#they were volunteers and charles was injured in an avalanche

[countyourcasualty]

The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

"Charles Xavier, open this g-dforsaken door!" an unfamiliar voice lifted amidst the pounding. First in his head but then flesh-against-wood, a typical cop-knock with dented fist-edges. Bang! Bang! Bang! The hundred-year old white-oak paneling on the mansion's front door would surely splinter under the force of it. Don't be so melodramatic, Charles.

Obscure. At first, but nothing remained obscure to Charles for very long. The accent, the cadence, the swirl of metal and rigid steel and smoke and crying birds-of-prey and desert sands and blinding skies that was… strange, in America. Topsy-turvy. September chill sets him bracing, and the streets are too quiet for spring, sprawling department stores and automated doors… finding himself missing the merchants, shoving new fruits under his nose… Acidic oranges, bright red seeds slipping out of mud-crusted fingers, watching the sky through sticks and leaves. Silence and seas of people adorned in white. Tishrei is your favorite month, New York City is too cold. Too-much metal like how you'd expect him to love. You remember this. The metal, wound down into the spaces between his atoms, his driver. But Lehnsherr - Shomron called him Ariel but everyone else just calls him Erik - just misses the heat. You can almost smell the burning rubber tires as the hollowed-out Jeep under your ass lifts off the ground and careens beyond an aging, rusted wall, medical tents line-by-line and you're really here, ferrying enormous jugs of water to the makeshift hospital. At least Haifa had roads. You could never classify whatever he was doing in this sweltering wasteland - this minuscule fraction of a place called Eilat - as driving in the first place. The Red Cross had convinced Charles to go. It'll be good for you, your people-finding skills are unprecedented! Oxford loves the extracurriculars. OK, except for the fact that no one in this entire country understood how a fucking motor vehicle worked, OH KAY? It's hard to sell it as good for him when he's imagining his skull through the windshield. Ma kara, atah mipachad? What's wrong? You scared? Of course Lehnsherr goaded him. Always had. Flyaway curls are freshly jammed under a black, tye-dye swirl toque (at least some things never change, you couldn't get Erik into a kippah if you paid him, but he'll show up to work in a 420 Blaze It beanie - OK, maybe not quite so theatrically goyische; the same category as Hot Topic and American Idol, but you honestly couldn't predict the man's moods on the best of days and he's absolutely been known to fuck with Charles in spectacular and delightful ways), and two large brown paper bags balanced in one of his arms, freeing up the other to… ya know… knock Charles's door down with.

Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing against a white stone…

This part of Erik, Charles was not familiar with. He didn't rise to the bait, any of it. His mind a glass sieve, fogged with snowflakes over a superheated element. "Ah , so you're incapable of reason, then?" Erik's poor arm crosses over his chest, one eyebrow arched back. "And I doubt you could see two feet in front of you let alone annihilate the opposition , kamerad." The statement is sharp, pointed at the whiskey tumbler in Charles's fingers. "But you are right that I am not here for a social call," Erik's quick retort lacked any indication of offense. Charles had the distinct capacity to wither with a well-placed word, a cutting observation, acerbic sarcasm designed to flay away skin and reveal bone. It wasn't that Erik was immune, no one really could be immune to that level of insight, but he was shored up with foolhardy courage, impulsive and willing to jump feet-first into the fire regardless. The little girl was spared from falling on her rear end by a neat application of Erik's abilities, setting her upright onto her feet before she hit the ground and kneeling to murmur something conspiratorially to her, watching as she ran off into the distance. It was a controlled display of power. No lurching, jerky, messy, noisy scraping and bouncing around. No cars crumpling under their own gravity, wheels dragging against gravel, fighting against him. No metal , either. Now he appeared to have distinct command of his environment, a clocked awareness of every reflective surface in the room a subtle magnetic pull in his neurons. Grounding, soothing. "Still smoke?" Erik with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, now there was a blast from the past. "I have liquor, pie and Newports. Don't say I can't bribe the best of them. Or the worst." Those eyebrows raised very pointedly down at Charles. He patted the top of the paper grocery bags.

That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here,

"I will make it and you will eat it," Erik pointed at him expectantly as he got to work. The cigarette by now had migrated its way under Erik's hat and behind his ear, safe and sound while he retrieved varying ingredients from the bag in preparation. "This is untenable," he muttered as he glanced about the kitchen, rummaging this way and that. Too much clutter, too distinctly lacking care, Charles found a shot glass set in front of him because, "don't drink out of the bottle like an animal," but whatever reply Charles gives he knows Erik isn't really listening. He's just making noise, making his presence felt, inundating himself into the cracks and walls. The shot glass settled itself in front of Charles expectantly. At least he wasn't griping about the drink, but apparently he'd gone full circle. Medic, fact-finder, social worker. And now, Charles-wrangler. Erik's career trajectory was shaping up nicely, he thought. Five years; it's long enough for him to have finally gotten a fucking post-secondary degree, a point of contention Charles very vividly remembers being mocked endlessly for in the ambulance as it skittered noisily over rocks. Look who grew up and got his Bachelor's all on his lonesome. (It's uhhh not that impressive comparatively, look who he's fucking talking to, but for Erik who Charles wasn't sure knew how to sit still long enough to learn anything that wasn't casualty evacuation triage, it was meritorious.) A knife snapped into his hand from the block and he sliced open the package, running the meat under the tap before cutting it into thin slices, splashing salt and pepper on it, a little rosemary, and pounding it thin for a stir fry. It's done all one-handed, with help only from the tug of Erik's mutation, fine-tuned. Nothing like the swirling, cacophonic maelstrom of Charles's mind. Splintered into millions of refracted-kaleidoscope prisms, thoughts-not-his-own. Ki'ani lo yetzat, the thoughts were so quiet as to be nearly indistinguishable from the sizzling of oil in the pan. Charles was too drunk to bother pulling out the interpretation. Something about not exiting . Why was he here? A pin-drop echo reverted upside-down right-side-up through the mirror, mud and crunching bones and aching metal. One foot in front of the other, two steps back to counter it. You always did make fun of his Avalanche phase (you never thought you'd meet Matthew Good's biggest fan in fucking Eilat , but life uh… finds a way) until one buried you. It's a memory from the ether, a forgotten spiel in the long litanies, the metronomes of Charles's current existential crisis. Once, Erik Lehnsherr had carried him across miles of desert in a very literal sense of the word. Now, it seemed, he had come back to do the same. Whether or not Charles approved.