Charles
When Erik told him Raven had left, that she was very sorry and she loved him and she would be back soon, Charles inhaled and exhaled a long, deep breath and stared at the ceiling while his eyes grew shiny. Then the first tear spilled over and all at once his face crumpled like tissue paper. He cried like he hadn’t cried in years, like he would never stop. There was something both beautiful and repulsive about him, Leander drowning in his own tears, and Erik watched him slack-jawed and helpless for a moment before reaching out. Charles turned on his side and wrapped his whole upper body around their joined hands and Erik stroked the clearly-defined joints in his spine and his tangled hair and his cheek blotched and wet and slippery. He might have been whispering stupid platitudes again, but if he was Charles didn’t hear them.
His baby sister had left him again and it felt like the end of the world.
“You remember her,” Erik whispered, daring to sound surprised.
“How could I forget my sister,” Charles spat back, sniffling and miserable.
Erik tensed, bracing himself against some kind of onslaught, and Charles was so taken aback by the stubborn, sad resignation in his expression that he hiccupped. His memory was a hoard of slightly-mismatched puzzle pieces and it took a long moment to sift through them and contextualize Erik’s reaction. There was a kaleidoscope of Ravens in his mind—the Raven blue and tiny and half-starved in his kitchen, the Raven blonde and smiling in their Oxford flat, the Raven Erik called Mystique, stern and strong as she navigated the blood and bodies and rubble of his prison. There was a contrast between Raven and Mystique. Not that one was a shadow of the other, exactly, but Mystique felt brighter, somehow. More fully present. More distant, too—still with that underlying emotional resonance of my little sister, so beautiful, so special, but tinged with melancholy. Mystique was a beloved stranger.
Erik was responsible for that distance, and he was waiting for Charles to remember that he hated him for it.
“You only did for her what I did for you,” Charles said. “I can’t blame you for her choices unless I blame myself for yours.”
He wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but he knew soul-deep that he felt responsible in a way that defied words and logic—for what Erik did and for who he was, some odd transmutation of protectiveness and possessiveness. All Erik’s burdens, all the blood on his hands, were Charles’s too because at some point he had fundamentally changed Erik, as Erik had him. That was a certainty, but all the rest was confusion and contradictions. Raven in his head was kaleidoscopic; Erik was the reflection in a fun-house mirror, both larger and smaller than life, distorted, exaggerated, monstrous in a way that could only be personal bias, not fact. No living, breathing human existed that matched the Erik in Charles’s head—certainly not the one sitting next to him, patiently waiting to be hated again.
“You do blame me for her choices. You blame me for everyone’s choices,” Erik said, not unkindly.
Charles managed a twisted smile and wet laugh, calmed to the point of silent tears instead of racking sobs. “Well, you must admit it simplifies things tremendously. A monolithic enemy.”
“A monolith, really? I had no idea you thought so highly of me, Charles.”
“I’ve always thought highly of you,” Charles said honestly, doing Erik the favor of looking away as he spoke. He wiped his eyes on the silk sleeve of his pajamas instead, took a few deep breaths, felt the hysteria drain out of his body like poison lanced from a wound.
“I’ll miss her,” he said.
Yet he didn’t, really, in the days that followed. Her absence left no discernable gaps in the life of the house; she slipped away like she’d never existed and nothing changed. Erik and Hank missed her passively, with no sense of urgency, which reinforced Charles’s instinctive understanding—most of his understanding seemed to be instinctive—that Raven never stayed, or stayed away, very long. As for him…well, it was difficult enough to grasp simple things, much less complicated emotions like loss and entangled memories like the ones of his sister.
And there was already so much to take in.
He spent most of the first few days asleep. He was too tired and easily overwhelmed to leave the room, though Erik brought him out onto the balcony. Neither of them slept well, or at normal times, so they watched sunrises and sunsets, drank cups of perfectly-made tea, took turns reading Victorian poetry to each other out loud. Charles liked Hopkins, Erik preferred Arnold. There was a record player on the desk one morning when Charles woke up and after that there was music in the air nearly all the time, everything from opera and symphonies to the Beatles and Stones. Erik didn’t like silence.
Hank came in often, not the skinny pale driver from his rescue but large, blue and furry, which Charles liked better. It felt more honest, and also less reminiscent of other doctors, the clay ones in white coats whose faces flashed before him at odd moments, making him flinch away from nothing. Hank always noticed and never said anything about it. He had learned quickly to be circumspect around Charles. At first he’d made an effort to carefully explain everything he was going to do—change bandages, draw blood, remove stiches—but that made Charles hyperventilate and press his hands over his ears.
“Just do it,” he’d gasped, because there was a voice in his head saying This may hurt, Dr. Xavier, listing every awful symptom he was about to experience, and it made him want to crawl out of his skin. “Please, I don’t care if it hurts, just get it over with!”
Hank stuck to pleasantries after that, though he was always friendly and smiling, chatting about safe things like the weather and what they would have for lunch. He managed to make the reason for each visit seem like an afterthought, an “Oh, can I get one more sample from you?” tossed out nonchalantly on his way out the door.
Even slow on the uptake as he was, it didn’t take Charles long to notice that Erik conveniently found reasons to leave the room every time Hank arrived, or that Hank frequently timed his visits to coincide with Erik being in the shower, kitchen, or on a run around the grounds. When they couldn’t avoid each other the atmosphere was a tense miasma of thinly-veiled hostility and awkwardness. Erik made snide comments; Hank pretended he wasn’t there. At least there didn’t seem to be any danger of violence erupting between them—they just didn’t like each other. The only thing they had in common was Charles, which was odd because he was fairly certain that he was the cause of their resentment and disdain for each other in the first place.
“Honestly, what did he ever do to you? He’s a perfectly nice fellow,” Charles said reproachfully one day after Erik had been especially scathing.
“Nothing at all, to me.” Erik didn’t even bother looking over, face placid and eyes hidden behind sunglasses as the day inched from afternoon into dusk. They were sitting on the balcony again, Charles in a wingchair Erik must have scavenged from another bedroom, Sinatra drifting out from the record player. When he wasn’t being an asshole to Hank, Erik existed mostly in a state of serenity so pronounced it was almost aggressive. A full five minutes passed before he finished the thought. “We have a difference of opinion on how he treated you.”
“While you were gone.” They had euphemisms for the large gaps in Charles’s memory, for certain things Erik didn’t want to talk about, for mutual conversational pitfalls and potential triggers. The year after Cuba and his decade in prison were all referred to as one stretch of time.
“Yes.”
“How would you have treated me, then?”
“I try not to think like that, Charles,” Erik said after another long stretch of silence. “There’s nothing but pain to be gained from dwelling on the past, what if, what could have been…none of it changes what was.”
“Oh, come now. It’s human nature to think of the roads not taken, isn’t it?”
Erik’s lips twisted mirthlessly. “Fortunately for us, we’re not human.”
As if to prove his point, the sky splashed with the pink and gold of a setting sun suddenly darkened, covered by clouds that came from nowhere. There was an ominous roll of thunder in the air, a metallic scent on the wind that whipped their hair into their eyes. Right before the rain began to fall in sheets, Erik pulled the metal from the sheeting on the roof down into a makeshift awning over their heads. He tucked his now-unnecessary sunglasses on the table next to their empty mugs and held his hand outside the safety of their metal canopy, watching raptly as the rain filled his palm immediately, then spilled over to pool on the balcony flagstones. Below them the grounds were drenched already.
Erik tipped another palmful of rainwater to the ground, rotating his hand to watch the drops run off his skin like he’d never seen anything more fascinating. He was a man of intense, unrelenting focus, which Charles found intimidating when turned on himself and oddly charming when directed at the most mundane things. Rain, a unique flavor of tea, a new book or record—he’d heard Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” for the first time a few days ago and made Charles listen to it at least twenty times since—they enthralled him, and Erik enthralled enthralled Charles in turn.
“I wonder what Ororo’s upset about now,” Erik shouted over the downpour.
“A storm this bad is a temper tantrum. It won’t last long,” Charles shouted back.
He was learning not to censor himself when he knew something intuitively. At first he’d said barely anything at all, practically mute with fear and some kind of conditioning he couldn’t really remember. Even when he had tentatively accepted that this wasn’t a dream, that they had come for him and he was safe now, again, it was difficult to articulate the half-formed fragments of memory that came back to him, sometimes in flashes, sometimes drifting up peacefully from his subconscious. Hank said it would get better as his body healed and he shouldn’t worry about remembering everything all at once. An incomplete memory was still progress. And though it was so tempting to hoard his memories, pore over them for details and savor the sense of self that was slowly being rebuilt from the rubble of his mind, Erik and Hank looked at him with such relief and gratitude any time he shared them that he was slowly becoming more verbal.
So they knew that he knew that this was his home, that a handful of children lived here, and one of them had only arrived a few weeks ago and was having trouble settling in. Charles had a few scattered memories of her face—a rare smile, a shock of white hair, her nose crinkled dubiously at Raven’s old clothes scavenged from the attic—but Hank had had to remind him that her name was Ororo and she had come from Egypt.
She also had about as much control over her powers as she did over her temper.
“She misses you,” Hank had admitted after a similar rainstorm a few days ago. “The kids knew you were gone and in trouble. They got pretty hysterical. We told them you’re safe and fine but you’re very tired. I don’t think they understand why they can’t see you.”
“Because he’s very tired,” Erik had snapped, whose bouts of overprotectiveness included children, apparently. “What’s not to understand?”
“Yes, thank you, Erik, that’s very helpful,” Charles had said in a tone that indicated the opposite was true. For some reason that made Erik smile, which Charles only found more annoying. To Hank, much more sincerely, he’d added, “And thank you, Hank, for handling everything. I do appreciate the…breathing space, for now. I’ll tell Alex the same.”
Alex he had only seen a handful of times. He had stuck his head in the door on the day Charles arrived and once or twice since, called him professor, told him to relax and heal up because everything was running fine, no need to push himself. Then he’d glared at Erik—and there did seem to be a danger of violence erupting between them—and disappeared again into the depths of a house Charles only remembered in pieces.
“I should help her,” he said now, looking up at the black clouds. “She’s a child and she’s scared and it would be so easy to help her. So why can’t I do it?”
“For the same reason that I spent two months in a Florida motel watching Saturday morning cartoons,” Erik said. “You’re hiding. How?”
“I’m sorry?”
“How could you help her?”
“What kind of a question is that? I could open the damn door, I could leave this room and they would know that I’m just fine and they don’t have to be afraid anymore. I could comfort them the way a teacher or a guardian or…whatever I am, should!”
“Ah,” Erik said neutrally.
Charles gritted his teeth, barely held back a heavy sigh. Erik did that a lot—asking questions and then reacting like Charles had failed some kind of test. He was fairly certain it had something to do with what had happened between them on the first day when Erik had tried to force whatever lay dormant in Charles’s mind back to life, nearly killing them both. He’d done quite a lot of yelling the next time he saw Erik after that, who had been pale and repentant and hadn’t attempted anything similar since. But he hadn’t forgotten, and these annoyingly vague questions were only slightly subtler attempts to make Charles acknowledge that he had options for communication not available to everyone.
“Until I have better control, I’m not going near anyone’s head, much less a child’s,” he said. “I did enough damage to you.”
“That was my fault, I’ve told you,” Erik said. “And I do wonder how you expect to develop better control if you won’t use your powers at all.”
He kept his voice light, almost teasing, though Charles knew that he was deadly serious. Erik used his powers like every metal object in the world was an extension of his body, fiercely and joyfully. There was no way for Charles to explain that his own mutation felt separate from himself, alien, a time bomb shoved inside his skull. Telepathy, he thought deliberately. It was called telepathy and he was a telepath and saying the word wouldn’t hurt anyone. Using it would, but he had no intention of that, wasn’t even sure he could have if he’d wanted to. The only way to control it was to keep it locked away, but if it kept Erik from lecturing him again Charles wasn’t above implying that he would “improve” eventually. It was only a harmless white lie.
“The point is, I’m supposed to be the headmaster of this school and it’s about time I started acting like it,” he said.
Erik looked alarmed. “That’s insane, Charles. After what was done to you? You can’t—”
He was interrupted by a flash of lightning that arced between the dark clouds and then down, jagged and bright enough to burn behind closed eyes, bisecting a tree only a few hundred feet away. The clap of thunder that followed a heartbeat later was so deafening that Charles jumped and then the echoing boom was his own skull bouncing off the floor of a shower stall and the raindrops falling on the flagstones were falling on white tiles, warm on his naked body. He was disoriented, bleeding, and the water swirling down the drain was pink. Phencyclidine echoed in his mind in a strange-yet-familiar voice, distorted, skipping like a damaged record. Phencyclidine phencyclidine phencyclidine and I am so proud of you my dear doctor my creation. There were dry lips on his forehead like a blasphemous benediction and a body lying next to him bent at impossible angles.
“Charles, it’s not real, it’s not real,” a voice cut across the corrupted memory, not frantic but very firm, and Charles opened his eyes, gasping. Erik hadn’t moved from his chair or touched him but looked like it was taking every ounce of restraint not to reach out.
“There you are,” he said. “Back with me? What was it?”
“The thunder,” Charles managed, already bracing himself for the next burst of it, but then he blinked, came fully back to himself, realized—Erik’s hair was glinting ginger again, lingering rays of sun shining down from a cloudless sky, and the only evidence the storm had ever happened was quickly-drying puddles on the balcony around them.
Erik reached over and squeezed his hand, apparently having decided that Charles was coherent enough not to judge him a threat and lash out again. “It’s over, just like you said. Ororo’s calmed down, we’re all fine.”
“How long was I out?” Charles said, bewildered. Ororo’s tantrums never stopped as suddenly as they began—her storms faded from torrential rains to a light drizzle, or hurricane-force winds to a healthy breeze, as real tears faded from choking sobs to the occasional teardrop to nothing. He looked around, stunned, but the air was still and quiet, without even the humidity to be expected after a summer storm.
“Five seconds, if that. Someone must have given her ice cream.”
“Yeah, of course,” Charles agreed mindlessly, rubbing his forehead to ease away the peculiar tightness there, an ineffable sense that he had escaped his body and then snapped back into it too quickly. Surely it had been more than five seconds. This was hardly his first flashback, though usually he emerged from them feeling like time had been compressed, not stretched. Yet he felt unaccountably shaken, this time.
Erik squeezed his hand again, his measured calm fraying under an increasing amount of concern.
“Can we go inside? I’m tired.” Charles managed a weak smile and then, knowing how ridiculous it sounded: “And then could you check on Ororo, please?”
Erik blinked, surprised. “Of course, but…why?”
“Hank gives her too much dessert,” Charles said, an answer that had the benefit of being true even if it had nothing to do with the real reason. The real reason was intuition; a kind of near-memory he would normally have forced himself to share. But this time, uneasy in a way he didn’t understand, he let Erik carry him inside and then leave, and didn’t say another word.