The X men have already reached their home, hours earlier. Nearly a day spent on re-construction by Magneto, Jean grey and other mutants who helped out and even upgrading the previous set up at Xavier's mansion. The ruins of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters still stood half-rebuilt under the grey light of morning.
Inside the mostly-reconstructed study, Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr sat amidst the dust and hope. The air between them was clearer than it had been in years, the ghost of Apocalypse's influence replaced by the echo of their old friendship.
Charles: "You stopped him. The world saw it. They will see the goodness"
Erik: "They saw the monster pause. That's all."
They were analyzing global news feeds with cerebro, one is watching a world grappling with news of a Apocalypse threat that their friendship and a little phoenix helped solve. The other is the inexplicable events surrounding the rescue.
Professor? Jean's psychic voice, calm but laced with surprise, touched his mind. There are visitors. At the gate.
Before he could probe further, the hum of an engine and tires, echoed through the grounds. A sleek, black Bentley Mulsanne rolled smoothly up the long driveway, its presence an anomaly amidst the mutant-powered reconstruction still happening around.
Outside, children on the repaired playground stopped their games to stare. Mystique, in her default blue form, and Storm, exchanged wary glances as the car slowed to a halt. Quicksilver raced and peeked into the car through all windows before it reaches to a stop and went back as if done nothing, all in a moment's time.
*Last time Soldier's came and kidnapped a few. Ofcourse they will be wary.* Tao told his passengers.
***
The driver's window lowered. A man with an unremarkable face gave a casual wave towards the mansion and said to those behind. "The people you seek are in there. Catch you later. Have a good second life."
Just as the three others left the seat, and doors closed themselves. Without another word, the car started and drove off, leaving three figures standing alone on the gravel looking back speechlessly.
* Magda Gursky's thoughts*
( Before coming here, we were unconscious and woke up hungry and weird, this morning. When we asked for anything to eat, the guy who gave us second chance snapped his fingers and said " That'll do it."
Hunger was miraculously gone. Then out of nowhere, a driver with his car came saying he doesn't need his car anymore. Nex, or whoever he is, simply drove us here and now gone as if we were some baggage. )
***
Meanwhile:
The psychic shockwave that hit Charles was twofold. First, the familiar, sun-bright signature of Alex Summers, a mind he had long grieved as lost. The shock of it was a physical jolt. Then, his senses brushed against the two women with him.
Their mental signatures were… new, yet intrinsically tied to a past his dear old friend knew intimately. One felt like a budding, curious star, the other like a long-quiet melody suddenly resumed.
Erik, Charles's voice was a strained whisper, his hand gripping the arm of his wheelchair. We need to go outside. Now.
Magneto, startled by the raw urgency in his friend's tone, didn't hesitate. He followed as Charles propelled himself forward, a sense of foreboding tightening in his chest.
The scene outside was one of quiet confusion. Scott Summers reached them first. His new visor hid his eyes, but not the tremor in his voice as he called out, "Alex?" and upon seeing his older brother, froze for a long second before crossing the distance in a few long strides.
The hug was awkward, fueled by a days of absence and a memory that was still a fractured puzzle for Alex.
Nina, meanwhile, watched the mutant children, feeling slight emotions from them, with wide, curious eyes, a faint, unconscious instinct released causing a nearby swing to sway gently on its own.
She could instinctly feel their surprise, guardness and also feel some one like her was in the mansion, almost inviting her in.
It was Magda who spoke, her voice soft but clear, her gaze scanning the faces of the adults. "Is… is Eric here?" But as soon as she spoke she saw a vision of her husband coming out of the mansion before it happened. " Eric.." Seeing the almost impossible hope she whispered, tearing a drop.
A moment later when the vision went, she saw herself reliving the moment again. But this was no time to explore that, she moved past the children.
Nina called out Magneto, both of them instinctively feeling the magnetic signature. " Tatuś " (dad).
The word came from Nina, soft and certain.
The name, spoken in her accent, in a voice he had only allowed himself to hear in the deepest, most guarded corners of his memory, stopped Magneto dead.
He stepped out from behind Charles, his usual mantle of imposing authority gone, replaced by a vulnerability that made him look like a different man.
His eyes found Magda first, the wife he had believed dead and, body even buried by his own hands, whose flight from his power had haunted him for the past week. Then, his gaze fell upon joyful Nina, their daughter ~ the child he had cherished, the loss that had calcified his heart.
***
The air crackled. Uncontrolled, a wave of magnetic energy pulsed from him. The playground equipment groaned, metal straining against its bolts. Dust lifted from the ground in a shimmering cloud.
For a single, terrifying, and beautiful moment, the Master of Magnetism lost all control, his power reflecting the cataclysm happening within his soul.
"Charles!" His voice cracked between anger and denial seeing her coming close. "Why are you showing me this?"
Charles's answer was not calm as it usually was, his tone carrying both joy and wonder. "I'm not showing you anything, Erik. They're as real as we are."
He was not looking at ghosts. He was looking at a past he had burned, but delivered back to him. And in that moment, the man who moved continents was utterly, completely still, until he felt the familiar scent and comfort of his wife at close.
"...How?" he whispered, as Magda reached him and placed a trembling hand against around him.
Everyone had the same question.
***
By the time the X-Men were ushering their long-lost family inside, I was already gone. That place… it's easy to slip in, but pulling a clean getaway is another matter. Those people, their guard never really drops, even in the middle of a miracle. Seeing their loved ones back from the grave just made them more wary, not less.
I watched from a distance, my senses painting the scene in my mind. Alex and the others told their story again, and they even let Xavier peek inside their heads. I didn't bother scrubbing myself from their memories. Why would I? Let them see. I left the conversations in there, too.
After I returned the car I'd… borrowed… I stuck around a little longer, just watching the fallout. It was fascinating. There was this gratitude, sure, but Charles… I could feel the struggle rolling off him. It's that brain of his, always working overtime.
He was sitting there, probably thinking, "If the dead can walk back into the world, who gets to make that call? Who deserves a second chance?" Just another day at the office for Professor X, I guess. Hank McCoy ran his tests, confirming they were the real deal and not some clever clones.
Everything checked out.
Then the conversation turned to me ~ specifically, the part where I'd apparently gifted mutant powers. That got everyone's attention. Jean Grey, curious and still shaky with her new power, accidentally brushed against a memory of mine in there: just them with me, having a coffee, acting like a self-proclaimed Grim Reaper on his break.
She didn't mean to, but her control is like a cup that's too full right now ~ things just spill over. She saw the person looked similar to earlier nightmare shocking her again, but kept to herself.
What Charles was really desperate to know was what I'd been saying to those invisible figures in the picture, and in those languages no one on Earth has ever heard. I think he was trying to get a head start on deciphering the language of the underworld, or whatever he thinks I represent.
It'd be pretty funny if they ever figured out the dialect from Glory City, I am from and tried speaking it to some hell demon loose on the surface.
***
A happy ending isn't it?
.... No.
Now I have to live with the consequences of doing a good deed for mutants. I knew this would happen. Even before I started absorbing that alternate future, I knew bringing back the dead would send ripples through time.
The biggest wave? It changes everything for Magneto.
Let me show you what was supposed to happen.
After his failed assassination of President Nixon and all the aggression that came before, Magneto was a ghost story. Just the false accusation of killing JFK was enough for US to bring in resolutions to curb mutant disasters.
Parents would whisper his name to scare their children. He had become a figure of apocalyptic terror, even to himself. So, he sought the one thing he thought was forever out of reach: normalcy. He chose peace, building a quiet life with his family, trying to bury the monster the world saw.
But peace never lasted for Erik Lehnsherr. Every time he tried to lay down his mantle, the world ~ or sometimes his own kind, would do something so heinous it would forge his reason to fight all over again.
The Apocalypse event was supposed to be the final straw. The sheer scale of destruction and the fickleness of human fear would have sent him into a new, hardened isolation.
He'd go to Poland, to the earth where he buried his wife, to gather the shattered pieces of himself. And they would refuse him entry. The Auschwitz memorial committee would coldly cite "security concerns." He was a ghost denied even his own graves. His aggression will be taken as terrorism.
He'd drift then, trying to lose himself in the roar of forges and the grind of machinery ~ Gdańsk shipyards, a Prague foundry, a Romanian dam. Working nights, paid in cash, the physical labor a temporary anchor for a mind adrift.
But even his small acts of kindness, his attempts to quietly atone for the terror he'd caused, would betray him. Saving workers from a collapsing crane wouldn't be seen as penance; it would make him a legend again. Another wandering again hardening his acts of secrecy and isolation. But legends attract both dangerous and desperate people.
Mutants on the run, those with no one else to turn to, saw the saviour in him. His history of persecution resonated with theirs. They'd find him, slipping notes into his toolbox to direct confrontations, their pleas etched with panic and hope: They're rounding us up in Sofia. My sister vanished in Budapest.
He'd burn every slip of paper and request, as if that could destroy the connection, but he'd memorize every name, every location.
His purpose would solidify not in a blaze of anger, but in the slow, cold hardening of resolve. Inevitably, one of his rescue missions ~ pulling mutants from some hidden experimental lab ~ would put him back on the radar of the world powers. And they would make him an offer he couldn't refuse.
In a windowless room in Geneva, a deal would be struck. "We can't have another Cairo," they'd say. "The Soviets want you extradited. The Americans want you disappeared. This is the third option." They'd give him a prison and call it a nation.
"I'm giving you a place to put the people no one else wants. Cross the border, and the deal dies. They will shoot you down."
And that's how he would find himself on Genosha ~ a speck of land northeast of Madagascar, stripped of its people for a U.S. base and then abandoned to the salt and sea. He'd be alone on a rusting airstrip, a king of nothing, coaxing a derelict plane into the sky to haul scrap.
It was a conscious, bitter rejection of Charles's dream of integration, a vow to protect mutants on his own terms, far from the governments he despised.
***
Word would spread on crackling shortwave radios. The first arrivals would come by leaky fishing dhows ~ a Kenyan teleporter, a Filipino girl who could make plants grow in the salt-crusted soil, a Russian boy who whispered to sea animals. They came because they had nowhere else, and he was the only one who offered anything at all.
It would grow. Thousands of people. A society built on labor hours, its law his word, its defense the innate power of mutants who could feel warships coming from over the horizon. It was a fortress, not a home ~ a far cry from the sovereign nation it becomes in the comics.
And just when he might have found a grim sort of peace in his isolation, the world would drag him out again, likely with news of the death of a woman he'd come to trust ~ someone who once put a bullet in his neck, but had since become a fragile link to a world beyond his walls.
***
That was his path. A closed loop of trauma, isolation, and violent necessity. That story is what lead me to give him this, small piece of comfort.
Now, that future is ash. Because he has a family. And a family is a chain that keeps the monster anchored. It's a weakness that makes a man think twice before tearing down the world.
Now where will the mutants go? What will Magneto do? Do you think keeping both mutant ideological axis to a single place helps them in helping others? No they will soon have other things to worry about. Peeking into the future every time is no fun.
Watching his story rewrite itself only solidified my own goal. I need a place on this planet that is truly mine. I could have taken any unclaimed island ~ even Genosha itself, with all its empty space. But the problem with Earth is that every patch of dirt, no matter how remote, has a history of claims and conflicts stamped on it.
Just look at Genosha's past: uninhabited apart from fossils, discovered by Europeans, a waypoint for the Dutch and the British East India Company, a pirate haven, then a prize fought over by the French and British before the Americans ever showed up. Its very soil is a testament to conquest.
So, I needed something… different.
A place with no history but my own. Now I have it.
....