Come Home (Cherik fanfiction)

Chapter Twenty

So, I know it's been awhile since I updated, but I did tell you I'd try to have one out before Christmas. I know I failed to do that, but I tried. Sorry :(

I'm going to skip the parts where Charles is captive and just get to the good stuff. However, if you want to, I can publish them later. Just message me or leave your request in the comments.

Here goes nothing:

It took three weeks, a collapsed skyscraper, many-a-drunken Erik, and a sloppy rag-tag team of enemies-turned-allies to find Charles. When and where they found them made Erik feel like an idiot, but in what state they found him put him on a rampage.

Charles was alone in a basement lab of house built into the side of a cliff in Chile. Beautiful view of the ocean and great architectural design.

Erik just about tore it right off and sunk it.

Surprisingly, it was only by sheer coincidence that they found him. They had been flying to Cuba from Bolivia. (Shaw had had another place Bolivia, and so it was decided that they would search there first after searching through the states.) Their search in the US didn't take long. Erik had been almost certain it had been one of his South American traders who had stole Charles. It was where he had gotten many of his precious metals and vacationed when all was well.

They boarded a plane on the boarder of Bolivia and Chile. They hadn't planned to go through Peru, but there was some sort of interference that made it impossible to fly northwest. Erik didn't care, so long as Beast flew well and they got to where they needed to go on time.

It had been a fluke thing: Banshee had been rummaging around at the bottom of the plane. While they flew over the mountains, he apparently slipped, fell, belted out one of his screeches and felt something bounce back, like sonar. Sean wasn't very confident in what he found, but Erik wasn't leaving any stone unturned. It took a while to find a safe landing spot (especially with Erik's excitement) but when they did, they practically turned the place inside out.

Raven found him first. Floor of the lab, bruised, bloodied, surrounded by motionless bodies with blood pouring out of their ears. She did not cry, and instead picked him up and coaxed him into two-word sentences.

"Bad man." he sobbed, trying to curl himself against the wall; away from Raven's touch. He useless legs were at uncomfortable angles. "Bad place." He muttered, over and over again, rocking back and forth whilst covering his ears.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team searched the rest of the building for any survivors.

No luck.

They found people (or the general remains of what might have been people) to be sure. However, aside from Charles, no one was breathing.

"He made them do this." Emma deduced, crouching over a body of a man who took a meat cleaver to his face to the point beyond recognition. "There's no way they did this to themselves."

The further they went through the building, the more weight her statement held.

There weren't many people, but there was enough to call it a mass . . . something. Hank called it mass murder, but Erik fixed that very quickly.

"I'm just saying," he gasped. He forgot to take off his dog tags that the CIA had given him before getting on the plane with the metal-bending psychopath. "There've got to be at least twenty dead. If not, more." Hank put his hands up in surrender. "I'm not saying he meant to, but he did do it."