"Torque": Physics at work, pounds versus pressure--when you twist something so far that it can't go any further without damage to itself, or to everything around it. The point beyond which bend...becomes break.
     And when was that point reached, exactly, Erik? Between you and I?
     1951. Wheeling along Avenue E with him by my side, all his usual fierce diffidence stripped away as he stares upwards, hypnotized, slant blue eyes devouring each new skyscraper from base to tip with the same hungry fascination. Hearing him hear the dull song of metal reaching out to him in every possible direction, all blind pings and clicks and hums, a different frequency for every type or combination: Steel over bronze, lead-glazed windowframes, fresh new blends and alloys. And hearing him think, reverently:
     *Ach, mein lieber Gott...Germany was a junkyard, Britain a bomb-site. But even there, with a crashed tank on every corner and bullet-holes in every wall, I have never seen half so many buildings made from metal, or around metal...so many different vehicles and toys and structures with a core, a frame, a skin of metal...*
     He makes sure to keep a safe distance, but I know he's pulling me along with him, subtly allowing his personal magnetic field to overlap with my chair's forward movement--increasing the current whenever he sees my arms begin to tire, almost without thinking about it. Old-World European courtesy at work. It's a typically grand gesture, as much arrogance as politesse, especially in the face of all he knows he owes me and my family. Of all he's always *resented* owing us, much as we tried to assure him we truly expected nothing in return but his own continued well-being.
     A dry mental scoff: *As though anyone ever expects nothing for something, even in America...*
     He was all but feral when I first found him, talent cleaving to talent as I felt blindly around from my high-priced hospital bed: Worse than Wolverine, in some ways. An animal in a suit, his shoes lined with cardboard, and only the barest shell of sheer good manners keeping him from pasting the amused Bronx pickpocket who'd stolen his landed immigrant's papers against the nearest wall with a well-placed cigarette machine.
     *Hey, look, I dunno watcha TAWKIN' 'bout, ya nutty Kraut bastid--oh, ya wanna make somethin' outta it, Sheenie? Huh?*
     One step away from murder, over a wad of creased and blurry documentation. He'd done it before, I saw--too many times to count. Shrapnel in the neck for a checkpoint guard who'd wanted more than money to let him through; two wires twitched together under the shell of an unexploded mine, just to the right of a truck-driver who'd spotted the number on his arm. Overturning jeeps and sending loaded-down soldiers hurtling back onto exposed and broken water-pipes as he hobbled his way through the chaos of that last night at Auschwitz, gaining hate-bred power with every step--until he reached the gates he'd once strained to pull down, and ripped them aside with a careless burst of force that almost ruptured his own half-starved internal organs...
     And yet: See just how generous I can afford to be to you, Xavier--me, the penniless refugee? Me, the monster child?
     Here, let me get you your hat, before your scalp begins to burn.
     //I'm not a CRIPPLE, Lenscherr,// I send, knowing well how he hates it when I brush his mind unexpectedly with mine. And see one quirked brow lift ever so slightly (pale grey already, threaded with premature white) as he thinks back, deliberately shaping the word/thoughts in English--his non-telepath's sending as careful and ill-formed and somehow *overlarge* as a child's first chalkboard lesson--
     //Of course you are not. I am well aware of z--*th*--zTHat.//
     (*Und I am nod a nurzmaid, eizer.*)
     Strange, how all his hard-won fluency always seemed to slip away whenever he sensed my mental eyes upon him--watching him from the inside, feeling vainly and instinctually along the surface of his surprisingly strong mental shields for any uncaulked fissures. "Spying" on him, as he prefers to put it, even now.
     *Are you rummaging around in here, Charles? Whatever for?*
     But no. The word wasn't "rummaging"...
     Aloud: "Zis is a beeyoudiful coundry uff yours, Charles."
     "BeAUTiful, Erik."
     Rolling those eyes at my tone, so haughtily--Lord, but he still hated to be *told* anything: Where to go, where to stand, if...let alone how...to talk. And snapping back, quickly--
     "BeAUTiful, ja. I *underztand*."
     //And I KNOW you understand, Erik.//
     //Ja, und I *know* you know...//
     *...zo get out uff my HEAD, you Gottdamn rich American--*
     (cripple)
     I give him a level stare, refusing to call attention to the implication; he stares back for a long moment, undeterred--then lets his gaze drop again. And sighs.
     "You know," he says, finally, "if I continue to learn English only from you, Charles...you und I vill end up zounding exACTly ze same."
     '51 to 2000, then, as dream-memory gives way to reality. I lie here in my bed at the School, my talent dimming to the edge of sleep--and find myself still feeling around for him, automatically. As though what little is left of "my" Erik, the old man (only two scant years older than I) who calls himself Magneto, were still some psychic touchstone for me to sharpen myself against in the gathering darkness. The one person I know, inside and out, who will always form a safe haven for my restless soul--even now, when we supposedly hate each other.
     Stranded alone in his whispery plastic prison, letting his failure chafe him to sleep each night like a hairshirt of his own construction: Delicious dreams of revenge, of victory. Metal's song, reduced to a distant subsonic hum of iron filings in the blood. His guards'. His own.
     I was in the hospital for tests, that year we first met, yet again; my parents would pay for every test known to humankind before they finally accepted that while everything else was in perfect order, my legs would never work again. Not polio, or MS, or some odd degeneration of the spinal cord--simply my mutation, expressing itself at the moment of impact. Giving with one hand, and taking with the other.
     Such a central question, that: The foundation of all my research, one way or another. Emotional stress triggers to talent, yes--but does it wait, somehow, until we need it to appear? How could it possibly KNOW?
     If Erik had never gone to Auschwitz, how long would it have been before *his* talent showed itself? Before it...
     ...HAD to?
     I had just turned seventeen. He had just turned nineteen. And as the pickpocket taunted him, I *felt* him, five stories below. Felt his pain, his helplessness in the face of a language he'd never learnt: The many-layered grammar of unapologetic plenty, of all-American peacetime. Skinless, skinny, too-thin boy turned too-thin man, crammed full to bursting of things too heavy to carry, too hard to hide; I knew his mind, in that one touch, as though it were my own. Felt him feel ME, and turn to look, as though I were there in the room with him.
     And I--
     --I *made* the man give Erik's papers back, before I'd even thought the idea through: Dug my mental fingers deep into his medulla oblongata and turned him, walked him, used him like a cheap tin toy. Then screw-hooked myself into his Broca's area like some mental parasite, and MADE him tell Erik where to find me.
     //I broke my vows for you, old friend,// I find myself sending, across the miles. //Before I even knew what they were.//
     Idiot. As though he were even awake to hear you, let alone inclined to answer.
     Faintly, however, the reply comes back: //Vows? So easy to make, aren't they,  Charles--for people like *you*. People who've always had it far too easy to see that some things are worth a little spilt blood.//
     *Those who have never known real passion, real privation...those who have never had to grub in the mud, or kill to eat, or--*
     (breathe their parents' ashes)
     Waking up blind and deaf, drowning, on fire; waking up under corpses, under mud, under bricks. Waking up shivering and screaming, at least inside his HEAD--skin bruised and torn, under a set of my father's old pyjamas, wherever what loose metal objects happened to be in the room had tried to burrow their way inside him. Then grabbing for my hand as I heaved myself to his bedside from the cot my mother set up near the door, hauling me up onto the mattress in a sweaty frenzy of fear, and pressing his sobbing face to my chest. This refined, dignified boy-man who used to kiss my mother's hand at social functions and click his heels before bowing, like a soldier, letting me wind my dead limbs around him and stroke his grey-white hair...letting me cluck over him, make soothing noises, listen to him gulp out his nightmares in a stream of English/German/Polish thought/memory/word/images...
     //Ze gate, z--THat gate, that *gate*--Charles, if I'd only, I couldn't, wasn't strong enough--//
     //Ssssh, Erik. Ssssh.//
     //If I'd gotten through that GATE, I--//
     Aloud, for emphasis: "You'd be *dead*."
     //...yes.//
     *YES*
     Like a hammer to the gut, that desperate, yearning urge: The call upwards, into those transformative white clouds which cluster and billow around the distant crematorium chimney's top. To let go, not care. To drop your body like a worn-out suit, along with your grand designs and oh-so-noble Cause, and simply do--what seems most natural.
     Like a father's hand, a mother's hug. Like...going home.
     But: //You do *not* want to die, Erik,// I send, with unquestionable authority. The way I always used to. And hear him snap back, stung--
     //What, are you God now, Charles? You don't know WHAT I want.//
     (*You never did.*)
     I feel myself tense, under my clean white Westchester sheets. And send, icily--
     *oh*
     //--*didn't* I?//
     In the dark, in my room, our thoughts--and bodies--merging. Him in my arms. Me in his.
     I shut my eyes, let those memories flow over me. Feel him doing the same, covertly, for all he'd deny it to my face--or my mind, if I were to mention it.
     And yet...that was just another thing for him to resent, eventually. That I would never allow him to reduce our relationship to terms he could understand; never make it a simple swap of goods for services, with no strings attached. That I could have the *temerity* to help him without harming him, to accept him for who--and what--he was. Make love to him. Let him...
     //MAKE me//
     ...love me.
     *And you did, you know.*
     So softly, then--a bare fingernail-scratch against my brain--
     (*still do*)
     And: Oh, my friend, my *friend*...
     An unstoppable force meets an immovable object. Torque results. Worlds are broken, and remade. Cerebro. Xavier's School for the Gifted. The Brotherhood. The X-Men.
     Everything I have, or will have, I owe to that one meeting. To Erik Lenscherr, my friend-turned-enemy, my first and best and most terrible love. And nothing we have ever done since, to anyone--even each other--will change that in the slightest.
     Besides which:
     //I could never *make* you do anything, Erik. Remember?//
     *Remember?*
     I shut my eyes, and wait in vain for a reply. But the rest, as ever--
     --is silence.

THE END