Like A Rolling Stone

The bike shop is a squat brick building tucked into a corner of Brook Street, surrounded by old, wooden residences, only a few blocks away from the nearby campus. It’s a tiny building, and it shows its age inside, crammed full of bikes of varying size, age, and disrepair. The corners are dusty from neglect. Tires hang from the ceiling. Bike tools and parts are hidden underneath glass counters and are left hanging on rotating metal displays. The linoleum floors squeak underneath Erik’s shoes. The back left corner has two bicycle repair stands that are never empty. The dim fluorescents keep it lit, but the store relies on the sunlight flooding through its open windows to keep the place from seeming depressing or dour.

Earl has owned The Hub bike shop for the last thirty years. For a while, Erik only knew him as the loudest member of his weekly chess group. He was always leaning heavily on his cane, and he liked talk to Erik as if he were twenty years younger than him instead of ten. “You ever spent time fixing bikes, son?” he asked, once, as he swept up one of Erik’s knights. He smirked like he already knew the answer. His hands weren’t quite steady any longer, but his mind was as sharp as ever.

As a matter of fact, Erik had once worked as a bicycle repairman in London right after he left Germany. He had been teaching himself English then, practicing his accent as much as possible. He travelled around the city, going where he was sent, so that he could smile at demanding customers and work miracles on broken bicycles. The job didn’t pay particularly well, and Erik had struggled to keep himself clothed and fed while the rest of the city rebuilt itself after the war. He had enjoyed learning that his mutation had practical uses as well, that he could mend as easily as he could destroy. He hadn’t enjoyed much of the rest of it, the tedium and the repetitiveness, and it didn’t take him long to become restless, searching for something else to do, something better.

Not long after that, Erik decided that Shaw needed to die and that he needed to die by Erik’s hand. “It has been quite a while,” Erik had said to Earl that day over the chess board. “I’m sure my skills are rusty.”

Somehow, Erik still managed to end up behind the counter at The Hub. Earl didn’t have the strength to do it himself any longer, seven days a week, and he insisted that he didn’t want any of his younger, more experienced staff members to handle the job. Most of them were students, working part-time between classes and homework. When Erik asked about it, Earl said, “They don’t know what it’s like, yet, having all your best years behind you,” and Erik supposed that was as good a reason as any. There is tedium again, but he finds he no longer resents it the way he once did. The extra source of income is welcome.

The shop itself is unsettling. He finds it disconcerting to be surrounded by so much metal that he can no longer feel. It’s a gnawing absence, the unnatural emptiness of the world around him. It reminds him too much of being in prison, confined in a cage of plastic, unable to touch, really touch, anything. Except once-- once, Charles had visited with a chess set and a pair of books, and he held out a hand, and--

---

This is a memory Erik has of Charles:

An early morning in the mansion. The windows to Charles’s room are open, and a breeze rustles the curtains, smelling of freshly cut grass. The gardeners must be hard at work outside. The carpet underneath his feet is soft, an indulgence Erik doesn’t want or need. Charles is asleep, sprawled on his stomach. With the sunlight on his skin, he looks almost as pale as the sheets. He huffs out a small breath and rolls over so that he’s sleeping on his side, turned so that he’s facing Erik. There are pillow marks on one of his cheeks.

In a few minutes, Charles will wake, pull himself into a sitting position, and bid Erik a good morning with bleary, sleep-softened eyes. But for now, Erik can examine the curve of Charles’s biceps and the lines of Charles’s shoulders. He can study the rhythms of Charles’s breath and the exact shade of Charles’s hair. In the hard light of morning, Charles looks almost fragile, simple flesh and bone hiding the most dangerous mind Erik has ever known. Later, Erik will discover that this is truer than he can imagine in this moment, both the strength of Charles’s power and the weakness of Charles’s body.

For now, Erik watches him sleep. He’s unable to look away, as if something small and tender has crawled its way into his chest, keeping him here. It hurts. It hurts in a way that Erik had thought he’d lost many years ago. He’s not so happy that he’s found it again.

He pulls on a shirt and a pair of socks, and he waits for Charles to wake.

---

Erik looks up when the front door beeps. A customer steps inside. Erik has been reading the morning New York Times, trying to reacquaint himself with the minutiae of human news, the rhythms of a human life. It’s been a quiet February. The campus is empty of most of its students, and there aren’t many cyclists on the icy winter roads. Earl has been leaving Erik to his own devices, and Erik would rather not have too much time to himself. If he sits still too long, he finds himself reaching for the spokes of the wheels, the change in his pocket, the pen they keep by the register, the mechanical parts inside the cash register, and it leaves him restless and irritated.

This customer is young, clearly a student. Her black hair is cut short, and there are five piercings in her right ear. If Erik were to attempt to pin down her exact ethnicity, he would say she was Japanese, maybe Korean, but he is hardly an expert at such things.

She is also a mutant. The backs of her hands are covered in yellow scales, and her thrift-store jacket has a double-helix patch sewn onto it, mutant pride. Charles popularized the symbol many years ago by accident with the cover design of one of his books, before he had come out as a mutant himself. He always seemed a little embarrassed by it. Erik never fails to find that amusing.

“Can I help you?” Erik asks in his coolest tone. The accent tends to take most of the Americans by surprise, but she doesn’t even blink.

She points her thumb over her right shoulder at the windows. “Sign says you’re the ones who want help.” Earl put that HELP WANTED sign up weeks ago and gave Erik free reign to hire someone he liked. This girl isn’t the first person who has come into the store and asked about it, but she is the first mutant to do so. It’s early February, and students have filled the campus once again. The store has become a lot busier as of late. Erik can’t cover all of that work by himself.

“We are,” Erik says, raising an eyebrow. “How are your skills with a wrench?”

“Pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. I’ve been fixing my brothers’ bikes for years.” She sticks out a hand. “My name is Sandra.”

Erik sits up straighter and shakes it. It is no longer a mutant-to-mutant gesture, one of solidarity and understanding between them. He wants to tell her that she is beautiful, but he is human now, and it is no longer his place. “Erik,” he says. She takes a good look at him, and a flicker of something (recognition, perhaps?) flashes across her face.

“Nice to meet you, Erik,” she says. He wonders, absently, what her major is. Tom is a graduate student in the physics department. Terrence studies foreign relations. They both treat Erik the same way they treat Earl, with the teasing condescension of the young for the old. Erik finds is grating, but Earl finds it endearing. Charles would probably find it amusing himself. Charles always did love his students, regardless of age or disposition. It was one of his best and worst qualities, how much he could love.

Erik smiles, thinly. “The pleasure is all mine.”

---

This is another memory Erik has of Charles:

A lecture hall at three in the afternoon. It’s full of the chatter of the students, the kind that ricochets off the walls and seems to take on a physical weight and shape. Erik hides in the back row, not that it would ever protect him if Charles wants to find him. The helmet is too iconic now to be worn in public. The caution does keep other eyes off him, eyes that could get him in trouble if he’s recognized.

The room is large and old, and the seats are hard and wooden, worn smooth over time and covered in scratch marks. Erik has never had much need for higher learning, but he knows that Charles is as comfortable here as he is in the mansion. This is his natural environment.

Someone introduces Charles, another professor perhaps, and Charles himself wheels out onto the stage. He is familiar and yet, he is different, rebuilt into something older, calmer, sharper than Erik remembers. His skin looks almost golden in the bright stage lights. His hairline is receding, and his eyes are not quite as large or as soft as they used to be. The force of his personality still fills the room as soon as he enters it. Erik feels attuned to every bit of metal in his wheelchair, every screw, every rim, every axle, every nut, every bolt.

Charles smiles. It’s an older smile, amused and indulgent. He looks around, eyes scanning the crowd. The room quiets almost instantly. Erik can feel the shift in the air, all of their attention focusing on the brightest point, the most powerful thing in the building. Erik has never been able to turn away from it. There are times when he doesn’t even want to. The whole room holds its breath, waiting for Charles to speak.

“Hello,” Charles says, eventually. “I’m here today to talk to you about mutation.”

Erik can feel the room exhale all at once.

---

The work is not as bad as Erik feared.

Erik may not be able to seal snapped spokes or adjust the length of a chain with his mind the way he used to, but he finds that he still remembers how all the pieces fit together. He still knows how to put a bicycle together and he knows how to take a bicycle apart. He hasn’t lost that much.

And, to his surprise, he finds that he likes it. He finds that the touch of metal under his fingers has its own beauty and its own resonance. He never had a chance to appreciate it until now.

He doesn’t like dealing with customers. They have a tendency to ask irritating questions and interrupt Erik while he’s trying to do work. At least he can let one of the others handle the register while school is in session. They are far better at it, willing to trade jokes and anecdotes and offer up advice about air pumps and helmets when a customer asks. They also spend quite a bit of time chatting amongst themselves in a language Erik doesn’t understand, talking about professors and exams and campus-wide events with the shorthand of college students everywhere.

When the store isn’t busy, they like to curl up with their books and their laptops at the front counter to study. Sometimes they play music on the battered stereo. The CD player on the machine has been broken for at least five years, but Terrence likes to listen to WBRU, nodding his head along to the pop music and rap lyrics. He hums to himself when a particularly catchy song comes on. Sandra likes to hook her iPod up to the stereo and put it on shuffle. Erik learns the patterns of their days, the days when Tom has to hold office hours and the days when Sandra has to go to her student group meetings. He knows when they have midterms, when they have projects. He is forced to understand the minutiae of their summer research and internship searches.

Sandra sometimes gets into arguments with Terrence about the latest actions of the Brotherhood, about whether or not Pyro is justified in continuing Magneto’s legacy of mutant extremism. The scales spread farther across her skin when she’s angry, a bright yellow that crawls up her neck and around her fingers and arms. Erik sits in his chair behind the counter and clenches his fists, where the others won’t be able to see it. His anger has not faded, but he no longer owns it the way he used to. It doesn’t belong to him.

“Whatever,” she says. “You’re clearly never going to understand it, asshole.” This isn’t anything, Erik knows, just children playing at being adults, at knowing how the world works. Perhaps they know something of struggle and perhaps they know something of responsibility (unlikely, considering the price of their tuition), but they don’t understand the toll of decades and decades of living, of being stripped of everything you are until you are nothing more than a shadow of yourself.

“Whoa,” Terrence says, holding up his hands. They’re covered with dirt and grease from his work. “Don’t get so worked up over this.”

Sandra sneers, almost a smile, all teeth. Most of her skin is covered in yellow now. She has a death grip on her screwdriver. She is extraordinary. “Fuck off,” she says, and she reminds Erik of someone he used to know.

---

(There’s another girl who comes by the shop who also reminds Erik of Raven. Raven, not Mystique. She’s a pretty blonde student who likes to wear too many scarves and is always smiling and laughing. She has an old banged-up cruiser whose chain keeps slipping, and she always looks a little chagrined when she shows her face to have it fixed. It’s something about her nose, Erik thinks, that feels familiar. It might also be the falseness of her smile, like she doesn’t want anyone to notice her, doesn’t want anyone to see her as she truly is.

But Raven has not worn that face for decades. She shed it along with all her other human connections. Erik does not know why he’s thinking of it now.)

---

On Sunday morning, Erik tucks a chessboard and chess set underneath his arm and goes for a walk. It’s spring now, and the air still stings a bit, shaking off the last remnants of winter. The sidewalks are still lined with snowbanks, half-melted and shrinking, leaving the pavement wet and slippery. Erik pulls his coat tighter around his shoulders. The air chills his lungs.

They’ve only begun to meet outside for their weekly chess club meetings. In the winter, they would convene at Earl’s house, cramming too many people into in his tiny living room until they overflowed into his dining room as well. Earl’s house is old, wooden, with floorboards that creak underneath Erik’s feet, and it always smells like a bad combination of cat litter and Lysol.

Erik is the first of their group to arrive at the park, though there are already a few joggers winding their way along the water. The park was built next to the bay on the other side of a major highway, and they’ve just finished a pedestrian walkway to make it more accessible from the main city. The paved areas have remained clear, and Erik can see patches of brown grass beginning to emerge from the melting snow. He can hear the rush of cars behind him.

He picks one of the tables and sets up his chess set there. It’s a sunny day, and light reflecting off the water gets in Erik’s eyes and makes him wince. He pulls his cap lower to ward off some of the glare. The picnic tables are hidden underneath the shade of the nearby trees, which are beginning to show the signs of green buds.

Erik busies himself with setting up his board. He found the set in an antique store on Wickenden Street. The brass pieces were beautiful, undamaged by time, and Erik had liked the weight and feel of them in his hands -- alien and familiar all at once. The man who owned the store was named David, an aging hippie who grinned when he saw Erik’s purchase and invited him to join their little chess club. Erik, somewhat reluctantly, agreed. He doesn’t care much about the games themselves, but he can lose himself in the familiar ritual of it all, from the first movement of pawns to the tipping of the king. He can find comfort in it.

He frowns at his board, where he’s only managed to set up the white pieces so far. Once, it would have taken him a second to arrange the entire board, a blink of an eye, a snap of his fingers, as easy as breathing. The metal would bend to his will; it would want to. For a moment, Erik allows himself to indulge in the fantasy of Charles sitting across from him, their powers fully intact. Charles would be holding a piece in his hand -- a knight, perhaps -- warming the plated brass with his skin. They’d only ever played with wooden and plastic pieces while Charles was still alive, and Erik adds this one regret to his mountains of them.

He closes his eyes and lets himself feel the morning chill. His bones creak, and his muscles ache, and his eyesight is getting worse every day. What was it that Charles was always looking for? Ah yes, hope. Hope is an indulgence for young men.

Erik is old. He has bled himself dry. There’s nothing left to hope for now.

---

This is the first memory Erik has of Charles:

The sting of seawater in his eyes. A voice that isn’t his own in his mind. Arms wrapped around his chest. Shaw’s submarine slipping away, out of reach.

A man saying, You are not alone.

Believing it.

---

When Erik he tells Sandra he doesn’t own a bike, she stops everything she’s doing so that she can stare at him. It’s usually impossible to get her to slow down even for a moment. She’s the kind of person who takes on too much and is then left rushing through her work, trying to cram in all of her projects in at the last moment. More than once, Erik has had to stay at the store later than he meant to because she’s been desperately finishing up her responsibilities last-minute around the shop.

“Seriously?” she says. “And the big boss still lets you work here?”

“He hardly has a say in it,” Erik says. The apartment he rents is only five blocks away down the slope of a steep hill. A bike would only make his life more difficult. His apartment is the second floor of an old house, small and awkwardly shaped, and Erik sometimes winces as he climbs up and down the stairs. He doesn’t own more than a suitcase of his things, and his apartment is bare, stripped down to the bones. He doesn’t need to add a bicycle to the mix. It would just be one more thing to leave behind.

“What, do you have some sort of blackmail material on him?” she asks. She smirks, brimming full of the arrogance of youth. Pyro was like that, too. Pyro was always on the verge of burning the entire world to the ground. Erik always liked that about him.

“That would be telling, now wouldn’t it?” Erik says. He smiles, mild and pleasant. He turns towards the windows. It’s eight at night, and the streets are dark. He imagines the quiet, lonely walk back to his apartment. He imagines making himself dinner with just his hands, even in a kitchen full of metal. He imagines falling asleep so that he can wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

“Tom said you only started working here last year,” she says. “What were you doing before this?” Her gaze is thoughtful and assessing, and all of Erik’s old instincts prick up.

She’s a clever girl. It wouldn’t take much to confirm her suspicions of his identity. A hint. A gesture. A veiled reference. For better or for worse, she understands who he was. She understands the cause. But that doesn’t mean anything to Erik anymore, now does it? Erik smiles as harmlessly as possible and says, “I worked an incredibly dull corporate job until I retired.” He is human, and this is what humans do. They live these plain, mundane lives, and they enjoy it. They yearn for it. Erik will never understand Charles’s desperate need to save them.

Sandra’s eyebrows draw together in disappointment. What stories did they tell amongst themselves? How great had his legend become, anyway? “Really?” she asks.

“Really,” Erik says. After a lifetime of lies, this lie comes easier than most. He has been cast adrift; his history has been wiped clean. Magneto is dead, and Erik must keep him that way.

---

This is the last memory Erik has of Charles:

Jean lifts him out of his chair. He floats there, suspended, a whirlwind all around him. Jean is pure fury, her eyes ablaze. She is at her full potential. She is glorious and horrific all at once, something beyond human comprehension, an angel come to extract her vengeance.

Charles, fool that he is, stares her down. The wind gets stronger. Erik is sure that there is no way any of them will survive it. Not him, not Charles, not even Wolverine, for all that his mutation will protect him.

Charles turns away from Jean, turns towards Erik. He smiles.

And then--

----

The campus thins out after commencement, but it doesn’t empty entirely. There are still summer school students, grad students, professors, even locals, who still visit the shop because they need a new basket for their bike or they need a replacement for a flat tire. Terrence and Sandra are gone for the summer, off to internships in different cities. Erik doesn’t remember where they went. All he knows is that they can’t cover their shifts, leaving him alone in the shop most days. Tom is still around, but he’s desperately trying to put together his thesis in the lab and doesn’t have time to spend in the shop.

Earl comes in more often. He likes sitting in his favorite worn down arm chair, talking about what the area was like ten, twenty years ago, and he somehow manages to draw Erik into conversations about what it was like, growing up in Germany before the war. They find a girl called Erin who wants to pick up another part time job and likes to work ridiculous hours. She needs the money to help cover her tuition, and there’s an air of desperation about her, something deeply human and eager to please. She’s studying something called Modern Culture and Media, and she’s spending her summer working on some kind of project without funding. She can handle a wrench just fine, but she needs Tom to walk her through the most common problems they see.

The large fan they keep behind the counter gets a workout since they don’t have air conditioning. They run it so loud it’s hear each other over the noise. On the stickiest days, Erik points it at his face so that he can feel the breeze on his nose and mouth and in his hair.

Erik finds himself venturing closer to campus. While school is in session, he avoids it as much as possible. The students are almost offensively young, flirting on that awkward boundary between childhood innocence and adult reality. The first mutants they recruited were around that age, for all they wouldn’t seem like it now. Havok, Angel, Banshee, Darwin. Erik sees the mirrors of their faces everywhere.

On weekend mornings, though, when the world still seems to be sleeping, Erik can make his way through the brick buildings covered with ivy, over the neatly maintained landscaping, past new construction and ugly 70s architecture. The oldest buildings remind him of the mansion in Westchester, carrying their age and stature and yet still so very young.

Since the campus is so empty, it’s rare to see flyers or posters advertising events, but this one catches his eyes. It’s affixed to one of the glass doors into MacMillan Hall, nicely printed in full color. Erik doesn’t walk through the sciences courtyard very often, so he hadn’t seen it before that moment. He pauses for a moment to study it.

The poster is for a special Summer Lecture Series in the Biology department, featuring Dr. Henry McCoy who will be discussing new breakthroughs in mutant genetics research. There’s a picture of him included, much to Erik’s surprise, of Hank’s smiling face. They’ve done nothing to hide the fur or to mute the color of it. His bright yellow eyes stare out from behind his glasses.

Ten years ago, Hank could barely even show his face in public. Twenty years ago, he spent most of his time communicating with his colleagues via e-mail and over the phone. He gained a reputation as a recluse, and an old photograph of him in his early twenties was the only one in circulation. These days, Sandra wears her scales openly, and not even Terrence mentions them when they get into arguments.

Charles would say this is progress, that this is a sign that the world has changed. Erik would probably snort in his face. He pulls himself away from the poster and starts walking back towards the Hub. None of this concerns him any longer.

He has begun to redefine the boundaries of his life. He is an old man who works in a bike shop next to a university. He plays chess on weekends in the park. He lives out of a suitcase in an apartment on the second floor of an old house. This is who he is. He can start from here.

---

This is what Erik is not:

Erik is not a mutant. When he wakes up, he can’t tell which way is north without a compass, and he can’t read the metal composition of his front doorknob. He can’t sense the rush of blood through his own body. He can’t open his drawers while his hands are full. He isn’t comforted when he climbs into the metal body of a car, and the hum of the engine is not as familiar to him as the beat of his own heart.

Erik no longer plays with coins. He doesn’t twist them between his fingers. He doesn’t twirl them in the air to delight the children, to make Charles grin, to make Mystique laugh. He no longer carries pocket change for the sole purpose of entertaining himself when he is feeling bored. The coins are are dead lumps in his pockets, cold and inanimate.

Erik is not a lover. Mystique is beyond his reach. He’s burned those bridges thoroughly enough already. They are strangers to each other now, wearing unfamiliar bodies and unfamiliar skins. He hopes-- he hopes that she is well, and that she is happy, wherever she is. He hopes that Charles has his own measure of peace. It’s been so long since Erik has let himself imagine what happens after death -- religion is a hollow, empty thing to him now -- but he wants something better than this life for Charles, even if it is nothing more than a quiet, eternal sleep.

Erik is no longer a fighter. He does not show the world their hypocrisy or their hate. He does not rail against injustices. He does not try to make them understand that they are repeating the mistakes that were made years and years ago. He is a model citizen, far better than Charles ever was. He pays his taxes. He smiles at strangers.

Erik is not quite alive. He gets up in the mornings and he goes to sleep at night and he eats and he pisses and he works. But does he live? He was Frankenstein’s monster once, stalking the world in search of its creator, and now he is a ghost, lingering in the physical world past his time. He has the approximation of life, a mockery of one.

And yet, despite all of things that he has lost, all the things he no longer is, he finds-- he finds that he wants to live.

----

Another morning in the park, clear and cold. Autumn has arrived, bringing back the student body and the school year. The bike shop fills up with people once again. Terrence is graduating this year. Sandra is cutting back her hours so that she can work on SDS’s mutant platform. The chess group still plays outside, stubbornly holding out until Halloween before admitting that the weather has become too cold.

Today is a beautiful September day. Erik pulls his wool coat tighter around his shoulders and sets up his chess set. The weather is warm enough that the park is still filled with people. Children playing with kites, joggers following the winding paths, couples taking their dogs out for a walk.

There’s an odd number of people playing chess today, and Erik has been left without an opponent. That’s rarely been a concern of his before. There was a time when he and Charles would play games against each other that lasted years, a new move every other month, a prolonged tease of a game. It had almost been a relief when Erik had been arrested. Their games could now be compressed into only a few hours.

And for months, Erik has been sleeping through these weekly chess games. What did it matter whether or not he won? It was just a game, a metaphor, a pale imitation of the real thing. It didn’t matter any more than his leaky roof or the naive undergrads or the threadbare clothes on his back.

Now Erik plays to win. He delights in every captured piece, every perfectly executed maneuver. If this is all he has left, then well, he will make the most of it. He may not have gone out with the bang he always expected, but he is still here. He needs to learn to make the most of it. There are pieces of this world he is still discovering. The feel of a cool breeze on his skin, the sight of sunlight filtering through leaves, the smell of car exhaust in the mornings, the taste of good falafel. Such simple things, and yet, Erik had never noticed them before. He has never had the time. There has always been one more target to hunt, another mutant to recruit, another base to attack.

He looks down at his board. It’s still in the configuration of the last game he played, his queen standing tall in the middle of the board. He holds out a hand, ready to set up the next game, but then he stops. He frowns. There’s a ghost of a feeling, an echo of something that he already thought he lost. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It means everything. He holds breath and reaches out for the queen, stretching himself further than he has in over a year.

He holds his breath and--

He reaches out and--

-- and it moves.

FIN.