Sinope's Fiction: Gravity (Fallen Apple Remix)

Title: Gravity (Fallen Apple Remix)
Author: Sinope at (no spam!) gmail dot com
Rating: R
Pairing: Xavier/Magneto, hints of Rogue/Wolverine
Summary: In which winter bites into Rogue's skin, Magneto finds himself anchored by the past, and memories link strange bedfellows.
Author's notes: A remix of Gravity, by Penknife, for Remix/Redux IV.
Disclaimer: This is an unofficial fan work. No profit was made; no ownership is implied.

Cerebro should have been ready by midsummer's eve. Erik knew it, and Charles knew that he knew it, just as Charles knew why he'd delayed the final installations of wires and vacuum tubes. Erik didn't need psychic powers to recognize that the moment Cerebro became operational, he'd lose Charles to its promises of unlimited information and guidance. They would have spent the summer indoors, tweaking the positions of panels and power supplies, murmuring to each other in their pidgin language of gestures and literary allusions and wordless telepathy. Chilled air would have hung silent and crisp in the room, cooling the circuitry and isolating each man in his own thoughts.

Instead, every evening, Erik told Charles "a few more days," and they spent the summer nights outdoors, writing course syllabi and debating Erik's newfound interest in Continental philosophy. (Charles had mildly mentioned Heidegger's political affiliations, once. Erik wasn't sure precisely which strand of his mental reactions had flared so brightly that Charles closed his eyes in speechless apology, but the subject never came up again.) Sometimes Eric would wrap the steel bones of the building around the two of them as they lay together on the roof, and Charles would grasp Erik's hand and speed the course of time. Stars twirled in their astral ballet; trees rustled and sang with the night; the eastern horizon paled and blushed like a virgin maid. When time slowed to its ordinary pace, Erik felt each cell of his body quivering with delight, as though newly alive. Those mornings, he felt as though he'd slept all night and dreamt of happiness.

Science might say otherwise, but winter feels colder every year that Magneto ages. Still, the skinny girl-body housing him hardly helps. Rogue's lost in self-pitying reminiscences that she secretly imagines are quite poetic - and Magneto's given up telling her real poetry, because at least her adolescent pap allows him space to think - but a gust of damp wind sends an unpleasant shiver racing over her skin, distracting Magneto from his own memories. He wishes she wouldn't punish everyone else in here with these teenaged whims, although Wolverine's grumbling almost makes it worthwhile.

"Up in Canada," Wolverine mutters, "we invented fire. Damn helpful in avoiding the cold. Always knew the Americans hadn't quite caught up."

That makes Magneto smile wanly. "You go warm her up, then." At least the two of them will give him space to resume his nostalgia, as disturbing as it is to watch Rogue flirt with a voice in her head.

Wolverine's departure feels - inasmuch as anything feels any more - like the brush of coarse fur sliding away. The resulting liquid emptiness relaxes Magneto; he feels his consciousness unfurling, sliding into Rogue's raveled memories like a man's embrace.

More than anything, thinking of Wolverine reminds Magneto of his nagging powerlessless. Charles might have been happy like this, but Magneto's powers have always been physical, tangible. Now, he's left unable to contact his other self short of a takeover attempt (more likely to leave the girl's body comatose than anything else), and it's horribly frustrating, because he has so many delicious secrets to tell himself. Take Wolverine: he'd dismissed the man in the past as a lone wolf with more muscles than brains, burdened with too many morals to be interesting. Now, Magneto's come to realize that Wolverine is something different altogether, perhaps not even a mutant at all, and that - that possibility has given him many hours of intrigued contemplation. At the very least, Magneto recognizes a kindred spirit in Wolverine's reactions to the easy rhythm of a horse's gallop, or the mouthfeel of tea that's overwhelmingly strong compared to wartime deprivations. This one feels old, older than Rogue imagines, and too often he reminds Erik of the Americans he met as a boy. (Christmas in Berlin, searching for Magda and desperate for money; he'd learned all too well the street corners near the GI bars. Bist du allein? Brauchst du geld?, they'd ask with drawling accents, and he would nod: yes, I'm alone, I need money. The Americans usually fucked him more gently than the Soviets, but the Soviets never had that horrible pity in their eyes.) Magneto doesn't remember Wolverine's face from that time, but then again, he can't count how many faces he's made himself forget.

And now, as the wind seeps through Rogue's impractically feminine clothes, she and Wolverine are chatting about sex in the distance. Wonderful. Magneto's not exactly a paragon of chastity, but between a perpetually-thirty-year-old's years of experience and a teenage girl's curiosity when faced with a lifetime of enforced abstinence, sometimes it feels like those two talk of nothing else. Yes, Wolverine, you're strong and manly and virile. (Magneto really wishes he had eyes to roll.) Yes, Rogue, you're awkward and naive. "By the time you're done indulging your adolescent hormones, she'll be as old as I am," Magneto murmurs. He smiles to himself as he feels Wolverine huffing and stomping away.

"I don't usually try real hard to be nice to people who've tried to kill me," Rogue says after a pause.

"Doesn't Charles teach that you should turn the other cheek?" Magneto says.

Rogue treats him to a cynical laugh. (That's my girl.) "Says the man who founded the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants."

"And to the public, doesn't that logically make you good by comparison?"

She opens her mouth and closes it. Not fair, she thinks at him, hard. Then she says, "I don't trust you. Not even the professor can make me trust you."

Ah, yes. Charles's laughable attempts to make Rogue accept her new mental bedmates. "That's all right," Magneto says. "Whatever he says, I don't think Charles trusts me either."

He gives her a flash of memory: The two of them, reclining in a cramped airplane seats at night, the lights so dim that he and Charles could safely interlace their fingers and doze off against each other. When Magneto woke, he still felt the last threads of his dream drifting off in a knot of crackling explosions and distorted iron. Charles's eyes watched him unblinkingly; Magneto knew that he'd entered his dream and dragged him into wakefulness, and that if he said anything in protest, Charles would just give him a frustratingly reasonable explanation.

"He ain't like that now!" she snaps. (Magneto's always been amused by how Rogue's drawl deepens when she's upset.) "Besides, I wouldn't want to watch your dreams if I had a choice, either."

"Says the young lady who dreamt last night of young Drake and Allerdyce in a conjugal embrace. Believe me, I'd much rather be viewing the glorious triumph of mutantkind."

"Tough luck, then, 'cause I'm steering the wheel." She uncrosses her legs, then crosses them the other way, hunching into herself to minimize the wind.

Magneto is bored of this conversation already. "I'm quite aware of my limitations," he says wearily, then tries to distract himself by reciting snatches from the philosophy books that Rogue refuses to touch. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. The intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. . .

"Show me something warm," Rogue interrupts, her voice taking on that wheedling tone that American women seem to think sounds fetching. Magneto's unimpressed. Still, even tarnishing his memories with outside viewing appears preferable to the biting cold. He clears his mind and thinks back, far back, into the hot whip of dusty Israeli wind.

Haifa: sometime after the War of Independence and before the Suez War, those years when Erik tried to forget about time. The two of them sat on Charles's balcony, sipping sweet coffee with cardamom and breathing in the scent of za'atar on sesame rings from the bakery below. To the west, the afternoon sun glinted off the new dome of the Baha'i shrine, a dazzlingly golden dream built to rebuke the memory of wars. The summer air felt languid and still; caught between the dry heat washing his face and the sun-warmed pillows against his back, Erik felt himself melting into the bench and Charles's arm.

"I think you are," Charles replied, his tone so tender that Erik never protested the absence of reciprocation.

There's a cold, numb silence for a few moments. "I hate you," Rogue says in a sullen voice.

"Oh dear," Magneto replies icily. "I must have failed at my grand scheme to make myself likable. Will you ever forgive me?"

"No." Ghosts of fear flicker through the periphery of her memory, and Magneto catches a brief vision of looking up at himself in terror, surrounded by the whir of silver machinery. The moment quickly fades to a stronger and more immediate memory: English class with the Drake boy, watching him mouth adolescent secrets to Rogue across the classroom. She'd wanted to kiss him that afternoon, yearning for his lips with amusingly youthful desperation.

Magneto shrugs internally and sends her a memory in response. Charles's office, back when the carpet rose too thick for a wheelchair's easy movement. Charles had him pressed against a bookshelf, textbook spines digging into Erik's spine, and they kissed each other, fierce and wet and hungry. Erik brought his lips to Charles's neck, lapping the skin with licks punctuated by sharp bites; he felt Charles's muscles quiver with each nip.

The memory's a pleasant one, and Magneto cast modesty aside long ago; he's so caught up in the raw friction of clothing against clothing that it takes a moment to notice that the girl's huddling inward, breathing hard with dry sobs. "Cheer up," he says dryly. "I'm sure your friend Wolverine has enough memories of copulation to last you a lifetime."

"Fuck you," she says, and adds a silent And I will never trust you.

Perhaps, Magneto thinks, but not too loudly.

Magneto gave up resentment long ago; after all, the only person he can reasonably resent for this situation is himself. Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der taeglich sie erobern muss, he repeats to himself; The only ones who deserve freedom are those who seize it daily. His true body sits in a plastic cage, from what he hears, but he's hardly feeling defeated; Charles will make a formidable opponent to battle for this girl's loyalties.

And the game wouldn't be fun if it weren't challenging. He has a limited stock of memories to dole out to her - fragments of sunlight on barbed wire, skinny boys bending over in a Brooklyn alley - and some memories will never be shared. (Oh, my Magda.) He'll have Wolverine's gruff morality to overcome, and Charles's meddling, and the hazy nostalgia of the Cody child. Nevertheless, Magneto knows, he will win. He has every minute of every day to find the right weakness - the right lever to move this world. Rogue's self-pity, her nostalgia, her prickling sense of separation, her bitterness at having been denied rightful happiness - each emotion will become a delicate tool. Magneto will escape this prison, he has no doubt, and he'll make Rogue eager to give him the key.

She looks up from whatever train of thoughts she's been pursuing. "'Very well then, I contradict myself,'" she says aloud, emphatically. "'I am large, I contain multitudes.'"

Magneto's surprised that she knows the quote, and he raises an intangible eyebrow in amused disagreement. "'You are nothing else but what you live.'" She won't recognize that one, of course, but that's never stopped him.

Rogue blinks her eyes, shaking her head as though waking from sleep. "Well, right now, what I'm living is awful cold."

"Then get your ass indoors," Wolverine smirks, making Rogue giggle. She stands up, looking toward the red-brick warmth of the mansion, and a chill gust takes the opportunity to snatch the hoarded warmth from her limbs. Magneto forces himself to feel the shivers pass through him tracelessly, and he listens to Rogue laugh. When she smiles so fiercely that blood flushes her cheeks, she almost seems to forget about the wind.

finis.