Charles
The wheelchair took the corner between the main hall and the kitchen too fast and avoided both doorframes by no more than a fraction of an inch. Charles scrambled to slow his speed just enough to regain control but not enough for the sudden stop to send him flying; entered the kitchen with a skidding noise; the left wheel came off the ground entirely for a terrifying moment; and then with a teeth-rattling amount of force crashed back down, all momentum depleted, right in front of a stubbornly stationary Jean Grey. For a few seconds they simply stared at each other, Charles catching his breath and Jean wide-eyed and watchful but quick to return his smile when he finally relaxed, chuckled ruefully.
“Seems I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yet,” Charles said.
“You didn’t hit anything at all this time,” Jean offered.
“Still, I had rather hoped that muscle memory would have helped…expedite things, I suppose.”
Charles was careful to keep his tone light, reveal none of the very real frustration that lay behind his words. Someone, probably Hank, had warned Jean at some point after his rescue about his unstable telepathy, and even though her own powers were poorly-controlled she had been careful not to speak mind to mind or reach out in any way, in case his powers interpreted even the simplest surface touch as a threat. But even without her telepathy she was an astonishingly—almost eerily—perceptive girl, picking up on moods and tonal shifts and hidden meanings like they’d been shouted out loud. She was also as bad at hiding her own feelings as she was good at sensing theirs, and that combined with her chameleon-like tendency to adopt the moods of everyone around her occasionally resulted in several hours spent calming her down because Erik was in a bad mood or Alex was thinking of friends who hadn’t made it out of Vietnam.
“I was just about to make a cup of tea,” Charles said, relieved that Jean hadn’t picked up on his irritation after all. “Would you like one too, Jean?”
“Yes please, professor,” she said. Then hastened to add, “But I don’t want to bother you…”
Someone, and he suspected Erik this time, had clearly lectured the children about not pestering him too much; they were sweet but shy, eager to spend time with him but almost too nervous to ask for it. Charles smiled again, reassuringly. “Nonsense, I’d love your company. If you could pour some milk into that saucer and some sugar in that bowl, that would be most helpful. I believe we have some digestives in the pantry as well.”
Jean sprang into motion, careful to leave him room to maneuver about the kitchen, filling the kettle and assembling tea bags while she piled the rest on a tray. Charles focused on keeping his breathing steady and movements methodical, ignoring the expected but still jarring stab of déjà vu. Even after a week of living downstairs again, there was still something terribly surreal about making a cup of tea in his own kitchen. It felt at once familiar and like his hands belonged to a stranger. More scraps of memory floated to the surface of his mind every day, but so much of it was still opaque, obscured by a mist of conflicting emotions and repressed memories. It was almost easier not to remember, to push through the flashbacks and do exactly what Charles Xavier would do, not be exactly who Charles Xavier was.
“Old routines will help,” Hank had said during one of an endless series of checkups. “Nothing too strenuous. Make your own tea, read your favorite books, mild physical therapy, play chess…would a list help?”
“He doesn’t need a to-do list for every second of the day, Beast,” Erik had snapped from the corner. He had moved downstairs at the same time as Charles, in practice if not in theory, which meant his borderline-disastrous encounters with Alex and Hank now occurred several times a day instead of once every few days. So far none had ended in actual violence, but the amount of snarling that went on was more suited to a kennel for strays than a house containing four grown men.
As he handed Jean two cups of tea to set on the table and then rolled after her, Charles cast about for polite conversation.
“Professor Summers tells me you’re doing very well in training, you know.”
Jean blushed, looking away so that her pleased smile was obscured by her long red hair. Even though she had been at the barely-reopened Xavier’s Institute the longest, she still responded to praise for her powers like a flower turning to the sun. “He’s really nice to me, even though my mutation isn’t like Scott and Ororo’s. We play a game with clay pigeons where he tries to hit them so they explode with his powers and I try to move them around so he can’t.”
Charles tried to disguise his laughter by slurping his tea loudly; if anyone could make blowing things up educational, of course it was Alex. “That certainly sounds like Professor Summers. And also quite a lot of fun. Perhaps I could come observe your lessons sometime?”
“Oh, yes please. And maybe you can help me—”
Jean broke off suddenly, horrified, her hands twitching like she wanted to clap them over her mouth. Charles tried not to wince; he didn’t have to read her mind to know what she’d been about to say, or how close she was now to bursting into tears at her mistake. And how could he blame her, when he would have given anything at her age to have another telepath to help him ease into his powers? Perhaps he wouldn’t have thought he was insane, then; perhaps Raven wouldn’t have forbidden from going into her mind, if his shields had been better or his projections less intrusive.
“Dr. McCoy would have my head at the moment, I’m afraid,” he said gently, trying to soften the refusal. “He’s very adamant that I do absolutely nothing useful, at least a little while longer. If you have any questions I’d be more than happy to answer them, but for now it might be best you focus on your telekinesis.”
“Of course, professor, I’m really sorry—”
“Nonsense, Jean, I know you meant well. And I very much look forward to working with you, as soon as Dr. McCoy gives me the all-clear.”
Fortunately, Jean was still too embarrassed to notice how blatantly he was lying. Charles knew he should feel guilty about pushing all the blame for his reluctance onto Hank but he didn’t, really; there was a new streak of fierce self-preservation underlying his behavior these days, with a potential for cruelty he didn’t like to dwell on. White lies and harmless scapegoating were the least of it. He was convinced that using his telepathy would be catastrophic the way he was convinced that Erik’s mutant-supremacy agenda was wrong and Raven’s true nature was good—utterly and unshakably, and woe betide anyone who tried to persuade him differently.
No one had, as yet. For all his constant checkups and nonstop fussing over broken fingers and cracked ribs and weight loss, Hank hadn’t once mentioned any kind of telepathic rehabilitation, hadn’t even asked if he had rebuilt his shields or if he could sense basic emotions or if he remembered any new details about the experiments that had been done on him. The children were so excited to have him back that they hadn’t even asked for the silly telepathic movies he’d sometimes eased into their minds instead of bedtime stories, or the blanket of calm he’d instinctively laid over the house at night to help them sleep. They wanted to hear his real voice, be reassured that he was home and safe, and were full of their own stories besides—training with Alex, science experiments with Hank, a treehouse they’d built themselves. To hear them talk he’d been gone forever, not two weeks that felt like forever. Even Erik, after his ill-advised intrusion into Charles’s mind that first afternoon, had hardly mentioned telepathy except idly, little conversational barbs thrown out but never pursued in any kind of meaningful discussion.
Raven called when she could, Erik hadn’t left, the children were as perfectly behaved as children could reasonably be expected to be, and Charles had become adept at disguising his flashbacks and shaking off moments of disorientation. It wasn’t perfect, but it was more than he had ever thought he’d have again.
And if there were times when it all seemed fragile, so easily lost—when he followed Erik’s raised voice into a room to find him on the verge of exchanging blows with Alex, or Ororo wouldn’t stop crying because she missed her mother, or Raven asked to speak to Erik about Brotherhood business—well, those moments passed, and nothing had escalated so far that Charles’s presence couldn’t deescalate it again. Something about that was surprising. Charles had never been such an imposing figure that people accepted his authority without question, but perhaps it was simply lingering concern over his captivity, not wanting to upset him.
As if Jean’s blunder had been a bad omen, the day only went downhill from there. Charles didn’t always join the students for lunch, as it had a tendency to get raucous and he still found too much noise and movement difficult to process, but he made the effort and regretted it before ten minutes were up.
“Scott stole my chips!” Ororo shouted in the middle of Hank’s quiet explanation of the Blackbird’s new shields.
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
Seeing she wouldn’t back down, Scott changed tacks. “It was one, stop being such a baby!”
“It was mine, you jerk!”
Alex tried to broker peace by making Scott apologize and give Ororo part of his cookie, but she wouldn’t take it, more outraged by the injustice of the theft than the loss of the food, and before long Charles had a splitting headache and a whole host of regrets that he hadn’t simply taken a sandwich to his room the way Erik did. He was so preoccupied with rubbing his temples in an effort to will away the pain that he missed whatever threat Alex used to bring everyone under control, but even complete silence for the rest of the meal wasn’t quite enough to help him regain a sense of equilibrium.
The flashback he had later that afternoon was the worst he’d had in days. During an NBC broadcast on the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland, a split second of newsreel footage, the remains of a bakery after the detonation of an IRA landmine, matched almost perfectly to a memory that wasn’t his. Nearly all explosions looked the same in the aftermath, but this time the baker’s name was Yiddish and the emotion associated with the memory was sadistic glee. He’d never seen that place or felt that emotion but it made no difference; he’d been in the mind that had.
Like a razor-sharp hook had been plunged into his gut and yanked hard, he felt himself wrenched back into that mental cesspool as if he’d never left it, those sick, slick thoughts curling around his weakened powers and sapping them of what little strength remained. That nauseating closeness persisted as the perspective shifted and he—or both of him—looked down at the ground from the height of a grown man standing up—though how that could be made no sense, since to his recollection none of the experiments had had any effect on his paralysis. He felt the muscles in his legs move in a strangely distant way, almost like he was using his own body as a puppet, and everything was colored with the red slickness of rage and adrenaline that he had come to associate with memories of phencyclidine.
When he came out of it he felt ill, shivering and sweating like he’d come down with the flu, bad enough that he mentioned it to Hank at their appointment a few hours later.
“I know I’m missing things from that day, the day they gave me PCP,” he said, obediently swallowing the painkillers Hank gave him. “And something about this—I was standing, Hank, I could feel my feet on the floor, and I’d gotten free of the restraints, somehow. The experiment must have gone wrong.”
“There’s a page missing from the notes Erik stole from the facility,” Hank said. “It’s the results write-up for that day. They must have done one, their record-keeping was impeccable.”
“It’s gone? Stolen?”
“Or removed on purpose. Maybe the higher-ups didn’t want anyone knowing what happened who hadn’t been there. All we know for sure is that the tests stopped after that. It’s the last experiment in the file.”
Charles shook his head, probing at the edges of the memory. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing else. I remember looking down at myself, realizing that I’m standing—and then it goes black, like a film cut off mid-frame.”
“Well, that’s more than you knew this morning,” Hank said. “It’ll all come back, Charles. Remember, each piece is progress.”
All told, Charles was a wreck when he finally made it back to his room that night. Erik must have felt him coming, because the door swung open before he could reach for it and pushing his wheelchair suddenly took almost no effort at all, but Erik’s back was turned and he seemed entirely engrossed in pouring two glasses of scotch until Charles had transferred from chair to the couch and mastered the sudden, strange urge to cry.
“Rough day, darling?” Erik said, only a little snidely. He handed over one of the glasses and raised an eyebrow when Charles took a gulp instead of a sip.
“You know, some people would interpret your refusal to be sociable, hiding in your room, general skulking, lurking, and so on, as troubling signs of a delayed adolescence or some such, but I’m beginning to think you have the right idea.”
“I skipped adolescence,” Erik said. “I was very precocious.”
“Yes, you took to murder and mayhem ahead of all your chums.”
“I skipped chums, too.”
Charles managed an exhausted huff of laughter, tilted his head back against the cushions, felt the tight knot of anxiety near his diaphragm begin to uncoil, just enough so that he could breathe more easily. At first he’d hardly dared say anything to Erik at all, vacillating between the serious and the saccharine, terrified that one wrong word would drive him away without warning; or worse, drive him away at the end of a vicious argument where they both said unforgiveable things and Erik vowed never to come back. But as the days passed they had relaxed around each other enough to tease, even bicker amiably. Charles wondered if Erik’s sense of humor had always been like this—dry almost to the point of bitterness, so self-deprecating—or if something about his years in prison had changed him. He was slower to anger than he had been, quicker to change subjects or lose threads of conversation. He no longer bothered to feign politeness, even half-heartedly. Nothing seemed to truly infuriate him and everything seemed to annoy him and Charles had finally given up trying to keep track of what and why. They were both taking it day by day, and that was enough.
He drank most of his scotch with his eyes still closed. Erik put on a record without ever getting up from his chair, something slow and vaguely psychedelic.
“I was in the library today,” Erik said after the first track ended. “Found this tucked away on a top shelf.”
Charles blinked as the old chess set floated onto the table between them, balanced on a metal disk that dissolved and reformed into an ash tray as soon as it had done its job. It was the set they’d used the night before Cuba and countless times before that, simple compared to some of the more outlandishly expensive sets stored around the mansion but emotionally resonant in a way none of those Italian marble or solid brass monstrosities could manage. Erik had stuck coins to the bottom of the pieces so that he could move them with his powers, said it balanced out the lightness of the wood.
“Oh,” Charles said stupidly.
“You would have had to ask Hank to put it there for you. You didn’t want to see it. You didn’t even want to think about it. Why?”
It was that or burn the damn thing didn’t seem like a particularly diplomatic response. “For the same reason you found the set on the plane almost immediately even though it was hidden in a locked compartment completely out of sight, I’d imagine.”
“I was looking for it, and it was there.”
“Well, I was looking for you and you weren’t,” Charles said without thinking, relieved when the words came out tired instead of sharp.
Erik simply nodded; he didn’t take offense and he didn’t apologize. Having done both once, he hadn’t seemed inclined to do either again since he’d arrived—since their argument on the plane, really. Instead he stood up, refilled both their glasses, and when he turned back he was frowning, more puzzled than irritated.
“I’ve been here for two weeks. Why haven’t we played yet? It was literally doctor’s orders.”
Charles shrugged, took a more restrained sip this time. He could already feel the scotch taking effect, warming his stomach, calming his racing thoughts. He wanted to lie down and use Erik’s surprisingly comfortable chest as a pillow, not argue about chess or push his already-strained synapses past exhaustion to something worse. “I haven’t exactly been at my sharpest. Wouldn’t have been much of a challenge.”
“You never are. That’s not an answer,” Erik said.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” With a sigh that sounded distinctly childish, even to his own ears, Charles struggled through his memories of the past few weeks. “Well, it’s not my fault. I’ve sent you for the board before, I know I have, and you’ve never come back. Always distracted by something.”
Erik tapped the side of his glass with a fingernail, repetitive and arrhythmic. “That doesn’t sound like me.”
“Yes, well, I lied to Jean earlier today and blamed it on Hank, and that doesn’t sound like me either, but I think considering recent events occasional moments of aberrant behavior are to be expected, don’t you?”
His tone had been joking, but Erik looked at him strangely for a moment. Charles knew he’d seen that expression before but couldn’t place it until Erik looked away and devoted the entirety of his attention to his next sip of scotch—that right there, that deflection, always came after a flash of distrust, old habit from the days when Erik had tried to shield his suspicious thoughts by piling mundane observations about anything else on top of them. Charles almost wanted to protest at the unfairness of it all—stretching the truth to spare a child’s feelings surely didn’t warrant such skepticism, and Erik must know Charles would never lie to him—but if he asked Erik if he trusted him and Erik said no…
Well, it would hardly be unexpected, but that wouldn’t make it any less unbearable.
“Let’s have a game now, then,” he said instead, forcing cheerfulness.
“I’d like that,” Erik said, smiling.
He was good-tempered after that, solicitous and almost sweet, pivoting between conversational topics with all his old wit without ever losing focus on the game, and by the time Charles tipped over his king he wondered if perhaps he hadn’t imagined that moment of suspicion after all.