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Erik Lehnsherr is dead. Before his funeral, Charles Xavier revisits old memories. __ If there was a god, and if he was watching, he would have seen two drunk fools tangled together in the soft light, creating their own sort of heaven. He might have taken pity on them; they did not yet know they were doomed. __

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Charles lit himself a cigarette with an unsteady hand. He hadn’t smoked in almost twenty years. It was unbecoming, set a poor example — but he made an exception today. He was sitting beside the window in his study. The door was locked, and a half-penned speech sat abandoned on the desk. His black suit had been carefully ironed. He had to wear it far too often in recent years.

Always another funeral, another eulogy, another of his little soldiers in the ground. He exhaled smoke through his teeth. 

Dozens of other drafts were balled up and scattered across the ground. He had stayed up through most of the night trying to figure out what there was to say. Supposedly, he was the eloquent one, the sycophant in the nicely-tailored suit, giving charming speeches on the evening news. He shook the hands of diplomats, and he turned the other cheek when the crowds spat back. He delivered sermons with the self-assurance of a priest, laid hands on the sick and the lost, and fashioned himself like a small god — preaching about finicky things like love.

He did not feel like a god now. He felt like a man. He felt old. A headache pulsed behind his eyes, and his back was sore, and the tremor in his hand made it hard to hold the cigarette steady. Jean had made him breakfast — toast, eggs, and a cup of tea — which went untouched. He would let them go cold.

Erik Lehnsherr was dead. What was there to say about that?

The funeral was supposed to begin five minutes ago, and Jean was knocking very urgently against the study door. They would be waiting for him. They would look at him the way one looks at a god, and he would disappoint them. He would not be able to keep his voice from shaking this time.

He tapped his cigarette into the teacup. “Again, please.”

Cerebro obeyed.

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It was July in Rome, and they were drunk on Aperol. In their early twenties, both pretending to be older than they were, pretending the world was a better place than it really is. They had spent the last nine months working together at the field hospital in Haifa, in Hell, among orphaned children with tear-streaked cheeks and broken men and mothers with voices hoarse from screaming.

It had been Charles’ idea, heading to Italy for the weekend. Erik, always stubborn, hadn’t wanted to leave his patients for a moment, but months of little food and little sleep and little good had begun to gnaw at him. Be selfish for once in your sorry life, Charles had told him with a smile, shoving a pamphlet about the Tiber River into his chest. Just for a little while.

And now here they were. Erik’s accent had begun to slip, and his hair was rumpled, and he had slowly started to become human again. He was always so tightly strung, but the liquor loosened him up. Charles liked him when he was drunk. You could see in him, however briefly, the man he might have been.