Magneto laid his helmet down in the grass for approximately three minutes. When he picked it up again, it said, "Mew."
As his helmet had never before made a noise other than the occasional metallic thump when he dropped it somewhere, and certainly had never fidgeted back and forth on its own as it was doing now, Magneto wasn't exactly surprised when he looked inside to find a kitten staring back at him. It was offensively tiny and had some disgusting gunk in its eyes, and as he glared at it, it opened its mouth and mewed again.
Magneto tipped his helmet over an inch above the ground, until the kitten wobbled out. Unfortunately, it wobbled onto the toe of his left boot, where it proceeded to sit and make more pathetic cat-sounds. "Shoo," Magneto said, reaching to move it. He half-expected to be bitten, or clawed, or yowled at, but instead the kitten licked him with its rough sandpaper tongue, and then began to purr. "I don't want you."
One vet visit, several containers of kitten formula and far too many other supplies later, Magneto arrived back at his lair with a kitten he hadn't wanted, didn't like, and didn't want sleeping inside his helmet. Of course, as the weeks went by, the kitten (which turned out to be a male, and which Magneto named Spot; names had never been his forte, and he counted it rather fortunate that Mystique had come up with Magneto for him) continued to sleep there no matter where Magneto hid it, until he grew too big and graduated to cardboard boxes.
Magneto never did grow fond of Spot, despite accusations to the contrary from various Brotherhood members, who considered five pages of instructions when they drew catsitting duty during missions to be excessive. He reminded Magneto of Charles, somehow. It was probably a combination of the delight he took in making Magneto's life harder, and the fact that he actually seemed to like him, for some reason.
***
Ten years later, Spot had grown old and fat. So had Magneto, who'd retired several years ago to be with Charles. (He didn't know why. He'd found his calling very satisfying, but Charles had had a ring, so it had seemed like the thing to do.)
Charles was not altogether fond of Spot. In fact, when he'd found out Magneto had a cat, the first words out of his mouth had been, "Oh, God. You're not bringing it with us, are you?" When he found out Magneto most certainly was, he spent the next two years sighing about cat hair on the seat of his wheelchair, which had quickly become Spot's favorite place to sleep. Magneto paid no attention; it wasn't as if anyone other than him was going to see Charles' ass, anyway.
Charles didn't warm up to Spot until one day when they were sitting on the couch watching Wheel of Fortune, which was virtually the only show neutral enough for Charles and Magneto to watch together and not end up screaming at each other. (Not that screaming wasn't an entertaining pastime, but Magneto liked to have sex occasionally, and Charles never would when he was angry. Not to mention that the couch was not nearly as comfortable at two in the morning as it was earlier in the evening with Charles on it too.) Spot waited until after the commercial break, then insinuated himself into Magneto's lap and began to suck on his finger, as he had done ever since he was just a kitten.
"What is he doing?" Charles asked, even though he supposedly didn't care about cats. Perhaps he had seen this episode before and was bored, though if he had, he was either getting senile or playing stupid about the answers to an offensive degree. "Why does he do that?"
"It's a nursing behavior," Magneto responded. "It's probably because he was taken from his mother too early." He would have gone on, said that the vet had guessed Spot to be four weeks old at his first vet visit, but Charles was giving him a very strange look.
"Ah," Charles said, as if he understood something he hadn't before.
"No," Magneto said, rejecting immediately whatever had just occurred to Charles that was making him look at Magneto with that much sympathy. He was sure he knew exactly what it was, too, but he refused to say that he didn't keep the cat because it reminded him of his childhood, or his mother. It was a cat, and that was it. "Stop it."
"All right," Charles said, but Magneto could tell he didn't mean it, especially when he held Magneto's other hand through the rest of the episode. He was probably going to cry later. Magneto would probably cry, too—not because he was overwhelmed with any particular emotion, but because they'd cried together so often over the years that they each had a Pavlovian reaction to the other's tears.
Magneto was cringing in anticipation already, but on the plus side, maybe Charles would stop complaining about cat hair now. Maybe he'd even clean the litter box once in a while. That was definitely what Magneto wanted for their anniversary.