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The hotel manager is nearly green. “He should go to the hospital,” he says in his heavily-accented English, glancing at the doctor. “We can’t be responsible for this.”
Erik’s leg is broken in three places from the “skiing accident.” The skin on his left arm and cheek is scraped nearly raw, his wrist is badly sprained, and there’s a nasty cut running down his side. Mystique feels him tense, so slightly he might not even be aware he’s doing it, and puts a hand down on his shoulder.
“It seems to me, Herr Straussler,” she answers coolly, “that we are paying you enough not to be so concerned about the limits of your responsibility.”
She wishes she could speak his language, but, while she’s been learning German, the man’s Schweizerdeutsch is so different that even Erik has had trouble understanding him. Her tone seems to do the trick, though. He steps back, cowed enough.
“It might be for the best, Frau Eisenstadt,” the doctor murmurs more deferentially from where he’s kneeling at the side of the massive wooden bed, as he squints at his stitching. “You might be more comfortable.”
Erik is pale and sweating. The doctor had given him some morphine, enough to make him useless in the argument, but not enough to knock him out completely. He hadn’t made a sound when his leg had been set, but she can almost hear the rattle of the little metal bedside clock now, as if the alarm were about to go off. She tightens her grip.
“We are not going to the hospital. It’s ridiculous to think of it.”
The doctor gives a discreet nod. “But I will send a nurse, of course? For the more…delicate care.”
“I certainly don’t need help to look after my own husband,” she declares, and he shrugs.
“As you wish, Frau Eisenstadt. You have my number if you change your mind, or if he gets worse.”
“I’ll call you if we need you, Doctor, you’ve been very kind.” She shoots the manager a look, then picks up the bloodied linens and drops them into his arms. “Perhaps we could let him rest now.”
The manager says grimly, “Please let us know if we may be of any further service, madam,” bows, and goes.
She accompanies the other two to the door, some distance in the cavernous suite, letting the doctor give her instructions. “Speaking of rest, I’m leaving you a good supply of morphine,” he says. “He really should take more. He will be having a bad few days. It will be easier on you both.”
She wishes she could agree. “I understand, Doctor, but my husband is a very stubborn man. I will do what I can.”
He takes up his hat. “I will come again tomorrow.”
It’s only when she gets the door shut behind him that she can close her eyes and let herself tremble, just breathing for a minute. It’s all right. They’ve made it back to safety. Erik’s not going to die. That lab is destroyed and none of the guards will be telling any stories any time soon. The scrape along her own ribs is nothing.
When she glances back at the bed, Erik is looking drily amused beneath the morphine haze. “What?”
“I had no idea you could be so…imperious,” he says.
“You’re forgetting where I grew up,” she says, coming back towards the bed. “And you’re trying to distract me.”
“Distract you? From what?”
“You know what. You’re incredibly powerful, Erik, but you’re not invulnerable. You’re as breakable as any human. You fight like your abilities can keep you safe from anything, but they can’t. As I think we’ve just seen.”
He blinks. “Since I’m the one with the broken leg…”
“No,” she says, the relief setting the anger free, “it’s not just you. You’re not on a one-man vendetta anymore. People are relying on you. People need you, Erik. Mutants need you. You can’t just keep throwing yourself into things blindly like that.”
For a moment, she feels bad, bringing it up while he’s drugged and in pain, but he sits up a little against the pillow, his eyes narrowing. “I’ve been doing this for more than ten years. I don’t need advice on how to fight from a…an American girl who only learned how to shoot a gun three months ago.”
She’d kept her mouth shut for years while Charles had pretended to be self-sufficient, but this is too much. At worst, she’d supported Charles reeling drunk the few blocks back to the college. She’d never had to half-drag him bleeding for miles in the snow.
“Oh, you don’t need me, Erik?” she snaps. “If I hadn’t been here, assuming you’d even made it back to the hotel at all, they would’ve made you go to the hospital. How would that have gone?”
“It would have been fine,” he said coldly, “because I’m not some child frightened of the place. It’s a ridiculous idea, and I don’t know where you got it from.”
They’re stumbling deep into the places she knows they shouldn’t go, scary places only half-marked on her map, but, seeing him there, battered and bandaged, she doesn’t care. “Fine, then. I’ll call the doctor back. He’s right. It’ll be easier for everyone than me having to look after you here.”
He glares at her for a minute, then swallows and looks away. She feels a twinge. More than a twinge. If it was up to her, she’d be happy to play along with him in pretending that he has no weaknesses. Isn’t he always treating her as stronger than she is, and doesn’t it make her better? But this is too important.
“No? Then if you’re going to need me to pick up the pieces when you get hurt, I think you should listen to what I have to say about why it happens.”
She goes out onto the balcony, shutting the door behind her. It’s bright and cold. She stands and breathes the icy air, looking out over the lake, for a long time.
She comes back in after the sky turns grey and it starts to snow. Erik is either dozing or sufficiently drugged not to answer when she asks him if he wants dinner. She decides to let him be for now and “dresses for dinner” on the way out the door.
Downstairs, the grand lobby is crowded with red-cheeked people coming in from the piste , letting in icy blasts behind them. Even in a sedate, expensive hotel like theirs, that means raised voices, cheerful laughter, snow tracked on the floor, children darting around. She’s still feeling jumpy after the fight and anticipates their trajectories with an irritable tension as she crosses to the restaurant, which is at least quieter, though the normal spectacular views of the surrounding mountainside are veiled by snow.
The minute she sits down, she realizes she’s ravenous from the day’s work. She orders half the menu and then props her head on her fist. She’s exhausted, too, now that the adrenaline from the fight has gone. With her eyes closed, she drifts a little. She could be waiting for Charles, any one of the hundreds of times he’d made a new discovery or run across a pretty girl and left her to sit in a restaurant, in a theater, on a park bench. Always arriving a little breathless, always charmingly apologetic, never sorry enough not to do it again…
She cuts off the line of thought. She’s afraid to think too much or with too much feeling about Charles. She doesn’t know what the limits of his ability to find her are, and she doesn’t want to do anything that might make her mind stand out to him. She doesn’t think he’d ever force her to go back to Westchester, but she doesn’t want lectures or awkward questions about Erik. Yes, Charles, I did run off with your only other friend, and we are sleeping together, and it would be pretty good except that he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing the way I thought he must have and now I’m wondering if we’ll figure it out before things get totally out of control …
The first course arrives, a heavy cream soup. She attacks it, feeling herself revive a little with the calories. This is still better, she thinks, looking around at the families filtering in to eat. Even having to keep half an eye on the door, even having to make sure that the people who give her funny looks are reacting to the sight of a young woman eating alone in public rather than recognizing her. Even with her ribs aching and Erik upstairs in pieces. This is better.
When she comes back to the suite after dinner, it’s dark. She quietly pulls a few woolen blankets from the closet and settles herself on the couch. The hotel was built before World War I, and the timbered, high-ceilinged room is chilly, with a serious draft. No matter how she winds herself in the blankets, she can’t get warm enough to drop off for more than a few minutes at a time.
It’s just as well, because it means she’s awake to catch the tiny sound of pain that comes from the bed.
“Erik?”
She fumbles the switch of the lamp by the bed. His color isn’t good. His eyes are screwed shut, his mouth is drawn tight, and his head is moving restlessly on the pillow.
She looks at the clock.
“Erik, you need to take some more morphine.”
He peers up at her blearily. “I don’t want to be knocked out,” he mumbles. “What if something…”
“I don’t know how to break this to you, Erik, but you’re pretty much useless as it is. And if you can’t sleep, I can’t sleep. Don’t you think one of us should be in shape to deal with other people tomorrow?”
He shuts his eyes again and sighs raggedly. “Fine.”
That he gives in so easily is an alarming sign of how much pain he must be in. She finds the kit and administers an injection, something she’s gotten pretty good at recently. In a minute or two, his face smooths out and his breathing gets more even. “That’s better,” she says, pats him on the arm, and starts to move from the bed. “Get some rest.”
“You’re freezing,” he says without opening his eyes. “Come here.”
“You’ll be a lot more comfortable with the bed to yourself, Erik.”
“Not with you shivering over there. Come on. If you can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.”
“I think the medicine will take care of that,” she says, but she recognizes an olive branch when she sees one. It’s not good enough for the problem, but it’s good enough for the night. She comes around to the other side of the bed and slips in carefully. Erik pulls her in awkwardly with his good arm. Under the heavy duvet is a blissful billow of warm air.
Erik’s asleep soon enough. She lies half-awake for a while, feeling him breathe, watching the huge snowflakes drift down past the high windows.
The next morning, the snow is still coming down hard. The balcony is piled high. Everything seems muffled and dim.
After the tension and effort of the last few days, it’s almost a relief to be stuck somewhere. She leaves most of the lights off, but builds the fire back up. After checking that the door is locked, she curls back up under the blankets in blue form to read yesterday’s newspapers—they’ve taken all of them, which makes for quite a pile. She polishes off Le Monde (her French, at least, is good) and digs into the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which is tougher going. After a while, Erik stirs. “Snowed in,” she tells him. “I don’t think even the doctor will make it today. Go back to sleep.”
He does. Finishing the papers, she spreads them out on the bed and starts cleaning her guns. The radio is playing soft, sleepy piano music, Debussy, she thinks. At some point, Erik opens his eyes to watch her drowsily. His stubble is starting to grow in, which has an oddly softening effect on his angular face.
“Hungry?” she eventually asks him.
He shakes his head. Not really surprising, under the circumstances. She looks at the clock. Past noon already. She reaches for the kit. He doesn’t bother arguing.
Downstairs, the heavy snowfall means a crowd in the restaurant. She steps into the bar to wait it out and manages to get a seat near the massive stone fireplace. She’s halfway through her whiskey when she hears a voice.
“Raven? Raven, is that you?”
She looks up, tensing. Her guns are upstairs, and she can’t run, not with Erik stuck in their room. Why hadn’t she worn a different face? But it’s only one of Charles’s colleagues, a florid Englishman in his forties she’d never liked. He’d always stood too close and looked at her too long. Well, at least she doesn’t have to be polite to him anymore.
“Dr. Harrington-Pryce, what a pleasant surprise.” She doesn’t get up, delivering the line with a frozen smile.
Of course, he doesn’t take the hint. “It’s lovely to see you, my dear. You’re looking very well, if I may say so.”
“Mmm,” she says, looking at the fireplace, waiting for him to spot the wedding ring. That might deter him, though nothing else had.
But he’s still blathering on, oblivious. “Though I must also say that I’m quite surprised to see you here. At a time like this, I mean.”
There’s something about his tone that makes her uneasy. She turns back to him. “What do you mean?”
“Well…with Charles in his…his condition. So to speak. I would have thought you’d think your place was at home.”
“His condition.” She lowers the glass very carefully.
“Well.” He drops his voice. “With the wheelchair and all. Seems very generous of him to let you go off on a ski holiday.”
It’s a good thing the glass is already nearly at the floor; when she lets go, it doesn’t break. She jumps up. “Excuse me. My husband’s waiting for me.”
“Oh, I see!” He puts his hand on her arm. “Congratulations, my dear. Who’s the lucky man? A friend of Charles’s?”
“Fuck off,” she says, and practically runs out of the bar.
Upstairs, Erik’s out cold.
She paces the floor for an hour, trying to decide whether she should try to reach New York. How could she have gone five months without finding out? Why hadn’t she called, just once? Why hadn’t he tried to contact her? Is he that angry at her for leaving? Does he think she hates him? Or that she wouldn’t care? Or does he think…
She glances over. Erik is propped up on his elbows, blinking at her. “Something’s happened.”
“Yes, but”—thinking about how it’s going to hit him in his current condition, her nerve suddenly fails— “we should wait to talk about it until you’re a little more clearheaded.”
She’s hoping against hope he’ll be doped up enough to accept it, but, unfortunately, Charles is a frequency they resonate on together, and he frowns. “Tell me, Mystique.”
She squares up and takes a deep breath. “It’s Charles. He…when he was shot on the beach, he was paralyzed. He’s in a wheelchair now. I just found out.”
Erik stares at her, as if unable to process what’s she saying. He presses his fist against his mouth and bites down on it, hard.
She didn’t do this, Erik—you did.
“It wasn’t you who started shooting with him in the line of fire,” she says, as she’d said to herself many times before. “It wasn’t you who was trying to kill us all in the first—”
The clock on the bedside table crumples.
“Erik,” she says warningly.
“I know,” he growls, and falls back on the pillows.
She finds her way to a chair halfway across the room and drops into it, staring in front of her.
They sit there in complete silence for a long time, so long the storm comes to an end and the sky begins to move toward dusk. Finally, Erik says something.
She tries to rouse herself, pushing herself up from her slump. “What?”
“I said, are you going back to him.”
His face is grim, his voice almost a monotone.
The question comes out by itself. “Do you want me to?”
“You’re free to come and go as you choose, Mystique,” he says mechanically. It was almost the first thing he’d said to her, once they’d left, and he’d repeated it often enough that she’d realized that he wasn’t talking to her so much as to someone else in his head. Hostages are not what I want. “You know that.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she says, irritation rising.
“In a day or two, we can probably reach Azazel. He can take me back to Wyoming and you to Westchester—”
“That’s not what I asked, Erik.”
He meets her eyes for a long moment. “No,” he says finally. “I don’t want you to go.” He looks at the clock, and it begins straightening itself out, unfolding on the table, but he’s clearly still too fuzzy to repair the fine damage to the mechanism. Little cogs and screws waver wistfully in the air around it. “But I can’t ask you to stay when…”
“It’s not actually a question of who needs me most, you know,” she says, and is surprised by the bitterness in her own voice.
He looks at her like he’s trying to decode a cipher. “What is it, then?”
Struggling with the answer, she doesn’t speak again for a while. It’s like, for the first time, she’s looking, really looking, at her own life with Charles, and everything seems at once familiar and extremely strange, almost unrecognizable. Erik finally gives up on the clock, and it falls over with a sad little chime.
“If I go back, that will be it,” she says dreamily. “His life will eat up mine. I’ll be taking care of him forever. Oh, he’ll be extremely considerate about it. He’ll be scrupulous about thanking me. I’ll be credited in all his books. I’ll never even have to ask for money. But that’s all I’ll ever do. Push his chair and fetch his books.” She frowns. “I can’t do it. I can’t, Erik. I can’t. I can’t.”
She knows she sounds like a child about to cry, and she hates for Erik to hear her like that, but she also doesn’t care. Erik curls his fingers into his palm, pulling her chair up to the bed. “It’s all right,” he says, resting his hand with the splinted wrist on her arm. “You don’t have to. I understand.”
“Do you?” She blinks into focus and stares at him. “Do you? Because I really need you to understand, Erik.”
He’s still slowed enough by the morphine that she can see him take in her meaning and watch the brief internal debate that follows. He sighs. “Yes.” And then, after another moment, makes a more determined offering. “I shouldn’t have gone in like that at the lab. I’m sorry. This is—this is all new.”
It’s the first easing of the tightness in her chest she’s felt since she’d learned about Charles. “For me, too.” She touches his hand. “You need your shot.”
“No.”
She narrows her eyes, surprised. “Erik, we just talked about—”
“You’re in pain because I hurt Charles,” he says. “I don’t want to be comfortable right now.”
And maybe that’s for the best, that he can’t numb away the feeling until he can lock it down with all his other bad memories. Or maybe he’s just torturing himself and it’ll make him worse. She doesn’t know. She does know it causes a warmth to flare inside that, mingling with the pain about Charles, makes her faintly sick, as if she’d eaten too much dessert. She gives in to the feeling, though she probably shouldn’t, and nods.
The thought reminds her, though, that she hasn’t eaten a thing all day. She calls room service and orders a meal for herself and toast and tea for Erik. “Half an hour,” she tells him, climbing back into bed.
He lifts his arm so she can nestle gingerly into his side and then strokes her cheek with his thumb. “Will you call him?”
She can’t bear to think about it. She doesn’t want to. How much of her life had she spent afraid of Charles’s disappointment, Charles’s disapproval?
He had let her go. No, he had sent her away. In that moment, hurt as he had been, he had been willing to accept never seeing or speaking to her again. Maybe it’s better to leave it at that.
“What difference would it make?” To call, and cry, and apologize for something she hadn’t done, that no one had meant to happen, but say, No, I’m not coming back, and no, I’m not leaving him?
“None,” he says. Erik loves the dramatic gesture, but, down deep, he’s a practical man. “Unless it would make a difference to you.”
“What about to you?”
He just shakes his head, and she feels the futility of it. What would, what could, Erik possibly say?
They’re still not wrong.
“Then…I don’t think I will.”
“All right.”
“I think…I think I’ll just…stay here for a while.”
He tightens his arm, though she can already feel the discomfort in him at moving. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, his half-laugh constricted by the pain.
“No kidding.”
What a pair of wrecks they are, and she doesn’t even have a broken bone as an excuse, she thinks, turning her face against his shirt. He kisses her hair. “We’ll make the world safe for him, Mystique.”
She doesn’t answer.
If she cries at all, or he does, neither of them mentions it later.