To most effectively engage with the stack of metal Erik had gotten down on his haunches; it's interesting positioning for this conversation in as much as looking up at others is a rare experience for him. He could stand, it would be more natural, but his understanding of the movement of the body is such that regardless of his intent, he knows there is no way for Ned not to interpret that as aggressive, as being advanced on and closed in.

So he stays down; what works in concert with the contrasts Ned is highlighting is that Erik can be comfortable in his body anywhere. It took him years to arrive in a place where that was possible, so he guards the idea as closely as he does--well, his physical space. To be let inside it is a privilege, to keep others out a right. Extending that to Ned isn't difficult, or anything beyond the most basic of decency. "I don't envy you," he returns, as unsparingly honest as ever.

Then again he doesn't envy anyone, except maybe Charles, who seems to effortlessly understand his mutation better than Erik does himself. As much as he's grateful, absorbs and uses the things the telepath has taught him, a part of him chafes at the idea that he'd worked for two decades to accomplish something that could apparently be learned in moments once plucked directly from his head, but that's neither here nor there, most certainly not here.

What is, easily, is the familiarity with Ned's fathomless autophobia--he doesn't feel it (anymore), but he's seen it. "What do you want to hear? That you deserve your own hatred because of what you are?"

Not 'what you can do.' "If so you're telling the wrong person. I've had it forced on me too often to swallow easily. I haven't always called myself a mutant."

The corners of his mouth twitch slightly at that; he knows his own presentation inasmuch as he cultivates it very deliberately, that he was always this. Unbreakable and shored up with iron. "Before that--let's just say they were names unsuitable for polite conversation." Now he's smiling again, but it is a sharp and ugly thing, a blunt and glaring contrast to the euphemism he employs.

He doesn't stay on it, anyway. "Are you to be feared?" That's a different question, and clearly rhetorical from the loose shrug that follows. "Yes. All of us are." As much as Erik sometimes revels in that, here it's just fact, as dry as two plus two. "To feel otherwise would be the worst kind of stupidity."

Which doesn't just apply to the world at large; he's also passing on the understanding that mutants as whole should be at home with that idea. "But trying make as few mistakes as possible and atone for the rest--that's no more or less than any of us are striving for."

Including Erik; he calls what he's looking for vengeance, but that lies just on top of the idea--well. Maybe he can dig deep enough to put a little of that forward, for once. "It isn't enough. You see this, now--"

A stray scrap of metal floats apart from the rest and then drifts gently down again, Erik closing off the gesture by curling his hand into a fist. "Now that's easy. Once I couldn't so much as lift a coin, and it cost me everything. There are always costs. Always losses. I'm not kind enough to tell you differently." Another shrug. "Or I just won't lie to you. Your choice. You make yourself out to be the stuff of nightmares, but you are--what any of us are. Control and intent are irrelevant."

He goes quiet for long enough that Ned may attempt to flee just out of self-preservation, but then--"I know a woman like you, back where we're from. Can't stand being inside her own body." A pause, warm and strange; it's not a romantic kind of fondness, but it's probably as much affection as Ned has seen Erik express for anyone. "Nature made her what she is, and she is perfect. That's what I see. But it's her skin, I don't have to live in it."

You know. Much like Ned.