When it happens, it's an accident. You'll never be certain, later, how much of it was your fault. You'll never know if you would have chosen it for yourself, if you'd gone in knowing—and you'll never be sure which would have been the coward's move. Stay or go? You've never been known for your inability to make a decision, yet you'll remain half-convinced, all the rest of your life, that you'd have had trouble with this one.
In the end, though it comes about due to your own actions, you've not really given any choice at all.
You're in Charles' subbasement—not arguing, for once. Later, you'll be glad you weren't. For now, all that's on your mind is the same idle consideration of every time you venture down here, with or without him. The Beast is always building one new gadget or another. You've never shied from examining anyone you find sitting around (or from taking it, if it would be of use to you; Charles has always found this particularly vexing when the useful thing you took happens to be one of his students). Charles knows all about your tendencies, has referred to you as a magpie more than once. Perhaps that's why the newest gadget is within a locked plastic box, stuffed into a corner behind a toolbox as if it is nothing of consequence.
It's not made of metal, but what's inside creates a strange sensation inside your head. A buzzing, calling you. It's why you notice it, where otherwise you'd have ignored it in favor of what appears to be the schematic for the next generation Blackbird. You make a lock-pick and use it while Charles had his back turned, telling you about the modification he currently desires for Cerebro, the reason he's allowed you down here this time to begin with.
He turns as you open the box and reach for the object within. You'll never be able to describe it later, not even to yourself. It's hidden in shadow, after all, and it won't be in your hands long enough to be brought fully into the light.
"Erik, don't—"
Perhaps you hit an unseen switch or dial, or perhaps the thing responds to your touch just as strongly as it called to you to begin with. Either way, you never get the chance to hear the rest, much less demand an explanation.
***
One moment you're there with Charles, and the next you're on a dark street in an unknown town, with nothing at all in your hands. There's little for you to do, in the end, but knock on the nearest door. It doesn't occur to you to worry overmuch about the reaction of whomever comes to open it; you're Magneto, after all, so you'll be the one demanding answers.
The door cracks open, and a woman looks out. She's haggard, but defiant, too, despite the fear behind her eyes. She looks you up and down. Whatever she sees in you, it's not what she's been bracing herself for, and while she doesn't relax entirely, the fear fades.
What you see in her, however...
"Ma? Who is it?"
"No one. Go back to bed."
The boy doesn't go, merely stares at you flatly from behind his mother. He's blinking away sleep and bracing himself to defend her in the same moment. He's the man of the house, several years younger than you were at the gates of Auschwitz; you know, looking at him, that you could never have been so young.
You think, quickly as you're able—which isn't very, since you're also having a certain amount of difficulty breathing.
"I do not think we can help you. I am sorry," the woman says. She sounds genuinely regretful. You wonder what you look like to her, an old man in a strange outfit, come to her doorstep to gape at her in the middle of the night.
A plan. You need a plan. You've always been good at coming up with a plan on the fly, but in this moment you're more lost than you've been within memory. For a moment, the only thing you can think of is to show her the number on your arm, the only possible proof of your true identity you've ever carried. In the next moment, you dismiss it; here and now, it would mean little to her. Here and now, neither he nor her son have been marked, so it would mean nothing if the numbers were the same.
Finally, you say, "Edie? Edie Lehnsherr?"
"Ye-es?" The fear is back now, in her voice this time. It's never a good thing, in this here and now, for strange men to show up on one's doorstep, knowing one's name.
"I believe I can help you."
***
Despite the circumstances, the hour, and the lack of any proof whatsoever you can do as you claim you can, it doesn't take much for her to believe you on that point. Perhaps she recognizes something in you, but you don't really believe that. Like every other Jew in Europe, she's well and truly frightened. She'd have left with her son already, if she'd had the means to. When you say you can get her out, she asks questions, but the doubts she speaks aren't nearly as strong as her hope. By morning, she's set herself and the boy to pack quietly, while you duck out to learn the lay of the land.
You've grown very skilled at crossing borders quietly over the years. Doing so in this era is a new challenge, but hardly a unique one. Here and now, no one knows your name. Here and now, no one knows what you can do. The anonymity makes up for the added difficulties in many ways.
If Edie's lips thin when you're forced to kill a guard or two along the way, she covers Erik's eyes so he won't see, and says not one word to you about it.
***
In the end there's only one place you can take them, the only place you'd ever consider going.
You arrive in North Salem very early on a Saturday morning. You're exhausted, all three of you. Erik, not usually a whiner, has been making one snide observation or another since the day before. Edie, not usually the snappish type, has grown quick to tell him to shut his mouth. As for you, you're tired, bone-weary in a way you don't recall ever having experienced before.
The gate's not locked. If it had been, you'd have opened it with your gift regardless, and never mind if Edie saw. The three of you walk through, then up the drive, all the way to the front door, where you knock and think, Charles.
Several minutes later, he answers the door, a boy no older than nine or ten, eyes wide with knowledge. You didn't give him everything, but you gave him enough to go along, and to know to ask no awkward questions.
"Hello," he says to Edie, though she understands no English. "Really? None at all?"
"No."
"Well, is it all right if I—" He taps his forehead, a wave of giddiness and fear coming off him as he does: in this time before Raven, this Charles must never have spoken of his telepathy before.
"Yes."
"All right." Hello. You're the new housekeeper, aren't you? Mrs. Lehnsherr?
Edie, giving off no more than a slight startle, said she was.
My mother asked me to watch for you. Please come in. And you—you're Erik, right?
Erik mutters something, with a suspicious glance back at you. He hasn't yet manifested for himself, won't for another year or two. He doesn't understand what a gift this is, to be meeting Charles Xavier; he doesn't know what it was like, to believe yourself alone until he pulled you out of the water and you weren't anymore. Not for the first time, you want to slap him, this weak, whining child who understands nothing.
Instead, you turn away, as soon as they're through the door.
"You aren't going to stay?" A child's voice, belonging to a boy in blue-striped pajamas with a gap in his teeth.
"I have work to do. I trust you'll take care of them while I do it."
"I...yes, I will." Of course I will. I promise.
Of this one thing, there's no doubt: the young Charles who kept Raven so close for all those years will do the same for your mother, for the boy who you already suspect will not become Magneto. In this knowledge, you walk back out the gate, one weight lifting while another descends.
Edie and her son are safe, but what's left now is all the rest.
***
You don't remember as much as you could about the Second World War. You spent so much of your life avenging the past, without wishing to learn anything more about it than what you experienced yourself. So you don't know where to strike, how to stop the war before it begins. The little you do know, you use. There's not one of the camps you don't visit, not one known killing ground you leave standing. It doesn't stop anything, but it slows down the machinery of genocide to some extent. (Sometimes, hearing of the shootings and mass graves, you wonder. You know those things happened before, but did they happen with the same frequency? You don't remember, and so there's no way for you to calculate if you've actually done any good, or if you've merely changed how they died.)
Those years are long and hard, the battle you've trained your whole life for, fought not for mutantkind but for the heritage you thought you shed when you took up that other mantle so many years ago.
On more than one night, between one objective and another, you sit up thinking of Edie, and of Erik, and of young Charles. Even more often, you think of your Charles, who's had a time travel device set to deliver him to your mother's doorstep.
Charles had a time machine. That's what you come back to, after each of your failures. You'll never be able to ask him what it was for, why he programmed it for the time and place he did. Perhaps he meant to do little other then rescue a young boy and his mother. It would have been far from the first time he tried to save you. Or perhaps he'd meant something greater, something better: to stop the war in its infancy, and save millions from the horrors to come.
Charles of all people could have done it...but you're the one who's here.
Eventually, the war ends, but not before millions upon millions die, no more than a little more slowly than they did before. There's really very little else to be said about it.
The war ends, and you go back.
***
Charles, thirteen now, is delighted to see you again. Erik, fifteen, pretends not to care. Edie, thirty-seven, is older than she's ever been before; she embraces you, and when your eyes grow red, she asks you what is wrong. You can't think of a way to explain it without sounding like a madman, so so you tell her she too will be weepy for little or no reason once she's past sixty-five for herself.
Edie and Erik live in a little cottage close at the back of the estate. As for you, you move into one of the house proper, into a wing a little dustier than any of the rooms Charles' mother ever enters.
The next few years should be a time of rest, but for you they're something else, instead. They're the memories of a war you've now lived as a boy and as an old man, jumping out at you every time you close your eyes; they're watching as Charles and Erik grow up together.
You despise Erik a little more each day. You know why, know where it comes from, are more self-aware than your Charles would have believed. You know it's jealousy and little else: Erik has your mother, has your once-lover, has the life you might have had if only you'd been allowed it. Meanwhile, all you're left with is ashes, and memories fresher and even more hideous than you had before.
You know what it is and where it comes from, so you speak to Erik as little as possible, even as you visit Edie at her cottage daily. You and she become quite good friends, and if it pains you that you'll never be her son, it's more than you ever dreamed of having before.
At first, the days seem endless. Then, it seems as if another month or year goes by for every blink. Charles and Erik graduate highschool and head off for college. If you cared about your own lack of an education, it would be another spark for the fire; since you don't, you're satisfied in having Edie to yourself during the semester, growing into the spaces Erik's absence leaves behind.
***
You dream of Charles, sometimes. Your Charles, whom you met in the water, the taste of salt and impatience in your mind; your Charles, whom you crippled and left on a beach in Cuba; your Charles, whom you returned to again and again, knowing the damage you were doing by leaving, but unwilling to let go of either him or the cause.
One night, you wake from one such dream, and young Charles is there, a golden figure in the lamplight.
You tuck it all back behind your shields, quite certain it's too late, that your attempts to keep a few precious things to yourself have succumbed to young Charles passing by your doorway at an inconvenient moment.
"I heard you from across the house, actually."
"Well, get out," you say, suddenly stung, in a way you haven't quite been, all this time. Maybe it's that Charles at twenty is no long a boy, even if he's still not an age you knew him, before. Charles at twenty is beautiful; Charles at twenty is the prime example of what you'll never be able to have again. He's not your Charles, but he looks and acts and speaks altogether too much like him.
Instead of leaving, Charles steps forward.
"I said get out."
Repeating a command never did much good with your Charles. It doesn't with this one, either. A moment later, he's in your bed, all twenty years of him, pressing a kiss to your mouth. You intend to refuse him, to throw him out--but as your Charles could never refuse you when you came to him, neither can you refuse Charles at any age, in any form, in any life.
It's been years since you lit this fire even alone, but with Charles here, eager and warm, you find it hasn't gone out, after all.
It will be only once. It can be only once. This Charles belongs with a different Erik, one who would not understand if he caught you together. It can be only once, and so you do what you've ever done, knowing every time could be the last time: You hold on tight, for as long as you're able.
***
Late the next morning, Edie is quiet when you arrive at the cottage for your visit.
"Is there something wrong?"
She turns to you, solemn. "I saw you this morning."
Try as you might, you can envision no scenario in which she witnessed your and Charles' lovemaking, and so you feel very confident in asking: "Saw what?"
"I saw Charles leaving your room, just after dawn."
It's going on sixty years since you last felt this particular visceral horror in your gut, at the back of your throat. You manifested when you were eleven, or perhaps twelve; you hid it from her, for as long as you could. When she finally caught you, as you'd always been destined to be caught, you'd felt like this. Your hands are cold, not trembling because of age, but something else.
"What were you doing with that boy?"
You can't bear to look at her, to meet her eyes. "He came to me, Mama. He's--he was very important to me, once. You have no idea how much he means to me. How much I care for him."
She's spoken with you about Charles and young Erik before. The kind of conversation that isn't common in this time, this place. You were surprised by her acceptance, though less so when you realized Erik is all she has. You were pained then, knowing she could never give the same to you.
You wait for what feels like a very long time for her to speak. Then a new horror floods you as you think back over what you said, and see your misstep. All these years, you've been so careful. All it took was one slip of the tongue.
Now, as much as you don't want to, you have no choice but to look at her.
In her face, you see many things. The one thing you don't see is even a hint of shock. There's a little surprise there, but not much.
"You knew."
"I was not certain." She sits down beside you, where before she'd been standing. That's how you know any chance of a scolding has passed; Edie never scolds from a chair, and certainly wouldn't disavow you from anywhere but her own two feet. "You look so much like Erik's grandfather...but my Jakob's father, he is is dead, and had no brothers."
"I see."
Then her hands are on either side of your face, raising your eyes to meet your own. "Erik, my Erik," she says, and presses a kiss to your forehead.
This is how you lose the composure you've forced yourself to keep, alone in a time and a place not your own, that will never belong to you: with your mother cradling your head to her chest, petting your hair and saying, "Shh, shh, my Erik, my sweet boy. It is all right, it is all right now."
It hasn't felt all right, all the time you've been here. All you've ever been able to see is what you've lost on the one hand, and what you can't have on the other. But perhaps this is what you needed all along. After you calm, after she releases you, you talk and talk, for hours, everything that's ever happened to you, in this life and the other. Your mistakes and your triumphs, and everything in-between.
Afterward, though you'll never quite cease feeling like a stranger in this place, you also feel for the first time in your long life—for the first time since you lost her, perhaps—as if you might have come home.