Narrative: Professor X & Magneto Who: Charles Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr When: Late evening, Sunday, March 16, 2008 Where: A hallway of the White House, Washington, D.C. What: With all of this fighting continuing on, it comes down to the two leaders, once old friends, who finally have to face one another.
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Eric wasn't hiding throughout over thirty-six hours of fighting. He was indoors, clearing the White House of anyone who infiltrated. He was outside, dropping city buses on his enemies. He'd slammed Iron Man into the dome of the Capitol building and had decided, this time, to go easy on him (though hadn't the fool learned his lesson the last time?). This was his Washington. This was his territory that he'd worked so hard to gain, this was his seat of power. Things had been difficult, yes, but they would have evened out. They would have gotten better. He wasn't about to see it go down because of Charles and he wasn't about to sit back in his room and wait for it all to be over. He could have. He could have easily done that, but he didn't. Unlike his old comrade, he didn't sit idly by and let others do all the work. Then again, dear Charles couldn't walk. What choice did he have? He had his telepathy and nothing else to save him. He'd learned recently not to underestimate Charles Xavier, but that hardly meant that he was going to make an appearance.
The second night of fighting was underway and Magneto was growing restless. This was going on too long. What he wanted to do, what he thought about doing, was to cause an implosion of the magnetic fields over the entire area. Crush everyone. The funny thing was, the thing that kept him from doing it wasn't an interest in the lives of the people who were loyal to him, but rather the mental blocks that Charles had put in place----the ones that said that Eric wouldn't be able to fathom killing Charles or any of the X-Men. He could cause pain, surely, as the Wolverine found out several hours before, but he couldn't kill. Angered and frustrated, he'd retreated back into the building to reformulate his thoughts. The battle had dissolved into chaos, the Brotherhood having no cohesive plan of how to hold Washington except to outnumber and overwhelm. They hadn't had much of a chance to discuss a defense strategy beyond that.
The voice came from behind him as he paced down the hallway.
"Well, Eric."
Eric stopped and turned, his cape swirling at his ankles before it settled again. Charles Xavier was sitting there in his wheelchair, looking quiet and calm. How Charles had managed to get through the fighting was beyond him, unless he'd somehow been there all along, just waiting for him. He felt his heart thud so violently in his chest that he nearly lost his balance. "Et tu, Brute?" The Julius Caesar reference wasn't lost on either of them----and knowing Charles, he'd picked the date of March fifteenth for that specific reason.
Charles sat straight in the chair but he still looked small. Exhausted, weary, and troubled... and yet at the same time, irritatingly calm. Always calm. "Eric, you knew it would come to this. You knew it would."
"This was what we wanted, Charles! I have the country. I have it. I can make things right. It isn't easy now but you would have seen. The world would be better for all of us, it would be exactly what you dreamed of. More schools, inspired by the model we set up together----mutants in power, mutants----"
Charles's calm demeanor disappeared. "You know this was never what I wanted, Eric!" he snapped. "You knew that twenty-five years ago when you walked out that door. Don't pretend you've done this for me."
"I have done this for you. For you, for your students, even for your damned X-Men----"
"You've done it for yourself, Eric. And you can't hold onto it."
"Why are you here, Charles? What are you going to do to me? You can't get in here." Eric tapped the side of his helmet.
Charles shifted slightly in his chair. Uncomfortable. "No. No, I can't."
Eric could feel his blood almost start to boil as he thought of Charles sitting there... unable to walk, just trusting the fact that Eric was mentally blocked against killing him. Destroying everything he'd worked toward and daring to face him. Charles couldn't attack him with his mind, not as long as Eric wore the helmet. And Eric... couldn't kill him. Oh, he couldn't kill him, but he could certainly let him die.
Snarling, he stretched out a hand. Immediately, Charles's wheelchair lifted into the air and started to twist----slamming the Professor into the nearest wall and pinning him viciously against it. Charles's legs hung limp but the rest of his body struggled against the wreckage of the chair. The side of his head had been flung into the wall with such force that it was amazing that Charles hadn't been knocked out or that his skull hadn't cracked like an egg. It was, however, starting to bleed profusely.
Eric grabbed Charles by the jaw and forced eye contact as the metal of the chair began to constrict around Charles's body. "What were you thinking, coming here? It's valiant of you, old friend, but you won't accomplish anything on your own. There isn't anyone around for you to manipulate to harm me. There are psychic scramblers throughout this entire building." Charles howled as the chair compressed his chest and a rib or two audibly snapped. "I'd say you came in with a death wish, so you don't have to deal with this any longer. A feud lasting a quarter century and here we are. I have the power and you have nothing. You----"
Suddenly, the constriction stopped. A dull pulse rippled through the air, followed by the faintest sort of low-frequency hum, coming in and out like a heartbeat. Eric's connection to the metal stopped and the chair wasn't pinned far enough into the wall for it to support Charles's weight without Eric's powers. Both the tangled chair and the wounded Professor crashed to the ground, crumpling in a heap. Eric knew this pulse, he knew that Charles had some mutant on his side that was negating powers and she'd done it periodically throughout two days of fighting. And that pulse had to come now, in this moment, and Eric felt naked and vulnerable without his sense of electromagnetic fields.
But that didn't change the fact that he was strong, healthy, and that Charles was a cripple who was also without his powers. Eric took the opportunity while Charles was down to kick him in the side. "It ends tonight, Charles!" Another vicious slam of his boot, this time against Charles's face. A part of him hated to harm the friend who'd meant so much to him in his youth, but there were things bigger than friendship here. There were things bigger than any relationship between individuals.
How many years had he spent helping Charles in and out of bed, helping him dress, guiding him through day to day life as Charles adjusted to paralysis? It was a cruel parody of those early years now as he knelt down, grabbed Charles by the collar, and tugged him up like a ragdoll. Charles's face was bleeding, his nose obviously broken, but his eyes were the same crystal blue as they'd always been. He looked... almost the same as the day when Eric first saw him without hair, the day of the accident, when he pushed and shoved his way into the hospital to see Charles and found him broken and bloody, his telepathic powers snapped out of control and his hair inexplicably gone. They'd locked eyes then much as they did now.
And wasn't it funny, that all those years ago the thing that had brought them together was the fact that they had powers, that they were so different from everyone else... and here they were now, both completely powerless.
Eric knew that mental block was there. He knew that Charles had tampered with him, made it impossible to actually kill him... but he could hurt him enough to keep him from getting up. Someone else would do it. Mystique would do it if he gave her the location----but he didn't have the chance.
Charles had reached into his jacket, pulling out something that Eric's powers hadn't managed to sense----because it was made of plastic. A gun. Eric didn't have a chance to register what it was beyond that. All he knew was that a split second later, Charles had pulled the trigger.
----and then everything for Eric Lehnsherr went black.