for a moment before pulling a lever, and the back of Erik's seat reclines. Hilarious. “They set this too high for a wheelchair.”
Erik’s lip twitches. “You should write a strongly worded note.”
“Shut up.”
“Ableism in the execution industry. It could be an exposé.”
“Shut up,” Charles says again. “You can’t ask me to kill you and then try and engage in witty repartee.”
Erik smiles the smile he’s been reliably informed contains too many teeth to be comfortable. He hopes Mystique copies it once in a while. Keeps it alive. “I just want to die doing what I’m good at.”
“Then I suppose it’s a good thing you’re going to die making shitty plans and trying to emotionally manipulate me.”
“Now who’s engaging in witty repartee?”
“Jesus, Erik.” Charles smiles as well. It’s his go with him, Raven, I’ll be fine smile. His Erik, there’s still time to stop this smile. When he puts his hand on the side of Erik’s face, his touch is gentle, loving, and Erik doesn’t know if Charles is planting the memory or if he’s thinking of it naturally, but he's on a hotel bed in ‘62, while Charles traces the shape of his ear.
“I wonder how many people are in hiding,” Charles said. “With physical mutations like Raven’s, but without her ability to pass as human.”
“Not people,” Erik said, and Charles laughed, delighted. “We’re not people.”
“I’m quite certain that I am.”
“No.” He sat up. Charles’s hands fell away and landed on the bedspread. Paisley. Coarse threads. These are the impressions that he would keep for the rest of his life. “You’re not. Can’t you see it? You’re different from the rest of them.” So much more, he’d meant, and Charles had heard it.
“We talk like people,” Charles had said, leaning closer. “We breathe like people.” An exhale, against Erik’s ear. “We eat like people.” Teeth on the lobe. “Presumably, we die like people.”
Erik thought of freezing water, and arms dragging him to the surface. “Do we?”
“Well,” Charles said, wandering hands finding a destination at last, “We certainly die a little.”
(And Erik had rolled his eyes at the pun, charmed despite himself, at this Oxford man with his classical education. Erik had learned French from a girl on his street, Before: she’d had a book of poems about Lancelot du Lac, the knight who shamed himself by riding in a cart like a criminal to save his love. She’d died in the street, that girl, and it had been Erik who rode in a cart, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of his world.)
He can feel Charles in his mind, his presence as warm there as his hand is on his cheek, and Erik wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Maybe that’s also why he asked Charles to come.
(He won't regret it.)
I gave you the chance to walk away, Charles says. As though Erik could have ever taken it. Charles sat there and said things like people will die, Erik, and this isn’t what you want, Erik, and I can’t let you do this, Erik. But of course people will die: they build up hopes and dreams and experiences and inside jokes and then they’re gone in an instant, gone because an illness went around or someone else was in a mood, gone because they’re too young or too old or too dark or too short, gone because they looked at the job listings and picked one that put them at the wrong place, wrong time. This is the way the world works. People die, but he and Charles aren’t people, they’ve never been people, and Erik has always seen the bigger picture.
So he hadn’t left, and when the plastic dart went into his neck, just under the helmet, he hadn’t been surprised.
He’d expected to wake up in Charles’s house, or on one of his more remote properties, in plastic manacles with a disappointed X-Man standing over him, throwing out-of-context King or Gandhi quotes at his feet as though they will change his mind.
(They’d sat at the Lincoln memorial once. Charles had driven away all the tourists, and they’d played chess on steps that honored a man who did the right thing for the wrong reasons. A year later, Erik read about the March on Washington, and thought of Moira shooting him in the back.
What would have happened if she’d succeeded? Maybe Charles would have seen, then, what humans are.
Who would have killed Moira? Azazel? Angel? Or none of them, because Erik would never have mattered?
Charles would have mourned him, at least, if he’d died then. When one violent move could be written off as the result of a very long few weeks. When he could have remembered Erik as the person Charles had wanted him to be, instead of who he was.)
I’m mourning you now, you idiot, Charles thinks, and it’s sometime in the seventies and they’re sitting on the roof of the school, where the kids won’t see the wanted murderer or the joint he’s sharing with their Professor.
"'Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it,'" Charles read. "'It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing of forgetting them.'”
Erik snorted. He'd have suspected that Charles set him up, if Erik wasn't wearing the helmet, and if Charles hadn't already been on the roof with The Once and Future King when Erik had— literally— dropped in. "If you forget wrongs, you allow them to happen again," he said, opening his mouth as little as possible so the smoke trailed out in a narrow stream.
"Only when the people in question are still in a place to continue those wrongs, I think," Charles said. "Should I keep reading or are you going to keep interrupting?"
"I'm going to keep interrupting. Kill Shaw, and then forget what he did for my own peace of mind, is that the logic?" He handed over the joint, as a reminder that he wasn't looking for a fight. An argument, perhaps. It was different.
Charles smoked, and contemplated."You don't have to kill someone to stop them."
"Had to kill him."
He got a shrug for that, one that meant Charles disagreed, but didn't want to fight either. "I was in Shaw's head, when he died,” Charles said finally. “ All the pain, the fear. I felt it all.”
Erik accepted the joint again, and considered asking. What did Schmidt think of, in his last moments? Did he regret what he'd done to Erik, or was he, in his own, twisted way, proud of what he had made?
Or maybe Schmidt died trying to think of a way to escape. Maybe he expected someone to save him. Maybe he thought of his own mother.
“Is it like that with everyone?” he asked instead, and Charles scowled.
“I haven’t killed anyone else. How can I, when I know it all? Their childhood games, what their mothers called them, what they want to do tomorrow. When I have to get in their heads and die with them. I have to carry it, and it’s…” he moved his hand to his chest, like he was going to pat his heart, but he didn't.
“What if you had to? With Cerebro, you could kill anyone in the world. You could kill everyone in the world.” He passed the joint back, and that’s the clearest part of the memory: the brush of hands as Charles took it, the long pause as he exhaled, the tap-tap of his knuckle against Erik’s helmet. Erik catching his wrist to shove his hand away.
“Except for you," Charles said.
“Except for me,” Erik agreed, even though they both knew that he didn’t sleep in his helmet. They also both knew that Charles sat in a metal wheelchair, and traveled in a metal plane.
There were many things they didn't talk about, and Charles never answered his question.
The joint was almost down to nothing, but Erik took it anyway, half-hoping it would burn his fingers.
The first time he’d smoked pot had been with Magda, after the war. They’d been standing on a balcony, Anya kicking against the inside of Magda’s stomach, and Erik had thought that’s what peace looked like. Until his hopes burned with his new family, and he realized this would never end until until Schmidt was dead.
Merlyn turned Arthur into different animals to teach him lessons, and for a while, Erik had thought that that’s what life had done to him. Son, experiment, husband, father, hunter, discoverer, villain, prisoner, crusader. Each form given and torn away, but he was never Arthur, and his changes didn’t lead him to legend. Just landed him here, now, where the last thing he’s going to feel are the restraints, the hard chair at his back, and Charles.
Charles, who is lit by that odd white light. Charles who is still above him, face crumpled.
“Please don’t make me do this.” He says it aloud, and Erik doesn’t know if it’s for him or for the security officers in the next room.
“Come on, Charles.” Breathe in, breathe out. This isn’t air, this isn’t real air, but it’s the best he’ll ever get again. Don’t make me die without you, he thinks. Don’t let my memories be lost forever, don’t let my family be lost forever, don’t let them touch me, don’t—
“Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“I can’t do this if you’re looking at me. Close your eyes.”
The lines around Charles's eyes. The light reflecting off his head. His face has changed, since they first met, and his hair is gone, but his eyes are the same. Erik blinks (his last blink) and looks (last look) and he closes his eyes, and remembers lying in his bed as a child while his mother told him stories, remembers sleeping shoulder to shoulder surrounded by fences and guns, remembers his bed in Charles’s house, the third one he’d ever climbed into and thought maybe this one can be it.
(What would have happened if he’d stayed? Taught languages to Charles’s students, played chess in Charles’s study. Watched their students grow up. What would have happened if he had been able to bring Anya there: let her powers develop, whatever they would have been. Your presence in the classroom is embarrassing to her, Charles would have told him over a drink, and Erik would have smiled.)
He’s not gone enough to not recognize that half this dream is Charles’s. Family dinners that never happened. The community they never built together.
I’m sorry, he thinks, but he’s remembering Charles saying those words— I’m sorry, my friend, but we do not— only this time it’s Erik lying on the ground, an ache in his chest and hard sand at his back. And it's Charles above him, tears in his eyes, the sunlight shadowing his face.
Come with me, Charles says, reaching out a hand, and, smiling, Erik reaches back—
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Two minutes later, a medical examiner enters the room. He checks for breath. He checks for a heartbeat. He gives the time, and then he reaches under the table to undo the restraints. A hollow, plastic needle slides out from his sleeve, and blue fingers jab the tip into the still-warm skin.
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Five minutes later, the stiffening body is placed in a bag. A man wheels out the executioner. The medical examiner does not watch him leave.
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After processing, the body is sent to the morgue.
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A day later, it is sent to the nearest cemetery that will take him. A young rabbi comes, and puts a rock on the grave.
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Three hours after that, the executioner arrives. He brings with him two men, and two shovels.
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This time, it is Erik who sits on Charles’s roof, paging through The Book of Merlyn. A can of beer sits by his foot, but he hasn’t opened it.
Charles, on the other hand, is towards the end of his third. It might be enough for him to give answers for free.
“Why didn’t you tell me there was a plan?”
“And ruin the drama?” Charles says it like a joke, but Erik can hear the honesty in it. Everything they said was being watched, and everything he thought was being considered. Analyzed.
“You wanted to know what I’d do.”
He knows Charles is drinking so that he'll have an excuse not to talk, so he waits. Looks at the withered, early winter grass down below them on the lawn. Four children are playing on it, waving wooden sticks as though they were swords.
“I wanted to know how committed you were to destroying me,” Charles says finally. “I wanted to see how deep the good in you was buried.” One of the stick-wielding children throws up her hands, and her opponent’s weapon ignites. “And I didn’t know for sure if Mystique was coming. If she hadn’t… I’d have either had to kill you, or save you and lose everything else.”
It’s clear from his tone he hadn’t decided which he’d do.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll come after you anyway? When they find out I’m alive?”
Charles wiggles an empty beer can in front of Erik’s face, and Erik makes a fist. The can crunches down into a tiny ball, and Charles rolls it around his palm. “I’m sure they would. It would be proof that not even the ‘good’ mutants can be trusted. They would tear apart everything I’ve built. Probably kill me, because aiding a terrorist makes me a terrorist.”
“Would?”
“If they ever get an inkling you’re alive.”
The ball turns into a tiny mace, and Charles flicks it away. Then he reconsiders, and bends to pick it up. Probably imagining some tiny feet stepping on it.
“So this is your revenge.” Erik tried to make Charles give up all his values to kill him. Now he must give up everything he was, to keep Charles alive.
“It only seemed fair.”
“I could do it.” He could rip Charles out of his life, out of the world, out of his heart. All he’d have to do would be to walk down the street.
Charles exhales, and Erik leans away from the smell of his breath. “And I could have left you to die alone.”
He couldn’t have.
And Erik can’t.
“Am I to retire quietly, to a tiny town where no one has ever heard of me?”
“There is no such place,” Charles says. “The world is too small for that.” He pops the lid of the next can. “You’ll have to stay here. Where I can tell who would be a threat to you, and nudge them away from recognizing your face.”
“Why?” Why did you do this? Knowing I don't want to live like that, and that you don't want to put up with it?
“You must think very little of me, old friend, if you think that after all these years I’d simply let you win.”
Erik summons Charles’s beer out of his hand, taking a sip himself. It fizzes on his tongue.
The taste of beer. The rough pages of the book in his hands. So many sensations he thought he’d never have again.
The girl on the lawn puts out the fire, and two of her playmates round on her, hollering. She lets out a wild war-cry and charges one with the stick, and they all run towards the gate that marks the edge of Erik’s new prison.
(And after Arthur vanished, after Guenever walked away from Lancelot in the hopes that he would turn to something better, the ill-made knight died in a cell that smelled like heaven.)
“I hate you,” Erik says, though that’s not exactly what he means.
Charles nods, taking his beer back. Erik doesn’t resist, and their fingertips touch for a moment. “Likewise,” he says.