Series Warning: The second and third stories in this series contain Holocaust imagery and other content that may be disturbing.

Date: April 17, 2003

Summary: Storm thinks she can solve Rogue’s problem, but Rogue thinks her solution is a myth. Set about five years after the movie.

Rating: NC-‍17

Series: History Teaches part 1 of 3. [part 2] [part 3]

Continuity: First movie

Disclaimer: The X-‍Men and the X-‍Mansion belong to Marvel Comics and Fox Entertainment, but the forest is public land. I take only memories and leave only footprints.

Author’s Note: This story is heavily influenced by the deleted scenes on the DVD (where Storm and Rogue actually interact, and Storm puts more than a dozen words together) but doesn’t require knowledge of them to make sense.

“I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.”
—The Fisher King

“Shall we go on to the next chapter?” Storm asked.

Rogue nodded, turning the page. “Perseus.”

They were sitting at a small table in Rogue’s bedroom, bending over two copies of the same book. Rogue had graduated less than two months ago from the so-‍called Xavier Institute of Higher Learning—college for students too freakish or too dangerous to go to college. For four years she’d studied under Hank McCoy, 300 pounds of blue-‍furred polymath for whom no independent study program was ever ambitious enough. She had been glad to be finished. And yet here she was, already studying again. Because being an X-‍man was three months of boredom followed by three hours of blind panic, and the training sessions Scott kept scheduling for early morning, before anyone had classes to attend or teach, just left her wide awake and with a whole day left to fill. She’d signed up for an Internet course on mythology almost at random. Then Storm, who had made some kind of pact with Kurt Wagner—the school’s other blue-‍furred teacher—to put comparative religion into the curriculum, had declared herself “ignorant of European polytheism” and enrolled in the same course. Studying together had seemed natural enough that Storm had probably felt that she had to suggest it, though it had been clear for a long time that she wasn’t really comfortable being too close to Rogue’s lethal skin.

It had turned out that Storm was trying to learn every name by heart, though all their tests were open-‍book. But that was all right. Storm liked to tell the stories aloud to fix them in her mind, and once she got started, she didn’t seem to care if Rogue stopped asking questions and just sank into the music of her voice.

Rogue doubted Storm would have spent so much time in anyone else’s bedroom with the door closed—man or woman; it wasn’t like that was a secret. But since it was Rogue, the thought would never cross anyone’s mind.

Storm closed her book, marking her place with a finger. “Now Perseus was the son of Zeus and who?”

Rogue searched her memory. “Danae.”

“Yes, but it is not Dan-‍EE like Marie—in Greek the stress tries to crawl as far back in the word as it can, so: DA-‍na-‍ee. Her name means ‘parched.’”

“‘Pahrched,’” Rogue said, drawing the word out in a Southern accent thicker than hers had been when she arrived at Xavier’s. “Kind of Tennessee Williams.” She glanced down at her book. “And Danae was the daughter of?”

“Acrisius,” Storm answered readily. “An oracle had told him that he would someday be killed by his own grandson, so in order to make sure his daughter had no child—”

“Didn’t he know you can’t beat these things?”

“No, he had not studied his mythology.” Rogue looked down to hide her smile as Storm continued. “So because it is too dangerous for Danae to love, she is imprisoned in a tower of brass, and there she whiles away her days....”

Masturbating, Rogue supplied mentally. She turned the page, using the seam of her glove to tease it free, and skimmed ahead.

“But even in her tower the storm-‍god Zeus sees Danae. He knows her beauty... and her terrible loneliness. So he becomes a shower of gold, and in that form he comes to her—”

Storm stopped suddenly.

“Yeah, I don’t get that either,” Rogue said. “Cause... what... did the tower have a moon roof?”

Storm glanced away, then met her eyes again. “A high window, perhaps. A crack. Some gap in the armor.”

“And he sent a shower of gold through this window and hit her right between the legs? Nice shot.”

“His control of his powers must have been remarkable. You see why we must continually practice.”

Rogue stared down at her book, not reading. She had once thought that practice might give her control of her power, that she might someday be able to touch people without hurting them. But that hope had faded five years ago.

“I’m sorry, Marie. I didn’t mean....”

Storm was looking at her so sadly that Rogue felt guilty for having reacted to what, after all, was only a careless remark. “It’s all right,” she said. “Really, it’s okay.”

Storm started to say something else, but stopped, opened her book again, and asked another question.

Perseus was born; grew; killed Medusa by being careful not to look her in the face; freed a girl chained to the rocks, and was about to kiss her, but stopped short, because it was time for Storm to leave.

Storm stood and kissed the air above Rogue’s forehead. “Good night, Marie.” On her way out she passed Rogue’s dresser, and looked down at the plant she had given Rogue almost a year before. She clucked her tongue at its pathetic state, and, concentrating, made a tiny rainstorm appear briefly over its pot. Glancing at Rogue one last time, she slipped out and closed the door behind her.

Rogue walked over to the dresser and took off her gloves, looking down at the plant, a trailing stem with three remaining heart-‍shaped leaves. She couldn’t touch people, but touching a plant was safe. She wouldn’t absorb the ability to draw nourishment from the soil, and it wouldn’t become any more of a vegetable than it already was.

For sixteen years she’d been able to touch people, but she’d taken it for granted. If she had focused more on what another person’s touch felt like when there was only warm skin, not the cold shock of transference, then maybe she’d be able to remember now. For a few months after Logan and Magneto, just stroking her thumbs down the curve of her lower back, or running her hands up the length of her legs, would call up a borrowed tactile memory—the ghost of a touch on a body not hers. But that had faded. Since then, she’d had to find other substitutes. Sometimes she tried different ways of touching herself, to trick her senses—her shoulder against her cheek, her forehead against her knee, the back of her wrist on the sole of her foot. Sometimes she gripped her wrist until her hand turned numb, so it would seem a little more like someone else was touching her. But now she caressed the plant, gently, with one finger. She needed to be careful. It was close enough to death already.

The leaf was cool to the touch, and yet.... So many of Rogue’s memories of Storm took place in the conservatory Storm used as a classroom that even now, she thought of Storm’s face set off by dark green leaves, the movements of her white hair echoed by the nodding fronds of palms. Now she only had to close her eyes to turn the velvet of the leaf into the smooth skin at the back of Storm’s wrist. Rogue had decided long ago that Storm’s skin was just a little softer than her own, except on the undersides of the fingers, where Storm had calluses from gardening that would rasp against Rogue’s cheek. They trained in the same way, so the muscles of Storm’s arm would feel like her own. Different curve of the waist she could trace in the air. Color she could picture but had never found the perfect name for, though she always sought out a match in any palette of browns—in bins of unground coffee beans, in brown pebbles made bright by the river, in dark honey and brown sugar and wood rubbed with linseed oil. Even in her first few months at Xavier’s, when she still thought that she wanted Logan, Rogue had noticed the grace of Storm’s movements and the liquid depth of her brown eyes. She had started coming to class early to catch sight of Storm supporting a frond with her hand, tracing the rib of a leaf with her finger. And then Storm would look up, and smile. Rogue had thought, then, that Storm looked at her with something more than sympathy. But she had lost her hope, along with her accent and her innocence.

Rogue imagined Storm surfacing from the pool, the water streaming from her face and from her hair; climbing out, the sun blazing off the water on her arms and back; then bending to scoop up a towel, walking past Logan casually as she blotted at her hair, perhaps even brushing him with a bare forearm, careless as Rogue could never be. Fresh from the pool, her skin would feel slippery, and might taste faintly of chlorine if Rogue could, somehow, touch a tongue tip to her earlobe or kiss the soft inflection of her throat. Storm had been worshipped once, somewhere in Africa; the people that she saved from drought had had a goddess they could touch; and sometimes it wasn’t so hard to imagine. But to Rogue, Storm was more like a real god, benevolent from a safe distance. Kisses in the air and smiles across the room and five years without even a touch on her gloved hand. Rogue rubbed the leaf between her fingers, harder, suddenly not caring. But the softness she destroyed was a gloved softness, a texture of fabric and not of skin.

And though she imagined Storm wet, the leaf was... dry. Storm had made a shaft of rain just the size of the pot, leaving the top of the dresser untouched; and the soil was soaked, but there was not a drop on the leaves.

You see why we must continually practice. Suddenly Rogue realized what Storm had been trying to tell her.

Rogue turned on the shower. The X-‍Men’s early hours did not suit her, so she showered at night to gain an extra twenty minutes in the morning. Also, at night there was plenty of hot water. She could stand there as long as she wanted, fogging the mirrors, letting the soft warmth envelop her skin.

She cupped her hand under the falling water, watching it pool there, then letting it slip through her fingers. Storm’s mythology lesson came down to this—a stream of water, only differently directed. Would that solve anything? It wasn’t that she couldn’t have sex—laid out under a sheet like a corpse, or with some muffled groping through multiple layers of clothes—but it would only be another substitute. She wanted touch. Real touch. Over the years, that thwarted need had twined around and around itself like the roots of a potbound plant, or the nerves when a limb is amputated. She remembered that her fantasy of Storm had had a plot once: the miracle, never quite specified, that made it possible for her to touch people; the brief romance with Logan, remnant of an earlier fantasy demoted to an appetizer; the battle leading to the sickbed over which Storm bent to kiss her; then their first time, exquisitely gentle because of the bruises that still enlivened her skin; then candles, and a subplot about sailing, and a long, slow deepening of love that developed over several nights through a series of climaxes, some obligatory and some optional. But all that carefully elaborated detail had been worn down to a series of disconnected images, the story jumping straight from one touch to another, so that the Storm in her head now was nothing but skin.

Would she know how to touch someone now, even if she could? After five years of not touching anyone... but of course, that wasn’t really true. Storm and Jean could strike the bad guys from a distance, Logan with his claws and Hank through gloves, but when she fought—slipping a hand through the mousquetaire opening of her glove and pressing it to an unwilling cheek—it was more like a rape. That was the only way she knew how to touch people. She was good at it. Even the leaf she had crushed in the end.

It seemed impossible that Storm could want what she had become. But then, she hadn’t really said she did. He knows her loneliness. Not: he loves her. Was it desire that Storm felt, or only some kind of divine condescension? Suddenly Rogue saw herself as a worshipper putting a candle at the feet of a statue, her burning met only with a coolly compassionate smile.

She wrenched both handles of the tap, gasped at the touch of cold water, then forced her face into the freezing stream. It shocked her skin, reset her senses. She turned off the water and stood in the tub, shivering into a towel.

Cold had brought clarity. She had to be realistic. If Storm’s offer was only pity, she was in no position to refuse it. If Storm’s powers only provided a new way to masturbate, she could use one. She had nothing better to hope for.

Not even braiding her wet hair, she lay down in her soft bed and slept not at all.

Rogue walked down the hall toward Storm’s classroom. Her scalp still ached where she had violently ripped out a tangle, and she knew her sleepless eyes were rimmed with red. A stream of students flowed around her, giving her plenty of room on both sides, though even her neck was covered. She found Storm erasing the blackboard beneath the familiar palms. Storm turned as Rogue approached—no doubt expecting a student. When she saw Rogue she started to smile, then looked again with concern. “Are you all right, Marie?”

Rogue looked into Storm’s eyes. She had worked out what to say, but it stuck in her throat. Why say anything? Her longing must show on her face. At last she raised her hands, slowly, to show she was wearing gloves—she could not bear it if Storm flinched. Seeing permission in Storm’s eyes, she put her fingers to Storm’s hairline and ran them slowly down over her forehead, eyelids, cheekbones, chin. If nothing else, now her hands would always know the contours of Storm’s face—its shape, but not its texture, like a deathmask.

She felt Storm’s hand against her waist. She had imagined this a thousand times—imagined warmth and the softness of skin, and desire blooming out from Storm’s fingers—but Storm’s touch through the fabric of her shirt was like a voice in the next room. Storm caressed her shoulders, then her arms, but not her face, because Storm’s hands were naked. Rogue took off one glove and held it out, putting her bare hand in her pocket so Storm could feel safe. Their hands were about the same size, and the glove fit Storm almost perfectly. Storm touched her fingers to Rogue’s lips, then moved them out along her cheekbone. Acting on instinct, Rogue gently trapped Storm’s thumb between her teeth. It tasted like lint.

Storm paused, her bare hand on Rogue’s hip, the gloved one at the side of her neck. “Marie... I know you long for... contact... but do you truly want me?”

“Yes.” In a whisper. But I can’t have you, so let’s just do this.

“Marie, I—”

Rogue covered Storm’s lips with her fingers, then leaned in to kiss the back of her own hand. Please don’t say it. I know, I know you can’t love me. But let me pretend.

Rogue wiped her forehead with her sleeve. “Does this have to be so far uphill?”

“The spot,” Storm said, “is private—well-‍drained—out of range of our household telepaths—and beautiful. It will be worth it.”

“You could have flown us there.”

“Then we would have missed the flowers.”

“I don’t see any flowers.”

Storm bent down to caress a leaf with one gloved finger. “This is trillium. The notched leaf is bloodroot, and that three-‍lobed one is hepatica. And this is a lady’s-‍slipper that will bloom in a few years.”

“Very educational.”

“It is not much farther,” Storm said, standing again. “We leave the path here.”

“I’m going to smell like sweat.”

“Not for long.”

They turned to the left, wound through the mossy trunks of trees, then climbed another rise, and suddenly came out of the dark woods into the light. Black-‍and-‍red butterflies scattered from their approach, and two wild turkeys walked disdainfully away, their dark backs barely visible above the long grass: miniature buffalo on a miniature prairie. A few more steps, and a stretch of sunny hillside spread below them, set in a ring of trees. Yellow and purple flowers thronged the green slope.

Storm took her hand. “Is it not perfect?”

“If I lie down on that grass naked, I’m going to itch for a week.”

Storm shrugged off the small pack she was carrying. “I brought a blanket.”

“Won’t it get soaked?”

“Yes.”

She was about to have sex with Storm, if you could call it sex. But her mind refused to take the idea seriously. It was so obviously a dream. When this aberration in her life had ended and she was alone again, she would edit this day down to the essentials in her mind, and that walk uphill would be the first thing to go.

Storm had spread out the blanket on an almost level patch of grass, and was changing to a different pair of gloves—silk slip-‍ons in a four-‍button length. They were probably left over from a bridesmaid’s outfit. Despite the heat, Storm was wearing long pants and a long-‍sleeved shirt with a collar that fit snugly around her neck. Hazmat gear. She brushed the hair back from Rogue’s temples, then drew her thumb along the curve of Rogue’s jaw. The silk was soft, but too smooth—lacked the fine grain of flesh. Storm lifted Rogue’s hand to her mouth and drew a circle on the gloved palm with her tongue as her finger traced over and over Rogue’s lips: a kiss cut in half. Rogue licked Storm’s finger with the underside of her tongue, so she wouldn’t have to taste the fabric.

Storm’s fingertip ran along the inside of Rogue’s lower lip one last time. Then the slightly moistened silk slid down her neck, which for once was bare, and came to rest in the hollow between her collarbones.

“Marie... I know this isn’t what you would choose if....”

“Please. Ororo. Anything.” She kissed Storm’s shoulder through her clothes—supplicating, desperate as she had promised herself she wouldn’t be.

The air changed; the wind became cool and the sky curdled. A storm was building. And Storm was unbuttoning Rogue’s shirt, then unhooking her bra. Rogue toed off her shoes without untying them, not caring that it hurt, not caring if it stretched the leather. Gloved fingers brushed over her hips as Storm, kneeling, pulled down first her pants, then her panties. She stepped out of the bunched fabric, bent to take off her socks, and stood up, exposed to the sky. She wondered for a moment if skin hidden from the sun for so long could burn even in a rainstorm, but she doubted sunscreen would hold up to what Storm had in mind, and anyway she really didn’t care. The air was cool. Rogue was always too hot, always sweating in too many clothes, and the breeze on her bare skin was as exhilarating as Storm’s gaze moving slowly up her body.

“Lie down,” Storm said gently. Rogue did, shifting around a little to crush down the grass. Kneeling beside her, Storm took her hand, plucked at one fingertip of her glove and pulled it off. She took off the other glove even more slowly, then cradled Rogue’s hand in both hers. “Do you know, I’ve almost never seen your hands bare?” Rogue watched with a trace of amusement as Storm turned her hand over and over—gasped when Storm’s thumb stroked the crease of her wrist. Then Storm traced the seams of her palm with a fingertip, and she shuddered and pulled away.

“I’m sorry, I....”

“I know,” Storm said. “The glove.” And she didn’t move to touch her again.

Was that all? A touch of the hand, then... the deluge? Take my wrist, she wanted to say; hold me still. But she knew that Storm wouldn’t.

The sky was growing darker. “When you feel the water you will want to cover yourself,” Storm said. “I won’t be offended. It’s an instinct. Even chimpanzees will shelter from the rain. But—try to embrace it. Open yourself to the rain as you would to the touch of my body.” The first drop of rain fell on Rogue’s face. “You know, Marie, this isn’t just a substitute. I’ve wanted to touch you this way for a long time.”

Rogue nodded. Because anyone would choose this, if they could have something real. God, just stop trying to make this easy.

Storm was looking down into her eyes. “I know it sounds strange, but—the storm is me. Does that make any sense?”

“You want me to pretend,” Rogue said.

A flicker of hurt in Storm’s eyes, quickly concealed. “Or... believe.”

Storm drew back as the rain gained strength. Rogue closed her eyes, crossed her arms, started to pull her legs up, but stopped herself. Embrace it. She spread her arms wide and tried to relax into the rain. And this was just the sort of thing she wasn’t good at—she was probably the only superhero to have freaked out over sticking her own finger with a lancet in genetics class—but slowly the discomfort flowed away, and a strange thrill of surrender tingled just beneath her skin. The rain on her face was so soft that she found she could keep her eyes open.

Storm was crouching by the pile of clothes, her eyes dead white, her floating hair alive with lightning. She was untouched by the rain. If Rogue stood now and went to her, and pressed a hand against her lips, she could extend the rain to cover both of them—

Stop that. Stop thinking that.

But Storm was transfigured, a goddess, her eyes almost too bright to look at; and Rogue could not bear it. She closed her eyes and waited for the afterimages to fade.

Then something touched her face. She opened her eyes but saw nothing. A small touch, like a fingertip, traced up the length of her arm. The rain was fine and cool, but in it something else was touching her. A jet of water. A ghost body. In the shower she could feel the falling water make a star shape on her skin, but this was smoother, softer. The shape of a hand touched her knee, its five fingers distinct. Insubstantial. But the touch of the rain had the warmth of flesh.

Believe. She closed her eyes again. Something—Storm’s mouth—brushed her nipple, unable to suck, but licking, teasing. An oval warmth, Storm’s palm, moved slowly up her thigh, and ghostly fingers trailed across her breast. Storm’s hands moved over her legs, her hips, her belly, over and over, caressing and soaking her skin. Then they were gone. A last quick brush of hand or tongue against her lips, and she was alone in the smooth rain, fighting the impulse to open her eyes. Suddenly there was no rain on her face or upper body—something was blocking it—as if Storm were really there, straddling her on all fours, sheltering her from the sky. But it was only a negative image, a hole in the rain. If she reached up, her hand would touch nothing.

Rogue felt warm breath against her cheek, then the trickling touch of Storm’s tongue. The rain reclaimed her face as Storm licked down her throat and out along her collarbone. Then over her breast, circling the nipple, brushing it, at last flowing over it—lingering there until Rogue felt her own moisture starting to answer the water that licked at her skin. The rain covered her again, and this time she felt that it was all Storm, everywhere at once, enveloping her body in a more than human touch. Then something, Storm’s hand, harder now, moved down her belly and came to rest against her mound. Not nearly enough pressure, and arching up against it did no good; but the water streaming from the edges of that touch sent rivulets questing down between her legs, and she opened them. For a moment only rain there; then Storm blocked it and caressed the wetness with her breath. Suddenly desperate, Rogue reached down and spread herself wide.

Storm’s tongue slid slowly up between her labia, seeking her out—stopping when she gasped and put her head back. Rogue’s fingers clutched the blanket and rain ran into her open mouth. A slow heat was blooming between her legs now, but the touch of Storm’s tongue was as light as a mist. She thrust against it and it slipped away—then found the spot again, massaging just a little more insistently. Her fists gripped the blanket so hard that she uprooted the grass under it, and the water she squeezed out of it welled up between her fingers. She was on the edge, not quite able to come. Then Storm’s thumbs brushed her nipples again, and hands, tongue, rain, all fused into a single warmth. She cried out, Storm’s touch was real, the longing dissolved....

For a moment. Then it passed. Her faith was gone, her thirst was unquenched, and Storm’s hands were only water. Abandoned by pleasure, she closed herself against the rain.

“Please—Ororo—”

The rain stopped. Rogue trembled in the cold, but then a warm wind gently dried her and the clouds began to part. Storm was sitting beside her, caressing her cheek with a gloved hand. Bone dry.

“I’m sorry, Marie. I thought at least it wouldn’t be through clothing.... I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“No, it was good,” Rogue said, not crying. “It’s just. I want to touch you.”

And what was the expression in Storm’s eyes? Sadness and compassion, Rogue thought. Not desire. But what had she expected? She was in prison, and sex was a gift that Storm slid underneath a glass barrier. There could be no real connection between them.

Storm reached into her pocket and pulled out Rogue’s gloves. Rogue sat up and took them. They were a little warm from being close to Storm’s skin, and for a moment Rogue just held them in her hand—but the warmth was gone almost at once, and maybe she’d only imagined it. And then there was no way to put it off any longer. She put the gloves on, looking down at her hands to hide the humiliation that must show in her eyes.

Storm’s clothes alone were not enough protection. A finger might wander beyond a hem. But it was almost safe to feel, through gloves and bra and shirt, a rumor of Rogue’s hands.

Rogue looked up when she could control her expression. And Storm, who had, it seemed, been waiting, began to unbutton her shirt.

Rogue watched, astonished. Did Storm really mean for Rogue to touch her with only gloves between them, and danger along the whole length of their bodies?

Maybe she should have expected this. She remembered Storm having once been afraid of things, but they had both changed since then. After a few battles with Sabretooth, being naked next to Rogue could start to seem sane.

How far would she take it?

Rogue got up and walked behind Storm, the grass tickling her bare feet. Kneeling, she put a hand between Storm’s shoulderblades. Storm did not flinch.

“I’ll be careful,” Rogue said.

“I know.”

She gathered Storm’s hair in her hands and lifted it forward, exposing her shoulders. Then she unfastened the hooks of Storm’s bra, her wrists carefully angled away, and slid the straps down just far enough to bare Storm’s back. The clouds had parted to reveal the evening sun, though most of the sky was still layered with slate—and Storm was golden, everything was golden in the light. Rogue watched the liquid skin flow over the moving shoulderblades as Storm drew the bra off her arms.

Soon Storm was naked and lying on her back, on the grass, not the soaked blanket. Her body was framed in green, uninterrupted by fabric. Her nipples were hard but that was probably the coolness of the air. As Rogue stood looking down at her, trying to memorize every curve and hollow of her body, a spider slid down an invisible hair from an arch of grass and walked across Storm’s breasts. Storm glanced at it and let it pass, her mercy extending to all creeping things.

Rogue knelt beside her, balancing carefully. The least instability could become a fall. She looked down into Storm’s eyes, lowered her hands to Storm’s collarbones—and suddenly she couldn’t stand it. If she touched Storm like this, with hands covered in cloth, that memory would be all she had. Everything she had imagined would be gone, and the interior of a glove would always be the texture of Storm’s skin.

She pulled her hands back and stripped off her gloves. Storm watched her curiously but without fear.

She trusts me. Should she?

Rogue put her hands an inch over Storm’s face, then half an inch, then still closer, until Storm’s eyebrows almost brushed the ridges of her fingerprints. Through her slightly spread fingers she saw that Storm kept her eyes open.

She moved her hands above Storm’s body, not quite touching her cheekbones, her shoulders, her arms—miming contact. From a distance they might almost look like humans making love. Her thumb almost brushed Storm’s nipple, and her fingertip traced over each areola in turn. She held her palm above Storm’s navel, a slight rise and fall of her hand matching Storm’s careful breathing. Storm slowly raised her head to watch. Rogue pretended to stroke the inside of Storm’s thigh—close enough to feel the warmth—and Storm let out a rough breath, as if the touch had been real. She moved her hand to the air between Storm’s legs, stroking first with two fingers as if to caress the labia, then with one as if to slip between them. As if her touch could be transmitted through the air, as if desire somehow could arc across the gap.

Suddenly Storm thrust toward her hand. Rogue barely, reflexively, jerked back in time.

“Marie, I’m sorry—” Storm put a hand up to Rogue’s face, stopped with her fingers almost touching Rogue’s cheek. Rogue froze in place, holding her breath. Staring into Storm’s eyes.

Storm wanted her. Desperately. With the same hopeless longing that Rogue felt for Storm.

Rogue scrambled backward, stumbling sideways onto one hand. She clutched at the pile of clothes, skipping the bra, buttoning her shirt wrong and having to redo it, stuffing her shirttail into her pants and her pant legs into the tops of her socks and her sleeves into the wrists of her gloves—dressing as urgently and awkwardly as she might have undressed for a first love if she were human, capable of human contact.

And with the same thrill of desire.

They stood on the footbridge they had crossed before climbing the wooded hill. It was sunset and the river sloshed and muttered in its sleep. It would be dark soon. They should hurry. But a few hundred more steps and they would see the car, and all too soon there would be the gate and the grounds and the front door and the astonished eyes of telepaths. And their rooms. And their beds. And their lives. Somewhere between here and Salem Center, Rogue was going to have to face the fact that they wouldn’t be spending the night in the same bed, that there was no way to make that safe. So they lingered on the bridge, watching dragonflies intercept a swarm of tiny insects that were lit up by the sun like flakes of yellow fire. Watching the sunset, blue and cream and gray and coral in a marbled-‍paper pattern that, Rogue realized, Storm must have painted on the sky herself. The full moon was rising behind them, so they could find their way back after dark.

The setting sun brought out the warm tones in Storm’s skin, and when the sun slipped behind the trees lining the river, Storm’s hair seemed to glow in the fading light. After a while Rogue realized she had, out of habit, been trying not to stare. She leaned against the railing, putting her back to the sunset, and looked openly. Storm smiled and their eyes met for a long moment. Then it was too much, and Rogue glanced away, back toward the path they had come down.

“So, um... chimpanzees. You’ve been up close and personal with the great apes? Goddess, schoolteacher, and animal behaviorist?”

“Don’t be silly. I read about it in Jane Goodall.”

“Someday you’re going to tell me that this goddess story is just something you saw in a movie.”

Storm laughed, and with two gloved fingers tweezed a bit of dead grass from Rogue’s damp hair.

Jane Goodall. Okay. And Rogue had seen the battered field guides lined up on a shelf above Storm’s desk. Seeing her in these woods, it would be easy to forget that Storm had grown up in a city in the desert. To her this landscape was exotic, and if she seemed to know it as well as her own body, that was just something she had cared enough to learn. For a moment Storm had almost made Rogue feel she, too, belonged here. And yet how out of place they must look, with their long sleeves tucked into their gloves—armored against the outdoors, like two people pathologically afraid of poison ivy. If someone passed by now and saw them standing there, with Storm’s white hair and her own white streak, would there be any way to get from that to interracial lesbian mutant couple, or would they just look like members of some kind of death cult?

Couple. Maybe that was taking too much for granted. Rogue leaned over the railing and watched the fish that were hovering against the current in the shadow of the bridge. Storm, she thought, would know what kind of fish they were, and could tell her the name of this river.

“Where did you get the gloves?” she asked, turning to face Storm again.

Storm raised her eyebrows slightly. “The silk? Neiman Marcus in White Plains.”

“For this?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Well. I guess you didn’t really get anything on them.”

Storm hesitated, then said tentatively, “If they became soiled, then while they were being cleaned perhaps we could try latex.”

“Oh. Um, okay.” Rogue thought for a moment. “We’re not going to be able to keep this a secret, are we?”

“No,” Storm said equably.

“What are we going to tell people?”

“That we are together now, and if they find it troubles them, they should discuss those feelings with Professor Xavier.”

“That’ll shut ’em up.”

“Do you suppose?”

Rogue smiled at the thought of some hapless student’s muddled homophobia encountering Xavier’s implacable sympathy. Then her smile faded. “We have to be more careful. We should really both stay dressed—you know, just undress enough to....”

“Marie... no matter how careful we are, you know that sooner or later we will touch. It isn’t the end of the world. You can pull back. I’ll recover.”

“No,” Rogue said. “We have to do it. We have to find a way. I mean—what if I didn’t pull back in time? What if I—Part of you could always be with me.“

“Is that so terrible?”

Rogue shrugged, looking away. “Well, you probably don’t want to be in here.”

“Oh.” Storm looked at her sadly, not taking it as a joke at all. “Even now?”

And Logan would have died without asking that question. Logan would never have wanted to talk about this, about anything. God, be careful who you wish for.

“It’s better... and it’s kind of worse. When I... when you...” She faltered, trying to express what it had meant when Storm grasped her gently stroking hand and pressed it down, urging her inside... and afterward, when Storm watched her take off her glove and lick the fluid from her own bare skin... that glove might never be the same. “You know,” she said, and she saw that Storm did.

And yet. She turned to face the sunset, gripping the wooden railing with both hands. “I want to touch you even more now,” she admitted in a whisper.

Storm stood behind her and stroked her arm with one hand, putting the other around her waist. “I know the rain wasn’t very... satisfying. We will find something that can bring you more relief.”

“You can’t beat these things. I’ve studied my mythology.”

“Marie, I love you, but if all I can do is torment you...”

Rogue looked over her shoulder, then turned in Storm’s arms and studied her face intently. “You...?”

“More than I can express. And... for longer than I should say.”

“Then why did you wait?” While I taught myself never to hope you could want me, and rubbed your image threadbare in my mind...

“It would have been—” Storm looked down, then met Rogue’s eyes again. “It hurt too much.”

Rogue nodded slowly. She could believe that. And she wanted to say I love you, but it was trying to come out as I’m sorry, and finally she just put her hand to Storm’s cheek.

Knowing her glove would block most of the warmth of her hand. Even comfort through a barrier.

Storm covered Rogue’s hand with hers and pressed her face against it. She curled her other hand around Rogue’s wrist, and for a moment she closed her eyes. Then she pushed Rogue’s hand away from her face and held it between her palms. “Marie. If being with me only hurts you, then I should....”

“No,” Rogue said reflexively. And then again, softly, gazing into Storm’s eyes: “No.” Her unfulfillable longing had never hurt more than that moment—and it made no difference. She wanted the one who haunted her, the one she thirsted for, the one that she could not kiss, could not taste, could not touch, always to be Ororo.

The color slowly drained from the horizon. Bats wheeled in the air, catching invisible insects, and in the distance an owl’s voice inquired. They looked out over the darkness of the river and silently clasped their gloved hands.

~*~

“Come in.” Xavier looked up as she stepped into his office. “Hello, Ororo.”

“Charles.”

He was driving his wheelchair out from behind his desk, so she sat on the L-‍shaped sofa. He stopped across from her. On the coffee table was a silver vase containing a cut spray of Phalaenopsis orchids—paper-‍white, and almost odorless when she leaned down to sniff them. Pretty, but she preferred wildflowers. On a hillside in the woods there was a meadow no path led to, so full of flowers that, from the air, the Black-‍Eyed Susans merged into a brown-‍and-‍yellow quilt. She had found it last summer, about this time. If she wanted the flowers to be at their peak, she shouldn’t wait much longer.

She looked up at him. He still waited patiently.

At last she said quietly, “Why do you make people say things out loud?”

“Why do people feel that until they’ve said something out loud, it isn’t real?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Charles, what do you think about teachers and... ex-‍students?”

“I’m not sure I know how to answer that question.” He rested his head on his hand. “We’re not exactly a normal school. Unless other high schools have started sending students and teachers into combat together while I wasn’t looking. I’m sure the Board of Education could provide me with five hundred pages on protecting former students from abuse of power, but power around this place is... complicated.”

He paused again, as if in thought.

“Charles,” she said. “How long have we known each other? I know everything that people say to you is like a surprise party you have to pretend not to know about. You have been preparing your answer to this question for at least three years. Would you please tell me what it is, without the thoughtful pauses?”

“Not nearly so long. If you shouted your feelings at me like most people, we’d never have any natural weather. But, yes, all right. A touch, I confess it.” He sighed. “We’ve never had a formal policy. I suppose the policy is ‘don’t make me write one.’ Be certain. Examine your own conscience.”

“I have,” she said.

“Oh, I see,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Ororo, there’s a trace of the maternal in your attitude toward everyone, including me. And there are probably better things to worry about than whether you started to notice her bone structure while she was still your student. Everything contains traces of its past, and human emotions aren’t pure—that’s not given to us. The question is whether your history as teacher and student would dominate your relationship now, and I don’t think you’re likely to fall into that particular trap.” He paused and then added grudgingly: “Either of you.”

Storm felt cautious relief, mixed with only a trace of embarrassment. He had told her, soon after he brought her to this school, that he could no more help hearing what she thought than others could stop hearing what she said. Somewhat later she had realized that he probably enjoyed it less than she did. In time, she had simply become used to it—so much so that when she had sat in this same office, eight years ago, and come out to him, she had asked him why he hadn’t simply told her. That never works out well, had been his reply.

“I’m not likely to be fired, then?”

One corner of his mouth twitched slightly. “Well, you’ll have to hide in the basement with Hank and Kurt when the next accreditation team comes through....”

“Don’t tempt me, Charles. Those visits are exhausting.”

“And Warsteiner is an excellent beer, even if they do insist on dyeing it blue. But, no, you won’t get out of grading papers that easily.”

Storm looked down at the orchids again. “Does she....”

“Ororo. I will not play ‘ask Jane to ask Sue to ask John if Bill likes me.’ This is a school, but I’m not fifteen years old and I have an unfair advantage.”

“I shouldn’t have asked.” She looked up. “In fact, I did not. If you refuse to answer questions that I only think, then let me finish my sentences before you... tax me with them.”

“Fair enough.” He looked at the piano behind her with a slight frown, as if thinking that it needed tuning. “Purely as a general piece of advice, not relating to anything that I might know: non-‍telepaths like to make things difficult. You see the expression on someone’s face, you instantly know just how she feels about you and why she’ll never say it, and five seconds later your insecurity has convinced you she must have been thinking of somebody else.” He met her eyes. “You know the answer already. Let yourself believe in it.”

Yes. She knew. But Xavier only briefly matched her smile.

“She’s not me, Ororo. You can’t sit around waiting for her to read your mind. You have to tell her how you feel.”

“That’s hard.”

“Even for you,” he said mildly.

“Harder for her, you mean. I know. I may not hear the words from her that I would hope for. But... in time. I can wait.”

“I see.” He was searching her face as if looking for the symptoms of some wasting disease. “I’d ask you if you know what sort of pain you’re letting yourself in for, but I can see it’s far too late for that.”

“The pain has been here a long time. Perhaps now some joy will be too.”

“I hope so,” he said.

His tone was so bleak that she raised her eybrows and asked, “Is that what hope sounds like?”

He looked down with an embarrassed smile. “I don’t mean to be so depressing. It’s just that—” He frowned, trying, she thought, to work out what he could say without violating Rogue’s privacy.

“I’m not blind, Charles. I know the difficulties are not really physical. I’ve seen the humiliation in her eyes when people touch her through her clothing.”

“Yes,” he said sadly. “You know, I’ve tried to talk to her about coming to terms with what she’s lost... but so often words are useless.” He leaned back in his wheelchair. “We have people here with the most astonishing abilities... we can create fire, walk on water, bring rain, control minds, destroy buildings, and none of us can give her the comforting touch that baboons take for granted. Why don’t any of us have a useful mutation? Say, the power to console the inconsolable—” He stopped in mid-‍oration, not quite hiding a look of surprise.

She winced. “You don’t have to pretend, Charles. I know when I’ve slipped. You saw that I’ve been... practicing.” “Well. That explains why News 12’s Doppler radar might as well be a Tarot deck.” For a moment he looked almost embarrassed. “You know, mutants are very different from one another, but I’ve found one universal truth: any ability that can be used in sex eventually will be.”

“That’s rather frightening to think of.”

“It should be.”

They both smiled, but Xavier’s smile faded.

“Ororo... be very clear about your own motives. It’s hard to watch someone you love deteriorate. But beginning a relationship with the idea that your love can save someone...” He glanced away, then met her eyes again. “Everyone here has already been endangered by that mistake.”

She gave him a carefully neutral look, interested but not curious.

“Thank you for pretending, but don’t bother. It’s the worst kept secret in New York state, including the five boroughs.”

All the X-‍Men assumed it, at least. Once you knew that he was gay, it was not difficult to guess the rest. But as far as she knew, he had never discussed it with any of them. Whatever warning he might be trying to give, she felt sure there was a more important reason he was telling her this now. Rogue must know. She still retained some scrap of memory from Magneto, or perhaps she and Xavier had talked about it while the memories were still fresh, and she remembered that conversation. He must believe that Rogue would tell her now—that, soon, there would be no secrets between them.

Long silences were hard to break. He must be nearly certain.

Perhaps, she thought, it would be easier if she said it first.

“You and Magneto were once lovers?”

“‘Magneto,’” he said slowly. “It’s so easy to call him that now. As if the man I’ve taught you all to fight were an entirely different person from the boy who convinced me to skip classes to go to the Museum of Natural History.... We were more than lovers. What I’ve tried to make this school to the students, we were to each other. A refuge. A home. We were seventeen years old when we met, and as far as we knew, we were the only mutants in the world. We didn’t even have a word for it at first—we only knew that we were different. We used to sit up past dawn, talking about what we were and what it might mean. Whether there would be others. I think the only thing we were really sure of is that whatever gave us our powers must also have influenced our sexuality.”

“If only.”

“Well, it would make being out easier.” He gave her a speculative look. “These children don’t understand, do they? They don’t know what it’s like to come into your powers without knowing what a mutant is. Making up reasons, wondering if you’re a god or a demon. It’s already defined for them—badly. They step into a trap where we walked off a cliff. You know, I’ve had students ask me if it’s true you were a goddess—as if that were something terribly exotic and intimidating. But when Erik and I started thinking of ourselves as mutants, it was far more fanciful than that.”

“What year was that?” she asked. “If you remember.”

He raised his eyebrows in exasperation.

“The beginning of a mutant identity....”

“Can’t this sort of thing wait till I’m dead?”

“All mutant history is recent,” she said innocently.

He laughed and shook his head, relenting. “I don’t know when to say we believed it. But the idea—it was after we came to America but before the double helix. 1950? 51? If he were here, he’d probably correct me.” He stared toward the window, where, the twilight having deepened, his eyes would see only reflections. “But then, I suppose we weren’t the first to guess it was genetic. That stands to reason, doesn’t it? All those nights in his bedsit, talking about what we were—someone had been there before us.”

He glanced at her, and she didn’t have to say anything, because he would see that she understood. The first to wonder what a mutant was must have been Mengele.

“Everything comes back to that,” he said. “They’re good memories, those first few years, but... haunted. I remember—Erik once persuaded me to throw a piece of metal at him while he was asleep, to see what would happen. I took a silver dollar and tossed it onto his chest, and it just slid off his skin, as if a breath of wind had carried it. As if metal had somehow agreed not to hurt him. He looked peaceful lying there—even to me. But I knew that in the morning, that coin would be just one more reason why things should have been different. If even in sleep he couldn’t be hit, if a bullet from behind couldn’t touch him.... He was barely thirteen when his powers manifested. You’ve seen what children go through when they manifest that young. And he was already half-‍starved, his body burning itself up for that first surge of power. He had no strength, and he was given no chance to regain it. But nothing is more insidious than the need to believe things happen for a reason. He thought there must have been some way he could have fought back, that his power must have been given to him to to save someone. But the only person it could save was him, and only by making him interesting to that smiling monster.... I think of all of us, he would have had the most cause to be grateful for his mutation, if things had been different. The city was so beautiful seen through his sense of metal. But the first thing he had seen with that sense was the gate of Auschwitz-‍Birkenau. Imagine being blind for thirteen years and opening your eyes in hell.”

She had tried, many times, to imagine what Magneto might have lived through as a child. But to her, in the end, it was only history. In Rogue the memory had been a living thing. For six months she had complained of terrifying, incomprehensible dreams in a sense that she didn’t possess and a language she didn’t speak; and at times, though no one else noticed anything wrong, Xavier would stop in front of her, call her name softly, and tell her what year it was. Rogue said those memories had faded now, but they must have left some imprint in her mind.

“After the war,” he said, “Erik was brought to England, along with other child survivors, to be cared for. To rebuild his life. But he never told anyone the real story of what had happened to him. He was convinced that if anyone knew about his powers, he’d wind up in another laboratory. He was isolated by his secrets. Until he met someone who knew the truth without being told. And I....” He closed his eyes. “I was a young telepath. You know, people in the throes of a first love often have a little trouble remembering where they end and their lover begins—normal people, whose heads are as separate as stars. In my case....” Suddenly his eyes looked right into her. “Storm. Don’t touch her. Don’t think you can solve anything that way. The best thing you can do for her is keep her separate.“

“I have to take the risk. I take it already, just being near her.”

“Yes, well.... As I say to the students, use protection.”

“As the students say to each other: Doesn’t he ever shut up about the condoms?”

Xavier laughed, but quickly grew serious again. “Being cautious doesn’t mean that you don’t trust her. Look at it as an acknowledgement that every instinct will be telling you both to touch.”

She said nothing, but he replied anyway.

“The way to win her trust is to tell her how you feel and stand by her till she lets herself believe it. Recklessness isn’t a shortcut.”

She stood and walked behind the couch to look at the painting between the windows. It was an abstract whose tamarack green and blue-‍purple always suggested to her a bog full of flag irises, though the scattered petals never quite resolved into a flower.

“Don’t ruin everything trying to prove a point to her,” he said. “Or to yourself.”

She looked at the Wedding Palm in front of the window, admiring its gracefully arching leaves. It survived here, even grew and was beautiful, but the air was too dry for it to be truly happy. She drew moisture from the rest of the room and gathered it around the palm’s leaves like a blanket. Finally she just started to recite the scientific names of palm trees in her mind. She couldn’t shut him out if he really wanted to scan her, but she could refuse to talk about it even silently. Livistona mariae, Ravenea rivularis, Chrysalidocarpus lutescens, Chameodorea elegans, Phoenix canariensis....

She ran out of palm trees and started on wildflowers. At last he said slowly, “The worst part of being a telepath is seeing the car on the tracks and not being able to convince the conductor to brake.”

She faltered, the Latin deserting her. When she turned back to him she knew the sky was filling with clouds. “We are not talking about a piece of latex, Charles. How long do you think we could be lovers, and yet never touch? What sort of caution would that require? Should I say to her: look on me naked—from across the room? Make love to me through four layers of clothing? If she asks just to stand close to me and feel the warmth of my body, shall I say: no, in case we touch by accident? If she wants to run her hands down my shirt, should I insist on gloves in case a finger slips between the buttons? Is that what she deserves from me, when I have—”

She stopped herself. Clouds were boiling in the sky. Heat lightning flashed in the windows, and the wind howled in the trees. She could feel planes, cutting into the air. They must be trembling in the wind that she was making. It was not safe, it would never be safe, to let herself feel this way. She closed her eyes and counted breaths until she felt the wind grow calm.

“When you have what?” he asked gently.

She took one more deep breath and let it out slowly. “I have been very careful not to touch her,” she said. “In the field—not wanting even to put a hand on her arm through the leather—it becomes obvious. She must have thought I was afraid of her, when I was really afraid of betraying myself.... Charles, she hasn’t been a student in my classroom for four years. Not really. I might give lectures now and then, but we all know the postsecondary program is four years of basking in Hank McCoy’s genius. Would it have been so wrong to tell her?”

“Would you have been able to stop at just telling her?”

“I don’t know. I suppose... I did what I had to do. But who did it serve, to wait so long? Is she really any better off? I watched her... wither. I watched her persuade herself that untouchable meant unlovable. And I kept silent. If she needs more than words from me now... Logan once touched her so she could be healed. If I refuse even to risk a touch—what sort of love is that? To say I love her, then refuse her everything she wants?”

“Sometimes the worst thing you can do to someone is give him what he wants.”

His tone, more than his words, stopped her reply.

He looked up at her slowly. “Erik... liked to be controlled.”

After a while he nodded, answering the question in her mind.

She thought for a moment and then shrugged. “I teach adolescents about the Victorians. Do you think I can be shocked?”

“I suppose if you think of it that way, it’s common as anything. What with the leather uniforms, you wouldn’t believe the thoughts I pick up. But restraints are... outside the skin. What I can do is too real to be played with.”

She sat back down on the sofa. She was not shocked but understanding might be more than she could give. Still, she remembered that her first crush on a woman had expressed itself as a recurring fantasy of being caught together in a rainstorm she had neither caused nor warned of. Now she found herself aware of every movement of the air over Rogue’s body, of the moisture in her every breath. Her desire to touch Rogue with her powers was not only the displacement of a simpler need. Perhaps he, in the same way, had always felt the weather of his lover’s mind, and had longed to raise storms or to quiet them. An unsettling thought.

“It must be very powerful,” she said. “To be trusted like that.”

“I don’t think I ever saw it that way. I didn’t need some dramatic gesture to prove he trusted me. I could feel it. When he was working I could walk behind him and he wouldn’t be startled—that was all the proof I needed.”

“He knew the sound of your steps.”

“He gave me a ring,” he said. “Nobody made tungsten rings in those days—when he sensed it, he knew it was me. Rather more like banding a bird than confirming an engagement, but we take what we can get. No, the control... it felt good. To both of us. I’m reliably informed that that’s the usual reason. I know it sounds terribly violent and strange, but it felt—restful. There was no materials safety data sheet to tell us the long-‍term effects. At first I suppose it was harmless enough, but—well. Things changed. For Erik, it became a form of self-‍extinction.”

“And you still...?”

He looked at her sharply. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Helping someone indulge a self-‍destructive impulse to prove you love him? Persuading yourself it’s an act of caring?” Then he looked away and his face softened. “It was the only thing that made it stop. And even when I realized what we were doing to each other, I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. I loved him. And also... some of the things we did together with my powers allowed me to put off coming to terms with the changes in my sexuality after the accident. I felt that by leaving him, I would not only lose the man I loved, but my own body.”

He was silent for a long time, resting his fingertip on the control of his wheelchair.

“So we stayed together. As everything got worse. Like two men drowning because they cling to each other instead of swimming free. In the end... I saved myself. And for years we didn’t talk at all. I used to use Cerebro twice a week to see if he was well. Then one day I couldn’t find him. For almost a year, I was sure he was dead. But then those appalling anonymous tracts started to appear. Even if I hadn’t recognized his style... Homo superior. I invented that term. It was a joke. It was... a sort of compliment. I can’t tell you what it was like to hear Senator Kelly repeat those words on television.”

He shook his head slowly. “It’s not about us anymore,” he said. “He put on that helmet and went off to fight his own dragons... or windmills. But this blighted political landscape—we made this. Imagine that mutants had appeared on the world stage as two harmless old men holding a press conference, instead of a series of terrified children with powers they couldn’t control. Imagine we’d begun with words designed to bring peace, and not the rhetoric of Erik’s leaflets. We were there. We had the power to control the story. We were given the gift of decades to prepare, and we buried it in a field.... You know, New York City is Erik’s favorite place in the world. If he’d been there I’m not sure the second plane could have hit the South Tower. Imagine the difference that that could have made. But now it’s ‘terrorists and mutants,’ as it used to be Communists and homosexuals, and there’s only one reason for those two things to be mentioned in one breath.” He looked down at his hands. “You know he started building that machine before he knew about Rogue’s powers. Working on a plan for mutant liberation that would kill him—as if the only thing wrong with the world was that he had survived, and he would finally set that right. I’d like to believe that was the only reason—like those commentators during his trial, trying to draw a straight line between Auschwitz and the Statue of Liberty. But I was the one who taught him to seek peace through self-‍annihilation. Seven hundred and thirty-‍two other child survivors were brought to England after the war—look at their lives, and then look at his. If he’d never met me, he’d probably be running a repair shop in London.”

He was inviting her to blame him, and for a moment, thinking of Rogue on the Statue of Liberty, she wanted to. But she broke up the knot of anger, like a clod of dirt crumbled to powder in her fingers, and smoothed it back into the soil with her hands.

Guilt, she thought, can be a kind of pride.

She took a breath to offer up some comforting cliché, but a bitter smile anticipated her words. “Telepaths,“ she said. “I can see how useless the words are before I say them.”

“Go ahead and say it.”

“It’s not your fault, Charles.”

“Thank you. Someday perhaps that will start to seem real.”

“What happened between you—young mutants in a destructive relationship with their own powers? How many times have we seen that? You both needed someplace like this, and someone like you as a teacher.”

“Now there’s an image. Me and Erik as boys, safe here... sitting together in your history class.”

“Not together. Not in my class. I’d separate the two of you.”

He smiled wistfully. “Good luck.”

She studied his face for a moment. “You said you loved him,” she said. “That was the wrong tense, wasn’t it?”

“I always meant to forbid the teaching of Romeo and Juliet in this place. Somehow I never got around to it.”

“I see,” she said neutrally.

Xavier snorted. “Yes, well... someday I’ll find a dashing, dangerous man with a sexy voice, piercing blue eyes, and the ability to make silicone do his bidding.”

She would have laughed, but suddenly there was nothing like amusement on his face.

“If the moment comes,” he said, “don’t hesitate. If he leaves you no choice—if it comes down to him or an innocent—don’t think about his past. Don’t think of the effect on me. Just act.”

“You do still love him,” she said.

“That doesn’t change anything.”

She thought again of Rogue and Magneto on the torch—distant figures, barely visible through the railing, dwarfed by the spinning blades of the machine. She shook her head slightly. “It would not.”

And the relief on Xavier’s face was hard to look at. She averted her eyes so he wouldn’t have to see his expression reflected in her mind.

When she looked back at him, he was staring down at the vase with its arching spray of flowers. “Ororo, you may never forgive me for saying this. But here we are agreeing that love is no reason not to kill him. I can’t help thinking that someday we could be having the same conversation about Rogue.”

“Charles....”

“I know,” he said. “You came in here with so much love and so much hope, and Ororo, I want to be happy for you. But sometimes I look at her and think—four minutes. That’s how long it would take. Me, then Jean, then Logan, then Piotr. A minute each to bring about a permanent transfer of abilities. Telepathy so she can’t be surprised; telekinesis so she can’t be touched; healing so she can’t be stopped; strength to destroy. We’re dead, her sanity is irrevocably shattered, and she’s the most powerful being on Earth.”

“It won’t happen.”

“Storm, if she touches you—”

“She touched Logan, Charles. And Erik touched her.”

“Two minds that are anything but restful. You’ve learned a great deal of emotional control to keep your powers in check. For someone like her, that control could be addictive.”

“You believe she would touch me deliberately.”

“I believe she could convince even herself it was an accident. Or if a touch destroys the distance necessary to your relationship—she’s learned to touch people just for an instant in battle, to take their powers and not their memories. It would be all too easy to hold on a little longer, just to smother her own personality for a while—”

“She’s not Erik, Charles. And I don’t think it’s telepathy that makes you think she is.”

He started to say something more, but stopped, and sank back. At a loss, for once.

“A child is not responsible for the Holocaust.”

“I know,” he said softly. “I know.”

And it was no work at all, not to be angry with him. Because now she was certain. She had worried that she would betray herself—that as much as she wanted Rogue’s skin close to hers, when the moment came she would flinch away. But he had said all those things and the sky was still clear. Nothing in her had said it was possible.

She wondered, suddenly, how long she had been sitting there. And she didn’t glance at the clock, but Xavier did.

“You’re late,” he said. It was an admission of defeat.

“I wonder how many times I have awakened before dawn,” she said, “only to wait for her in the Danger Room....”

“I have no intention of sitting here listening to you wish you were with her.”

“Charles—”

“You’re in love. You can’t help it. Get out of my office. Go study history.”

“Mythology,” she said.

“Yes... of course... history with superpowers.”

She stood up, but paused, looking down at him. She still wanted to show him his fears were unfounded. But what could she say to him?

That Rogue wouldn’t have to struggle, always. That she could learn to let the touch she could have be enough. Because Storm had. In the beginning it had seemed unfair, impossible, that she could never touch Rogue’s skin. But she had imagined just being close, just touching Rogue’s hand through her glove—had longed for it, until that almost-‍touch seemed almost natural. It was, she thought now, just part of the bargain. In nature what is beautiful is often poisonous.

She could tell him that she knew, now, that who mattered more than what. And that for Rogue, the choice was even starker. That if all you could ever do was stroke a lover’s hair, even that would be something to cherish....

That he, of all people, should know that.

But she could see that it would make no difference.

She bent down over his wheelchair and kissed him on the forehead. Then she went out, impatient to be with the one she loved, to try to express what she felt. To build something that would not fit in the cage of history. Closing the door behind her, she left him alone with his past.

~*~

No lover would refuse... to melt into his
beloved and become one being instead of
two. For that is how we were when we were
whole beings... until, for our sins, Zeus
split us apart.... We have every reason to
fear that if we are not obedient to the
gods, we may be split again, and go about
sawn in half....
—Plato, The Symposium

JULY 1953

“Did it work? It worked, didn’t it?”

Charles lay still, trying to remember which body was his. He was, at the same time, aroused to the point of desperation and completely sated. He felt an erection pressing against the bed—not against skin—which meant Erik had come and he had not. He slowly dragged his senses back into his own body, like a fisherman hauling in a snarled net. “Yes,” he said.

“So? What was it like?”

“Um...” He stirred, and Erik rolled off him so he could turn over onto his back. “The same,” he said. “But... different.”

Erik waited, propped up on one elbow, but Charles couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“That’s all?” Erik said. “‘The same, but different’? You just became the first person in history to know what orgasm feels like for another person—something that Piltdown man probably wondered about in his cave—and your report on your discovery is ‘same, but different’?”

“It’s... hard to describe.”

“I should have known,” Erik said, sinking back onto the pillow. “Great explorers are always the taciturn type. I suppose when the first man comes back from space he’ll say ‘Well, there are a lot of stars up there,’ then shrug his shoulders and walk away muttering.”

“Erik....”

Erik stood up and took a towel from the nightstand to wipe himself off. “When you write about this for your memoirs, just mention me—that’s all I ask. ‘While the talent and inspiration were entirely mine, my assistant Erik Lehnsherr purchased Vaseline, mixed drinks, and provided a penis.’”

“Erik, one of us is too aroused for this conversation.”

“‘And performed other menial services.’” Erik lay down between Charles’s legs. Charles started to protest that his cock was still covered in Vaseline, then realized that was a stray tactile memory from Erik. He still felt disoriented and tenuous—stretched out between two bodies, like a wire between two towers.

Erik paused with his lips pressed against the tip of Charles’s cock and looked up, his thoughts an obvious invitation.

But Charles was exhausted, and not only because of the usual postorgasmic lassitude that Erik had never quite believed was normal. It wasn’t difficult for Charles to link their minds so that he could feel touch on Erik’s body as if it were his own, but until tonight, the connection had always slipped away from him when either of them started to come. After the strain of maintaining focus through Erik’s orgasm, his mind rebelled against further effort—like his eyes after too many hours of reading.

Erik pressed his lips down over Charles’s cock and sucked briefly, then pulled away, meeting Charles’s gaze, letting Charles feel how much he wanted to be controlled. To be enfolded in Charles’s power. To be taken. His eyes in the lamplight were kingfisher blue.

Relenting, Charles focused on Erik’s mind and silenced the motor cortex. It was easier than making him do anything, and when he felt Erik’s reaction to being held still, the ache in his mind didn’t seem to matter anymore. He let the paralysis fade, then took over Erik’s hand and made the long, sensitive fingers stroke his hip.

“If I hadn’t been expecting it, I’m not sure I’d have known that wasn’t my idea,” Erik said, staring at his own hand. “You know, you’d never have learned such precision without me to practice on. This is why you can’t find any others like us, Charles. All that wasted time driving around neighborhoods, scanning people’s minds—there could be thousands who never think about their powers because they never thought of using them in bed.”

“Erik.”

“Yes?”

“A suggestion.”

“What is it now? Every time I think you’ve reached the limit of human ingenuity, you bring home some new idea fished out of other people’s minds. Yes, by all means, give me the benefit of your wisdom.”

“It’s easier if you’re not talking.”

Erik touched his tongue to the tip of Charles’s cock, lizard-‍quick. “Shut me up.”

Charles closed his eyes and took Erik’s mind all the way in.

SEPTEMBER 1953

Erik looked up from the television. “Was I thinking too loud?”

Charles sat beside him on the sofa. “I’m finished studying for the night. But I did hear you inventing colorful synonyms for ‘junior Senator from Wisconsin.’”

“I can’t help being more interesting than classical mechanics.”

“I just think of it as Yiddish lessons,” Charles said. “Any news worth thinking about twice?”

“Nothing that touches us directly. Tailgunner Joe is still exchanging fire with the Army. Meanwhile the House Committee on Un-‍American Activities is protecting us from Protestant clergymen and Lucille Ball... some nonsense about her having once registered to vote Communist. Though I can’t say I’d object if they waited for her to leave the country and then changed the locks, the way they did to Chaplin.”

“She’s not bad. I liked Without Love.”

“You liked Spencer Tracy.”

Charles laughed. “I was fourteen years old when that film was released. Spencer Tracy must have been forty. Besides, that was three months after my telepathy began. I liked whoever the rest of the audience liked.”

“I’d better make a point of impressing the neighborhood girls if I want to hold your interest,” Erik muttered.

“Have you looked in a mirror lately? They’re impressed.”

“That’s useful, so long as you don’t leave the house. What happens on your way to school? The female and deviant population of Manhattan Valley must have its own favorites.”

“Around 119th Street I feel the strongest—” Charles stopped in midsentence and put a hand on Erik’s knee. “You know I don’t want anyone but you.”

Erik snorted and looked back at the television. It was the response Charles had expected. Erik always did this—fished for an expression of love and then didn’t answer. Being there, on a sofa in an Upper West Side brownstone, was his answer. It had not been given easily.

The news was over and the television was showing a cooking program of no particular interest to either of them, but Charles saw that Erik was waiting for The Man in the Iron Mask on Channel 9 in fifteen minutes. In the meantime he was not looking at the television but into it. Charles closed his eyes and tuned in Erik’s metal-‍sense, so that he too could look through the round porthole of the screen at the flickering magnetic fields that swept the electron beam across the glass. Vacuum tubes stood in rows behind the clear wood of the cabinet, and beyond that, cars were passing on the street, their electric wires showing through the steel like faintly glowing veins.

The skin of the world had been peeled back in April 1944, during selection at the gate of Auschwitz-‍Birkenau. Erik’s parents had been taken from him. And in his surge of grief and fear, there was a flash of light, the sudden rush of a new sense that made the metal of the gate seem solider, more real, while flesh and wood and fabric grew transparent. He had reached out and torn at the barbed wire, knowing, somehow, that it would respond to his will. He was sure that this power had been given to him for a reason, and the vague wraiths rushing toward him could not possibly stop him from opening that gate and freeing the people walking toward that distant chimney... but in the arclight of his metal-‍sense, they were already faint, already fading, had, it seemed, already turned to smoke.

When Erik came to England, he had found a kind of peace, Charles knew, in caring about no one but the dead. Charles had found him living alone in an Islington bedsit, making a living by repairing cars and sometimes radios; and if at times, carrying his mostly ornamental toolbox down the street, he had been wary as a hunted animal, at least there was no one else for him to fail. But he had let Charles into that little room, locking the door behind them by fusing the hinges solid. In time, he had let Charles bring him out—to a new country, a new city set about with towers of steel. And he had seemed to thrive. He began studying electronics—not steadily the way Charles studied physics, but in bursts of furious tinkering, the components assembling themselves in the air as his eyes remained fixed on his book. In the intervals, he took a core sample of the library by reading any book by anyone named Alexander; and some days he would just go to Penn Station, stand on the concourse, and let the trains sing in his bones. Also, he haunted the Museum of Natural History, and at idle moments would stage fights among skeletal dinosaurs he formed out of any convenient metal—childishly absorbed, as if he were continuing some game that had been interrupted nine years ago. And yet almost every night, they woke together, gripped by dreams in which Charles was hurt, killed, or taken away, and all Erik’s power was useless.

Erik had never yet said he loved Charles. But it was Charles, now, that he feared for; Charles who was torn from him in his dreams. Erik had given another hostage to the world, though he was sure that the world would eventually use it against him. There could be no more convincing demonstration. So there was no reason at all that Charles should long to hear the words aloud.

But someday Erik would say it. It would probably happen quite suddenly. In the beginning Erik had only made dinosaurs when Charles was out—knowing that Charles could see the memory in his mind, but never showing him. Then one day, when Charles came home from school, a pterosaur composed mostly of silverware had landed on his shoulder, digging its tines in painfully hard, and rubbed its tea-‍strainer bill against his cheek.

Erik was toying idly with the television—compressing the picture to a horizontal line, then to a dot, then slowly letting it expand to fill the screen. “Do you suppose it’s true, what they say about that man? That he and Roy Cohn are as perverted as we are?”

“Is that possible?”

“Well. As perverted as they can be, making allowances for limited capacity. How could someone like that work against us?”

Charles let the word us pass unremarked, though he knew that what Erik really thought was more like them. As if he needed to believe they weren’t like other homophiles. The notion of being a separate species—a short-‍lived one, evidently, given the chances of their reproducing—wasn’t entirely a joke to him anymore. Every now and then, during an argument, Charles was tempted to point that out, but he knew better. At 14, he’d thought that everything should be brought out into the light. At 22, he understood that every mind has secret caverns, hidden passages, skeletons bricked up behind walls.

“People are very complicated,” Charles said.

“That’s your answer to everything.”

Charles shrugged. “If you really want to know what goes on in McCarthy’s mind, we could drive down to Washington someday and find out. The Capitol must allow visitors of some sort. Even if I had to stand outside and scan, I could find him eventually.”

“You could make him vote however you liked, you know.”

“Don’t you think people would notice?”

“No,” Erik said, warming to the idea. “He’d have to find some way to explain it, wouldn’t he? He couldn’t say he didn’t know why he voted that way. He’d have to claim some sudden crisis of conscience. If he doesn’t know you exist, he might even persuade himself.”

“You know I can’t go around doing that sort of thing.”

“I know that you can. I also know you prefer to stare at the oncoming train and do nothing to stop it.”

“A coup d’etat isn’t the only way to make things better. Look at what the Mattachine Society is starting to do now. Helping people who have been caught, bringing together those who are isolated, working to—Erik. It’s not ignoring the problem. It’s raising an army. Who is going to fight for us if a whole generation of sexual variants are runaways shivering on street corners?”

“Is that what you’d say to Alan Turing, if he were here?” Turing, a mathematician Charles admired, had been convicted of homosexuality the year before, and sentenced to a course of hormone treatments. “That you’ll solve that little problem in a few more generations?”

“I didn’t say it was easy.” He felt the inadequacy of his reply, and Erik immediately pressed the advantage.

“If you had been there at his trial, would you have stopped the judge from rendering that verdict? Or would you have let them inject hormones into his veins for the sake of your conscience?”

Charles put a protective hand on Erik’s arm. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I suppose I would help him.”

“And yet you would stand by while they pass laws that could bring the same fate to thousands.”

“No one elected me leader of anything,” Charles said. “I like the rule of law. I don’t want to return to a state of society in which we’re all ruled by whoever happens to be strongest.”

“If you refuse to use your strength now, the day will come when you need it just to survive.”

“I don’t believe it will come to that.”

“Don’t be fooled by this comic relief, Charles. Asking Lucy to explain the henna on her voter registration card and making the Little Tramp move along to the next park bench.... Marx said that history repeats itself once as tragedy and once as farce. He forgot to add that farce is also deadly.”

“Erik... when they passed the Subversive Activities Control Act, you were convinced it was a prelude to concentration camps—”

“Look at it, Charles. Forcing Communists to register with the government? What is that if not a step toward—”

“Yes. It’s a step. It’s one step. But that was three years ago. The next step may never be taken, and even if it is, there’s no reason to think that persecution of homophiles will be increased at the same time. You can’t predict the direction of an entire country. Erik, if you put ten people in a room together, even I don’t know what they’ll do. It’s like predicting the weather—there are too many variables to begin to analyze. People can change their minds so quickly.... I wish I could show you how complicated people’s thoughts are. Then you’d realize that there’s always room for hope.”

“You see too much,” Erik said. “You see the complexity of a cortex, when history is as simple as a bullet. Individual doubts won’t change anything. Heisenberg says you can never know exactly what any electron is doing, and yet when the switch is thrown, the current flows. As the Rosenbergs found out.”

“People are afraid,” Charles said. He nearly added I’m afraid myself, because he thought that if he dreamed his own dreams and not Erik’s, it would be the thought of Soviet H-‍bomb tests that woke him in the middle of the night. But they would both sleep better if he didn’t refer to a threat Erik couldn’t protect him from. “There’s never been anything like this before.”

“There’s always something to be afraid of.” Erik looked back at the television. Nine o’clock. He smoothed out the distortion in the picture and then changed the channel with a thought. “God, Charles... pink priests and redheads. If they knew about us.”

APRIL 1954

“Did it work that time? It sounded like it worked.”

Erik pressed against Charles to help him sort himself out. One body felt warmth along its front, the other on its back; Charles split the two apart along that seam, like the halves of a zipper, then detached his senses from the body that was not his. “Yes,” he said, turning over onto his back.

“Was it good?”

“Yes.”

“Scale of zero to six,” Erik prompted.

“Erik... I don’t know. A five.”

“For me, too. The same this time.” Erik was fascinated by the fact that their evaluations of the same orgasm didn’t always match. He said he was trying to work out whether there was some subtle difference in what they experienced or whether, somehow, the strength of orgasm was something other than a scalar. Secretly Erik wondered if Charles exaggerated his own pleasure in order to flatter—one of them—Erik wasn’t quite sure which—but of course he would never say so, and anyway Charles forgave him.

Erik stood for a moment to wipe himself off, then lay with his head between Charles’s legs, licking a slow line up the shaft of his cock. He blew on the head for a moment, then paused, waiting.

A flicker of surprise crossed Erik’s mind. “Why didn’t you—?”

“You didn’t ask me to,” Charles said.

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you expected me to. It’s not the same.”

“You’re arguing with me about what I thought.”

“Yes, and don’t bother pretending you don’t know I’m right.”

Charles watched the desire to say something incredibly scathing form in Erik’s mind and then fade, replaced by a conciliatory impulse. Erik was trying to be diplomatic for fear that Charles might refuse to control him. Charles had only been trying to make the point that an explicit invitation would avoid misunderstanding, but for Erik to feel an obligation to be nice to him was genuinely disturbing.

How had this taken over so completely?

It had begun as practice. Charles had discovered, soon after his powers manifested, that he could control minds as well as read them. In those early days he had found other people’s thoughts intrusive, and once, unable to escape a married couple seething with resentment toward each other, he had instinctively reached out and made their minds quiet. It had frightened him so much he hadn’t dared to try it again. But he could see the ripples in the mind as words fell on the ear, the flickering impulses that made the body move. He felt he knew just how to tap the surface of the brain to send a message down the nerves, or press his hand against a lobe to silence it, as you might stop a ringing bell. As if some instinct told him how to do these things. At times, refusing to control the minds that he could see so clearly seemed like a strange, unnatural restriction. Look but don’t touch.

Erik had thought he was insane not to develop his abilities. When Charles protested that it would be wrong, no matter how natural it felt, Erik just rolled his eyes and said “We’ve had this argument before, and you were on the other side of it.” True. But it was one thing to argue for what they had both wanted. To take someone’s mind like that, without consent—

“Practice on me, then,” Erik had said, finally. “Do you think the world is safe, Charles? Do you think you can afford not to learn how to defend yourself? Do it to me.” And he meant it. To make Charles safe he would do anything, even this. Charles didn’t believe in the threats that Erik saw around every corner, but if Erik could feel what Charles could do, then maybe he could rest, a little. Maybe he could trust Charles to protect himself. Charles was tired of playing a damsel in distress in Erik’s dreams.

He raised a hand to Erik’s temple, not because he had to, but so it wouldn’t be a surprise when he touched Erik’s mind. It was like leaning in for a kiss: an instant’s hesitation asked permission, and a slight change in the angle of Erik’s head gave it. Willingly. Amazing, that Erik could trust him to do this. And not at all surprising that Erik was, nonetheless, afraid.

Charles found the fear and stroked it, first gently, then harder—like rubbing knots out of a muscle. The tension drained away so slowly that Erik didn’t even know he had begun. Then there was no fear at all, and Erik knew that his mind had been changed, and had what should have been a fight-‍or-‍flight reaction but couldn’t be; and what was left felt a lot like excitement, and that became wonder. Neither of them had realized what this would be like. There was actually no pain. For Charles it was bittersweet, because he knew it would last only as long as he kept pressing that spot in Erik’s mind. When he let go, the pain would come rushing back. But for the moment Erik’s mind was as calm as a forest just after a blizzard—pine needles iced solid, and everything stilled by the weight of the unbroken snow.

Erik raised his eyebrows. “Is this what you plan to do to your enemies, Charles?”

“No,” Charles said, and gripped Erik’s motor cortex, holding him perfectly still.

After that they practiced almost every day, long past the time when Charles could tell himself that it had anything to do with self-‍defense. The gesture of touching Erik’s temple became so familiar that when Charles raised a hand that had been clenched on Erik’s shoulder—only meaning to stroke his hair—Erik misinterpreted the touch. And Erik’s thoughts were all the invitation that Charles needed to narrow his consciousness, shut down the utterly unnecessary gag reflex and, with a movement of both bodies, thrust deeper in.

Charles couldn’t seem to remember now exactly when that gesture of touching Erik’s temple had fallen by the wayside. After a while, it had just seemed unnecessary to announce his presence.

“We never do anything normal at all now,” he said.

Erik sighed, then got up and sat on the edge of the bed. “Charles, whatever you do is normal for homophile telepaths. The average of a single number is itself.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Did you wake up this morning and decide to make the word normal a part of your vocabulary? You’ve never said no, Charles. Most of the time you do it as soon as I can think of it.”

“That’s true,” Charles said slowly. “But I think I do that because you want it, not because I do.”

“You do know the difference.”

“Yes. But I know it the way I know Planck’s constant, not the way I know fire is hot.”

“Well, write it on your hand, Charles—”

“I know,” he said, smiling. “There’s nothing you can do about it. But if I remember correctly, I actually like listening to your thoughts instead of turning them off. It must have been three years before we even discovered control—”


“It took us months to progress as far as fellatio—do you want to discard that now too?”

Charles met Erik’s eyes for a moment, then reached down and pulled the sheet up to his neck.

Erik laughed, looking away. Charles felt Erik make a conscious choice to humor his inexplicable whims this once—and he knew Erik knew he had heard that thought and didn’t care. But when Erik looked back at him, Charles could feel that the sight of him under the sheet was arousing. When Erik lay down on top of him, memories were welling up in both their minds.

It had been in 1949 that Charles walked into Erik’s bedsit for the first time. There had been no furniture, only a thin mattress sagging against the wall. Sheets and scraps of metal covered every inch of floor.

“How is it a bedsit,” Charles said, “if there’s no bed and no place to—”

The metal stirred, flowed, and resolved into a bed. Erik pulled the mattress down onto it as Charles stared.

“It doesn’t fall apart under you when you sleep?”

“No. Do you stop hearing voices when you sleep?”

“I dream other people’s dreams.”

“This would be a bad place for that.”

But Charles was still staring at the jigsaw bed. “I sort of lose control of it when I, you know. Come off.”

“It’s not as if I’ve never—”

“Don’t you think it might be different?”

Erik looked at the bed and began to doubt.

“It’s all right,” Charles said. “We don’t have to—”

Use the bed, he had been going to say. Because his head was stuffed full of ideas from other people’s minds, and some of them didn’t require one. But Erik had thought he meant we don’t have to do this, and had reacted with relief. Uncovering the attraction he could see so clearly in Erik’s mind had seemed as urgent as rescuing a man buried alive, and he’d been much too quick to let himself believe that Erik was ready. But Erik’s intellectual acceptance was crumbling now that they were here.

He knew he was the first person Erik had ever let into this room. For now, that would have to be enough.

“Show me how it works again?” he said, gesturing toward the jigsaw bed.

For a moment there was no reaction. Then the bed suddenly rattled and collapsed, the mattress falling. The pieces began to rise into the air, and Charles understood what was happening at the same time Erik did. Metal barred the door, fused to the lock and the hinges, filled the gap underneath. A sheet of metal formed a seal over the window. Charles reached for Erik’s metal-‍sense like a light switch in the sudden darkness.

He looked around him in wonder. The pieces of metal that Erik had collected had been dull gray and silver, but now each had its own color, scent, taste—something. The walls and the floor were invisible. In another room someone was playing a radio, the valves and the cord and the mains wires all glowing—and Charles couldn’t help being fascinated when he realized he was seeing electromagnetism.

Erik was visible as a belt buckle, a zipper, the eyelets of his boots, the pack of razorblades he always carried; audible as ragged breaths that suddenly drew closer. Then Erik was pressed against him, his body warm even through clothes, his thoughts at that range overwhelmingly strong. Charles stood perfectly still for a moment, because Erik didn’t like to be touched, and he wasn’t sure if, even now, the rules had changed. But when he dared to stroke Erik’s back, he could feel Erik relax into his touch, his mind growing calmer.

“You’re safe,” Charles said. “We’re safe”—but the words meant nothing. Only his warmth and the touch of his hands could get through. It was comfort and then it was something more—and this couldn’t possibly be a good idea now, but Erik’s desire was unfolding inside him, and he couldn’t think of anything else. He pulled up Erik’s shirt and ran his hands over the curve of his back, over the skin, smooth and hot, and already it seemed that there was no air at all in the room. But they were too close to do anything—they would have to pull away even to kiss—and he didn’t want to disturb whatever delicate balance of forces allowed Erik to be there. Gently, experimentally, he shifted his hips forward so that Erik’s cock rubbed against his thigh, and gasped as Erik’s reaction to that faint, faint pressure burst into his mind.

It had been far clumsier than the way Erik rubbed against him now, on a wooden bed as solid as a monument—all mortised, because the nails in their first one had sometimes assumed a threatening shape in Erik’s dreams. Erik’s movements were slow and controlled, not quite enough to bring about the shuddering release that they had eventually found in the darkness of Erik’s bedsit. Charles could feel that Erik wanted him to break, to become desperate, and he did—pressing up against him urgently and moaning into his mouth.

Erik pulled away with a flicker of triumph, then slid down between his legs, pulled back the sheet, and took him in. Charles put his head back and ran his fingers through Erik’s hair. He could hear Erik assessing reactions, choosing the right touch and gauging the right moment—solving him like a problem in physics—while at the same time the taste way Charles’s cock filled his mouth made him grip Charles’s thigh and suck harder. Deeper, underneath the mask of consciousness, Charles could hear the faint continuo of pain, and he knew Erik longed for him to take it away—but he wanted Erik’s mind like this, with all of its strata intact. All of him, everything; and the layers of Erik’s mind were blurring now, starting to run together, roaring like a seashell held up to the ear, and Erik’s mouth and Erik’s mind became a single warmth—

Suddenly Erik pulled away. Charles thrust his hips, seeking Erik’s mouth, but Erik pinned him to the bed with both hands.

“What do you want?” Erik said.

To feel Erik’s mouth around his cock again. To sink his hook deep into Erik’s mind and pull him down.

“Remember that,” Erik said, and lowered his head again to take him in.

DECEMBER 1954

“Is it true? About McCarthy? They censured him?” Charles stopped in the doorway. “It is true.”

Erik looked up from the radio he had been disassembling. “Is there any use in my saying anything at all?”

“When you say things out loud, I know it’s all right to reply to them. What did they say?”

“Something about ‘conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions.’ I think if they’d taken a few more months, they could have thought of an even weaker way of putting it.”

“They also said he ‘tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.’”

“If you already knew—”

“It’s on the radio next door right now. And it’s no use pretending you’re not pleased.”

“I’m delighted he’s been humiliated. I hope they’ll put him in the stocks next. But you can’t believe this changes anything.”

“People’s minds have changed. Since the Army hearings—no, Erik, not completely. Nothing’s entirely anything. But I can feel the difference. They’ve realized that things had gone too far—”

“Do they think any differently about us?”

“No,” Charles admitted. Even now, he couldn’t stand to look too closely at what other people thought of homophiles. It was one reason he liked cities—there was always another mind in range for him to switch to if those thoughts came too close to the surface. “But this shows that things can change for the better.”

“I see. So you’ve deduced the possibility of an improvement and already you’re preparing to make sure the government has your name on its list by subscribing to that ridiculous homophile magazine—”

“Erik. We’ve talked about this. I’m sure there’s a list. There must be hundreds of thousands of names on it. They’re only going to single out the ones that they think are security risks. Since I’m not likely to be seduced by one of those beautiful boy agents the Soviets are supposed to have, or blackmailed into revealing nuclear secrets—”

“Yes, how would a telepathic physics student know anything about atomic weapons?”

“You know what I mean. We’re not interesting enough to draw attention.”

“We’re not ordinary enough to survive it.” Erik looked back at the radio and gestured, and five tubes rose out of their sockets. Charles knew perfectly well he didn’t need to move his hands to use his powers. Once when their car had refused to start—on the morning of Charles’s ill-‍fated attempt to teach Erik to ski—he had turned the engine over while leaning against the car with both hands thrust deep into his pockets. But when they were alone, he nearly always used those gratuitous stage-‍magic flourishes—showing off for no one but Charles, who, after all, knew how his power worked as well as he did. When he made a transistor walk across the table on its three pins like an H.G. Wells Martian, you didn’t have to be a telepath to see that he would like to have an audience.

“Maybe someday we’ll be able to tell people the truth,” Charles said. “I mean the whole truth.”

“You’re not serious.” The tubes spun slowly to a landing on the desk.

“We don’t have to be at odds with the rest of the world, Erik. Imagine that we go on television—you can show them how you make the sugar tongs walk—”

“And you can show them how you make humans walk.”

“I know. It’s more frightening. But what if we helped people? Think of what we could do in the case of a bank robbery. You could stop bullets, I could make robbers surrender. We just need to make sure everyone thinks of Superman comics and not atomic-‍mutant movies. They won’t have to be afraid of us if we show them we’re on their side.”

“And are you?” Erik said, examining a resistor in his hand. “On their side?”

“We both are,” Charles said quietly. “Erik, I’ve heard you talk about Soviet anti-‍Semitism—”

“Do you think that makes a difference?” Erik met his eyes and spoke with withering contempt. “You think as long as we’re sufficiently anti-‍Communist, we’ll be allowed to live our deviant lives in peace?”

“I think we can—”

“We’re not the Rosenbergs, Charles! We’re the bomb. We’re too powerful not to control. Let’s take over the government, you and me. Who is going to stop us? The villagers had better start sharpening their wooden stakes. Let’s build an A-‍bomb—you read Oppenheimer’s mind and I’ll find out if this country’s supply of plutonium is protected from being levitated out of its enclosure by someone who can ignore bullets. If the American government finds out what we can do, they will know their survival depends on controlling us, and they will be correct. There is no rule of law when individuals have as much power as governments. When we are discovered, there are two possible outcomes. We win—by any available means—or we both die in laboratories.”

“Erik....”

“Don’t do that.”

“I don’t—”

“I used the word ‘laboratories’ and now you’re about to start soothing me instead of arguing with me. This isn’t a nightmare, Charles. My eyes are open.”

“I wasn’t....” Charles stopped and looked down at the floor, covering his mouth with one hand.

“Oh, what is it now, Charles?”

“It’s irritating, having your mind read.”

Erik’s hand tensed on the radio cabinet for a moment. Then relaxed. One corner of his mouth curled in a smile. “You get used to it.”

Charles exhaled slowly. “All right. Look... the plutonium may not be safe from you now, but as soon as they find out about us, it will be. They’ll find some way to block my powers. And not everything has to be a conflict. We can coexist. We can....” He closed his eyes. “Is there any use in my saying anything at all?”

“You think the world is a Rorshach blot in which I only see the past—”

“No, I think you’re incapable of admitting you were wrong, and that it’s probably genetic.” He opened his eyes again. “Look, as long as there’s no one else who can read minds or control metal, we can suit ourselves. But there are homophiles being arrested in raids every day now—”

“You admit it’s getting worse.”

“Only as long as we let it. There are millions of us, Erik. And thanks to Kinsey, I’m not the only one who knows that. People are going to realize that if we all stand up, there aren’t enough prisons and hospitals to hold us all.”

“Charles, tell me you’re not planning to start a New York chapter of the Mattachine Society.”

“If someone does, I’ll go to the meetings. And so will you,” he said. “You’ll tell yourself you’re only there to keep me from doing something foolish, and your primary contributions will be sarcasm and scanning the street for police cars, but you’ll be there. You’ll make everyone wish you weren’t, but it will be better because you are.”

“And how will the poor humans protect themselves from your newfound ability to tell the future?”

“That’s all right. You don’t have to believe me. It will come true anyway.”

JULY 1955

“It didn’t work, did it?”

“No. I lost it.”

Erik gently stroked Charles’s shoulders. “Well. Give me a few minutes.”

Charles pushed himself up with his arms. Erik stood and put his hands under Charles’s legs, helping him turn over. Then he straddled Charles’s hips so that Charles could reach up and caress his chest.

Erik’s fears had come true, but not the way he’d thought. In the dreams that had clawed at his sleep, he had always found, just at the moment when they were surrounded, that he could no longer even make the attackers’ rifles tremble in their hands—an image easy to shake off in the morning, as the teakettle once again rose in the air to pour its contents out into the pot. But when the white and blue Oldsmobile suddenly skidded on the ice into the path of Charles’s car, Erik had been at home, watching a news program. The soldiers that stormed the house in Erik’s nightmares had become a young and rather diffident policeman who recited the facts briefly, who did not ask what relation they were to each other, and who asked to come inside and use the phone when he found his squad car inexplicably distorted—its radio useless, though its red light was still flashing out of a depression in the roof like the flame of a guttering candle.

Charles took Erik’s hand in both his and kneaded the muscle between thumb and forefinger, where there was so often a cramp now, but he knew that his touch brought no comfort. The same thought kept pacing its treadmill in Erik’s head: if I had only been there... Because two-‍ton pieces of metal did not hit cars containing Erik Lehnsherr. Charles had explained that it happened too fast, that there was no time to do anything. But Erik thought that with him in the passenger seat—even asleep—the two cars would have slipped past each other without touching. He was probably right.

Charles dragged his fingers down Erik’s side, over the ribs to the softness of the waist, past the hard crests of the hipbones and then along the outsides of the thighs.

Erik’s breathing changed when Charles touched his legs. The pleasure of that touch was mixed with loss now. For him, too, there was a line about the level of the waist below which everything had changed. He too was cut in half.

Erik had pointed the policeman toward a pay phone and rushed to the hospital, not knowing whether they would even tell him anything about Charles. Not family, after all. No relationship that could be spoken of. But that policeman had seemed puzzled, as if he was sure he had driven there for a reason but couldn’t quite remember what it was. Maybe when Erik got to the hospital all difficulties would just melt away, and he would know Charles was alive.

He walked through the door of the hospital and into a laboratory at Auschwitz. He couldn’t see it, but his metal-‍sense insisted that there was a needle coming toward him. What was left of his power kept trying to push it aside, and he was struggling for control, struggling to let the needle pierce his skin and take more blood so he could live another day. And Charles, from half a hospital away, felt his fear, tried to reach out and put words of comfort in his mind, but failed, and slipped out of consciousness.

Someone shaking Erik’s shoulders awakened him. He wasn’t sure how long he had been standing there. Somehow he forced himself to approach the desk, but he couldn’t seem to find the words to ask about Charles. And slowly he realized that no one was paying attention. The panicked staff was dealing with a crisis. For five minutes, all the elevators had stopped, and surgeons found themselves unable to move their instruments.

They didn’t see each other again until Charles was transferred to rehab, two weeks later. And even there, when someone picked up a syringe two floors away, Erik was startled as if by a gunshot. He tried to keep it from showing on his face, as if that could make a difference. But his presence left Charles feeling drained and helpless, and he knew it. Finally, desperate to drive out the images in Erik’s mind, Charles motioned him close and kissed him.

Charles should have sensed the nurse’s presence in the hall. But he had been careless, and they had been seen. He found himself telling Erik that it had been a near thing, that the nurse had been distracted as she passed the door and hadn’t noticed them. But they had to be more careful. Erik should go. And that night, Charles lay awake, listening to the news propagate through the night shift. He had heard about cures—about electroshock and radiation and even lobotomy. Alan Turing had killed himself after the hormone injections had ended, leaving no note, no explanation of what had changed. But Charles, despite his useless legs, was anything but helpless. Erik had been right. The skills he’d practiced would protect him now. He would control the right person at the right moment and stop the plans before they started.

By the next day he had realized he didn’t have to worry. No one was going to try to cure him. Everyone considered him effectively castrated already.

After that, Erik was a voice on the phone, asking about Charles’s progress in physical therapy, talking about the ramp to their front door he was building—“with tools,” he said, with a trace of amusement Charles wanted to believe was real. But he couldn’t be sure. If he asked what Erik felt, he might only make things worse. With the blunt instrument of speech, he couldn’t know Erik’s thoughts without changing them. Their conversation was hesitant now, full of awkward pauses, as if he didn’t know how to talk to Erik anymore. And without being able to sense the rise and fall of Erik’s thoughts, he could never seem to find the right moment to tell Erik what he needed to know about Charles’s body.

Then Charles was home—they were alone at last—and Erik knelt by his wheelchair. Almost-‍stroked the metal with a furtive little movement of his hand. Then ran his fingers down the sleeve of Charles’s shirt, feeling the new muscles of his arm. Charles cupped a hand around the back of Erik’s neck and leaned over to meet his kiss. Erik’s hand moved over his chest and down, and then, it seemed, away—not quite touching, not quite producing the feeling of contact. Then Charles heard the rustle of skin against wool as Erik’s hand stroked at the fly of his pants. And he knew, but only because he saw it in Erik’s mind, that his cock had risen, pressing the tube of the catheter into Erik’s palm through the fabric.

Charles took his catheter out before sex now, because he couldn’t stand the pulse of grief that went through Erik at the sight of it. If Charles had been anyone else, Erik could have said it didn’t bother him, and probably, after a while, that would have become true. But Charles couldn’t be lied to. To avoid incontinence, he didn’t drink fluids for hours beforehand, and so during sex he was always thirsty.

Charles ran his hand down Erik’s chest one last time, then brought it to rest against Erik’s cock, knowing just the moment when that would be welcome. He rubbed his palm over the head, then sheathed it with his hand, tightly enough to feel the pulse as it slowly grew firm. Erik lowered himself down and lay on top of him, putting his weight on Charles’s chest, where he could feel it. Charles worked his hand on Erik’s cock as best he could in the tight space between their bodies—not stroking but kneading, pressing with a rhythmic motion of his fingers.

Too soon, Erik climbed off him. Charles pushed himself up into a sitting position against the headboard, then reached down and pulled his legs apart so Erik could sit between them. He brushed his lips against the nape of Erik’s neck, where the hair was just long enough to be soft. Then he put his hands high on the sides of Erik’s head, over the somatosensory cortex. Closing his eyes, he imagined his skin thinning, becoming liquid, until it flowed out from his fingertips and over Erik’s body. Erik’s back was pressed against his chest, and as the connection grew stronger, he could feel both halves of that contact, as if he were touching himself. But his thighs around Erik’s hips were an alien warmth, like someone else’s body in their bed.

He moved his hands to Erik’s shoulders. The connection was strong enough now. Erik leaned forward to touch his own feet, and Charles let his hands slide down Erik’s back, over the beads of the vertebrae. Cervical, thoracic, lumbar. The spinal cord was a frail cable underneath that saurian armor. He rubbed his thumbs in small circles on either side of the spine, following the curve of the lower back, feeling the muscles give up their tension.

Erik was kneading the soles of his own feet. Erik had done that for him once, before the accident—massaged his own feet while they were linked, so Charles could feel it. Then, of course, he had spent just as long interrogating Charles about what he had felt. Charles had liked it. Prolonged debriefing was just part of sex with Erik. But Erik no longer needed to ask about the difference between their two bodies. One was intact, and the other a centaur of live and dead flesh.

Erik sat up slowly, drawing his hands up the length of his legs, then took his own cock in his hand. Charles curled a hand around Erik’s arm, feeling the muscles move under the skin with each stroke. His own body was responding with an arousal located somewhere in the belly or perhaps nowhere, a strange phantom-‍limb sensation that made him press against Erik’s back. He slid his hand down to touch Erik’s fist, stopping it. “Let me,” he said.

He saw doubt in Erik’s mind. But he could feel the air drawn into Erik’s mouth when he ran a fingertip along the underside of his cock, then let out roughly when he rubbed the head between thumb and curled forefinger. Clear and strong. No, he would not lose this connection.

He stroked Erik’s cock, slowly at first, then building toward the rhythm he remembered. With borrowed muscle memory he could touch Erik exactly the way Erik touched himself—the same motions fine-‍tuned by the same instant feedback, made different only by being his touch. It was enough of a difference to make Erik press back against him, pushing him painfully hard into the headboard.

“Is that—”

“Yes,” Charles said. He kissed Erik’s shoulder, the side of his neck, everywhere he could reach, as he stroked harder. Erik began to thrust into his hand—hopelessly awkward in their position, and Charles wrapped his left arm around Erik’s waist to hold him still. But he felt it too—a vestigial desire to thrust his hips and rub the cock that he should have been able to feel against Erik’s back. Impossible. But he could let go of Erik’s waist—his point made—and push two fingers into Erik’s mouth, tasting the salt, feeling the tactile memory of his own cock going deeper than his fingers could.

When he pulled out, Erik brought his tongue up underneath his fingertips, licking slowly across them, then probing the slit where they met. Then he took Charles’s fingers into his mouth to the first knuckle and sucked hard. Charles drove his fingers deeper, pumped them in and out. Erik tilted his head back and relaxed his throat, releasing a burst of memory that made Charles close his eyes and suck desperately at the skin of Erik’s shoulder. One last stroke of his hand, and Erik shuddered and arched his back and he, they came. Loud rasping breaths and the pulse of Erik’s cock against his fingers and then calm.

When he began to feel the sweat on Erik’s face, he broke the link between them. It would only be more difficult if he waited. He had felt so close this time that he would have come at the lightest touch on his cock, if there were any way for him to feel it. Instead he wrapped his arms around Erik’s chest, pressed his cheek against Erik’s hair, and waited for his arousal to subside. It was always like this now when Erik came for him—a cruel pleasure, stirring up unfulfillable longings. Mixing memory and desire. But it would be worse to forget what it felt like.

Eventually he let go. Erik got out from between his legs and turned, kneeling, to help him lower himself back to the bed.

He couldn’t fall asleep this way. He had to go put his catheter in. But Erik curled up and put his head on Charles’s chest, and Charles closed his eyes and listened to him thinking about wheelchairs.

While Charles was still in rehab, Erik had been gathering materials—scouring junkyards for unusual metals, and buying up bicycles that, he said, “smelled good.” Already his designs were far better than the chair Charles had come home in—stronger, yet lighter, more comfortable and able to be folded smaller. They were elegant to look at, glorious when seen through Erik’s metal-‍sense. Charles kept trying to tell him they should sell them. Erik might think his electric designs were still too cumbersome for use, but whoever brought the first motorized wheelchair to market was going to revolutionize the lives of quadriplegics, and probably get rich, or richer, doing it. They had capital and far more engineering talent than anyone else was likely to bring to bear. But Erik only muttered about the difficulty of adapting his designs to be manufactured by humans—a problem that didn’t hold his attention. What obsessed him now was an improbable thronelike chair with three wheels arranged in a triangle on each side, that could easily get up an eight-‍inch curb if Erik pushed it. The prototype was almost impossible for Charles to wheel himself in, but Erik said that with electric motors it could be made to work. The control circuits to shift the center of gravity as the chair climbed a rise would be tricky, but you could fit an amazing amount of complexity into a small space with transistors. Erik thought he was no more than two or three years from a wheelchair that could climb stairs.

But Charles was returning to Columbia in September. He couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The doctors had said he had about fifteen years before something, probably kidney failure, killed him; more likely ten, their minds had added. Not much time at all to make some lasting imprint on the world. So he was going to need someone to help him over obstacles.

Erik wanted to do it himself. After all, he could get a wheelchair over anything. And that way he would always be there to protect Charles. He would stand behind Charles scanning the world for threats. When hen anything startled him, the spokes of the wheelchair would quiver in readiness, lampposts invisibly strain toward his hand—and Charles couldn’t stand it. It would be hard enough to push away the thoughts around him without Erik’s fear scratching at the back of his head.

There had always been things in people’s minds that he recoiled from, but it had only been by chance that he encountered them. No one had known what he was. He was set apart visibly now, and every mind he passed informed him he was nothing more than an object of pity—admirable, perhaps; a veteran, probably; but broken now. Used up.

He didn’t need a better wheelchair. He needed a way to turn it off. When he went out, he had to wear gloves now, not just because his hands would blister, but because everything left on the sidewalk by dogs and humans—spit and phlegm and gum and feces—stuck to the wheels and came off on his hands. He needed a glove for his mind, something to keep filth from being tracked in.

Charles stroked Erik’s hair and watched motor control circuits shift and flicker in his mind. He had always liked it when Erik thought about electronics. After sex, when Charles was half-‍asleep but Erik’s mind was always racing, he would often build a circuit in his head and then imagine how current would flow down from the height of a battery into the pools and channels he had made for it. Or Charles could be studying while Erik took apart a defunct radio in the next room, and the crackle of Erik’s thoughts was like a fire in the hearth on a cold night. He would look up and laugh as Erik made the extracted parts invade his cabinets in a miniature war that ended with the invaders falling exhausted into their labelled drawers alongside their enemies. Then he would wait, marking his place on the page with a finger, to feel Erik’s brief regret at throwing away the case. Only when Erik had turned back to his workbench would Charles look back down at his book.

Before the accident, Erik had come home once or twice a week with the remains of radios cradled in his arms—wood and plastic and Bakelite and Catalin, with leaky capacitors or burnt-‍out rectifiers or output tubes that had gone open circuit; once, a little white Marconiphone that someone had thrown out a second-‍story window. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have the money for components. But Erik liked taking things that were broken and giving them new life. When they walked down the street, Charles had been able to feel how Erik longed to smooth dents in the cars that they passed—not caring in the least who drove them, but feeling sorry for the wounded metal.

If nerves were wire. If flesh were steel.

His heartbeat was strong in Erik’s ear, his chest warm against Erik’s cheek. And quietly, without words, in curls of foam around the edges of his mind, Erik was wondering if Charles would ever control him again.

“Erik....” he said, finally.

“I know.”

“It’s different now.”

“I understand,” Erik said. He was thinking that the things Charles had once made him do were impossible now—and Charles had to stop himself from flinching at the image of Erik sucking his insensate cock in an empty parody of sex.

He’d been concealing his reactions to Erik’s thoughts since he came home. A non-‍telepath might not have realized anything was wrong. But Charles knew that Erik never stopped being aware of his wheelchair. He could go to the next room and be invisible to Erik, but that cage of steel was always there, a constant reproach even in Erik’s dreams. From the moment he woke up, Charles could see the vision of an icy road and an oncoming car playing in Erik’s mind over and over in a thousand variations, as if Erik could atone for not having been there by getting the images exactly right. And at night, when Charles had taken out his catheter and voided his bowels and washed his hands and transferred himself to the bed, Erik touched him as if fingering the sharp edge of a broken cup.

Controlling him might help, Charles thought. If Erik could just remember for a moment what it was like not to feel this way, then maybe in time he could be healed. And for now, Charles could at least give Erik rest. But he was afraid. Because something in him wanted far too much to turn Erik off—to shut down the voice that he couldn’t shut out, that kept telling him that he was broken. He had always felt relief when he took away Erik’s pain, but he had been glad, too, to let go and feel Erik come back to himself. Now if he controlled Erik’s mind, he might not want to stop.

But he could never tell Erik that. If he admitted how Erik’s thoughts affected him, it would just be one more thing for Erik to blame himself for. So he had let Erik misunderstand. He had let Erik think his refusal meant What could I make you do for me now?—even though they both knew the control hadn’t always been about sex. He knew Erik also, unconsciously, believed Charles was punishing him, and the worst part was that Erik accepted it.

He had to get over his fear of controlling Erik. That was the only way out of this stalemate.

It wasn’t as if he’d do anything differently. He could be careful not to control Erik any longer than before, not to make him do anything he hadn’t already done. Only Charles would know that the reasons had changed. And his discomfort didn’t matter. Somehow he had to find the strength to give Erik what he needed.

Erik, sensing that something was wrong—through some slight change in the tension of his muscles, the corporeal telepathy of touching bodies—pushed himself up on one elbow, then lowered his head and kissed him. At this range, Erik’s mind drowned out everything else. Charles had welcomed that, once. Now he forced himself to tune out that strong, close signal, to seek out other minds, so that he felt nothing of Erik but tongue and lips and teeth. This was what other people had—this strange, flat sensation, the husk of a kiss. But he couldn’t give it full attention. He had to concentrate on not hearing Erik’s thoughts.

Hundreds of minds were in his range, if he could only focus on them. Throughout the city, people were were talking, eating, kissing, making love—longing, possibly, for some connection closer than the touch of skin. They didn’t know that God had locked them in their own heads for a reason.

A change in Erik’s thoughts brought him back. Erik had realized that Charles wasn’t really there, and was pulling away, lying down beside him, looking at him with increasing doubt.

“I love you,” Charles said, watching the words fall into Erik’s mind like a flashlight dropped down a well.

Erik closed his eyes. “I....”

But that sentence, Charles realized, would never be finished.

“It’s all right,” he said, touching the back of Erik’s hand. “You don’t have to say anything. I know.”

-end-

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