Charles
Charles knew the difference between natural and drugged sleep by now, having experienced both so often in his (admittedly dubious) recent memory.
He woke from natural sleep suddenly, with a gasp or choking sound and eyes so wide they looked pinned open. His heart galloped painfully in his chest and if his muscles were stronger he would bolt upright instead of his upper body simply twitching like a beached fish. More often than not Erik was nearby, still half-asleep as he wrapped an arm around him and pulled him close with a strength that would have been intimidating if it wasn’t so comforting. Charles calmed quickly then but those first few adrenaline-fueled seconds never got easier to bear.
Drugged sleep was a struggle to escape, presuming he could muster the will to try. Suffused with an unnatural, treacly calm, his thoughts twisted lazily like a mobile above a child’s bed, aimless, hypnotic. In the lab he had learned to sense impending consciousness without grasping for it, registering that his body existed and then training himself to fall back into the darkness. They had ways of waking him, when he was needed again. And then after his rescue, those first few days when physical or mental pain had intermittently necessitated a morphine drip, voices had whispered that he was safe, he could rest, whenever he had begun to regain consciousness until he had believed them. He allowed himself to drift away, over and over sometimes, until the morphine was out of his system and he woke with a gasp, shaking and terrified and himself again.
This was drugged sleep but as Charles floated up from the dark, closer and closer to his body but not yet touching it, he knew with the certainty felt in dreams that he had escaped the lab and not needed morphine for weeks.
He blinked until his vision was no longer blurry, taking in the room as a series of still photographs: the row of hand-painted toy soldiers on the dresser, the reproduction of a 14th-century nautical Portolan chart, a poster for the 1963 film The Great Escape with its block lettering and Steve McQueen on a vintage motorcycle. The room adjacent to Hank’s lab, and the heaviness in his limbs and molasses-thickness in his thoughts were the aftermath of sedation. He was alone and missed the soothing voices in an abstract way that evoked no emotional distress. Instead he accepted the sensory input calmly and drifted away again.
The second time he woke his head throbbed like he’d had too much to drink or mixed uppers and downers, the way he’d done too frequently during his decade of bad decisions. He groaned and it sounded cacophonous in his own ears, though logic told him his throat was dry and his voice could only be a croak, if that. Immediately there was a straw at his lips but he was only able to take three voracious pulls on it before it was gone again.
“Dr. McCoy says it’ll make you sick if you drink too much too fast,” a young voice told him sternly.
Charles forced his eyes open, found the only light came from a dim bulb in a standing lamp in the corner that barely hurt his head at all, turned his head to find Jean watching him like a small, concerned hawk. He tried to smile at her reassuringly but his lips were dry and cracked and the movement hurt.
Jean held out the water again, a little tremulous but eager to be helpful.
After a few more sips he was able to rasp, “Thank you, Jean.”
“You should get some more rest,” she said with that quiet wisdom beyond her years, that was conjoined with and yet entirely separate from her ability to read minds.
“Yes, nurse,” Charles said, pretending to pout. It made her smile as he’d meant it to and although his voice was still rough, almost unintelligible, speaking was better than the pain that would shoot through his skull if he nodded his acquiescence instead. Even this small interaction drained him; every muscle and joint and even his thoughts felt heavy and useless. He was crushed under a foreign exhaustion that he was just now finding the clarity to question—something had happened, he had done something, he remembered the library and flashes of trailing behind an agitated Erik and Hank shining a light in his eyes, but memory disintegrated after that. It was all fog and shadows. All he knew for sure was that Erik and Hank weren’t here now and their absence only intensified his rising dread.
“Jean, where are Dr. McCoy and Mr. Magneto?” he asked casually, carefully.
She tilted her head, listened to the silent room for a moment in a way he recognized as her telepathy unfurling. Sounding far away, she said, “Dr. McCoy fell asleep in the lab. He stayed up all night, he’s worried about you. Mr. Magneto has been on the roof all morning. He’s scared.” She blinked as she came back to herself; the blankness that took over her expression when she used her powers was replaced by a confused frown. “Why is he scared?”
“I don’t know,” Charles said honestly.
In fact he doubted very much that scared was an accurate description of Erik’s mental state. When Erik was truly frightened he lashed out against the threat or vanished until he had control of himself again; he didn’t brood on rooftops. But Jean didn’t know how to read the intricate web of feelings and associations that comprised Erik’s mind and had pulled out the first dominant emotion she encountered, which meant that Erik was unsettled enough that fear colored his surface thoughts but not so terrified that he had left the mansion. Charles found some small reassurance in that.
He would have been more worried if the sedation still hadn’t weighed so heavily on him. Hank was only in the next room, Erik just a few minutes away, but they felt so far removed, miles distant. His small bed in this small room might as well have been on a different continent. He wanted to grasp for them with all the desperation of a man drowning at sea but they would never reach him in time.
He wished he could remember why his head hurt so badly.
There was a small voice telling him not to worry, to just rest, and he obeyed it gratefully.
He woke for the third time panting and sweat-soaked. He felt entirely present in his physical body, could envision with perfect clarity the blood pulsing in his veins, heart convulsing in his chest cavity, his adrenal cortex kicking his dopamine levels into overdrive. At his waist the paralysis began and every sensation vanished. His legs might as well have been logs or dead things; it seemed impossible that they belonged to the same body whose upper half thrummed with such a textbook fight or flight response. Nothing outside his body made as much sense as the familiar physiological reaction unfolding within him. The mattress beneath him was too soft and there was no one next to him, which was wrong too. He threw a hand out, his breathing loud in the quiet air, and patted the empty bed as if expecting to find Erik tucked under the folded blankets somehow.
“Charles?” Hank said from the doorway, and Charles’s unseeing gaze flew to him and then focused. Hank was in his natural form, blue and steady and reassuring.
“Hank,” he said, relieved. “I—wasn’t Jean here, just a moment ago?”
“You slept for a few more hours. She wanted to skip training in case you woke up again but Alex said you wouldn’t approve.”
“Good man, Alex.”
Charles calmed quickly in Hank’s presence. His energy had changed during their decade of isolation, less nervous and self-conscious, more grounded and self-possessed. His intelligence had sharpened where Charles’s had dulled. At his most overwrought, Charles trusted Erik to protect him, but he trusted Hank to engineer an actual solution to the problem and the problem, at the moment, was what exactly he was doing here.
“There are some…gaps, in my memory,” he admitted.
“That’s not surprising,” Hank said, arranging pillows behind his back so he could sit up properly. “You had quite an episode.”
“In the library.” Charles remembered that much. Grasping for memories was futile and frustrating; he closed his eyes instead, relaxed, let them float to the surface of his mind, tenuously connected like water lilies across the surface of a pond. “I was sick all over the rug. Erik brought me here. I must have been in some kind of shock.”
“You regained another memory, a pretty traumatic one.” Hank paused, clearly about to ask if he had lost it again but wary of triggering another episode.
Charles hadn’t lost it and was almost glad, especially since distance and drugs had softened its edges enough to make it bearable, like a grainy newsreel he might have seen as a boy. This process of regaining and losing the same memories again and again, reliving the trauma each time, always surprised and horrified anew, was exhausting and, he was beginning to realize, counterproductive. Even damaged his mind was agile enough to hide the most painful truths from him, but that protection of his sanity and his understanding of himself came at the expense of his ability to heal. Now he forced himself to remember, though he allowed himself the weakness of euphemisms.
“The last experiment. Yes, it was very…vivid.”
“We can talk about it later,” Hank said. “But you know it wasn’t your fault, don’t you?”
Charles could see what had happened as though someone else had done it and felt a kind of morbid fascination, a clinical curiosity toward the type of person who could do what he had done. The kindness in Hank’s voice made him vaguely nauseous. “I know I was compromised. That’ll have to be enough to go on for now, Hank.”
“That’s fine, professor. What else do you remember?”
“Very little, after coming down here. The shock, I suppose. I remember talking to Erik but not what we talked about, and I—I was sedated, wasn’t I?”
That was less a memory and more a logical deduction. Hank nodded in confirmation but even with his facial features distorted by his natural form Charles could read the confusion in his expression.
“What is it, Hank?”
“I was actually hoping you could help me fill in some gaps there,” Hank said, clearly discomfited by the not knowing. “I’m not the one who sedated you. I remember asking you about the possibility that your telepathy might manifest and that made you agitated and then I don’t remember anything, really. There’s a blur, like I drifted off mid-conversation. Next thing I knew you were unconscious, there was a syringe full of tranquilizer in your arm, and Erik was across the room looking like he’d seen a ghost.”
“What did he say?” Charles asked because it was expected. In truth he didn’t want to know. He felt a shiver go down his back from the top of his neck to the point where the paralysis set in. This conversation was going in a direction he didn’t like and couldn’t control but there was no way to turn from it without turning back to the memory of playing puppetmaster with another human being.
Hank hesitated, then relented. “He said, ‘Be careful.’ And then he left. I haven’t seen him since.”
Jean had said that Erik was on the roof, and scared. Charles said, “I don’t remember what I did to him.”
He did have an image of Erik with his back against the wall across the room, but it was from his full height and was thus impossible. The wheelchair had been taken away; he couldn’t have left this bed. But nonetheless the image was there: Erik with his head tilted back, his mouth open a little, like a cornered animal who had accepted the inevitability of the kill and relaxed into it. There was something giving about his posture, an anticipation in his eyes. Erik always had been better acquainted with that Freudian thanatos than anyone Charles had ever met. He only sought to do something noble, make some great sacrifice, before he gave into it. Normally the sight of Erik like this would have inspired a swell of pity for him; when his rage was banked at its very lowest and his serenity shone at its brightest Charles could see what could have been if not for Shaw and forgave Erik everything. But now the image—memory?—was overlaid with something predatory, something Charles didn’t like to think himself capable of but had to admit that he was, if he was ever to accept what happened during that last experiment. Whatever else he had done, he had seen Erik as something to be devoured, to be bent into whatever shape he wished, and he couldn’t remember what had stopped him. It might only have been the sedative.
“The one thing Erik’s never been is shy about communicating when he wants you out of his head,” Hank was saying thoughtfully. “Jean said he hasn’t left the grounds and the helmet is still locked away so whatever you did can’t be that bad, can it?”
“Unless I made him think it wasn’t,” Charles said.
“Don’t make yourself out to be worse than you are. At least talk to him first.”
As Charles should have expected, it wasn’t that easy. A few hours later when Hank had given him a clean bill of health on the condition that he took it easy for the rest of the day, he found Erik in the kitchen making lunch for Scott, Jean, and Ororo. He stopped his wheelchair in the doorway, shocked, taking in the sight of Erik at the stove laying out slices of buttered bread in a frying pan, adding slices of sharp cheddar cheese that began to bubble as they melted, then flipping them with a spatula that he never touched. Charles had seen him devote equal attention and precision to far more complicated recipes than grilled cheese sandwiches. Next to him Ororo had been given the responsibility of stirring a saucepan of tomato soup; he gave her instructions in a low voice and she nodded seriously, mimicking his posture and behavior in a way Charles doubted was entirely conscious.
“Professor, you’re up!” Jean noticed him first and ran over to throw her arms around his neck before she became embarrassed by her own display of emotion and pulled away quickly.
“Yes, I’d overslept quite long enough, don’t you think?” Charles said, aiming for a kind of cheerful self-deprecation.
He didn’t miss the unreadable look Erik shot him before he turned back to his task.
“You’re just in time for lunch,” Erik said casually, like nothing about the past night or the current situation was at all bizarre. “How do you like your grilled cheese?”
“Lightly toasted, please,” Charles said automatically, to buy himself some time.
Erik nodded. “There’s coffee. Or the kettle is still hot if you prefer tea.”
“Thank you.”
It gave him something to do and made the silence that settled busy instead of awkward. Erik handled the children well, brisk and businesslike but careful to give them all responsibilities so no one felt excluded—he told Scott to set the table, Jean to pour everyone glasses of milk, steadied Ororo’s grip as she poured the soup into a tureen that had belonged to some obscure Xavier relative. He barely looked at Charles at all, then or while they ate and the children filled him in on their training and morning classes, peppered with questions about his absence that he answered as vaguely as possible.
Perfectly timed with the end of the meal, Erik said, “The dishes are all yours, Charles,” and vanished without waiting for a response.
As he rolled up his sleeves and plunged his arms into the soapy water up to the elbow, Charles reflected that of course Erik would consider it a viable strategy to use the children as barriers between them to avoid a conversation he didn’t want to have. He probably considered it more mature than taking refuge in a place Charles couldn’t physically follow; and besides, his guilt hadn’t yet allowed him to take advantage of the disability he had caused. But the children were fair game and so, Charles was willing to bet, were long runs, assorted house projects, and volunteering to go to town for groceries, a task Erik usually avoided like the plague.
Charles’s own guilt was still sharp enough that he allowed the particularly unsubtle avoidance for the rest of the day. He needed to know what he had done to Erik, what Erik had done to him, but there were so few answers that wouldn’t make him a monster and reveal new reasons for Erik to distrust him. He clung to his delusions for the final few hours he could and tried not to wonder if Erik would sleep somewhere else tonight.
In the evening he found himself in the small study next to the library with a large glass of scotch pondering the dangers of his telepathy, renewed in his conviction that he was a threat to everyone around him. That had always been true but some wall had been torn down, some animal part of himself let loose. He would shed no tears for the dead Nazi but the next time he lost control it might not be someone as guilty as that man, or as strong as Erik. His shields, which had been decimated after his rescue, had begun to rebuild themselves naturally—his mind guarded itself against the loudest thoughts and strongest emotions instinctively, it seemed—but they were still flimsy things. He could build them higher. It would muffle the world, cast a sheen of unreality over all his senses, but if it was necessary to protect the people he loved then he would do it without question.
He nursed the scotch with a moroseness Erik would normally have mocked him for until he caught the murmur of a familiar voice from the library next door. The temptation to wheel closer and press his ear against the wall was impossible to resist; he couldn’t make out the words but recognized Erik’s tone, the clipped cadence he used when he was agitated.
Charles barely took the time to rationalize that he had already crossed so many boundaries today that one more invasion of privacy could hardly matter before he was wheeling out of the study and to the cracked door of the library.
“I need you here,” he heard Erik say. “His powers are expanding exponentially. Projections, mind control, even unconsciously. Emma was a shadow in comparison.”
Charles frowned at that word, unconsciously. If he was using his powers in his sleep, he hadn’t known it.
Erik was quiet for a moment, then snapped, “The humans are the least of our worries if what happened last night happens on a mass scale. The whole war, forgotten in an instant because he needs peace or he loses his mind.”
Another pause. A sigh.
“Not without raising suspicion. Nor do I want to. It’s…magnificent, in a way. The power of total annihilation…I felt it turned on me and it was transcendent. How can we begrudge him his natural state?”
A longer pause, and then a clear interruption:
“No, he doesn’t—he needs anchors, he needs people he can trust, and I need to know my thoughts are still my own. I had your back when you asked me to, now it’s your turn. Appoint a second-in-command and come back to the mansion, Mystique, or I will come to you.”
Charles couldn’t bear to hear any more; he backed away silently and returned to the study, downing the rest of his scotch in two gulps. Whatever total annihilation meant, he had threatened Erik with it and rattled him so severely that he had turned to Raven. He could hardly count that as a betrayal when he was so clearly responsible but it sent a stab of pain through his chest regardless.
He could only ensure that it didn’t happen again, so he closed his eyes and began to build his flimsy shields as high as he could.