Checkmate: Games of War » [Cherik]

Chapter Nine

Outside, beyond the dingy panes - mottled with moss and grime - rain wracked on the window, the racket rattling through Erik's apartment. The foundations holding the derelict and decrepit building up, shivered, the trains worming beneath the soil in the subway stations sending shockwaves to the surface - a dusting of plaster and brick dust trickled from the ceiling as the vibrations dislodged the brickwork. From the autumnal storm - the royal carpet of colourful leaves kicked up into the air as if the wind were a child at play - and a chill crept beneath the draughty door and rustled the canvas curtains.

Inside, it was like a category five hurricane had ripped through Erik's apartment: furniture uprooted, suitcases ransacked and paraphernalia displaced.

Papers were sporadically strewn about the room like the debris of a tropical storm, scattered in the wake of Erik's restless foraging. Citizenship credentials, court summons, legal warrants and testimony recordings... Others more trivial: newspaper clippings fastidiously trimmed out of broadsheets, under-developed black and white photographs with light-leakages in the corners, and a comprehensive collation of maps: downtown districts of New York City; Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.

He rendezvoused relevant documentation, and it was arranged around him like Bowie's avant-garde 'cut-up technique'. The snippets were disordered, but so was Erik's mind.

In the array of photographs were multiple of him and Charles; courtesy of the X-mansion's resident budding photographer, Raven. Amidst the duration of his stay, Raven had dug up Charles's old camera - a Ful-Vue Super, top of the range - and snapped a bunch of candids. The rowdy girl had shoved the camera into Erik's face much to his disdain, and caught some of the less salient days like butterflies in a jar: sealing them in a photograph. And just like a butterfly, they were spread out in all of their colourful beauty.

Charles was consistently smiling across the snippets of history; the same carbon-copy sunny smile. Coral pink lips framed a set of perfect pearl white teeth - his wealth affording him top-notch orthodontics as a youth, Erik was sure - that formed a cheek-tearing grin. His eyes crinkled at the corners, gallantly embracing the wrinkles that would permanently bunch there in years to come. His head was thrown back to the sky, sunlight showering down on him like a saint in a stain glass window. Not a cell of cynicism infected him, but it would come to contaminate him, and eviscerate him with Erik's leave - not yet happened in the photographs.

So many photos of summer days in lush green pastures, when the topiary was tamed and the ivy scaling the walls of Westchester trained into a strict shape. Trees in full bloom, leaves coating the gnarly boughs in emerald green, some plentiful with fruits - unattended, but somehow bountiful with Charles's natural aura of nurturing. Erik longed for the fresh air that the countryside surrounding Xavier mansion provided, far from the choking smog that hung over New York City as it was coughed out of chimneys and cars; that, and the boundless space, a stark contrast with the packed streets, crammed alleys and stuffed underground stations. The peace and silence was a thing of the past too; New York City was like a living being, with a constantly thrumming heart of cars and people, lungs of black smoke, and winding limbs of streets. Erik tried to abscond the nostalgia, but it guided his every action: he couldn't even tear himself too far apart from Charles: kept him within a car journey's reach, and were his connections with the brotherhood still strong, he would keep tabs on the distraught professor.

Some of the photographs caught he and Charles playing chess, taciturn looks intercepted by a tactile battlefield of black and white converging forces, some pieces felled in sacrifice, others simply victims of the game. Half-empty glasses of whiskey precariously perched on the rim of the table, malformed ice melted by the daylight streaming into frame. By the foot of Charles's armchair, his copy of 'Origin of the Species', bookmarks haphazardly tabbing the pages, the spine creased and cracked from being read cover to cover a thousand times and more, and discoloured pages trying to escape from the rest.