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masterofmagnetism · 4 years ago

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my head is the room, and the room's filled with broken glass (oh, the pieces i can't put back)

“She’d never seen him make a mistake, never seen even for a second Erik Lehnsherr lose a scrap of the control he always seemed to keep a tight leash on.”

WHO: Erik Lehnsherr, Jean Grey @jeaniegreysummers, and Lorna Dane @mistressxfmagnetism References to Kara Danvers, Alex Danvers, Lena Luthor, Scott Summers, Maddie Pryor, & Charles Xavier WHEN: 14 days before [redacted] WHERE: Genosha WHAT: A father-daughter sparring session goes terribly wrong. One slip of the tongue brings a two-decade-long deception crashing down, leaving no one unscarred. In which Erik royally fucks up many many times, Lorna discovers the truth of what happened to her mother and stepfather, and Jean questions whether her trust has been well-placed. WORD COUNT: 13.1k WARNINGS: Strap in: violence, gaslighting, manipulation, brainwashing, plane crashes, murder, PTSD, death mentions, trauma, infidelity, abuse, and egregious acts of hypocrisy.

ERIK: Peace was a fragile thing.

Sure, they'd won their island; won independence, freedom, safety, a breath of fresh air (well, fresh-ish; one could only ask for so much when New York City sat just a fifteen minute ferry ride away). Genosha was growing nicely, people were settling in, and everything seemed to be going well.

Erik should be happy, but instead he found himself agitated and on edge. Complacency was dangerous. Faith in humanity's ability to leave them alone had always been hard to come by, and a few signed pieces of paper did little to ease his worries; the Native Americans had gotten their treaties, too, for all the good it did them. With humans, danger was always lurking somewhere on the horizon, and he refused to lower his guard.

Which is where the training came in. Mutants couldn't understand their powers better without using them, without pushing their limits and seeing how far they could go. Ric had gone from quaking buildings to dragging an island out of the sea. Jean had the Phoenix at her disposal, sure, but even outside of it she was classed as an Omega-level telekinetic. No upper limit. Here, where it was safe, she needed to push what she could already do. ( He needed to know how far she could be pushed. ) And Lorna... well, he'd seen her do far more than she was doing now at a much younger age. She could do more, be so much more.

A good father, a good leader, would help them find out just how far they could go.

The last set of projectiles successfully deflected, Erik retaliated against their joint attack with one of his own, reversing the magnetic fields around his daughters' feet to off-balance them as he sent a return volley of his own.

JEAN: The war was won. That’s what Jean kept repeating to herself, in the brief moments she had in peace and relative quiet. The war was won, and yet she hadn’t stopped for even a second, barely an instant, to look around at what they had accomplished. Her days and nights blended together as she attended to training and patients at Sara Memorial Hospital, Genosha growing up around her as she built their new healthcare system from the ground up. She was desperately out of her depth and she knew it, but the level of education most mutants could hope to attain was slim to none. The people who arrived in her department wanted to better themselves, and she would do everything she could to pass on her knowledge, soon finding that her abilities could be used in new and unique ways to aid her mission.

The Phoenix would protect her. She would protect her family, her country, her people. Jean knew that now, without a shadow of a doubt (maybe a small shadow). The Phoenix would protect her, but the minutia of creating this new life? That was down to Jean, and she had been neglecting her training up to this point. Luckily, she had one of the best teachers in the world on hand, and a fellow student just as eager to refine her abilities.

“Are we playing dirty, Erik?” Jean called out, an exhilarated smile on her face as she pushed out her hands, focusing on the atoms in the air around her and forcing them to steady so she could float above the ground. “I thought we were going for a warm up round, first.” Of course, if he was going to play hardball -- as she knew he would -- Jean wasn’t going to hold back. She looked over at Lorna, winking at her as she formed a telepathic link between them.

Think of it as comms, she thought at Lorna. How are we getting around this?

LORNA: Winning Genosha had felt like a dream, and for the first few weeks Lorna was waiting to wake up from it. Waiting for their victory to be snatched out from under them. The war was won, but how long had they been at war? She didn't know how to be at peace any more. She didn't trust that it would last. Even in times when she felt unbreakable and untouchable, she was angry. Angry at the thought that they would try. Because she was sure someone would.

Training with Jean and Erik was a good distraction from that. She had seen Erik do things she could imagine having the power to do, but she was sure that anything he could do, she could too. He'd simply had longer to train, she reasoned. She could become stronger, especially with the right teacher. And now, she finally had the time to learn.

"Erik doesn't know how to play fair," Lorna countered, pushing straight back against his magnetic fields. She'd found that they seemed to reflect each other in that way; the polarity of her powers mirrored his, but perfectly opposite. She couldn't completely undo it, but it held her steady for now.

Hearing Jean in her mind, she glanced over with a grin of her own. Distract him. Break his concentration and I can try reversing it on him. Try being the operative word. This was unfamiliar to her, but hell if she wouldn't mimic what she felt. Unless you've got a better plan?

ERIK: He grinned across the field at the two of them as they stabilized themselves. "No such thing as playing dirty, Jeannie. You play to win or you play to lose." Erik tilted his head, felt his powers branch out and sink into the ground beneath them.

"Besides, you two don't need a warm-up round. Not my girls." Even now, he could see by their shared glances, the two of them were scheming. No doubt courtesy of Jean's telepathy. He'd expected that, though.

Lorna's magnetism pressed at his own, a tug that required actual work not to cede to.

An idea took shape, and Erik smirked before wrapping his powers around a piece of scrap metal in Lorna's side of the bubble, creeping up from the ground. He could resist her pull. It couldn't, not without direction, and he gave it none, letting it sail toward his daughter and pick up speed.

JEAN: Scott kept looking at her, lately. She couldn’t track his gaze from behind the shades, but she’d never had to in order to feel his eyes on her. He kept looking at her, reaching out over the kitchen table as they sat reading or eating dinner, leaning against her side when they walked. He wanted her to talk about it, she knew. He wanted her to let it go, wanted her to stop crawling back into that space where she bottled everything up, shoved it into cardboard boxes barely contained in the back of her mind and pretended desperately that they were never there in the first place.

(It was always Charles who told her to control it. Erik was the one extending a hand, that sharp smile on his face, suggesting that she was a little too tense for her own good, that letting off just a little steam would help. It was always Erik that had faith she wouldn’t crack the world in half when that happened.)

The problem with letting go, though, was she needed something to let go of. Jean’s family -- her biological family, at least -- were gone, dead, buried. All of them were dust with the exception of Maddie, and Jean felt nothing. Unless Scott, Erik or Maddie told their friends, Jean wasn’t going to be the one to divulge her latest failing (and tragedy). She had other things to focus on.

There was always another battle to focus on.

They’d fought so hard for this that Jean was content to focus all she had on the here and now, in this moment of relative peace. (A small part of her mind wondered how Erik could slip off Lorna’s tongue so easily when even as a child herself, it had been preceded by hesitation, always ... Erik, always on the brink of something else.) “There are different ways to win, though,” she called back, sending a telepathic confirmation to Lorna regarding her advice. “Alex Danvers seems a little irritated at you for throwing her friend down an elevator shaft.”

It was teasing, of course. Hurting people was never something Jean revelled in, at least not when she was in her right mind, but … well, she had to admit there was something appealing in it. “But if we are playing to win, you have to know my dirty is a little different to yours.” Only a little, and there was far less distance between them than Jean had once thought, but where Erik used a little more physical means of intimidation, Jean was all mental. “I might not be able to use telepathy, but there are other ways to get into your head. Everyone’s got secrets, right?”

LORNA: The last year had been a turbulent one for Lorna in more ways than she could count. But a prominent one stood before her. Erik. Magneto. Her father. Lorna had known for a long time that her dad wasn't her dad. That Magneto was her father. But for a long time she'd rejected it, rejected him, in the way she'd felt rejected by him. Abandoned even. Those letters, coming just once a year, was not enough to make him her dad. But these past months... Lorna had nearly slipped up more than once, even if Erik rolled off the tongue easier than anything else still. But after everything that had happened... He was finally feeling like her dad.

And they were more alike than Lorna had ever realised. Lorna had been told most of her life how much she looked like her mother. How she took after her. But she had seen this year that those things that no one could place came from her father. Her anger, her stubborn sense of justice. Her instabilities. She saw them mirrored in him more than she'd like to admit. But it gave her insight into him beyond what one ought to have in just a year.

"Definitely," she added to Jean. Although she was insanely curious about what Jean was saying, Lorna knew that she had no time to listen. Jean was giving her an opportunity, she had to use it. She wanted to know about these secrets, but she didn't have a chance right now. Not if she wanted to win this fight. She pushed hard, reversing the pull of their magnetic fields until he was thrown off. Feeling the scrap metal sailing into her own field, Lorna glanced over her shoulder and using the momentum it had already gained, flung it towards Erik, hard and fast.

ERIK: There were pieces of him in all of his children. Not just genetically, not in the literal sense--Jean and Scott were his as surely as any of them, blood ties or not. Each bore some glimmer of his best and worst qualities.

Lorna had his powers, of course. She had his drive to protect what was theirs, to pull no punches against enemies that would see them hurt or killed, his ruthlessness. There were other things, too, things he'd caught glimpses of here and there over the last few months; hints of the waves of manic focus and the subsequent crashes. They didn't talk about it, just like they didn't talk about Erik's drinking or Lorna's risk-taking or the million other unhealthy coping mechanisms they'd both collected.

Scott had his strategic mind, the sort that could fine-tune plans until they were elegant pieces of art rather than a simple series of hopeful steps. He had that charisma that drew people to follow him, into peace and war alike. He had the same distrust of authority figures, even the ones he cared for, after years of being abused at their hands, that creeping paranoia that colored Erik's thoughts more often than he cared to admit.

Jean had his fire--and he had Jean's, now, in the most literal of senses. Jean, who had known him longer than any of the others. Whose care for those she loved was enough to drag them back from the grave, who welcomed Erik back with open arms even after he'd left in a way that the others had taken longer to do. She'd been in his head, after all, one of only two people he trusted enough to let his guard down with; at least until the Phoenix. (It didn't make sense, he knew, because it was hers more than his, but it shushed that there was no need to worry her, no need for her to know all his secrets, and so the guards stayed up more often than not, these days.)

It was easy to get into their heads, because they were so much like his own. But he'd overlooked the all-too-simple detail that that connection went both ways.

Jean was right--she didn't need the telepathy to get in his head. She mentioned Alex Danvers, mentioned secrets, and had he been prepared for that sort of conversation, he might have been able to keep the expression of shock-guilt-annoyance off his face. But he wasn't, so he didn't, knocked off-balance by the non-sequitur.

How much did she know? That was the important question, and even though he got his face back in order quickly, his mind was slow to follow, branching out into questions and hypotheticals and what-ifs.

"I don't know what you--" he started, only to be cut off by a sudden push from Lorna, followed shortly thereafter by the piece of scrap he'd tossed in her direction. He cursed, and managed to bring up a small shield. It wasn't enough to stop the impact, sending him flying off his feet.

Erik grunted as he hit the ground, mind moved on from the topic of Jean and Kara to the fight. Adrenaline sang in his veins, and Erik rolled to flash both of them a grin before reaching out with his powers as he'd experimented with a few times while the Sentinels were a threat, curving the light ( electromagnetism was his ) that should bounce from him to their eyes up and away.

A disappearing act.

"Time to think bigger."

JEAN: There was so much of the world that Charles and Erik respectively had prepared her for. Charles taught her empathy, compassion, built on an innate, natural desire to help people that Jean had been fostering since she was a child, that was threatened when Annie bled out on that pavement and when she spent her teenage years facing off against hatred and discrimination. Erik taught her something sharper, bringing out that other side, the side that was desperately angry at what her family was facing. Jean saw the way people glared at Hank on the street. She heard the thoughts that went through her parents’ minds when they looked at Scott. She knew what every single person thought about mutants within the city’s boundaries, and it was enough to drive her insane -- if she hadn’t had Erik.

It was Erik who taught her how to breathe, how to recentre herself, how to trust in her own instincts. Mutant abilities, he said, were their birthright, their culture, the only legacy they were allowed to keep. They were protective mechanisms and the way for them to propel their people into the future. Being mutant meant being powerful, and for so long Jean had been terrified of that power. Erik never was. He never faltered. He never thought to hide her away, never told her to dampen those flames.

In many ways, as ironic as it was to admit, the skills and qualities Erik had taught her were more likely to attract the Phoenix in the first place rather than anything else. He was a part of her, even if there were years when they both pretended they were nothing other than mutants on opposite sides of a civil rights movement, employing completely contradictory tactics to get what they deserved.

Now, Lorna got that opportunity to learn. She got the opportunity to teach. Jean knew Lorna long before the truth was revealed about her parenthood. The young girl was already leading mutants underground, navigating borders and laws, putting herself at risk to defend those most vulnerable. It wasn’t Erik who made her that way -- it was all Lorna. Spending time with two of the people she loved most was as close to paradise as she could get.

(Death, she told herself, was inevitable. It would happen to all. Her parents, her siblings, her nieces and nephews -- they would just come back. Sara hadn’t, not yet, but it was all a matter of time. The Phoenix wouldn’t let her suffer.)

Erik faded from view, and Jean closed her eyes immediately, focusing on a lesson he had taught her once more. The atoms in the structures around her -- the ground he was standing on, the air that moved around him, the breath leaving his lungs -- moved and interacted, painting a telekinetic picture of exactly where he was standing. Two metres to the left, three in front, she sent to Lorna, but he’s moving quickly.

Her focus maintained until a niggle in the back of her head made it waver ever so slightly. The look on his face when she mentioned secrets … it was likely to be a trick of the light (surely that would be his justification) but Jean and psychology always ran closely together.

“Are we hiding today, Erik?” she called out. “I thought we were all about transparency these days.” (Half teasing, half serious -- the perfect balance, Jean thought, even as she could feel in her chest something would come of it she wasn’t anticipating. She was telepathic, not psychic.)

LORNA: Lorna envied Jean in some respects. While Lorna had been left with almost nothing from Erik, no guidance or support to speak of, Jean had been half raised by him. Jean had had what Lorna had yearned for from her father, even when her longing turned to resentment. And it was evident now with how easily Jean could affect the usually stoic Magneto, with just a few words, knowing just how to distract him so that Lorna's attack would land. Lorna just hoped that Jean didn't feel that flash of jealousy in her. It wasn't Jean's fault after all. And now wasn't the time, she had to focus.

Especially as Erik disappeared. Lorna's eyes widened in surprise. I didn't know that was possible. Her thoughts immediately jumped to the possibilities; anything Erik did, surely she could do to some extent. Lorna took Jean's advice on Erik's location and reached out mentally, letting the world around her fade into one of magnetic fields. Looking for Erik's patterns, for the disturbances. She couldn't focus on what Jean was saying, letting the conversation happen around her for now. Instead, she picked up the scrap metal around them again and flung it at Erik.

ERIK: Appearances were often deceiving. It was a cliche for a reason--90 years of life had proven it true time and time again. People pretended to be things they weren't, situations were rarely so clean-cut as they appeared, and your senses could be made to betray you a million different ways. Most people focused on what they saw in front of them, plain as day, and let that control their actions. But there was so much more to focus on, especially in a fight. Neither Jean nor Lorna let his disappearing act throw them off-guard; Jean closed her eyes to focus on her telekinesis instead, near-instantly, and after a moment of visible surprise, Lorna was stretching her hands out and feeling at the world that thrummed around the two of them constantly, that web of magnetic fields and electricity that Erik hadn't properly seen until the Phoenix.

He was moving fast, trying to stay ahead of their senses as best he could, and so he didn't have a qualm about speaking when they were focused on so much more than the source of his voice. "I am transparent, Jean, or are you not paying attention?" he tossed back cheekily.

Another toss of scrap metal in his direction, and this time he was ready for it. His focus on keeping himself hidden dropped, energy instead directed toward freezing the projectiles in their path like he had on a beach in Cuba a lifetime ago. It had been harder, then, but this came as easily as breathing.

"Well done, Lorna," he praised, because controlling as many different things as she had been with any degree of accuracy was difficult and she'd done so beautifully. He waved a hand, and the scrap began to liquify into bands of silvery metal around him, falling into orbit around him at its center. "You're still thinking small, though. Scrap is easy for your opponent to see, easy to predict. We're surrounded by bigger metal, in buildings and the ground and the sky that you can use without anyone seeing it coming."

He'll regret his next words for the rest of his life. He'll regret them the heartbeat after they leave his lips, in fact, but they come out anyway. He'd try to blame it on the Phoenix, later, blame it for a looser tongue, for focusing him too much on the fight and not enough on the conversation.

But it was all him. Getting lost in the fight was easy, and he didn't realize how little focus was on his words rather than the metal swirling around him until the damage was already done.

"We're surrounded by buildings, and drowned ships in the bottom of the harbor, and drones and satellites and a hundred other things above our heads, anymore. In a fight, use them. What's buried, what's hidden, what's aloft. I've dragged a submarine out of the sea, you've pulled a plane out of the sky, I know you're capable of more than flinging scrap metal."

He realized a second later what he'd said, but it was far too late by then to suck the words back inside.

JEAN: This was what it was all for, Jean thought to herself as she looked over at Lorna, her sister, watching the exhilarated smile on her face and seeing how she moved and adjusted to the fight. It was so easy for them to think themselves invincible, at least when they first developed their powers. Jean was the only child in school who could rip the gym from its foundations, who could hear exactly what her crush thought about her, who could manipulate teachers’ opinions with the click of her fingers if she wanted. When she was among the others in the Institute, she realised how much technique came with being in the big leagues -- and Lorna was by far a major player. This was the purpose of Genosha: a place for them to grow and develop in their gene given abilities, somewhere they could learn and teach and feel the world around them in ways only mutants could.

“I pay attention to everything, Erik,” Jean called back. “It’s just what I comment on that you know of.” The lessons that he was giving Lorna now were the same ones as he had only started when Jean was so much younger. While others prophesied control, boxing her emotions, Erik always encouraged her to let go (perhaps if she listened to him more, she would be a different woman now. Maybe if he had stayed, she wouldn’t feel this way). “Feel the environment, Lorna,” she said. “You’re a part of it, it responds to you.” If there was anyone who could think outside the box it was Lorna, who was quick witted and sharp in a way few other people were.

Of course, it didn’t take a quick wit to catch onto the implications of what Erik said. Even Jean, who had no knowledge of what he was referring to (a fight they’d faced together, perhaps, without her -- an idea that pulled unnaturally towards jealousy, even as a grown woman) could read it all over Erik’s face. It was unintentional, a slip of the tongue.

She’d seen Erik on the opposite side of a battlefield, watched him as he lost soldiers and families alike. She felt his grief, his guilt, his pain -- heard him talk about it, counselled him through it, bonded with him because of it.

She’d never seen him trip up like this. She’d never seen him make a mistake, never seen even for a second Erik Lehnsherr lose a scrap of the control he always seemed to keep a tight leash on.

“Erik,” she said, her focus disappearing entirely, the world settling down around her, the fight cold and forgotten. “What are you talking about?”

LORNA: She needed to think bigger. To pull from everything around her. The world was made of metal, she could control it all. Part of Lorna wanted to snap at Erik that maybe she'd be better, more advanced, if she'd had a teacher. If she hadn't spent her entire childhood hiding her powers and her adolescence being self-taught. But she bit her tongue, nodding instead. Taking Jean's advice, her mind began to try and rework how it viewed the room, try to see another angle. Until Erik caused the fight to come crashing to a halt.

Lorna half stuttered to a stop, all focus on Erik's use of their shared powerset, and how she might use that, gone. Instead, his words echoed in her brain, louder and louder until it felt overwhelming. ...you've pulled a plane out of the sky...you've pulled a plane out of the sky...you've pulled a plane out of the sky... She went deathly still, eyes locked on her father, her hands glowing without her even meaning to. To say Lorna hadn't been on many planes was... both true and untrue. Her dad--her mother's husband--had been a pilot, and up until the age of three, Lorna commonly travelled by plane with her parents. After the engine malfunction sent his plane crashing to the ground, leaving her the only survivor thanks to her powers manifesting, Lorna had hardly stepped foot on a plane. She'd only been in one crash. Only seen one plane crash. No. No way. The engines had malfunctioned. Lorna's powers just protected her.

"What are you talking about?" There was no room for taking it back, no acceptance of excuses in her voice. Erik wasn't making a grand statement of what she could do, he said she had done it. "Erik." It occurred to her briefly that he might be making it up, but for one thing she didn't believe he was that callous or cruel. For another, his own shock spoke otherwise. (And lastly, though she wanted to ignore it, something niggled inside her. Deep within her mind, she knew he was telling the truth.)

Lorna turned on Jean. "Do you know what he's talking about?" she demanded, half accusing and half begging for answers. But Jean seemed as lost as she was.

ERIK: The moment seemed to stretch on forever, the three of them standing frozen in silence. His daughters staring at him in shock--and anger, judging by the slow green glow appearing at Lorna's fingertips. There would be no convincing either of them that he'd misspoken. No way to take the words back, to pretend like he'd said or meant anything other than precisely what he had. Maybe one of them, one-on-one, he would be able to sway. But not both.

Damn it all.

The moment stretched taut, and then they were demanding answers almost in unison, and Lorna was turning on Jean, and Erik sidestepped and cleared his throat, watching the two of them carefully. Erik was rarely on the defensive. Even more rarely with his own children.

"Jean doesn't know, Lorna," he said, snapping their attention back to him. "It was a long time ago. She was a child, still.” Erik looked between Lorna and Jean, took a half-step forward and then lingered there, unwilling or unable to coax himself closer. "You know what I'm talking about, Lorna," he said quietly. "You don't remember it. You were too young." He took another half-step closer. "It wasn't your fault. I need you to know that."

JEAN: There were parts of Jean that Erik would always understand more than almost anyone else. There were parts of Erik that Jean didn’t need telepathy to understand on a fundamental level, to empathise with and connect them together. Some of those parts were good -- their determination, their curiosity, their desperate pursuit of knowledge, their dedication to family and mutantkind. Other parts …

Well, other parts were this. Other parts involved Jean, mere minutes after seeing her parents’ blood soaking into the carpet, looking down at a traumatised teenager and deciding that the best course of action was to make her forget. Derry was dangerous. She was angry, she was desperate, she missed her father and her aunts and uncles and everyone she’d ever known. She was, arguably, better off not knowing what happened that day, better off passing all the trauma onto Jean and living her life as best she could with a family who always wanted kids, a family who Jean knew would treat her well --

But that didn’t mean what Jean did was the right thing. It was easiest, perhaps. It was the most simple solution. It was the best one for Jean, instead of being looked at as a murderer by one of the last blood relatives (no, not blood) she had left. That’s what it came down to, in the end. The decision she made along with Maddie, the decision she made to the sound of Scott’s silence, was to clean up one of her own mistakes, to make it easier to live with.

Is that what Erik did here? Was that the legacy she was doomed to repeat, and Lorna as well?

Erik corrected Lorna quickly, and Jean blinked. He protected her, she knew that. He protected all of them. His daughters were his life, and she’d long been considered in that group. Protecting your family meant doing what was right for them, didn’t it?

(Jean loved Scott more than life, and she dragged him from the grave after he died fighting for a cause he believed in. She adored Maddie, and she never put voice to the fact that she doubted her sister was even real, that she still believed even now she was someone else entirely, someone she lost long ago. Jean loved people. She protected them. But what she did to them … it wasn’t right.)

It wasn’t your fault. It was the same thing he said to her when she approached him about her family, when she told him of the massacre that had occurred. It was the same thing she would say to Rachel, if the roles were reversed -- taking the responsibility onto her own shoulders, even if it was a lie. It wasn’t a lie, Erik said, and this time, when it came to Lorna, Jean believed it without a doubt.

She was only a child. A plane from the sky. (Jean thought of the nightmares that haunted her husband, then, of a parachute strapped to his back and propellers in flames and his brother screaming, clutched to his chest as they tumbled through a field, their parents long gone above them.)

“I think we need more information, Erik,” Jean said quietly, finally, the inside of her cheek tasting of blood on her tongue. “Just … tell us what you mean. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, right?”

LORNA: Jean didn't know. Even before Erik said anything, Lorna could see that. She trusted Jean implicitly. More than she trusted Erik some days (although she'd never really know if it was just that part of her that had felt rejected talking or an actual gut feeling that led her to question him). But Jean didn't know, and Erik wanted to protect her from Lorna's potential misguided anger. Lorna wasn't angry yet. She was confused, wary, but not yet angry. Erik's hesitant walking towards them and beginnings of an explanation, however, were making her think that was about to change very quickly.

You know what I'm talking about. Lorna's mouth twisted slightly as she summoned the words. She so rarely spoke about it. "The crash that killed my parents. The engines malfunctioned. My powers protected me." Erik had found her before emergency crews, brought her to her aunt and uncle. Too traumatic for memories was what the doctors had told her, what they'd told her aunt and uncle when she hadn't remembered any of it. It was her mind protecting itself. She'd been so confused. But Erik didn't say that... "No. I didn't remember it even as a kid." She did remember the aftermath though, even now. The grief, the loneliness she felt. The funeral. But not the crash.

She had to know. Because if it wasn't an engine malfunction... If it had been her... Why? Most mutants powers didn't trigger until they were teenagers, unless they were needed. Lorna had assumed it was her powers saving her that triggered them early. But she couldn't have brought down the plane if that were true.

She had to know. Her eyes turned to her sister.

"Jean. Show me. Even if I don't remember, the memories are there somewhere, right? Can you show me? I need to know what happened." She looked back at Erik. "Maybe it will help me understand what I can do," she added, daring him to argue.

ERIK: It wasn't anyone's fault, right? Erik huffed, shaking his head and scrubbing a hand through his hair. "Oh, no, it was someone's fault. But certainly not Lorna's."

Erik nodded slowly as Lorna mentioned the crash, though what she was saying wasn't the truth. It's what she'd been told, what she'd been led to believe. She would know that was a lie, soon enough, but Erik could still do damage control. Keep her from getting the full story, because some things were better left buried.

Lorna asked Jean to pull out her memories, and Erik's response was near-immediate. "No. Teasing them out by force could be retraumatizing," he said, crossing to stand next to them. "I can tell you what happened. Show you my memories of that day. If it brings the memories forward on its own, that's one thing, but Jean should not have to go digging up things that were buried."

He turned to Jean, and let his mental walls come down a bit. He knew she'd feel the anxiety, the frustration, and hoped that she didn't care to follow it to its source as to why he didn't want her in Lorna's head. "Let me show her."

JEAN: It was far from the first -- or the last, undoubtedly -- time Jean had been caught in the middle of a family dispute. The X-Men were closer than anything Jean had experienced before, but they were still volatile kids who had no idea how to be a part of something, and that came with challenges. She spent the majority of her teenage years smoothing over disagreements between the boys, and it seemed as if that legacy was continuing now -- only this time, it wasn’t petty disputes over what girl they were dating or how long they took in the shower. This time, it was something ground shaking, something that made a pit drop in her stomach and had her mind fading into silence for the first time in as long as she could remember.

(It hadn’t been that long. Her mind had been silent since she found her parents bleeding out in the carpet. Try as she might to distract, she hadn’t found something yet. Maybe this was the universe answering her prayers in the most masochistic way it could. It seemed fitting, given her history.)

“Memories are never completely gone,” she agreed, but then Erik was speaking and he had a point too (he always had a point. He always had a fucking point. That was how he got out from under everything, wasn’t it? Their last conversation about Kara, that day on the Raft, the hundreds of missing days they hadn’t discussed since they happened). She turned to look at Erik, meeting his eyes for a long moment before letting out a sigh. “Fine,” she said. “But if either of you start to splinter in any way, I’m done, and I don’t care how angry you are at me. These memories are only being shown if they come naturally. I’m not messing with heads.” After all, Jean was more inclined to break than heal, these days.

She looked over at Lorna, gaining her consent silently once more, and then touched a hand to Erik and Lorna’s forehead, closing her eyes, focusing on allowing the memories to filter through from father to daughter, using her as the bridge.

ERIK: Erik will be happy if he never has to set foot in fucking Tennessee ever again. The music grates on his nerves more often than not, the accents grate worse, and while he doesn't have anything against a good mountain, he does have something against the idiots who built roads two steps from a 700-foot drop.

He's on one such road, in the middle of nowhere with the radio of his car crackling in and out despite his best maneuvering of the antenna, when he feels it. He's not sure what it is, but it may as well be a flare to his senses in a sea of nothing but trees and the muted thrum of iron and copper in the mountains beneath his tires. A sharp flash of energy that actually steals his attention away from the road for a moment, because it feels almost like a blast from himself. What the hell--? Not very much sleuthing is necessary, though, because in the next few moments, a plane that had been frittering at the edges of his sense in the clouds above comes quite literally crashing down into the forest perhaps two kilometers away.

A rescue team will take hours to get out here, at least. He can fly (or close enough), and he's not one to leave well enough alone, and a little niggling at his conscience sounds feels suspiciously like Charles’ expectant stare, so he lifts his car clean off the road and carries it across the sea of trees until he can navigate it down to settle in a small clearing a few hundred meters from the crash. He's out of the car and making his way toward the plane in moments, shirt pulled up over his nose against the smoke. He stumbles across the first body with the bulk of the scattered wreckage, a face that strikes him as familiar making him pause and stop to wipe the blood from her face. "Suzanna?" He reaches for a pulse, and nothing meets his fingers, so he moves on to where he sees the bottom of the plane and the seating on its side.

Then he hears the crying, and sees a young girl with hair greener than the trees around them sitting unharmed in the wreckage. He's drawn to her, almost like a--oh. She was the flash.

LORNA: Lorna didn't really want to accept Jean's terms, but there was no arguing. She nodded to Jean, closed her eyes, and let Jean connect her mind to Erik's memories.

Lorna watched Erik's memory, somehow both separate from him and in his mind and feeling what he felt. Was this what telepaths felt constantly? Maybe not so intensely for one person as this though. But still, she felt the irritation from Erik as he drove, then the shock to his senses that Lorna recognised. She'd felt that before, but in reverse; when Erik used his powers, especially if he was close. Then the plane fell, and Lorna's heart clenched in her chest. It was familiar but she still couldn't remember it. As if there was something preventing her from accessing that, like it was shouting from behind glass.

Lorna tensed as they got closer, and the unstable feeling she couldn't shake intensified. Part of her didn't want to see this. She'd hated planes for years, but she'd never had nightmares of this night. The doctors her aunt made her see had said it was her brain repressing the memory (just like Erik said). She had insisted on knowing, had to know if what Erik said was true about the plane. Had to know why she'd made it crash. But this wasn't those answers. This was just the destruction she'd caused.

Even in memory, the smoke irritates her lungs and her eyes. She followed Erik's memory, right beside him until they both saw her. No. No no no. Lorna didn't want to see this. This wasn't what she was looking for. Her mother, injured and bloody. More than injured. Dead. Lorna felt it like a stab through the heart, and she's sure it's strong enough for Jean and Erik to feel through their shared connection too. Lorna knew she'd lost her mother that night, but looking at this wreckage and knowing what Erik felt... she knew she'd done this. She'd killed her mom. And her dad. Where was he?

Before Lorna could look for him, she heard the crying. Her crying. Unharmed, she looked dazed and frightened. Confused. And she can feel it in Erik's memories, as well as in all the metal around her--calling out like only metal she'd manipulated did-- that she'd done this.

"That's enough," she snapped, easier to indulge her anger than any of the other feelings. Some of which she didn't know if she could name. They were feelings she'd had in her mind for years, but brought to the front. "This doesn't show me how I did anything or why. I want to see my memory."

ERIK: Just like that, they were snapped out of the memories, Erik's focus landing squarely back in the present just in time to hear Lorna's frustrated demands.

His own remembered grief from finding Suzanna melded with Lorna's response to seeing her mother dead; her anger was nudging at his own, her concern.

Her questions.

Erik shook his head immediately. "No. Lorna, those memories got buried for a reason. Your powers manifested early, you brought the plane down on accident, I found you. There's no need to go combing back through buried memories for something that will only make you more upset. It's for your own good, Lorna."

He looked to Jean, and there was something like fear edging into his mind, and he knew she could probably feel it if she was paying attention. "You said you wouldn't force out any memories. If that didn't bring them out for her, you'd have to dig them out yourself. Tell her you won't."

LORNA: They might have been buried, but they were closer than they'd ever been. Lorna knew she knew those woods, knew that that smell was familiar, even if she couldn't place it with a memory. And it would never leave her alone if she gave up now. Even as it was, she was upset and on edge (she killed them. She downed the plane and killed them) but not knowing wasn't going to help.

"I wasn't asking your permission," she snapped at Erik. He'd been there, he'd known this entire time what she did. Had he taken her straight from there to her aunt and uncle? Left her like she was a stranger he didn't care about? He'd known she had powers, that they were out of her control and he left her. Was she even angry right now? If she was, it felt hollow and that scared her too. What she felt more than anything was cracked. Twisted. And muted, like something was trying to get out but it was stuck.

She turned to Jean. "Please. I need to know." The tremor in her voice was slight, but there, as was the one in her hands. She didn't want to say what she said next, but she had to convince Jean somehow. "I'll find someone else to do it if you won't."

JEAN: History repeated itself. Jean knew that all too well. Every battle she faced, every loss she suffered, it didn’t come by itself. No experience was ever truly unique, and she used that to relate to the people around her, used it to come closer to them even when she was underground for years before, used it to remind them that she was human too (even if she wasn’t so certain of that fact, these days). History repeated itself, and she almost knew what would happen long before she acted as the conduit for this memory, for emotions that were as turbulent as they were intense.

They were the same, Lorna and Erik. They felt things more strongly than most, felt them in a way Jean could scarcely put into words, and she adored them for it. Her family were dead, and a part of her died with them, but standing here between Erik and Lorna, two people she loved desperately, she could almost forget all of that. She could almost convince herself she was still breathing, that her lungs weren’t made of lead.

They were the same as each other, and they were the same as someone else, too. The memory uncurled, the recognition settling deep in her gut. They were the same as Jean and Charles.

(This is for the best, Jean. The last thing you want is to hurt someone. Trust me. Let me in.)

That’s how she knew what it looked like. That’s how she knew.

For years, she’d focused on telekinesis. She’d locked the part of her mind off that could traverse through neurones, could pull apart memories and traumas, the part that could hurt and heal in equal measure. She used the power that could wound physically, but not in a way that would last (sometimes death was better than the alternative). For years, Jean pretended she wasn’t an Omega level telepath, denied her training, and Charles … well, he’d never fought back against it. He’d focused his efforts instead on Betsy, or Emma, because playing with an atom bomb never ended well.

Maybe she would’ve missed the signature if she didn’t know how it felt to have that block in her mind, that empty spot -- maybe she would’ve missed it if she didn’t love a man whose consciousness was a patchwork quilt. Maybe she would’ve missed it if she didn’t know it all along.

No. No, she didn’t know it all along. She would’ve told Lorna if she did. She would’ve--

Would you? a voice asked. Did you talk to Kara Zor-El, Jean Grey? Did you ask her?

Jean swallowed thickly, lowering her hands from Erik and Lorna’s temples. Erik was looking at her, she could feel his gaze on her side of her face, but she was focused on Lorna.

Dangerous. Volatile. Better off not knowing. They’d both been told the same things -- and Jean found hot tears pricking at the corners of her eyes that she managed to blink away just in time.

“She’ll find someone else,” Jean said, turning only half to Erik. Someone like Sinister -- someone like Emma. “It’s deep,” she explained to Lorna. “Trauma must--”

She reached for her again, focusing her abilities, and that’s when her gut feeling was confirmed. That’s when she knew.

The block was intentional. The block was familiar, calculated -- exactly the same as what she had performed on Derry, Maddie’s hand clutched in hers, sweat pooling in their palms.

Jean stepped back, gaze shooting between father and daughter. “Someone altered the memory,” she said.

You could fix that.

No. No she couldn’t.

You’re powerful enough. Why do you hold yourself back?

She was a battering ram in a china shop. She would rip Lorna’s mind apart.

Is that the reason?

“I can’t get it,” Jean said. “I won’t risk you by trying any more.”

ERIK: Lorna was insistent, but right now, it wasn't her that he needed to convince. It was Jean.

Jean, who was avoiding looking at him straight on. Whose jaw was working, whose eyes were glimmering with unshed tears that she blinked away before they could fall, whose sentences came hesitant and incomplete.

Jean knew about the block, and he knew that she knew even before she finally said that the memory had been altered.

And she still couldn't look him in the eye.

But she said no. Erik tasted bitter relief on his tongue, and turned to look at Lorna. "Let it go, Lorna, please. Everything there is in the past. Leave it there."

LORNA: Lorna implored Jean with her eyes as she seemed to consider it, needing to know why these memories were so buried. Why she felt like they were clamouring to get out but slipping backwards? What had her mind pushed away? Was she so broken? Perhaps she didn't need to stand at the gates of hell to be twisted. She'd been called unstable before--even had it used to defend her once--and she hated it. She didn't like feeling like the ground underneath her was unsteady, like she was falling with no way to slow herself.

Jean seemed to understand, finally. And Lorna wasn't making an idle threat; she'd find someone. Someone would help her. She'd just much rather it was Jean. She trusted Jean, implicitly and unwaveringly, with her life and with her mind. With her memories and everything that she'd kept private or hidden from the world. Jean would leave that alone, just dive to this moment. Find out what was banging inside her to be released.

Someone altered the memory.

No. Lorna frowned. No way. There was no one who could have done that. She'd never remembered this moment. Ever. Her aunt and uncle had always said so, her medical records from the aftermath had always said so. She had no memory of it, no nightmares, no nothing. She asked for her mommy and daddy because she didn't understand where they'd gone, so genuinely and consistently that they'd surmised that she wasn't faking either. No one could have had a chance to tamper with her memories between when the crash had happened and when Erik had found her and left her with her remaining family.

No one.

Except.

Unless.

No.

Lorna's eyes narrowed.

He wouldn't. Not the man who had famously worn a metal helmet that kept out telepaths, who Lorna knew did not permit them in his head without his knowledge and consent. He wouldn't mess with her head as a child like this. Would he?

Lorna stared at the face of her father, inspecting his reaction to Jean's statement. She watched the relief when Jean refused to dig past this block.

There was the anger she'd expected to feel before. Igniting in her chest, twisting in her heart like the dagger she'd felt seeing her mother dead (killed).

"Jean. You can." She ripped her eyes away from Erik, letting the anger stay on him. "Please. I trust you. Whatever happens is on me. But I need to know." She looked to Erik. "Someone altered my memories. Shouldn't I know why?"

ERIK: Lorna always was expressive. Erik watched her face twist from pleading and doubtful, to confused, and then her gaze landed on him and something hardened between her eyebrows and in the set of her jaw and he knew she was putting pieces together.

And she was getting angry.

Nowhere near as angry as she would be if she saw the memories, though, and he was still certain that he'd done the right thing in burying them--not just for himself, but for her. Seeing her mother's body had triggered a strong enough response. Seeing the whole event? Out of the question.

But Jean was considering it, under Lorna's pleading gaze, and Erik's expression hardened. "Jean," he said, and his voice and expression went from desperate, pleading father to the sort of hyper-calm that settled right before a fight. "Do not drag those memories out. I'm not asking, I'm telling you. Do not. I forbid it."

That didn't sound like father Erik, but general Erik. King Erik.

JEAN: Whatever happens is on me. Her sister said that, a lifetime ago — long before Jean was a married woman, long before she was even part of the X-Men, back when her mutation had only just come to the surface and their parents worried themselves into a black hole trying to prevent their daughter from ripping the city apart. Jean had one of her migraines, and the house was shaking. Tears were streaming down her face, her parents were praying in the basement, her brothers were screaming, and Sara just walked into Jean’s bedroom, sat down beside her, and said, whatever happens, that’s on me. I’m choosing to be here.

Sara died for that choice. Jean didn’t kill her, at least not directly, but it was her fault that she was dead. People claimed to want to take the risk, but that was only until the adverse effects came around, only when things turned tragic, and with Jean ... well, tragedy was something of a given.

“You say that now,” Jean said, keeping hold of Lorna’s hands, “but if something goes wrong here, now, you won’t be around anymore. It’s not a physical harm I cause, Lorna, it’s so much worse than that. You’d never come back. You might want to take that risk now, but you’ll thank me for stopping you later.”

(She sounded like Charles. She sounded like Charles and for the first time, for a reason she couldn’t exactly pinpoint, the concept of that familiarity made her sick to her stomach.)

Erik said her name, and it stopped Jean from saying anymore. It stopped her dead in her tracks, because the icy level headedness he was demonstrating now … well, she had seen it before. The U.N. Those memories from Cuba. Every time she faced him as a teenager, and he pushed her to be the best she could be.

Or the worst.

Jean’s hair began to stand on end. She felt a flicker in her mind, knew instinctively her eyes must have flashed with fire. He thinks he can forbid us, came a curling whisper.

“No one tells me to stop anymore, Erik,” she said, calmly, even as her arms cracked with glowing amber. “Especially not you.”

And with the force of the Phoenix behind her, Jean reached for Lorna and cracked the memory apart.

LORNA: Lorna was about to open her mouth to argue, to insist against what Jean had said. But before she could, Erik stepped in. In a voice she had rarely heard from him, but one she knew instinctively. And one she immediately hated in this context. In a fight, a war, that voice was important. Someone needed to take charge. But here? The war was meant to be over, and her memories should not be a battlefield. And it seemed Jean reacted just as negatively to his command. Lorna barely had a chance to close her eyes as Jean reached for her and broke the seal on the memory.

Lorna was sleeping, curled up across two seats in main cabin of the small passenger plane. They were flying home after one of her daddy's jobs, and Lorna was more than used to falling asleep anywhere like this. But tonight, she was woken up by shouting. Fierce arguing, coming from the front of the plane.

Lorna hated the shouting. Just as she woke up, she felt the plane dip and her mom screaming something about killing them before it righted again. "Stop!" she cried. "STOP!" She started sobbing, hating when they fought. They fought all the time, and her mommy was always so quiet after. Her daddy got so angry.

In the cockpit, Arnold Dane had decided that right now was the time to confront his wife about what he had learnt; she had cheated on him. Here, where she couldn't run away from the conversation. It had quickly turned to a screaming match that had now woken the brat he now knew wasn't actually his daughter.

"Now you've woken Lorna!"

"Go make the brat shut up then!"

Her mommy came down to the back, looking both frightened and angry. "Be quiet, Lorna!" she hissed. But Lorna shook her head.

"Stop fighting! STOP. STOP!" With the last cry, there was a creaking noise and green light. Lorna, too upset to notice, kept shouting to stop. But her mother could only look on in horror and terror as her daughter lit up green. Lorna squeezed her eyes shut and screamed one last STOP.

Then there was an incredible sound. A tearing, creaking, scream of a noise, like the world was coming apart around her. And it was. The metal of the plane ripped itself apart in the air, the engines cutting off mid flight and the wings beginning to detach as the now flightless plane dropped like a stone. Lorna screamed again, terrified this time, but when she opened her eyes, she was on the ground. Hiccupping from the crying, but unharmed.

And now lost. She couldn't see her mommy or her daddy, only wreckage that she knew was the plane. Smoke filled the air, hurting her eyes and lungs, making seeing and breathing harder. Lorna began to cry again, but this time it was far quieter. No longer the screaming of a child, howling to be listened to, but the unstoppable tears of one who was lost and afraid with no one to help her.

She tried to stand up, to go find her mommy or daddy, but her legs wouldn’t move. Not because they were hurt, but her whole body seemed to not want to go anywhere. Too afraid, too shocked, too overwhelmed by everything. All she could do was cry and wait. She didn’t have to wait long. The sound of a car approaching reached her, and then soon after that, a man appeared. She watched as he found her mom, bending down and then standing up. Lorna knew then, though she didn’t know how, that her mom wasn’t coming back. She let out a quiet wail of despair, wanting nothing more than her mommy to comfort her.

The man turned to her, and Lorna was startled by the pull she felt. It was like the feeling she felt when the green lights started, like how magnets attracted each other. He came towards her and Lorna let him pick her up, clinging to him. She didn’t know why, but he made her feel safe. Safer than she’d felt on the plane when her parents were arguing. Than when her daddy shouted and raised his fists.

As if summoned by her thoughts, there was movement from the rubble. Bleeding and dazed, but still alive and mostly uninjured, Arnold Dane pushed himself from the wreckage he’d landed in. Lorna, seeing him and knowing how angry he'd be, clung tighter to the stranger. She always hated when her dad was angry. He was scary when he was angry. The stranger felt safer.

ERIK: Arnold Dane stood, looking dazed until his eyes settle on Lorna and Erik, and then his expression turned hateful. "So you're the freak bastard my wife fucked." Erik's arm tightened around Lorna, and he cupped a hand over one of her ears, pressing the other against his chest. Her arms tightened around him, too, and he knew she was afraid not of a stranger like she should be, but the man she thought was her father. Had he ever hurt her?

"That would be me," he confirmed coldly. "Which must make you the abusive swine she was trying to get away from."

Arnold sneered. "She wasn't trying to get away from anything. She knew I was the best she was gonna get. Came back every time I called, like a good bitch. She wouldn't have been able to take care of the brat without me and she knew it."

Erik shifted Lorna on his hip, glanced at Suzanna in the rubble, and then back at Arnold, expression frigid. "I should've killed you for her as a parting gift three years ago. She was insistent that you were doing better. I knew better, but she was so sure. The things love does to you. G-d knows you didn't deserve it from her." The metal of the rubble around them was buzzing, his anger charging the air. Erik tucked his head down against the girl's--his daughter's--and told her to keep her eyes closed.

And then, with a wave of his hand, pieces of shrapnel sharpened into needles. A clench of his fist sent them through the man's limbs and drove them into the ground, like a butterfly pinned under a microscope. Erik ignored the screaming, silencing it with a piece of metal over the man's mouth a moment later, and set Lorna carefully on a flat part of the rubble. He offered her a warm smile. "You stay right here, hm? I'll be right back. I promise."

Three minutes later, Erik was scooping Lorna back up into his arms, that same warm smile on his lips and a new splotch of blood on his jeans. "Come here, darling. Let's get you somewhere safe."

LORNA: She didn't understand a lot of the words her dad was using. But she recognised them as ones he'd hurled at her mom before. Ones that made her mommy flinch and shout back. Ones that Lorna didn't like. And clearly the stranger didn't like it either, because he covered her ears, pressing her head against his chest until the words became muffled and all she could hear was the beating of his heart in his chest. Rhythmic and steady, nothing like the racing of her own as she sniffled and tried to stop crying.

From where she was held, she could see her mother laying lifeless, and rather than calming down, soon Lorna was shaking. Trembling against the stranger. She didn't hear what he said to her dad, nor what her dad was sneering back. Nothing until the stranger urged her to shut her eyes. But even with her eyes closed and her ears covered, she heard the screaming. She felt the metal moving, like a sixth sense now blown open wide and sensitive, and felt it pierce something that screamed.

She was sat down, and Lorna kept her eyes closed at first. But she was curious. Too curious. She opened them just a bit, peering through her eyelashes, and watching as the man made sure her daddy was never going to yell at her or hurt her again. When he turned back, Lorna squeezed her eyes shut quickly, pretending she hadn't seen the images that burned into her retina. Nor heard the sounds that echoed in her ears. She didn't know why, but even still she trusted this man. Maybe it was the pulling in her to him. Or maybe it was that he protected her. He scared her too, but he protected her. But she let him pick her up, nodding as he promised to take her to safety.

Somewhere safe, apparently turned out to be what looked to Lorna like a doctor's office the next day. "Where are we?" she asked the man--Erik, she knew now. "Am I going home?"

ERIK: Erik had been plagued with the guilt of killing his own mother since he was 14. He wouldn't allow Lorna to live with that guilt. To know that she'd downed the plane and killed her mother, that her powers had saved her life but not Suzanna. And he didn't want her to remember Arnold, either--better to let her think there was just an accident. Nothing she could've done. It was for her own protection. And he didn't want to introduce himself to his daughter as the murderer of her stepfather. The memories needed to be wiped, buried, deleted.

Charles could do it. Whether he would was a different consideration, and Erik couldn't be sure the answer was yes. He didn't need the weight of Charles' disappointment on him for asking, or worse yet for seeing what Erik had done in the first place. Jean was too young. Emma Frost was absolutely out of the question. So Erik had reached out to some of the old network and heard of this man. Discreet and damn good at what he did, as far as his reputation went, and that was enough. Needed to be enough.

"Soon. We're just stopping for a quick check-up, alright?"

The telepath walked in, and Erik shook his hand, introduced himself, and explained the situation in quiet terms to the man, smiling over at Lorna every so often. Erik laid out very clearly defined limits on what he wanted wiped, the man agreed, money changed hands, and then the telepath was pulling up a chair to sit in front of Lorna, Erik standing off to the side between them, watching closely. Protective.

"Hello, Lorna," the man said with a smile, and something in his gaze was shimmering. Soothing. "Erik here was just telling me all you went through yesterday. How stressful that must have been, far too stressful for a young girl like you. I want you to relax for me--there's a dear. Just listen to me..."

The telepath pressed forward into her mind, and the last thing she saw was Erik watching over his shoulder, brow knit with concern.

LORNA: The memories ended there, with them being wiped from her mind, buried deep inside. As Lorna came back to the present, stumbling back away from Erik, she realised absently that that clawing feeling was gone. These memories were released from their box, and they were no longer crying to get out. But now she had to deal with it.

Her cheeks were wet, tears fallen when she wasn't aware. The metal around her creaked--much as it done in her memories--responding to her anger, her shock, her horror. She'd killed her own mother. She remembered more things more clearly now than just the crash too. Her 'father'--Arnold--had scared her more than she'd ever remembered before now. It was as though when certain memories were blocked, her mind allowed others, connected to them, to fade too. Lorna shook like a leaf, her mind running a thousand miles an hour. "You. You took my memories!" With barely a thought in her head, or a twitch of her hand, metal hurtled towards Erik to pin him to the wall. It was the easiest thing to grab onto, her anger at what Erik had done to her, rather than face what she had done to her own family. What he had hidden from her.

JEAN: You need to learn how to cast the thoughts out, Jean. Charles’ voice came back to her now, smooth and comforting and always so deeply in control, even when Jean felt as if she was going to scream as the world shook around them. Anything that isn’t yours, just let it pass by. Take some of the feeling, but you can’t take it all. No one person can hold the world’s pain alone.

No one person could hold all the pain. No one person could hold that much grief, or that much suffering, or that many secrets. No one person could hold all the cards, and yet here they were, once again, Erik pulling the rug out from someone he claimed to love.

(No. He loved Lorna. He loved her so desperately he built a country for her, protected him from himself in the most painful way a parent could. His absence had never been for his own benefit, Jean knew that, she’d seen the aching before Lorna came into their lives. She knew Erik, knew him better than almost anyone else. She was his daughter.)

But he just kept surprising her. He kept surprising her, and it was never with anything good. The memories of what happened with Kara, those flames in her eyes, her demanding that Jean stayed out, were still fresh and burning in her mind. The memories of the tears streaming down Lorna’s face, her shaking hands, they wouldn’t leave anytime soon. They wouldn’t vanish as quickly as Erik wanted them to.

He wouldn’t be able to talk her out of this one -- and yet, when Lorna reacted, Jean stepped in just as quickly. She waved her hands, forming a telekinetic shield that prevented the metal from wrapping around Erik’s arms, from escalating the situation further than she knew her sister would want, when she was calmer (they always ran so hot). “Lorna, that’s enough,” she said. “Erik, just--”

Shut up? What the hell did she say to someone who made fire burn in her chest and a cold pit drop into her stomach at the same damn time? What Erik had done, what he had altered, wasn’t all that different from what Jean and Maddie had done with Derry, the decision that she made for the greater good in spite of the grey it caused on her husband’s face. Who was Jean to judge, when faced with a similar situation she made the same decision?

“We have fought and died for this home,” Jean said instead, her voice strong and confident and not wavering nearly as much as her resolve (or her mind, which jumped from place to place). “If you think I’m going to let father and daughter tear each other to shreds on its soil you have another thing coming. Erik made a choice. It was a choice that you may not agree with -- God knows I’m not sure if I do -- but the decisions we make aren’t always the best. Sometimes we make mistakes. I am not going to let you do this, Lorna. You don’t want to do this.”

ERIK: The memories slipped away, leaving in their wake exactly what Erik had known would happen. Exactly what he'd warned against. Exactly the reason he'd buried them in the first place, and exactly why he'd forbidden Jean to try setting them loose.

Lorna's face was wet with tears, shivers of shock wracking through her body, and every parental instinct Erik made him want to wrap his arms around her shoulders and let her sob into his chest until she settled. But he didn't need to be a telepath to know that would be absolutely unwelcome; Lorna's emotions had the metal around them trembling, the same way it did when Erik's temper was at a breaking point, and he knew what was coming in the moment before it happened.

Except that the metal never quite touched him, because Jean threw up the defense that he himself wasn't going to raise. But she still wasn't looking at him. Whatever she had to say to him was aborted quickly, redirected to Lorna, and Erik felt a lash of anger curl through him. What would she have had him do? Had Arnold walked away from that plane crash alive, Lorna would have ended up in his hands again, or Erik would've been forced to reveal himself to the courts to fight it. And how was he to let her live with the guilt that had lived in his mind for over 70 years if he had a way to stop it?

A way that had been perfectly effective until Jean cracked it open. Anger sang at his fingertips, but for once, for once, Erik held his tongue, watching his daughters in deceptively stoic silence.

LORNA: She wasn't going to kill him. Not really. Probably not. She just wanted him immobile, stuck where she wanted him, so he couldn't get away. So he couldn't avoid this. Later, she'd almost certainly be more grateful to Jean, once she realised how out of control her powers were at that time. It had been a long time since she'd lost control like this, but it was to be expected. Her mind was trying to deal with a traumatic event it had never fully processed. It was no longer equipped for those memories, perhaps never was. So Jean was right to stop her. That didn't mean Lorna liked it right now.

"Enough? I haven't even done anything to him yet."

Damn Jean and her words. She had never needed her powers to get in Lorna's head, to convince her. She knew Lorna too well for that, and right now she knew what to say to get Lorna to back off. We fought and died for this home. It struck a nerve, but it worked. And she was right. Lorna didn't want to kill Erik. Especially not after learning what happened with her mother.

You killed her. You killed her. Youkilledheryoukilledheryoukilledher.

Lorna let out a cry of frustration, far more directed inward than at either of the people in the room. She couldn't get her mind to stop racing, tumbling over itself as it spun in circles and tore her apart. With a flick of her hand, she pulled the metal from Erik, throwing it to the floor and letting it spin away to the far wall. She wanted to break, to cry, to try and figure out how to even begin to process all the things she had seen. She wanted someone to hold her and tell her it would be okay, even if they didn't know if it was true. But she was so angry too. So angry that all of this had been taken away from her. Angry at herself for losing control. Angry that Erik had fought her trying to see this. Scared that she could hurt him and Jean.

"I..." She had no words. Nothing came to her. She swallowed hard, stepping back, away from them both.

JEAN: She wanted to be on Lorna’s side. More than anything, Jean knew the pain that came with being alone -- with feeling as if there was no one who understood the turmoil that was ravaging through your mind, that was changing things so irreparably you could never go back to who you were before. She knew what that felt like, and she always promised that she’d try to prevent other people from suffering the same emotions if she could, that she would prove to them they weren’t alone, that they had a friend, that they could work together. After all, Erik could stand up for himself -- was stronger than even Jean gave him credit for so many years ago -- and he would want her to defend his daughter, if she could.

But she couldn’t. Not entirely, at least. She could understand where she was coming from, could empathise, but condemning Erik’s actions were impossible when she had made the same decision less than a few weeks before -- a decision that had the last remaining member of her family outside of Genosha struggling to remember where she came from, no idea of who she truly was.

“Lorna,” Jean said. She couldn’t be on Lorna’s side completely, and she could feel their bond stretching. She could see her physically step back, could hear the pain in her thoughts. “Don’t do this.” Don’t leave. That was the worst thing a person could do when they were in pain, but it was what they defaulted to every damn time. “We’re here for you. Don’t walk away now, please.”

ERIK: Erik knew anger better than he knew anything else. Better than love, better than pain, better than fear, he knew anger. Like a shadow that never left his side. Charles had told him all those years ago on the lawn of the Institute that there was more to him than pain and anger, that he could be good.

But Charles had been wrong about a lot of things. Shaw, for all that Erik hated the man, had been right. About humans, about the world, about Erik. He'd won the day, won the safety he'd always said he wanted for his family and his people, and yet the anger, the fire in his veins hadn't cooled. It'd gotten worse.

( All his children fell to fire, eventually. It was only a matter of time. )

Lorna's anger was electric, ozone on the tongue, but she was crying out and backing away, and Erik wasn't holding his tongue, anymore--now it was lead. He wanted to reach out and stop her. To echo Jean, to tell her everything would be alright and tell her to stay.

Magda had looked horrified, just like this. Had backed away, just like this, one foot behind the other until she ran, and Erik could see how this was going to end already. Nothing new under the sun. He could beg her to stay, but he would beg and she would leave like she had, and the thought of begging and failing yet again made him sick.

Maybe it'd be better, if she left. Erik had a way of destroying the lives of all of his family, one way or another, eventually, a one-man wrecking ball despite all his love. Despite trying. She'd reappeared in his life and he'd dragged her straight into a war, put her on the frontlines and watched her plunge her hands into the mess with pride. She'd been better off with her aunt and uncle, that much was increasingly clear, and Erik wasn't sorry for what he'd done in the memories.

He was sorry he'd been selfish enough to let her come to him.

So he didn't reach out for her, despite the itch to wrap her in his arms and protect her (she needed protection from him, not from him). He didn't apologize, because it would've rang hollow. And he didn't ask her to stay, like Jean did, because he'd stopped asking people to stay by his side after Cuba. Because he was not a good man, he was a dangerous one.

Lorna backed away, one foot behind the other until she ran, and Erik stood there with a blank expression and watched her go.

#c: jean grey #c: lorna dane #f: discord #d: the pieces i can't put back #tw: violence #tw: manipulation #tw: gaslighting #tw: ptsd #tw: trauma #tw: brainwashing #tw: plane crash #tw: murder #tw: death mention #tw: abuse #tw: cheating

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