Charles
Hell on Earth, Charles decided, was an itchy nose when you were strapped to an operating table with no way to scratch it. His captors had invested in psychiatric-hospital grade suicide prevention restraints that refused to give no matter how hard he wrenched his wrists against them, and a leather band across his forehead kept him from turning his head. He was held completely immobile, and now his nose itched, and his only consolation was that his captors probably mistook his thrashing for manly defiance and not childish irritation at base physical discomfort. A week ago he would have asked one of them to scratch it for him, but a week ago he had been attempting to build comradery via a kind of faux-joviality, a we’re all in this together, chaps mentality, which had done no good at all and been discarded in favor of this week’s sullenness interspersed with screams as necessary.
His fever was getting worse, too.
Half a dozen familiar faces, all wearing identical white lab coats and telepathy-proof helmets, moved around him, tapping keyboards and adjusting IV lines and prepping syringes. They spoke in low voices, were polite and professional, called him “Dr. Xavier.” It was worse than silence or cruelty could have been, to have that modicum of respect and have it make no difference. They would still hurt him.
Even strapped down, Charles could always tell when the project director entered the room: the atmosphere shifted subtly, the technicians’ body language conveying respect and, in most cases, fear. Whoever he was, he was ex-military, cold and calculated and clinical—Charles thought of him as the General, though he made a point of calling him “you bastard” or “bloody idiot” in conversation.
“Good morning, Dr. Xavier,” the man said, stepping into Charles’s field of vision and snatching up the clipboard that held his recent vitals. “Fever holding around 101, I see. Excellent. Several instances of involuntary muscles spasms of the lower body overnight…vomiting at 0300 and 0600 hours…traces of blood in urine. All as expected, very good. Are you experiencing any lingering effects from yesterday’s tests?”
Yesterday had been LSD. The General had had high hopes. As he had explained helpfully while a technician injected a worryingly high dose into the IV, LSD caused visual and auditory hallucinations, dissociation, and suggestibility, with the possibility of panic attacks or psychotic episodes if the patient experienced stress or negative emotions while the drug was in effect. Figuring a persistent, untreated urinary tract infection wasn’t stressful enough, the General had casually broken Charles’s left pinky as well.
“Couldn’t sleep last night,” Charles said. He had learned quickly that lying gave him no advantages, and always resulted in punishment. “And for a while time passed strangely. Felt…stretched. Stopped a few hours ago.”
The General nodded, made some notes on the clipboard. “You seem lucid enough. Pity. We’ve had some reports of long-term psychosis, symptoms similar to schizophrenia, and it seemed a reasonable hypothesis that your powers would increase the chance of those particular side effects.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Charles dead-panned. He closed his eyes against the fluorescent lights, which only aggravated his lingering nausea and the throbbing pain that had taken up permanent residence right behind his eyeballs. He had neglected to inform the General that he had tried LSD once during his decade-long bender; in fact, he’d even pretended to be more afraid than he was, begging the technicians to help him, warning them that telepaths and hallucinogens should never mix. As he remembered it, LSD was unpleasant but not disastrous: spooked by colors that felt wrong and a creeping sense that he was losing himself, he had reached out for Hank and the few remaining students, coasting along their normal, everyday sensory input until his own perception of reality was firm again. The General’s test parameters had inadvertently allowed the same thing.
And there it was. Charles sighed in relief as his telepathy suddenly encountered a new mind, unshielded and real. Struggling up from a drugged unconsciousness, quickly souring with fear, it bled information effortlessly—young man, recent father, communist leanings, and Charles soaked every drop up gratefully. The helmet-wearing technicians who moved around him might as well have been robots, or corpses, and even the General felt like an abstraction more often than not, for all that he held conversations and inflicted pain like a real person.
The wave of dread that swept over Charles wasn’t simultaneous yet but would be soon. He knew he was being conditioned. An unshielded mind meant the test was about to begin, and his instinctive joy as his telepathy unfurled like a crushed flower would soon be indistinguishable from his fear that this would be the day they finally succeeded in damaging him beyond repair.
“All right, Dr. Xavier, we’re about ready to begin,” a distant voice was saying.
Drifting dizzily, Charles didn’t respond until pain exploded on the left side of his face. Even then it was a struggle to open his eyes; his flinch away from the lights and another blow was mostly instinctive.
“With me, Dr. Xavier?” the General said. “We’re trying something new today. Well, something old, actually.”
He held a thin glass vial in Charles’s limited field of vision. For a moment it appeared empty, but then the light caught the clear liquid at the bottom, hardly more than a few drops.
“Got this off the Jerries at the end of the war. Of course, like yourself, they didn’t really have much choice but to be accommodating, did they? Why they held off mass-production on this little beauty I’ll never understand, though I sure am glad they did, for all our sakes. Packs quite a punch, sarin.”
“You said you didn’t want to kill me,” Charles managed through suddenly-numb lips, proud that his voice shook only a little. He couldn’t take his eyes off the vial and those few, insignificant-looking drops. Not for the first time, he cursed his eidetic memory. Every newspaper article he’d ever read that mentioned the mysterious G-series of toxic nerve agents that had come into the Allies’s possession after Germany’s surrender flashed before his eyes again, the black newsprint stark and inescapable. The Soviets had chemical and biological weapons, Nixon promised; it would be suicidal not to have the same. Catastrophic synthetic compounds--insecticides for humans--ready to be released into civilian crowds without warning. Everyone in Times Square dead in seconds, their bodies catapulted into overdrive to the point of respiratory failure, convulsions, paralysis.
“Oh, of course we don’t want to kill you. No, we’re very interested in keeping you alive, if not necessarily...intact,” the General said. “Sarin isn’t fatal in very, very small doses. Normally it’s dispersed in its aerosol form, of course, but it seemed inefficient to clear the room and introduce it through the ventilation ducts, and I was informed that a face mask would deliver too concentrated a dose.”
He turned away and picked up a pipet filled with another clear liquid as one of the technicians rolled a tray closer, too deep in Charles’s peripheral vision for him to see its contents. Knowing it was futile, he thrashed against his restraints, tried to turn his head despite the leather strap, desperate to see what was coming even if he couldn’t stop it. The not knowing was almost as bad as the pain itself.
“I’d advise you to be quiet, Dr. Xavier,” the General said absently. “I’m going to dilute the liquid form in water and the proportions are crucial. A drop too much sarin, a drop too little of the solvent, and the results could be...disappointing. It’s in your best interest to let me concentrate.”
Charles fell obediently silent, pressing his lips together tightly to quiet his gasping breaths, though he couldn’t help the rattling of the wrist restraints as uncontrollable shivers racked him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt in control of his own body.
“You can’t honestly think I’ll swallow that voluntarily,” he said, voice high and breathless with fear, when the General turned around with the prepared dose in a small beaker.
“Goodness no—we give you far more credit than that. We’re going to administer the dose via an orogastric tube. It’s a common practice in prisons and mental hospitals—force-feeding of political dissidents on hunger strikes, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, we can’t sedate you, since sarin is quite fast-acting and we wouldn’t want to miss its effects, so it may hurt a little. Nothing we can do about that, I’m afraid.”
Charles looked up at the ceiling, willing the tears not to fall but barely noticing when they did anyway. He was so tired, and afraid, and tired of being afraid. He wanted Raven the way children wanted things—so completely and with such desperation that his need canceled out the rest of the world, became all that he was. And—there was no point in lying to himself now—he wanted Erik too. Sometimes when the pain was so bad that he slipped away from his body, he saw them coming for him: Raven, so fierce and focused, dispatching the technicians with a dancer’s grace, while Erik faced down the General, incandescent with rage. Charles never allowed himself to dwell on what exactly Erik would do; the more murderous his fantasies, the closer he became to the monster they wanted him to be. He preferred the moment Erik bent over him, breaking the restraints with a thought, whispering soothing nonsense and then lifting him up and away, away, away.
Odds increased by the day that he would never see either of them again. Even if they were within his range, his grasp on his telepathy was too unstable. There was no guarantee he wouldn’t telepathically lobotomize them with a simple projection. That would please the General—the increasing amount of physical abuse was evidence of his disappointment that Charles hadn’t yet involuntarily lashed out at any of the poor bastards brought in as guinea pigs—but even a few days of rest or antibiotics weren’t worth harming Erik or Raven. He kept his shields strong to protect them, and condemned himself instead. It felt like a fair trade, somehow.
You were right, my darlings, he thought into the wailing vacuum of his own mind. My dear Erik, my beautiful sister. You tried to warn me and I wouldn’t listen. So convinced I knew best, you see. Thought even if I couldn’t reach all of them I could reach the important ones, the humans with power, bring you the friends you’ll never make, not you solitary warriors of the old guard. You never would have trusted a human to help you—you barely trust each other. You’ll never fall into a trap like this.
That was some comfort, at least. Barely recovered from his decade of self-destruction, mentally if not physically still an addict, the school not yet reopened, Charles Xavier’s death would be no great loss. Other mutant rights advocates more eloquent than he would lend their voices to the cause. He could only hope that it ended here, in this lab—respiratory failure, a heart attack, a brain embolism—and not after his mind snapped. A deranged telepath let loose in the middle of a civilian population, projecting uncontrollably, spreading his insanity faster than any biological weapon, would convince the entire country that the Sentinel program was crucial for national security.
Somehow he managed a bitter smile through the tears as a technician lifted a long plastic tube into his field of vision; the diameter seemed far too wide to fit down his throat, but he didn’t doubt that they would force it to.
“You’re making a mistake,” he choked out. “You’re playing with fire, you utter, utter morons, and by the time you see it, it will be too late. Did none of you ever read Frankenstein in high school English class? You do not want an insane telepath as your creation, I promise.”
The General smiled. “I did, and found it quite inspiring. Proof that the natural order was no more mandated than conventional morality, as long as one could face the consequences. Poor Frankenstein didn’t have the stomach for it, but I assure you, Dr. Xavier—I do.”
As the tube descended, Charles managed a shaky burst of comfort to the man strapped down next to him and then raised his shields. Until the past few weeks, he hadn’t been alone in his own head with his powers since he was nine years old, and every time he locked his telepathy away within the confines of his skull the silence transmuted into shrieks that sounded like his voice. The more powerful the drug, the harder it was to remember why it was so important to hold himself apart from the blessed relief of the unshielded mind mere feet away, open and leaking feelings like a call for help only Charles could answer.
Raven Raven Raven Erik Erik Erik stay away not safe but I need your strength/stubbornness/courage
Then the world burned away, consumed by a fiery pain in his throat that even the blood trickling down his esophagus couldn’t extinguish. Charles began to scream, and choked, and tried to imagine Erik’s eyes looking down at him, bright with tears and love and forgiveness.
He realized the instant before the sarin took effect that he couldn’t remember Erik’s eyes at all.