Work Text:
England, 1959
Jan Barth was a former Lieutenant; he'd once indulged a penchant for snaffling young girls in the camps, "saving" them from the gas chambers, though not leaving them alive for long. Erik had tracked him to London, and from there to Milton Keynes, where Barth had taken the name George Barrister - an absurd disguise when his English was both butchered from a schoolbook and later learned on the fly when he abandoned the Third Reich to its fate. But he'd come to the sleepy little town with enough money and self-flagellating charisma to poach himself a comfortable, quiet life. That was until Erik came calling, of course.
He got a couple of names out of Barth before he smothered him with a silver-cleaning cloth the man had been using to polish his medals. He would have got away quietly - the death might even have been overlooked as natural causes, Barth was hardly young or fit these days - but it turned out Barth had a little tart coming to visit him. More unfortunately, she heard Erik before he heard her, and most unfortunately, she knew where Barth kept his pistol and how to use it. She shot Erik in the leg as he exited Barth's bedroom. It was all rather ignominious.
As Erik was lying on the floor cursing heavily in German with the gun pointed at his head from a few feet away, he realised two things: 1) that the girl was even younger than him, and 2) that she had shot him in the leg because she didn't want to kill him and not because she couldn't aim at point blank range. Erik could have ripped the gun from her fingers with a flick of his mind, but if he did she was apt to go screaming to the nearest neighbour before he could get even himself upright. He didn't want to have to kill her. He was still new to this killing business at all, and young Englishwomen were very, very low on his hitlist.
"Who the ‘ell are you?" she demanded, glancing through the open door at Barth's body. "Why the devil are you ‘ere?"
Somehow, in the ridiculous mess that was left of both their evenings and with his leg bleeding between his clenched fingers, Erik ended up telling her about Barth and his crimes. And somehow she believed him, and decided that in the interests of her own conscience she would drive him to a hospital in the hopes that he'd get out of the mess without being arrested.
"We'll take 'is car," she said, helping Erik downstairs with one of his arms slung around her shoulders. There were tears in her voice but she still had enough wits to wipe up Erik's blood, her prints off the gun and leave the weapon in the cabinet where she'd found it. "George is always letting me borrow it. My Dad said 'e's a creep and I shouldn't take gifts from 'im but I'm too greedy to listen, I guess."
"You're a good person," Erik told her, quite genuinely.
"Says the murderer I’m aiding and abetting. I can't take you to the local clinic, they'll wonder 'oo you are. It'll 'ave to be Churchill 'ospital over in Oxford, they're so busy you might get through without ‘em calling the cops. It's an hour's drive."
"I'll make it," Erik grunted.
She left him at the door of the emergency wing and drove back to Milton Keyes. Erik was swept up into the machine of the teaching hospital and was focused on keeping his lies consistent through the haze of pain and blood loss. He never found out what happened to the girl; perhaps Barth’s demise had been ruled a natural death after all.
"Cleaning my gun. Idiot not to unload it, I know," he told the blue-eyed registrar doing the rounds in accident and emergency. "I only just arrived here tonight for a weekend of hunting. Guess my weekend's ruined."
"At least you'll walk again. It's gone right through the medial gastrocnemius," the registrar smiled, patting his hand. He had a thick mop of black hair and a playful smile. Probably followed rules to the letter, but as long as he didn't suspect foul play Erik might yet get out of here without seeing a policeman. "At this stage we'll pump you with penicillin and reduce nerve damage as much as we can. Talk about prognosis after surgery, how does that sound?"
"Thank you," Erik said. He thought, I couldn't be luckier today. He was, as they say, dead wrong. "Doctor...?"
"Xavier," the registrar answered.
None of the nurses could tell him when surgery was scheduled, but as the evening clicked over into the early morning, Doctor Xavier returned to check on Erik.
"You should be resting," he said with a note of fatherly concern. "I've booked you in for surgery first thing in the morning, and fatigue isn't good for the immune system," he was fiddling with the IV line supplying saline to Erik's drained body.
"What's that?" Erik asked, watching Doctor Xavier inject something into his drip from a hypodermic.
"Just something to help you sleep."
"I'd rather not be sedated."
Doctor Xavier perched on the side of his bed and took his hand. His face was almost painfully sympathetic now, gazing into Erik's eyes for all the world as if they were experiencing some terrible, shared grief together. "You don't have to worry, Erik. I'm taking good care of you."
"I don't want sedatives," Erik said firmly, reaching for the taped IV needle buried in the back of his hand; Charles, however, covered it quickly with his own palm. He clicked his tongue soothingly, and Erik felt suddenly exhausted, his eyelids so heavy he had to blink just to keep them open. But no drug he'd ever taken had ever worked so fast-
---
He awoke in a cold room full of metal.
His head felt like a dark, sloshing well and he struggled to surface from it, a sharp pain throbbing behind his face. His limbs were too heavy to lift. The lights cut at his pupils until they began to retract and he took in rows of small, steel doors front of his eyes. A morgue. He must have died after all, damn it. What would he tell his mother when he saw her? He hadn’t even got close to finding the man who’d killed her.
He winced at the bite of the wounded leg. That was odd, that his body’s wound still hurt. He tried to lift his head to look at it and felt an immense weight pressing down on his forehead. No, it wasn’t a weight – when he tried to turn his head he felt a rubbery resistance: it was some kind of band holding his head in place. His thoughts began to come together more cleanly. There were straps across his wrists and chest, too, and he was still dressed in the worn hospital gown he’d been given on admission. He wasn’t lying down, either, but propped up in some kind of slope-backed chair like at a dentist.
Immediately he thought himself back in Shaw’s laboratory and his heart began to race. He strained at his bonds, grunting in frustration.
“Sh, sh,” a voice floated from somewhere near his head and he felt a cool hand push a few strands of fringe out of his eyes. “Calm down, Erik. You’re safe.”
Unable to turn to look, he had to wait for Doctor Xavier’s young face to move in front of him, that sweet smile playing across it.
“Is this… have they done the surgery?” Erik asked. That had to be it. Maybe some people moved even under anaesthetic, and had to be strapped down. All of Erik’s experience of the medical profession up to now had involved physical restraint. And his head was still so fuzzy from that damn sedative.
“I’m going to start soon, but I need you to trust me,” Doctor Xavier bent down until their gazes were level with each other, his hands propped on his thighs. “You might be alarmed by this set-up, but it’s quite necessary, I assure you.”
“This,” Erik balled his fists beneath the straps, “is necessary?”
“Which one of us is the doctor here?” Xavier said with a chuckle. “If you don’t cooperate, Erik, you might lose your leg. Understand me?”
His head was clamped down so tight that Erik couldn’t even nod, but he swallowed and said, “I trust you.”
“Good,” Xavier reached out a hand and patted Erik’s cheek. He disappeared from his field of view, and Erik heard the clatter of tools. His awareness of metal all around him was starting to become clearer, and he could feel the shine of Xavier’s belt buckle and the steel implement in his hand, attached to a long thread of copper wiring. A moment later, there was the buzz of machinery that made Erik’s headache a maelstrom. He squeezed his eyes closed, wishing he could put his hands over his ears.
“What is that?” he gasped. “Is this going to be local anaesthetic or something?”
“You’ll go to sleep soon enough,” Xavier’s soft voice replied above the grinding. “But I need to put some electrodes on your skin to monitor you while you sleep.”
The buzzing noise was excruciatingly close to Erik’s ear now. When something first brushed against the back of his head he tried to jerk away and adrenalin flooded him, his brain remembering Shaw and masks and tools and he needed to run, get out now. His tense muscles sent shocks of pain up from his injured leg, but after at least a minute of confusion the buzzing droned to a halt and Xavier’s hand patted his shoulder.
“Calm yourself, Erik. I just had to shave part of your hair for the electrodes.”
“No one told me this,” Erik snarled. The adrenalin had cleared his brain out a little, or the drugs were wearing off. Shouldn’t there be nurses to do this sort of thing? And the steel doors winking at him from across the room – surely the hospital wasn’t so short on space it needed to do surgery in its morgue?
“I didn’t want to bore you with the details, my friend. Just relax.”
He heard the doctor return the electric razor to the tray behind him and felt the cool hum of a new tool in Xavier’s hands. His powers were too fogged with the sedative and the waves of pain from his injured leg to determine exactly what it was. Soon enough Xavier’s fingertips pressed lightly against his scalp, in the breezy patch where the hair must have been removed. There was the cold wipe of alcohol, then the slightest prick, and Erik felt the area begin to numb up with some kind of local anaesthetic.
“Bit of a sting now,” Xavier said. “Nothing to worry about.”
Erik felt an intense, focused twinge. The area was too drugged to perceive any pressure. He gasped deep in his throat, but the pain did not retreat.
“What are you doing? That isn’t – tell me –” he shut his eyes again for a moment, feeling the pain traced across his scalp in a wide circle.
“I’m sorry, I just need to remove a part of your scalp and then a piece of your skull, a few inches wide,” Xavier said conversationally.
Erik felt as if his blood had just crystallised into ice. A ringing started up in his ears. “What did you say?” he croaked. “I wasn’t shot in the head. You can’t do this—”
“I’m afraid I can,” Xavier said. Erik felt him move away from the back of his head and he came to stand in front of Erik again. The implement in his hand was revealed to be a small scalpel, slick with Erik’s blood. “I’m so pleased you’re here, you see, Erik. I’ve had to watch dozens of others like you and me pass right under my nose all these years – but there was only so much I could learn from external observation. It was so frustrating.”
“You and me?” Erik breathed.
“People who are different. With abilities,” Xavier smiled and tapped the side of his head. “I read your mind as soon as I walked into the ward. Your thoughts burn terribly bright, it’s quite beautiful. And it’s not like anyone’s going to notice you’re missing – no one even really knows that you’re in the country, do they?”
He grinned broadly, a loving, grateful grin, and then straightened up and walked around to the back of Erik’s head again.
“The mind is a fantastic thing, Erik, and I’m convinced that it’s from the mind that our powers originate. You needn’t worry. Once I remove the bone there are no nerve endings in the brain tissue and we can really start having some fun. The importance of a live subject is that I can perform targeted damage to different areas until we figure out exactly where the seat of your abilities lie. And once I have replicated my results here, we’ll have a precise map of the region. It would be wonderful if I could tell you how it’s going to turn out, but… more’s the pity.”
Erik licked his lips. “You read my mind,” he rasped, fighting to ignore the damped sting of the scalpel on his numbed skin. “Did you see what my ability was?”
“Oh, yes. Fascinating. I’ll have to take some tissue samples to see if there are unusual aggregations of iron that might be somehow generating these magnetic fields.”
Erik flexed the fingers of his right hand. “And you’re not afraid of it?”
“The sedatives should take care of it,” Xavier said distractedly. There was the sound of a scalpel scraping against bone and the pain in the back of Erik’s head intensified.
“You know, Doctor,” Erik rumbled. “I think you might want to consult the literature on that one.”
He clenched his hand and his ability felt the rod of metal in Xavier’s fingers shoot backwards at an incredible speed. There was a nasty, gritty squelching sound and then an extended thump as the doctor’s body fell to the floor.
---
Erik closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. With his powers, he fumbled at the tray of tools behind him until he found something that felt like it had a blade. He floated it over and cut one of his arms free, then gripped the hovering scalpel – considerably larger than the one Xavier had been using – and sliced through the rest of the straps.
He scrambled off the chair first before gingerly reaching around to touch the back of his head. The flap of skin that the doctor had been cutting away had folded back into place and Erik smoothed it down, hissing. He’d be wearing a hat for quite a while, it seemed.
His legs shaking and his arms held at the ready, he stepped around the chair until Xavier’s prone form came fully into view. The scalpel had gone through his eye so deep that only the crimson-stained blade protruded out of the punctured socket, vitreous humour oozing around it and dripping over the bridge of Xavier’s nose. His other eye, still a clear, darling blue, stared at the floor.
It still looked a little curious.