more x-snippet
12 Sep 2011 10:33![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneI'm thinking I should maybe start tagging this stuff.
Anyway, continues directly from here.
3000 words
Erik stood unmoving after Xavier closed the washroom door, unsure what to do. He’d agreed to stay, but there was nothing binding in that agreement, at least from his perspective, and getting as far away from all of this – the American military, the CIA, a man who could read minds – was of utmost and growing urgency. He was going to have to find Schmidt all over again, starting from scratch again with only a new name to go on and the knowledge that Schmidt had previously unimagined resources and now knew that Erik was looking for him. Gabi might be able to help him, but the Americans’ involvement would complicate matters.
A lot of things complicated matters, starting with the fact that he’d gone from believing himself alone in the world with his unbelievable powers to getting his mind pawed through and used against him by two separate people in a matter of minutes.
Erik didn’t know what to make of that beyond the immediate response that it was a terrifying ability for anyone to have and that he deeply resented having his brain opened up like a lunch pail and all of its contents examined and borrowed without his permission. His mind was his last untouched bit of self, the only place the Nazis had been unable to reach with their weapons and their cruelties, the only part of him Schmidt had been unable to master as he had Erik’s body with its scars and its unnatural powers to bear witness. It had been his to share or withhold as he chose and now it wasn’t, now it was an open book for some feckless English academic to examine like a copy of the Saturday Evening Post and discard when he was through. Or worse, what the woman had done in service of Schmidt.
(Blonde hair, blue eyes, not a trace of Slav or Semite about her, of course Schmidt would see her as something other than an experiment. Schmidt might not have been a Nazi – most of them weren’t – but that didn’t mean he didn’t share their preferences and their predilections.)
Xavier had known about her, though. The American government did as well. Maybe he’d been brought in to counter her. But he knew about others with abilities – mutants, an appalling choice of identifier – and Erik wanted to know about them, too. How many, why, to what purpose and with what consequences? Were the Americans trying to collect them like trophies or round them up like Jews? Did Xavier even know or was he just happy to have his research funded?
“The shower’s no luxury, but it’ll get the job done,” Xavier said as he emerged, toweling off his hair with one hand and clutching his wet clothes in another. In exercise clothing he looked younger than before and Erik bridled once more at being so much at the mercy of someone so unversed in the world’s evils.
“You haven’t gone through the offerings to see if anything fit,” Xavier said with a frown, as if he’d just now realized that Erik hadn’t so much as shifted since he’d gone. “That’s got to be getting uncomfortable.”
He crossed the room to where the pile still stood and sorted it into its component parts. “Would you prefer the—“
“What do you know about people like us?” Erik cut him off. “Mutants.”
Xavier’s head came up sharply. “You say it like it’s a bad thing, like—“
“Jews?”
Xavier scowled. “Like ‘freaks,’” he said sourly. “Like something unnatural.”
Erik coughed out a laugh. “Is that not what we are?”
“Quite the opposite,” Xavier replied, the scowl giving way to a smile. “We are the epitome of natural. We are the first tentative steps in humanity’s next evolution. There is nothing more natural.”
Erik felt like they were speaking different languages that coincidentally used the same words. He knew the component elements, but strung together as Xavier had arranged them, they made no sense.
Something must have shown on his face because Xavier’s smile faded and his voice gentled. “Scientifically speaking, of course. Practically, we might seem so very different as to appear quite unlike something nature ever intended. And for that, we will face consequences.”
“What do you know?” Erik asked again, softer.
Xavier sighed and ran his fingers through his still-damp hair. “From a genetics standpoint, plenty that you probably don’t care about. From a historical standpoint, nothing concrete.”
Erik frowned. “So nothing useful at all?”
“It depends on the use,” Xavier retorted. “This field of study is so new, the existing work so clandestine, that I can’t paint you a big picture and expect it to be accurate. I’ve never encountered another telepath before today, nor anyone with the ability to control wind – if that’s actually what it was. Nor have I ever encountered someone with as much raw power as yourself. I can tell you how and where we are identical to homo sapiens and where we are not, but not why you ended up with ability to control magnetic fields and I ended up a telepath. I have honestly no idea how that happens.”
It bothered him profoundly that Schmidt, with his experiments and vivisections and the pile of corpses carted away from facilities with no shame whatsoever might end up being the actual expert.
“You should go shower,” Xavier said into the growing silence. “Or at least change into some real clothes. We’ll be there shortly – it was a quick trip out here.”
As if on cue, the speaker in the corner started blaring instructions for preparations to dock.
Erik nodded; he had his hotel key with him, but he’d left the clothes he’d worn over the wetsuit on the boat he’d stolen to get closer to Schmidt. Slipping away from the docks in some kind of uniform would be easier. He grabbed a pair of dungarees and a work shirt off of the piles Xavier had made and went into the tiny washroom. He didn’t bother with the shower, just changed his clothes and put his boots back on.
Xavier was sitting in the stateroom’s desk chair when he emerged. “What I don’t understand is how your Klaus Schmidt and my Sebastian Shaw can be the same person,” he began as Erik folded up the wetsuit and looked around for something to secure it in a tight bundle. “They are different ages, vastly so, and Shaw’s whereabouts since the war have been easy enough to verify.”
“He could have had surgery,” Erik replied, then paused. “You still don’t believe me.”
Xavier made a frustrated noise. “No, Erik, I do believe you. That’s the problem. I can’t not believe you. I’ve seen what you experienced, both during the war and on board the ship tonight. I’m just trying to make sense of it all.”
Erik finished securing the wetsuit with an extra belt, waiting for Xavier to say something else, something that might merit him staying a moment longer than he had to once the ship docked. Something that might turn him into a future ally and not yet another foe.
“I remember when Sebastian came home,” Xavier said quietly. “My brother – my step-brother – had gotten back months earlier and was already living at his new duty station, but he came back to New York for this because they’d been school chums. Sebastian had been in the POW camps and then he’d been in the Army hospital and then finally he’d come back to the States after his father had pulled all sorts of strings to get him released. And I met him at the dinner party the Shaws held. I’ve met him half a dozen times since then. I would have known that he wasn’t Sebastian…”
Erik put the bundle down. “Would you have?” he asked, curious for the answer. He didn’t know how mind-reading worked, whether Xavier’s development, unforced by trial and trauma, would have allowed him to see or not see.
Xavier didn’t answer straightaway and Erik sat down on the bed to wait.
“The first time, probably not,” Xavier said in a half-murmur, as if he were talking to himself and not Erik. “I knew how to shield my mind already by that point and I would have made a point of reinforcing it for a social gathering. Crowds were difficult back then and I had to overcompensate. I still do, more or less, but I had no fine control back then and it would have been Hadrian’s Wall when a picket fence would have sufficed. Also, everyone had made such a fuss about Sebastian being delicate – they were having the party in the first place mostly to prove that he hadn’t cracked when he’d been a POW, even though they all privately thought he had – and I would have tried to hide from that as much as I could have.
“Later on… later on it was mostly raucous parties or funerals, neither of which I really wanted in my head. I suppose it could have been Schmidt all along, but… But I should have seen. Neither my control nor my willpower is perfect. I should have seen something, accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose. Everyone said he’d come back broken, that he wasn’t the same Sebastian. I of all people should have seen it.”
Erik, not knowing how true that was, offered no sympathy. “What about tonight?”
A bitter laugh from Xavier. “Tonight there was no chance. I got as far as skimming the minds on board to see if any of them were Shaw’s before Emma – his telepath – locked me out.”
He’s about to say something else, but paused. “Moira’s looking for us,” he said. “We’re back at the port.”
Moira was the CIA agent, Erik realized. Xavier had pointedly skipped introductions on deck.
There was a firm knock on the door and they both looked at it.
“Can you distract her for a moment?” Xavier asked, standing. “I don’t want what happened tonight to get out and I don’t think she’d approve.”
Before Erik could ask what was meant by that, Xavier went into the bathroom and there was another knock, more insistent, on the stateroom door. Erik got up to open the door and was halfway across the room when it opened on its own.
It was sheer instinct that had him reaching out with his powers for something to use a as a weapon. Moira looked pointedly at the letter opener suspended in mid-air a meter from her neck, which was where it had been flying before Erik’s conscious thought caught up to his unconscious reaction to being surprised.
“I wasn’t expecting the door to open without acknowledgement,” he said curtly, flattening out his accent to make it seem more American and ignoring her glare. He returned the letter opener to the desk with a small flick of his hand.
“Where’s Doctor Xavier?” she asked, looking around.
He could feel the gun she was carrying and knew that that’s why her hand was hovering at an odd angle on that side. He couldn’t help but smile at the manifestations of mutual distrust. It felt much more natural than dealing with Xavier and the way he ignored the threat of his terrifying powers, not even able to comprehend how that threat hung over everyone else.
He gestured with his head toward the washroom.
“We haven’t been introduced,” she said, holding out her hand. “Moira McTaggart.”
He shook her hand – over-firm grip, like she’d practiced it to seem more manly. He noticed she didn’t give her affiliation, which was not a surprise even as she must have realized that Xavier would tell him anyway. Maybe she didn’t, however. He wasn’t sure how long or how close this relationship was.
“And you are?” she prompted when Erik made no returning introduction.
“Eric Grossman,” he replied. It was one of his aliases, his best-established with respect to legend, and now one he’d have to retire after handing it over to the CIA to file. He’d have preferred to burn a less useful one, but he’d had no chance to discuss anything with Xavier and he didn’t want to have to explain anything if Xavier came out of the washroom and addressed him as something other than the name he’d given her. He’d get a replacement; the news about Schmidt should buy him enough goodwill for a new set of American documents from King Saul Boulevard.
“And may I ask what you were doing taking a late-night swim in the middle of the Atlantic?” McTaggart asked.
Erik briefly considered telling her no or at least lying. “Repaying an old debt,” he said instead.
“A personal one?”
“Very,” he assured, understanding that the real question was whether he was an agent of a foreign government and that there was probably no denial he could give that she’d believe. The CIA saw communist agitators on every corner, Soviet spies under every bush. Especially Jews from Eastern Europe and he had no idea if McTaggart could tell a German from a Hungarian from a Pole. His American accent was imperfect and while he could disguise that he’d learned English from the BBC, he couldn’t hide that it wasn’t his first language.
“How do you know Sebastian Shaw?”
“I don’t,” he replied mildly, wondering what the hell Xavier was up to and how much longer he was supposed to keep McTaggart from banging on the door and asking if he needed medicine. Or, if her current line of questioning were to indicate her thinking, from drawing her gun and holding it on him until he could prove that he hadn’t killed Xavier and dumped him in the shower while singing “L’Internationale.”
McTaggart’s retort was abandoned when the washroom door opened and Xavier reappeared, hair freshly combed. “I see you two have met,” he said cheerfully. “Good.”
“Your friend Eric was telling me about how he knew Shaw,” McTaggart said mildly.
Xavier looked at Erik, who looked back with annoyance. Xavier broke the gaze to rub at his temple with his fingertips as if he thought water were dripping down from his scalp.
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Moira, he’s not a Soviet spy,” he sighed with what seemed to be genuine annoyance. “He’s trying to kill Shaw for much more prosaic reasons than the defeat of capitalism and the rise of the proletariat paradise.”
Erik wondered if it were Xavier who was the actual communist sympathizer in the room.
“I’m an Oxford don on sabbatical,” Xavier said tartly to both of them, which made Erik suspect that Xavier had heard that last part in stereo. “The bevy of spies came from the other place.”
McTaggart glared at Erik, probably for effect, then turned back to Xavier. “They’re throwing out the lines now. We should be able to disembark in half an hour.”
Xavier nodded. “Good. Erik and I will meet you and Mister Anderson in the officers mess as planned, then.”
It wasn’t a dismissal, but it was near-enough like that McTaggart started and looked ready to fight him on it. Xavier touched his temple again and McTaggart’s raised finger of indignation turned into a gesture pointing over her shoulder.
“We’ll wait for you there, then,” she said, then left.
Erik watched her go, feeling nauseated by the ease with which Xavier used his powers to override others’ will and intentions. He wondered if Xavier had done it to him in the water and how he’d ever know if it happened again. Maybe it already had. Maybe it was happening now.
“Yes, in the water,” Xavier said and Erik turned to him. “You were completely willing to kill yourself and it would have been a wasted effort because you didn’t have the power to keep Shaw from running. Not at any point since then. Not now.”
“How would I know?” Erik asked simply.
“You wouldn’t at the time,” Xavier acknowledged. “But you’d realize afterward that you’d done something completely opposite to what you wanted to do. Moira will be quite angry with me when next I see her.”
Erik nodded, accepting the explanation without assigning it a value. “Why did you do it, then?”
“Because you and I have to finish talking,” Xavier said. “We have to start talking. And we have precious little time to do so if you mean to disappear once we disembark--”
“Stay out of my head,” Erik ground out.
“That’s not me reading your mind, Erik,” Xavier sighed. “That’s me putting two and two together after reading Moira’s mind and seeing that you gave her a false name despite my assurances that nobody was going to make you do anything you didn’t want to do.”
“Says the man who just sent the CIA agent out of the room,” Erik bit off.
“There are some things that the CIA doesn’t need to know about just yet,” Xavier replied. “I agreed to help them. You made no such offer.”
Erik nodded.
“But I wish you would,” Xavier continued. “Imagine the resources at your disposal – at our disposal. To find Shaw – Schmidt. To help shape policy toward mutants…”
Erik snorted. “I know what their policy will be.”
Xavier’s powers were all the more frightening for the shocking naiveté that they came entangled with.
“They’re not the Nazis, Erik,” Xavier said. “They’re--”
“They interned their own citizens during the war with Japan,” Erik cut him off. “Just because their camps didn’t come with crematoriums doesn’t mean they’re benevolent, Doctor.”
“Then come with me to make sure it never reaches that point,” Xavier exhorted. “Don’t you see that there’s the possibility for more than just suffering?”
Xavier looked pleadingly at him. Erik closed his eyes and turned away.
“No, I don’t.”
Before Xavier could say anything else, Erik reached out with his powers to the bundle that was his wet suit and brought it to his hands, went to the door, and opened it. He found his way back up to the deck and waited unobtrusively against the cockpit wall as the last preparations were made before dropping the anchor and lowering the ramp.
He knew Xavier knew where he was, but he was left alone, for which he was grateful. He was also allowed to thank the nearest officer for his rescue and walk down the gangplank without feeling any sudden urges to reconsider his refusal of Xavier’s offer, for which he was even more grateful.
Nobody stopped him as he traversed the Coast Guard’s base, finding his way to the exit and then out into the civilian Florida night. He found a taxi and asked to be taken to a club he’d been past two nights earlier. He walked around the block from there, made sure he wasn’t being followed – there was no way of knowing what other CIA assets were in the area and McTaggart would have had time to call in a favor with the local police -- and took another taxi to his hotel. He’d leave Miami in the morning.
The outline's at 30k words and 50-something pages. And nowhere near done.
Anyway, continues directly from here.
3000 words
Erik stood unmoving after Xavier closed the washroom door, unsure what to do. He’d agreed to stay, but there was nothing binding in that agreement, at least from his perspective, and getting as far away from all of this – the American military, the CIA, a man who could read minds – was of utmost and growing urgency. He was going to have to find Schmidt all over again, starting from scratch again with only a new name to go on and the knowledge that Schmidt had previously unimagined resources and now knew that Erik was looking for him. Gabi might be able to help him, but the Americans’ involvement would complicate matters.
A lot of things complicated matters, starting with the fact that he’d gone from believing himself alone in the world with his unbelievable powers to getting his mind pawed through and used against him by two separate people in a matter of minutes.
Erik didn’t know what to make of that beyond the immediate response that it was a terrifying ability for anyone to have and that he deeply resented having his brain opened up like a lunch pail and all of its contents examined and borrowed without his permission. His mind was his last untouched bit of self, the only place the Nazis had been unable to reach with their weapons and their cruelties, the only part of him Schmidt had been unable to master as he had Erik’s body with its scars and its unnatural powers to bear witness. It had been his to share or withhold as he chose and now it wasn’t, now it was an open book for some feckless English academic to examine like a copy of the Saturday Evening Post and discard when he was through. Or worse, what the woman had done in service of Schmidt.
(Blonde hair, blue eyes, not a trace of Slav or Semite about her, of course Schmidt would see her as something other than an experiment. Schmidt might not have been a Nazi – most of them weren’t – but that didn’t mean he didn’t share their preferences and their predilections.)
Xavier had known about her, though. The American government did as well. Maybe he’d been brought in to counter her. But he knew about others with abilities – mutants, an appalling choice of identifier – and Erik wanted to know about them, too. How many, why, to what purpose and with what consequences? Were the Americans trying to collect them like trophies or round them up like Jews? Did Xavier even know or was he just happy to have his research funded?
“The shower’s no luxury, but it’ll get the job done,” Xavier said as he emerged, toweling off his hair with one hand and clutching his wet clothes in another. In exercise clothing he looked younger than before and Erik bridled once more at being so much at the mercy of someone so unversed in the world’s evils.
“You haven’t gone through the offerings to see if anything fit,” Xavier said with a frown, as if he’d just now realized that Erik hadn’t so much as shifted since he’d gone. “That’s got to be getting uncomfortable.”
He crossed the room to where the pile still stood and sorted it into its component parts. “Would you prefer the—“
“What do you know about people like us?” Erik cut him off. “Mutants.”
Xavier’s head came up sharply. “You say it like it’s a bad thing, like—“
“Jews?”
Xavier scowled. “Like ‘freaks,’” he said sourly. “Like something unnatural.”
Erik coughed out a laugh. “Is that not what we are?”
“Quite the opposite,” Xavier replied, the scowl giving way to a smile. “We are the epitome of natural. We are the first tentative steps in humanity’s next evolution. There is nothing more natural.”
Erik felt like they were speaking different languages that coincidentally used the same words. He knew the component elements, but strung together as Xavier had arranged them, they made no sense.
Something must have shown on his face because Xavier’s smile faded and his voice gentled. “Scientifically speaking, of course. Practically, we might seem so very different as to appear quite unlike something nature ever intended. And for that, we will face consequences.”
“What do you know?” Erik asked again, softer.
Xavier sighed and ran his fingers through his still-damp hair. “From a genetics standpoint, plenty that you probably don’t care about. From a historical standpoint, nothing concrete.”
Erik frowned. “So nothing useful at all?”
“It depends on the use,” Xavier retorted. “This field of study is so new, the existing work so clandestine, that I can’t paint you a big picture and expect it to be accurate. I’ve never encountered another telepath before today, nor anyone with the ability to control wind – if that’s actually what it was. Nor have I ever encountered someone with as much raw power as yourself. I can tell you how and where we are identical to homo sapiens and where we are not, but not why you ended up with ability to control magnetic fields and I ended up a telepath. I have honestly no idea how that happens.”
It bothered him profoundly that Schmidt, with his experiments and vivisections and the pile of corpses carted away from facilities with no shame whatsoever might end up being the actual expert.
“You should go shower,” Xavier said into the growing silence. “Or at least change into some real clothes. We’ll be there shortly – it was a quick trip out here.”
As if on cue, the speaker in the corner started blaring instructions for preparations to dock.
Erik nodded; he had his hotel key with him, but he’d left the clothes he’d worn over the wetsuit on the boat he’d stolen to get closer to Schmidt. Slipping away from the docks in some kind of uniform would be easier. He grabbed a pair of dungarees and a work shirt off of the piles Xavier had made and went into the tiny washroom. He didn’t bother with the shower, just changed his clothes and put his boots back on.
Xavier was sitting in the stateroom’s desk chair when he emerged. “What I don’t understand is how your Klaus Schmidt and my Sebastian Shaw can be the same person,” he began as Erik folded up the wetsuit and looked around for something to secure it in a tight bundle. “They are different ages, vastly so, and Shaw’s whereabouts since the war have been easy enough to verify.”
“He could have had surgery,” Erik replied, then paused. “You still don’t believe me.”
Xavier made a frustrated noise. “No, Erik, I do believe you. That’s the problem. I can’t not believe you. I’ve seen what you experienced, both during the war and on board the ship tonight. I’m just trying to make sense of it all.”
Erik finished securing the wetsuit with an extra belt, waiting for Xavier to say something else, something that might merit him staying a moment longer than he had to once the ship docked. Something that might turn him into a future ally and not yet another foe.
“I remember when Sebastian came home,” Xavier said quietly. “My brother – my step-brother – had gotten back months earlier and was already living at his new duty station, but he came back to New York for this because they’d been school chums. Sebastian had been in the POW camps and then he’d been in the Army hospital and then finally he’d come back to the States after his father had pulled all sorts of strings to get him released. And I met him at the dinner party the Shaws held. I’ve met him half a dozen times since then. I would have known that he wasn’t Sebastian…”
Erik put the bundle down. “Would you have?” he asked, curious for the answer. He didn’t know how mind-reading worked, whether Xavier’s development, unforced by trial and trauma, would have allowed him to see or not see.
Xavier didn’t answer straightaway and Erik sat down on the bed to wait.
“The first time, probably not,” Xavier said in a half-murmur, as if he were talking to himself and not Erik. “I knew how to shield my mind already by that point and I would have made a point of reinforcing it for a social gathering. Crowds were difficult back then and I had to overcompensate. I still do, more or less, but I had no fine control back then and it would have been Hadrian’s Wall when a picket fence would have sufficed. Also, everyone had made such a fuss about Sebastian being delicate – they were having the party in the first place mostly to prove that he hadn’t cracked when he’d been a POW, even though they all privately thought he had – and I would have tried to hide from that as much as I could have.
“Later on… later on it was mostly raucous parties or funerals, neither of which I really wanted in my head. I suppose it could have been Schmidt all along, but… But I should have seen. Neither my control nor my willpower is perfect. I should have seen something, accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose. Everyone said he’d come back broken, that he wasn’t the same Sebastian. I of all people should have seen it.”
Erik, not knowing how true that was, offered no sympathy. “What about tonight?”
A bitter laugh from Xavier. “Tonight there was no chance. I got as far as skimming the minds on board to see if any of them were Shaw’s before Emma – his telepath – locked me out.”
He’s about to say something else, but paused. “Moira’s looking for us,” he said. “We’re back at the port.”
Moira was the CIA agent, Erik realized. Xavier had pointedly skipped introductions on deck.
There was a firm knock on the door and they both looked at it.
“Can you distract her for a moment?” Xavier asked, standing. “I don’t want what happened tonight to get out and I don’t think she’d approve.”
Before Erik could ask what was meant by that, Xavier went into the bathroom and there was another knock, more insistent, on the stateroom door. Erik got up to open the door and was halfway across the room when it opened on its own.
It was sheer instinct that had him reaching out with his powers for something to use a as a weapon. Moira looked pointedly at the letter opener suspended in mid-air a meter from her neck, which was where it had been flying before Erik’s conscious thought caught up to his unconscious reaction to being surprised.
“I wasn’t expecting the door to open without acknowledgement,” he said curtly, flattening out his accent to make it seem more American and ignoring her glare. He returned the letter opener to the desk with a small flick of his hand.
“Where’s Doctor Xavier?” she asked, looking around.
He could feel the gun she was carrying and knew that that’s why her hand was hovering at an odd angle on that side. He couldn’t help but smile at the manifestations of mutual distrust. It felt much more natural than dealing with Xavier and the way he ignored the threat of his terrifying powers, not even able to comprehend how that threat hung over everyone else.
He gestured with his head toward the washroom.
“We haven’t been introduced,” she said, holding out her hand. “Moira McTaggart.”
He shook her hand – over-firm grip, like she’d practiced it to seem more manly. He noticed she didn’t give her affiliation, which was not a surprise even as she must have realized that Xavier would tell him anyway. Maybe she didn’t, however. He wasn’t sure how long or how close this relationship was.
“And you are?” she prompted when Erik made no returning introduction.
“Eric Grossman,” he replied. It was one of his aliases, his best-established with respect to legend, and now one he’d have to retire after handing it over to the CIA to file. He’d have preferred to burn a less useful one, but he’d had no chance to discuss anything with Xavier and he didn’t want to have to explain anything if Xavier came out of the washroom and addressed him as something other than the name he’d given her. He’d get a replacement; the news about Schmidt should buy him enough goodwill for a new set of American documents from King Saul Boulevard.
“And may I ask what you were doing taking a late-night swim in the middle of the Atlantic?” McTaggart asked.
Erik briefly considered telling her no or at least lying. “Repaying an old debt,” he said instead.
“A personal one?”
“Very,” he assured, understanding that the real question was whether he was an agent of a foreign government and that there was probably no denial he could give that she’d believe. The CIA saw communist agitators on every corner, Soviet spies under every bush. Especially Jews from Eastern Europe and he had no idea if McTaggart could tell a German from a Hungarian from a Pole. His American accent was imperfect and while he could disguise that he’d learned English from the BBC, he couldn’t hide that it wasn’t his first language.
“How do you know Sebastian Shaw?”
“I don’t,” he replied mildly, wondering what the hell Xavier was up to and how much longer he was supposed to keep McTaggart from banging on the door and asking if he needed medicine. Or, if her current line of questioning were to indicate her thinking, from drawing her gun and holding it on him until he could prove that he hadn’t killed Xavier and dumped him in the shower while singing “L’Internationale.”
McTaggart’s retort was abandoned when the washroom door opened and Xavier reappeared, hair freshly combed. “I see you two have met,” he said cheerfully. “Good.”
“Your friend Eric was telling me about how he knew Shaw,” McTaggart said mildly.
Xavier looked at Erik, who looked back with annoyance. Xavier broke the gaze to rub at his temple with his fingertips as if he thought water were dripping down from his scalp.
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Moira, he’s not a Soviet spy,” he sighed with what seemed to be genuine annoyance. “He’s trying to kill Shaw for much more prosaic reasons than the defeat of capitalism and the rise of the proletariat paradise.”
Erik wondered if it were Xavier who was the actual communist sympathizer in the room.
“I’m an Oxford don on sabbatical,” Xavier said tartly to both of them, which made Erik suspect that Xavier had heard that last part in stereo. “The bevy of spies came from the other place.”
McTaggart glared at Erik, probably for effect, then turned back to Xavier. “They’re throwing out the lines now. We should be able to disembark in half an hour.”
Xavier nodded. “Good. Erik and I will meet you and Mister Anderson in the officers mess as planned, then.”
It wasn’t a dismissal, but it was near-enough like that McTaggart started and looked ready to fight him on it. Xavier touched his temple again and McTaggart’s raised finger of indignation turned into a gesture pointing over her shoulder.
“We’ll wait for you there, then,” she said, then left.
Erik watched her go, feeling nauseated by the ease with which Xavier used his powers to override others’ will and intentions. He wondered if Xavier had done it to him in the water and how he’d ever know if it happened again. Maybe it already had. Maybe it was happening now.
“Yes, in the water,” Xavier said and Erik turned to him. “You were completely willing to kill yourself and it would have been a wasted effort because you didn’t have the power to keep Shaw from running. Not at any point since then. Not now.”
“How would I know?” Erik asked simply.
“You wouldn’t at the time,” Xavier acknowledged. “But you’d realize afterward that you’d done something completely opposite to what you wanted to do. Moira will be quite angry with me when next I see her.”
Erik nodded, accepting the explanation without assigning it a value. “Why did you do it, then?”
“Because you and I have to finish talking,” Xavier said. “We have to start talking. And we have precious little time to do so if you mean to disappear once we disembark--”
“Stay out of my head,” Erik ground out.
“That’s not me reading your mind, Erik,” Xavier sighed. “That’s me putting two and two together after reading Moira’s mind and seeing that you gave her a false name despite my assurances that nobody was going to make you do anything you didn’t want to do.”
“Says the man who just sent the CIA agent out of the room,” Erik bit off.
“There are some things that the CIA doesn’t need to know about just yet,” Xavier replied. “I agreed to help them. You made no such offer.”
Erik nodded.
“But I wish you would,” Xavier continued. “Imagine the resources at your disposal – at our disposal. To find Shaw – Schmidt. To help shape policy toward mutants…”
Erik snorted. “I know what their policy will be.”
Xavier’s powers were all the more frightening for the shocking naiveté that they came entangled with.
“They’re not the Nazis, Erik,” Xavier said. “They’re--”
“They interned their own citizens during the war with Japan,” Erik cut him off. “Just because their camps didn’t come with crematoriums doesn’t mean they’re benevolent, Doctor.”
“Then come with me to make sure it never reaches that point,” Xavier exhorted. “Don’t you see that there’s the possibility for more than just suffering?”
Xavier looked pleadingly at him. Erik closed his eyes and turned away.
“No, I don’t.”
Before Xavier could say anything else, Erik reached out with his powers to the bundle that was his wet suit and brought it to his hands, went to the door, and opened it. He found his way back up to the deck and waited unobtrusively against the cockpit wall as the last preparations were made before dropping the anchor and lowering the ramp.
He knew Xavier knew where he was, but he was left alone, for which he was grateful. He was also allowed to thank the nearest officer for his rescue and walk down the gangplank without feeling any sudden urges to reconsider his refusal of Xavier’s offer, for which he was even more grateful.
Nobody stopped him as he traversed the Coast Guard’s base, finding his way to the exit and then out into the civilian Florida night. He found a taxi and asked to be taken to a club he’d been past two nights earlier. He walked around the block from there, made sure he wasn’t being followed – there was no way of knowing what other CIA assets were in the area and McTaggart would have had time to call in a favor with the local police -- and took another taxi to his hotel. He’d leave Miami in the morning.
The outline's at 30k words and 50-something pages. And nowhere near done.
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