Communication: That was their mission now. Charles to sit in Cerebro all day, every day, finding their people in order to help them find one another (or, more often these days, to offer what scraps of comfort he could in their final moments); Storm and Wolverine to fly and guard the jet, to keep the Blackbird and its inhabitants out of range of the Sentinels below; and Erik to watch after Charles, to decide when he'd been in long enough and needed to come out long to sleep, to eat, to do anything else. Left to his own devices, Charles would stay in Cerebro for a day or even longer before it occurred to him to leave. Left to himself, Charles would die in thrall to the needs of those others, few as they now were.
In the beginning, Erik and the Beast had traded off Charles duty, one to stay by his side as the other went on missions. Now there was only Erik, and he no longer went on any missions—for in his absence there was no guarantee that anyone else could attract Charles' attention long enough to draw him back out. Erik had left Charles for dead too many times before. He would not leave him again.
Charles had activated Cerebro several hours ago. He needed to come out now, to drink a glass of water and eat a snack, to shift his position in his chair and tell Erik about anything he had seen that was of interest, or gnawing at him. Maybe he would tell Erik about something horrible he'd witnessed; maybe Erik would say 'I told you so,' not because he'd ever wanted to be right, but because neither of them knew any other way to talk about it, even now.
***
("How many of us are there?" Erik had asked, later, once he and Charles were alone, with no government men to listen and take notes. "How many did you see?"
The page of coordinates that had spit out of Hank's machine had been so long. Erik had never once imagined there could be so many others like him; until he'd met Charles in the water, he hadn't known there were any others at all. Only yesterday, he'd thought himself a monster, a mistake alone in the world; how quickly everything had changed.
Charles was grinning when he answered. "I'm not sure exactly," he said. "Hundreds. Maybe even thousands. More than I ever dreamed of."
That sounded good to Erik. The more, the better. There was strength in numbers, if they stood together.
He never stopped asking, whenever he and Charles met, especially when they had been apart for years. As time passed, 'maybe even thousands' became tens and hundreds of thousands. One million. Two. In the mid 90s, in a hotel room in San Diego, Charles told him that by the year 2030, one in twenty-five children born would be a mutant. By 2050, one in ten. By the end of the next century, they could well be a majority.
Even then, a decade before mutantkind had come so close to being diminished to just the two of them at Alkali Lake, Erik had known the caveat—that they'd have to survive so long, first.)
***
"How many?" Erik asked, when Charles had emerged. He didn't want to ask, didn't want to know, but he had never had whatever it was that would have allowed him not to ask, to turn his face away so he wouldn't have to see the end in its full clarity. He had always asked, and he always would ask, until the answer was 'there are no others remaining.'
"Less than three hundred," Charles said, as if he didn't know exactly how many fewer there were, down to how many of their people were likely to die in the next few minutes, down to any babies who would be born in the next few days. "I need another hour."
"You can have fifteen minutes."
"An hour," Charles pressed. "I'm still trying to find Kitty's group. I think I've almost gotten a handle on them this time."
He'd been looking for Kitty's group for weeks. Over the last few days especially, he would think he'd found them, only to discover he'd found only an echo, an impression where they weren't. He would tell Erik this, and Erik would think, not so quietly, that if Charles couldn't find them then that meant they were dead, and all he was seeing was his own guilt. He thought it now, too.
"That's not it," Charles said. "There's something else. Something I haven't told you. I didn't want to get your hopes up unnecessarily." As if there were any hope. As if Erik wanted any. He could think of nothing that would be crueler. "I need another hour. I'll tell you then, whether I find them or not."
"Half an hour," Erik said. "And whatever the big secret is, you tell me now."
"All right, done."
After Charles had told him, Erik gave him his hour.