Magneto Clash

Once upon a time, off the cold gray coast of Nova Scotia, there was a metal platform floating on the sea.

It was a research station — home to scientists who studied the ocean floor and the mysterious cables that carried electricity beneath it from one shore to another. In the ordinary run of things, it was a quiet place. Seagulls. Salt air. The low hum of instruments. The occasional dolphin surfacing near the platform's legs to have a look around.

On this particular day, it was not quiet at all.

Erik Lehnsherr had arrived.

You may know him by another name. Most people in the Marvel world did. They called him Magneto, and when they said it, they usually said it quietly — the way you say the name of a very large storm.

Magneto had a power unlike almost anyone else in the world. He could control metal. Not just lift it — control it. Bend it, pull it, push it, shape it, move it through the air at any speed in any direction. Steel. Iron. Copper. Titanium. Any metal responded to him like water responds to a drain. Effortlessly. Inevitably.

He wore a cape that moved in the wind like a red flag, and on his head he wore a deep crimson helmet — and that helmet was important, because it blocked all telepathy. Jean Grey could not touch his thoughts. Professor Xavier could not reach him. Inside that helmet, Magneto was completely alone with his own mind and his own choices, and he preferred it that way.

He had taken the research platform for a reason that he considered very serious indeed. The platform sat above a junction of undersea cables — cables that carried enormous electrical power from one part of the eastern seaboard to another. Magneto intended to use the platform's equipment to send a disruption through those cables: a message, he called it. A demonstration.

The X-Men called it a threat and arrived in the Blackbird within the hour.

It was a gray afternoon, the sky heavy with the particular clouds that come in off the Atlantic in late autumn. The Blackbird set down on the platform's landing pad with a sound like a held breath being released. The doors opened. The team moved.

Ororo Munroe — Storm — went up. She rose into the air above the platform, her white hair streaming, her eyes gone the silver-white of a sky before lightning. She was managing the weather — keeping the clouds from breaking into a full storm, which would have made everything more difficult for everyone, which was, she had decided, not going to happen on her watch.

Scott Summers — Cyclops — was on the comms. He was running coordinates, identifying the platform's key structural points, tracking Magneto's last reported position on the upper deck.

Jean Grey was maintaining a protective field — a thin, strong barrier that she could feel from the edges of her awareness, the way you feel a fence you've put up in the dark, running her hands along it constantly to make sure it was holding.

And Logan went up the stairs.

He always went first. This was not recklessness — it was calculation. His healing factor meant he could sustain damage and keep moving. His senses gave him early warning of what was ahead. Going first was the most useful thing he could do for the people behind him.

He was on the fourth step from the top when Magneto appeared on the upper deck.

Erik Lehnsherr was not a man who made an entrance by accident. He stood at the railing with his cape moving in the sea wind, and his hands were already raised — not threatening, precisely. More like a conductor before a symphony begins.

He looked at Logan. Logan looked at him.

Then Magneto raised one hand, and Logan left the stairs.

It was not violent. That was the thing about it — it was not violent at all. Logan rose from the stairs and hung in the air thirty feet above the platform deck, completely still, completely controlled, suspended by the pull of the adamantium in his skeleton. It was like being a compass needle pointing at true north: the force was absolute and very calm.

Logan extended his claws. They caught the gray light. He looked down at Magneto.

He was not afraid. He had been in a great many dangerous situations, and most of them had ended with him standing at the end of them. He understood that Magneto was making a point, not making a move. He understood it the way you understand the difference between a held breath and a held fist.

So he waited.

He waited, very quietly, thirty feet in the air, while his team did what his team did best.

BLAM — from the lower deck, a precise ruby-colored beam cut through the air and took out the control housing on the platform's main antenna. The housing sparked and went dark. Cyclops didn't shout. He simply aimed and fired, the way a person who has been training since adolescence does when it counts.

CRACK — from above, a forked bolt of lightning came down exactly where Storm directed it — into the secondary generator housing, which gave a long groan and went quiet.

And below, Jean Grey was moving.

She was guiding the research crew — quietly, efficiently, with a calm that she projected outward as deliberately as light from a lamp — through the lower corridors to the reinforced emergency bay. Every one of them. She did not raise her voice. She simply let them feel that she was there, that she knew the way, that everything was being handled. They followed. All twelve of them. Safe.

Magneto had taken the platform. But the platform's leverage was gone.

He looked around. The antenna was dark. The generator was offline. The crew was secured. His three points of control had become three empty rooms.

He lowered Logan back to the deck.

It was a slow movement — careful, deliberate. There was something in it that was almost respectful, in the complicated way that two old opponents who understand each other deeply can sometimes be respectful even when they are at odds.

Logan landed. He stood for a moment, finding his footing on the deck. Then he retracted his claws, one hand at a time.

He looked at Magneto across the platform.

"It doesn't have to be this way, Erik," he said.

His voice was quiet. Not angry. Just even.

Magneto stood very still. The wind moved his cape. The gulls called somewhere below. The sea did what seas do — moved, and moved, and moved.

Then Magneto turned, and the red cape swept behind him, and he rose above the platform and was gone into the clouds that Ororo had built in the sky like a room with no ceiling.

Logan stood where he was for a moment longer. The cold salt wind came off the water. Below, he could hear the research crew being checked over by Jean. Cyclops was calling the all-clear on the comms. Storm was letting the clouds thin to ordinary gray.

Logan thought about Magneto. About Erik. About the strange, complicated thing it was to see someone with so much greatness in them spend it on opposition instead of protection. He thought about it the way he always did when they met — not with anger, but with the particular sadness of seeing something that could be different.

Then he went below to check on the crew.

Some questions, Logan had learned, do not have quick answers. Some things can only be offered — a word, a choice, a door left open. Whether anyone walked through was always up to them.

But you kept leaving the door open.

That was the thing you could control.

Sleep well, little one. Some things take patience. And some things are worth being patient for.