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Most people break out of Danielle Moonstar's nightmarish illusions within twenty minutes. Erik has been under for two hours. All that time, he has been thrashing, convulsing, crying out in German, and somehow, Charles's first thought is that he's going to scare the kids.
"We've got to help him," Dani murmurs, visibly shaken by her ordeal.
"I am well aware."
Dani's powers are not telepathic in nature, but they work with many of the same fundamental forces as Charles's own. There are many core levers by which he can pry into a mind. Humans, and mutants too, are made up of a tumult of base emotions, and fear is the basest of them all. Beneath all of his wrath and ire, Magneto is scared. But of what?
He is his enemy. But he won't leave him to his madness.
"Take the helmet off. Keep it close."
Dani clutches it to her chest like some sort of talisman, or like a burning hot iron, depending on who you ask. Her mentor takes a deep breath and enters Erik's mind.
His psyche is a blasted waste. He can feel gravel and bone shifting beneath his feet. Smoke drifts over the horizon, stinking of sickness and starvation. The whole place echoes with the voices of the forsaken. Memories. Or ghosts. He's never been perfectly certain of the difference.
Sitting in the middle of it all is a little boy with white hair and blood on his hands.
"Charles."
It is unspeakably unsettling to hear the voice of the man he knows come out of that tiny, fragile body.
"You told me you would never enter my mind against my will."
"I had to. There was no extracting you otherwise."
He takes a deep, rattling breath, sucking in the smell of death between his teeth and fighting not to sob.
"You lied to me."
"Magnus—"
"This is why I could never tell you about this. Did you know that?"
He had his theories, as Charles always does. A man of his age and from that specific region has beyond a shadow of a doubt seen some things. But he only ever spoke of the camps distantly, tastefully, as if it had all happened to somebody else, long ago and far away. But they are here and alive, in his memories, in his bones, in his genes.
They took a class, some time ago, at university, about epigenetic trauma. He never forgot how he flinched when he went to pass him a pencil.
"Get out of my memories, Charles."
"I am trying to help you."
"I have never asked for your help, nor do I need it."
He reaches out to touch him, unwilling, unwanted.
"Get out!"
The whole place smashes, and the shades give way to something new, something darker. A dull and sterile place, swallowed whole by silence. The child, the child he refuses to let himself think of as Erik, is crying on the floor.
"Someone hurt you here."
"Don't touch me."
"This is your nightmare, isn't it?"
"Don't touch me!"
The bond between their minds screams and warps and shifts, tainted and broken by decades worth of mistrust. There is damage here that can never be fixed.
He's beginning to think he's not the man for this job.
"What do we do?" Dani mutters.
And Charles, against his better judgment, replies, "I don't know."
He tastes shades in her mind. A legacy of blood.
"Erik?" she whispers. "You can come out now."
And just behind it, unspoken, I understand. I remember too, the paths men walked with stone feet. I remember how hunger felt. It is in my skin, my bones, my blood. It is in our genes.
His eyes snap open, but Charles can feel nothing behind them. He has the emptiness of a dead man to him.
"Child. Are you hurt?"
Of course. That would be the first thing he does, to comfort one more helpless than himself to hide his own helplessness.
Danielle shakes her head, and mumbles a stiff apology, as if she had bumped into him while carrying a mug of hot coffee. But Charles cannot forget the child. He cannot forget the things he saw. And if he cannot forget, how much harder is it for one who lived through it all?
"Magnus—"
He reaches out.
"Do not touch me. How many times do I have to tell you? I don't want you near me. I don't want you in my mind. I don't — I don't want you."
"Then why do you keep coming back here?"
He knows, and has known, that Magneto could kill him with spectacularly little difficulty, in a number of very painful ways. He could throw the whole world off its axis if he wanted to. He doesn't want to.
"You have a place here. Just the same as any other mutant. You are not the monster you fear you are."
For the smallest of moments, there is a crack in the wall. And then he puts the helmet back, and his mind is sealed up tight again.
"Stay away from me. Please."
He spends the next half hour in a silent room atop his asteroid base, pinching his brow in the way that he always does when stifling tears. He runs his numb, gloved fingertips over pictures of his children, of his wife. Of him.
Behind them, he keeps a collection of stolen photographs, the ones museums would not display. One of them, he knows, holds the last image of his family's faces.
He should not remember them that way, or at any rate, he should not want to. But it is in his bones, in his blood, in his genes, and he cannot forget. Any more than he can bury that child in the ashes.
Time does not pass the same here in space. The present can feel a million years away, and the past as clear as the morning. He presses his hand against the cold glass and tastes the metal in the stars.