Lucius let his psychic presence spill outward in widening circles.
He remained seated in the chair by the window of his mansion while the reach of his mind extended far beyond the room, beyond the beach, beyond Long Island, and out across the planet with a cold confidence. Xavier needed Cerebro for this sort of thing. Lucius needed a decent chair, a good mood, and the willingness to pry open the world without asking.
Step by step, minds began to appear.
Humans came first in the usual quantity, billions of little flickers full of hunger, fear, boredom, lust, grief, bills, and self-importance. Mutants stood out differently, each one marked by that particular potential of possibility which the X Gene always carried, as though biology had been interrupted mid-sentence and decided to improvise. Animals came in broad, simple currents beneath the human noise, cleaner to touch and far less exhausting.
He kept reaching.
North America slipped behind him. Europe rose. The old continent always felt crowded in a different way, less open, more layered, as if history itself had developed territorial instincts. Mountains sharpened under his awareness. Borders did not matter. Only minds did.
Then he found what he wanted.
A compound in the Carpathian Mountains, tucked under rock, metal, and confidence. Around two hundred mutant minds nested inside it, some sleeping, some training, some standing watch, some trying very hard not to think about the fact that Magneto's hospitality usually came with ideological rent.
Lucius smiled.
So Erik was staying close to his roots after all. That felt appropriate. Eastern Europe had given him camps, war, steel, and trauma. It made sense that he would choose mountains rich with iron ore and enough old-world hostility to make any government surveillance team earn its salary before getting close.
The place was clever too.
The Carpathians gave him depth, concealment, and the sort of terrain that punished lazy pursuit. Rich iron deposits threaded through the mountains, which made the site even better for a man like Magneto. Someone with earth powers had clearly done their share as well. Lucius could feel the worked stone and shaped tunnels, the layered chambers carved out with effort rather than contractors and permits. They had not merely occupied the mountain. They had persuaded it to cooperate.
His mind stayed fixed on the compound while another part of him wandered, as it often did, into the great heap of embarrassment that was the cinematic X-Men timeline.
He had never found a tidy way to respect that clusturfuck.
At some point, the films had simply given up pretending they remembered themselves. Hank McCoy was visibly blue and furry throughout the prequel years, yet somehow turned up in the later timeline looking far too human for a man who should have needed industrial amounts of fur shampoo and a public explanation. Moira MacTaggert appeared young in First Class in 1962 and then barely seemed to age by the time later films rolled around, as though the years had politely decided not to touch her. Wolverine's claws obeyed no stable history either, changing between bone and metal depending on which film wanted what and whether the audience had the energy to argue. Xavier lost the use of his legs in First Class in 1962, yet older flashbacks still expected everyone to accept a walking Charles in periods that should have had him firmly in the chair.
Then Days of Future Past arrived with all the shameless confidence of a drunk editor kicking in the door and announcing that yes, the timeline was an unholy mess, but there was no reason to panic because time travel would now be used as a very large broom. It was less a fix than a public declaration that they had already broken too much to repair properly and would therefore prefer the audience to forget the wreckage. Shameless, efficient, and deeply insulting. Lucius almost admired the brazenness.
He only hoped En Sabah Nur had not yet honoured the timeline. He loved the idea of an amplifier to ...discuss some important... stuff. Yeah, important stuff.
That thought led him to another.
What exactly had the SMS entity done when it dumped him into this place?
Had it simply taken the MCU and the X-Men films, slapped them together like two slices of badly matched pizza, and then used brute metaphysical force to insist the cheese had always connected? That would have been crude, but not impossible. The thing behind the messages had never struck him as delicate. Powerful, yes. Petty, definitely. Elegant, not so much.
Lucius shrugged once in the chair.
Whatever it had done, his current circumstances were much better than his former life. Better body, powers, prospects. Better enemies. He was, on the whole, satisfied.
"Thank you, SMS god," he murmured, then corrected himself because he still had standards. "Thing, entity, whatever, you got the idea. Thank you."
Now that he had found his little magnet, he vanished from the chair with a cheshire grin on his face.
--
Mystique looked at the phone in her hand and blinked once.
Then she turned towards the main entrance of the mountain complex with a slow, thoughtful look that did not suit panic and therefore came much closer to it than shouting would have done.
Noctis had said he could simply pop in.
That would have been easy enough to dismiss if he were some loud fool talking around his own mystique. He was not. Raven already knew better than that. She had met him once before, where wealth and danger sat together too comfortably, and she had come away from the experience with a clear understanding that Noctis could be petty, tasteless, and offensively smug without ever becoming harmless.
The problem with men like that was never the boasting.
It was that sometimes they had earned it.
She moved into the corridor at once.
The Brotherhood headquarters had been built the hard way, by mutant labour, paranoia, and patience. Earthquake, the one who helped with this complex, had shaped much of the stone in the early stages, widening chambers and stabilising the deeper cuts through the mountain while Erik handled everything with metal in it or near it. The result felt less like a cave and more like a military compound that had decided concrete was too soft for the job. Wide corridors ran through the carved interior. Rooms sat on upper and lower levels linked by steel stairs and narrow lifts. Armoured doors cut sections apart. Storage, barracks, workshops, meeting rooms, armouries, and private quarters all sat hidden behind enough mountain to make governments swear on expense reports.
Raven moved through it fast.
The guards let her pass without question. They knew her face in all the ones she chose to wear. By the time she reached Erik's level at the top tier of the central section, she had already decided two things. First, she did not like Lucius knowing enough to threaten an uninvited arrival. Second, she disliked even more the possibility that he was not threatening at all and had merely been informing her.
The heavy metal doors to Erik's quarters slid aside before she reached there. He had sensed her coming.
She stepped in.
Erik stood near the long table by the wall, one hand braced against the edge, the other holding a file he had already stopped reading the second he noticed her pace. The room and the next one, which was his personal chambers, were barren, because comfort meant less to him than readiness.
Raven did not waste time.
"Noctis called."
Erik's eyes sharpened at once.
"That quickly?"
"He wants to meet." She crossed the room and stopped opposite him. "He says he's bringing Strengthening Potions as gifts. He wants you to hear the rest in person."
Erik set the file down.
"Did he say where?"
"No. He said now."
A slight pause followed.
Then Erik asked the question that actually mattered.
"Did he tell you anything useful?"
Raven let one shoulder move.
"He told me he was informing me politely. Then he refused to explain himself because apparently if he wanted to overshare on a telephone, he would have called Xavier."
That got the smallest sound out of Erik, not quite a laugh, but close enough to admit the line had landed.
"He has a point."
"Don't encourage him."
Erik leaned back against the table and folded his arms.
"I'm not encouraging him. I'm acknowledging that he is smart, which is not the same thing."
Raven watched him for a moment.
That was why Erik kept control of the Brotherhood as long as he did. He could be brutal. He could be vindictive. He could mistake certainty for justice often enough to fill a graveyard. What he rarely did was dismiss a threat merely because he disliked the person carrying it.
"He said he could just pop in."
That made Erik's expression flatten further.
"He would not say that lightly unless he could."
"That's what I thought."
He moved away from the table then, pacing once towards the rear wall where a relief map of the region hung with marked tunnels, supply points, and fallback routes. His hand rose without touching anything, and a narrow line of steel lifted from the table edge behind him, hovered by his shoulder, then settled again.
"If he can reach this place, then the secrecy of the site is already partly compromised," Erik said. "If he is bluffing, we lose nothing by assuming he isn't. If he is telling the truth, then we do not test that truth with our main headquarters."
Raven nodded once.
"So?"
"So you call him back." Erik turned to face her fully. "You give him coordinates to the underwater site off the New York coast. Neutral enough, defensible enough, and far less costly if he decides to be theatrical."
"The old submarine station?"
"Yes."
She took the phone out again but did not open it immediately.
"You think he'd really try to walk in here?"
Erik's mouth moved a fraction.
"He's already trying to make sure I believe he can. That alone is worth respecting."
Raven prepared to leave the tunnels so the phone can work.
"I still don't like it."
"You do not have to like it." He held her gaze. "You only have to avoid underestimating him."
She took the first step.
At that exact moment, a pleasant male voice spoke from the middle of the room.
"There's no need for that."
Both of them turned.
Lucius stood by the long table with his hands in his pockets as though he had been invited five minutes earlier and was only mildly surprised nobody had offered him a drink yet. He wore his usual expression of polished amusement, the one that always seemed to suggest he had arrived carrying a private joke at everyone else's expense.
For one clean second, neither Erik nor Raven moved.
Then the shock hit both their faces at once, sharp enough that even Lucius, bastard that he was, took sincere pleasure in it.