They sleep in the mansion that night. Charles insists on that. He stays up making calls, trying to recover all of the children who've been scattered to neighbors' houses and social services and the occasional jail cell. It's two a.m. before it's clear that anywhere else that his children might be isn't answering the phone.
There are lesson plans from three days ago still spread across his desk. When he finally gives up and puts the phone down, the wheels of his chair crunch across broken glass on the way to the door. He wants more than anything to be able to get down on hands and knees and clean it up, restoring order himself rather than waiting for someone else to set things to rights for him.
Marie is waiting for him in the hall, leaning against a wall, her gloved hands pressed against the wood as if she's trying to hold herself up.
"You should rest now," he says. "There will be plenty to do in the morning."
"Are you all right?" she says, and there's a familiar sharp note in her voice. He closes his eyes and opens them again. He's never been sure how to reassure Erik, and is even less sure how to reassure a ghost. He resents a little having to try.
"No, of course not," he says. "But I will be. We all will. It's been a shock, and we've all had a tragic loss." As he says it, he can hear the distance he's putting in his own voice. As if it were a difficult book they'd read, shocking and sad.
"Did Stryker hurt you?"
He's seen Stryker chained to the dam in Logan's memory, so much like the imagined revenges Erik used to invent for people who'd been rude to them, to make him laugh. He wants to say, what more would you do to him if he had? But the one who did that isn't here.
"I appreciate your concern, but it's really misplaced," he says. "I think you've had a worse few days than I have." He's had decades of practice at telling comforting lies. He waits to see if this one will drive the shadow out of her eyes.
She takes a step closer, and raises a hand as if she's going to touch him. He can almost feel the brush of gloved fingertips on his cheek. It won't really remind him of anything else, and he's glad. She stops herself, anyway, checks with her hand half-raised.
"I'm just so tired," she says. There's still something wrong in her voice.
"Go up and sleep," Charles says. Tonight she'll sleep on soft sheets in her own bed; if she reaches out, she can brush the metal headboard with her fingertips. He'll be a floor below, close enough to know if she dreams. If she wakes he'll pull on a bathrobe and go and sit by her bed. It's what he can do now.