Work Text:
Such as I am...was wrought from what I had to build with:
Honest bone is there,
and Anguish;
Pride;
and Burning Thought;
and Lust is there,
and nights not spent alone.
~Edna St.Vincent Millay
It is astonishing how quickly things can change in the span of a few moments.
For Charles, his mind leapfrogging like explosions of lighting from mind to mind, thought-to-thought, sharp bursts of inspiration and winding corridors of tumbling, draining emotion, a few moments can seem like whole lifetimes full of someone else entirely.
And so sometimes, his mind buzzing away, bright and brilliant and humming with pure expansive energy, Charles speaks without thinking at all. Without censoring himself. Without realizing that his brain has reached out and snatched something that was never his to know, or take.
Usually it doesn’t matter. He’s been so alienated from people his entire life, knowing too much, being too intuitive, too intelligent, too charming for his own good, ordering just the right drink to impress that girl, knowing just the right thing to say in class. He has always driven people away.
Except Raven. Raven, the only person who knew exactly what Charles was.
Raven, the only person who had asked him to stop. Who knew what he could do and told him to KEEP OUT.
Which is why it matters when Charles, distracted by the new specifications Hank has drawn up for a bigger and better Cerebro, opens his mouth and responds to something Raven never actually said out loud.
And in the span of a few seconds everything is suddenly so much worse than it was before.
***
“That’s nice Raven, but I’m not sure the quality of Hank’s backside supersedes his intelligence.”
It had been such a casual, light floating thought, puffed in his direction, outlined in dark pink. The threaded echo of Who cares if Hank is building Cerebro 2.0 when his ass looks like that? reverberating through his mind.
It’s not until he registers the long beat of silence that he realizes something is wrong. He looks up from the blueprints spread out on his desk to see Hank, his face flushed dark red, his head ducked awkwardly down to his shoulder.
He’s about to ask him what’s wrong, when he hears Raven make an abrupt, strangled noise to his left.
“Charles!” She says, and oh dear, now he can feel the anger absolutely radiating off of her. Sean is laughing at her side, but Raven’s expression is thunderous. Charles straightens and looks around the room for help, but Erik is shaking his head at him, and Alex has his arms crossed, looking disinterested in the entire episode. Moira is conveniently elsewhere, and suddenly Charles wishes he were with her.
He looks back to Raven, and asks,
“What?”
Her entire face goes rigid, and Charles can only watch helplessly as she spins on her heel and storms out of the room, taking the visceral cloud of negative energy with her. Sean is still laughing, and when Charles looks to Erik for an answer, he looks disappointed when he says,
“Charles, I’m sure there are some things Raven would prefer to be kept private?” Frustrated, he replays the last five minutes through his mind and realizes with a sudden shock what he has done.
“Oh dear.”
Erik nods his agreement and Charles can feel his eyes burning into his back as he leaves the room, shamefaced.
***
He finds her in the same place she hid when they were children, when she needed to get away. He thinks, with a sharp bite of pain in his chest that it wasn’t until recently that she felt the need to get away from him.
She’s in the west wing library, far away from the commotion of the house, curled up in the tiny alcove by the window. He waits for a moment in the doorway just looking at her, blond hair glinting in the sunlight beaming down through the panes of glass. For a split second, he sees the tiny girl he once knew, his sister before they began to grow apart, back when they were inseparable, back when she loved him, and she thought the world was at their fingertips, and that Charles hung the moon on a silver string.
“Go away Charles.” The illusion is broken and he sees Raven as she is now, the young woman who feels nothing but frustration, and exasperation when she looks at him. Who chafes against the reigns and boundaries Charles set up for her safety. Who is close and present in the room, and yet farther away then ever before, a gulf rising up between them, black and deep and insurmountable and only getting larger with every day that passes.
Sometimes, in the dead of night, when he’s aware he is in his own nightmare and not someone else’s, he sees Raven standing on the other side of a great void, and he knows he will never reach her again. And sometimes, Erik is standing with her.
He pushes inside the room, and crosses to sit in the chair facing the window, facing his sister who still won’t look at him.
He sits, and watches her for a while, and holds himself in check. He will not read her mind again, and he reels in any mental tendrils that are stretching out towards her, grasping for her mind like sticky cobwebs trailing in the dusty sunlight of the room.
“I’m sorry Raven.” He says, finally.
She laughs, but it’s short and brutal and Charles can’t hide how he flinches at the sound of it.
“Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?”
“I shouldn’t have revealed your thought to everyone, it was unfair to you, and Hank—“ She spins suddenly, facing him, planting her boots on the floor, leaning forward and pushing herself into his space so quickly that Charles sits back, surprised.
“It doesn’t matter WHAT the thought was—you shouldn’t have heard it. You told me you’d stay out, Charles.”
He nods, and finds he can’t meet her eyes. Yes, he did promise that, a long time ago.
“I know I did, but sometimes it’s hard—“ She scoffs at him and jumps to her feet.
“You’re a hypocrite Charles.” He does look at her then, startled. She points a finger in his face. “You keep talking about how I need to appear ‘normal,’” she spits the word out like it’s bitter poison in her mouth, “You make me hide away from everyone, but the only person I’m not safe from is you.”
He stands then to so he can look at her directly, and he nearly recoils at the visible resentment that is swimming beneath her false, peach coloured surface, her brown eyes.
“Raven, I—“ she pushes past him, nearly knocking him off his feet and heads for the door. Before she gets there, she spins to look at him, gritting her teeth together.
“If I have to appear normal, so should you. You can’t just mess with people’s minds whenever you want--nobody wants you in their head Charles—“ She cuts herself off and huffs a harsh breath through her clenched teeth,
“Least of all me.” She turns and leaves the room, slamming the door behind her.
***
Later, he’s standing before her closed bedroom door, the low warbling strains of Elvis Presley creeping through the wood and drowning out the tentative, but resolved sound of his knocking.
He waits a few moments, but when there is no response, he tries calling out her name, knocking again for good measure. She says something, but he’s not sure whether it’s directed at him, or in response to Elvis who is singing, “that’s alright now mama, anyway you do,” or at someone else entirely. He’s attempting to shield, so as to not further damage what is already broken, but with the closed door and thick walls in between them, Charles has no hope in hell of understanding Raven, even if she did say something to him. Without his telepathy, and without visual contact, things tend to get muddled and confused. He has no cues for understanding.
Eventually the music gets substantially louder, and that’s enough of a hint for him to step away and give Raven some space.
He can’t seem to settle, though, when he gets back to his own rooms. He’s always had a tough time going to bed without resolution, without closure. Raven is the only person he’s ever had that stuck with him for a lengthy period of time, and he always attempted to keep things between them steady, and even. Safe. Secure. He always felt so certain that he had done what was right for her in the past, but now Raven is so angry with him, and shutting him out. Suddenly he feels the need to reassess.
Maybe things haven’t been as steady and even as he thought. Maybe all those times he thought he was resolving their fights, he was just condescending to Raven, and not really listening to what she had to say. Obviously she has been withholding certain frustrations from him, a simmering anger that has built up over time, only to boil over today at a relatively small indiscretion.
Now it is his turn to feel frustrated. Going over the past few heart to hearts he had with his sister, he can now see that they were having two very different conversations. A memory of Raven in a bathrobe comes to him abruptly, tooth brush in hand, teeth stark white against the dark blue of her skin. He replays the conversation in his head and slowly a seed of nausea takes root in the pit of his stomach, growing larger and heavier as he combs over each word. Had he really said “what, blue?” like that? He certainly didn’t mean for it to sound like that. He feels sick and pushes the memory away. He can’t help it if Raven doesn’t talk to him. How is he supposed to decipher what she is thinking if he can’t read her mind?
The problem, he realizes, running his hands through his hair, is that he only collects snatches of thought from Raven. A wisp here, a lightning strike there. It’s like reading a book with half of the pages torn out at random. He can’t make sense of her. And with every day that passes, she gets more and more indecipherable. With a sudden swoop to his stomach he realizes that one day, he won’t know her at all. His sister, his only family left in the world, will be a complete stranger to him, foreign and alien.
He feels sick with sorrow and guilt at the thought of it, and unbearably lonely. But they are familiar emotions; after all, has he always pushed everyone away?
Maybe he has to set up defined parameters when it comes to his telepathy—all, or nothing at all. Maybe the brief glimpses of her mind are only confusing the situation. He sits down in his favourite chair before the fire, running his fingers across the worn fabric decorating the arms.
He comes to a decision. If Raven doesn’t want him looking in, not even fleeting, random brushes of her thoughts and emotions, he will just have to contain himself, and endeavour to shore up his shields. Raven is worth a little discomfort on his part.
And he really did feel quite bad about embarrassing Hank. The boys had been merciless over dinner about it, and Charles hated nothing more than seeing someone get bullied for his own mistakes.
He settles back into his chair, resolved, and starts the arduous process of winding in the threads of his telepathy from the long corridors of the house, from the parameters of the estate, building up the blocks piece by piece, making sure the foundation is solid and there are no cracks or weaknesses, no fractures in the walls. It hurts, like gears shifting and grinding against each other through his skull, like snipping off fingertips or burning off taste buds, but he thinks about how much better he’ll feel once Raven is speaking to him again, and he doesn’t allow himself to stop.
He doesn’t stop until it’s done.
***
Dinner had been tense and unpleasant, with Raven picking at her food, fuming silently until Charles tried to start a conversation with her. Without a word she had stormed out, plate left half full, her bedroom door slamming shut with a bang that resonated all the way down to the dining room.
Charles had looked pale and miserable, though he tried to cover it with a smile and a laughing, “Guess she’s still angry with me,” before he got up and followed in her wake, presumably to try and speak with her again. For his part, Erik would rather have gone back to face the Russians.
He left the boys with the dishes, and the noise of them bickering over the sound of running water and clacking plates was almost soothing as he bid Moira a stilted goodnight and retired to the secluded library to wait out Charles.
It had become something of a tradition during the weeks at the mansion to meet up with Charles for a nightcap, and often a game of chess. Erik had begun to look forward to that time of night with a frightening amount of fondness. He tried to remind himself that this was temporary and fleeting, that once Shaw was gone he would vanish again, as he always did. But then Charles would look up at him, his chin resting on top of his folded hands as he contemplated the chess board, and he would smile at Erik, face illuminated by the fire, and Erik found himself forgetting everything for a moment. Allowed himself to be swallowed up by the wanting…
Besides, he’s sure Charles could use a drink tonight after the cock-up of a day he’s had. So he pours out two measures of bourbon and sits in his regular seat, allows the strains of the day to slowly drain away, his shoulders dropping, eyes mesmerized by the flickering of the fire.
But Charles doesn’t come. He gives it a good hour and a half before he gets worried that maybe Raven killed him, and decides to go and check on them both. He doesn’t really want to get embroiled in a quarrel between siblings, but in order for training to proceed smoothly, he thinks it is probably best if the spat is settled tonight.
He pauses at Raven’s door, where the music continues as it has for the past few hours: loudly, and unrelenting. He hesitates with his fist raised, before deciding that maybe he should find Charles first. He resolutely tells himself he is not afraid of a girl, but lowers his fist and steps away from her door all the same.
The door to Charles’ room is ajar, but he knocks anyways. He hasn’t been in Charles rooms yet, and feels a bizarre thrill of nerves in his stomach at the thought of stepping past that finale barrier between the two of them, a rising bit of excitement and arousal that he shunts aside for the time being.
When Charles doesn’t answer, he pushes the door lightly with his fingers, opening it enough to poke his head inside and look around. The room is smaller than he might have expected, but undeniably Charles’: piles and piles of books, desk covered in sheaths of paper, a crumpled sweater on the unmade bed, and Charles himself, slumped in an overstuffed armchair by an unlit fireplace, illuminated only by the light of a stain glass lamp on the table by his elbow.
“There you are,” he says, pushing the door open wider so that he can step through. He pauses on the threshold, unsure of his welcome. Something seems…off about Charles, and there is a strange deadness to the room. As if all the air has stopped moving.
Charles himself blinks, long and slow, and finally looks up at him.
“Oh,” he says softly, his mouth moving again after he’s said the words, as though silently echoing himself, “hello, Erik.”
“I thought maybe you forgot about me,” he teases, trying to draw Charles out of whatever strange mood this is. Charles looks confused for a second, before his face smoothes out into a blank canvas once more.
“No,” he says, “you’re Erik. I remember.” Erik, who had been about to amble into the room, freezes. Something is definitely wrong. Charles, who flirted and teased, bantered and debated with him like it was nothing, like it was as easy as breathing, now sitting there pale and shut off, and slightly confused, as though Erik is speaking another language.
“Charles,” he says slowly, coming a step closer, “are you alright?”
Charles smiles then, but not his regular smile, something strange and spackled together, like a painted grin on a glass doll. Looking down, Erik notices that he is twisting his hands, pulling on his fingers one at a time before wringing them all together, rhythmically, over and over again.
“Perfectly fine,” he says brightly, and then softer “fine. Fine?” like he is testing out the proper emphasis, and Erik feels a chill, and a palpable sense that no, Charles is not perfectly fine. But when he opens his mouth to say so Charles cuts him off with,
“Actually, I think I might retire early, if that’s alright with you? I’m feeling rather tired.”
Erik hesitates, debating with himself for a long moment before he nods. He tries to convince himself that maybe Charles’ behavior can be attributed to exhaustion, the result of Charles pushing himself to the brink trying to get everyone to train, to be ready for whenever Shaw makes his next move. But in order to make himself leave the room and not hover uselessly over Charles has he readies himself for bed, he asks,
“I’ll see you in the morning?”
Charles looks up at him as though he had already forgotten Erik was there. There is a long pause and then he says, tentatively, as though not sure of the correct answer,
“I…expect so?”
It’s almost enough to make Erik turn around and force Charles to go down and see Hank and get checked out. But then Charles smiles at him again, and it is close enough to his regular smile that Erik nods and leaves the room.
Closing the door behind him is more painful than he thinks it should be. He comforts himself with the thought that he’ll check on Charles first thing in the morning.
***
Real. Real. What is real? The floor? No. Floor could be illusion. Floor could be any number of things, figment of imagination, undigested food, crossed waves. Floor isn’t real. Something natural? Grass.
He goes to the window. The glass is cold and when he finds the seam he can open it. The air is freezing and tastes like wet. Rain. Rain is real?
No. No. What is ‘outside’? Bursts of falling stars and carbon and limestone, calcium carbonate and silicon dioxide. Could be fake, could fall to pieces. Is the ground steady? The universe is swallowing me whole. I am swallowing the universe and it is filling me with fire.
Suddenly full of a fear that cripples and clutches and squeezes his heart in a vice grip, he tries to close the window, but his hands are wet. There is something leaking water into his eyes and he can’t see, and when he touches it, it is soft, it is attached--
Hair? Hair is real.
He grips his hair tight in both hands and tugs as hard as he can, and it hurts.
Pain. Pain is real.
Pain is real. Yes. He feels along the wall until it intersects in a corner and settles himself down with his back to the wood panels. Now no one can creep up from behind him. He hadn’t heard Erik before. Was that even Erik? Had he even been there? He had seemed like a puppet, a soundless, mute puppet, without thoughts or feelings, a nothing-person, a clay person. Had Erik ever been real? Had Charles invented Erik for comfort and games of chess? To love?
Pain.
He pushes his sleeves up, scraping bitten down fingernails against the skin there.
Yes. Pain is real.
***
The next morning Erik wakes with the sun, as always. He pulls on his sweats and his running shoes and forces himself to go for a run, the same run he always goes on, instead of rushing to check on Charles right away. Knowing what he does about Charles, he doesn’t think he’ll thank Erik for waking him up at 5am.
When he gets back to the mansion he feels better about the night before, as though with each stride of his run more and more of his tension had been shook out of his body. It’s not enough to completely dispel his worry for Charles, however, and instead of heading to the kitchen to start coffee and breakfast he immediately heads up the stairs and knocks on Charles’ door.
It’s only 6am now, but if Charles doesn’t like it, too bad. Erik is actually looking forward to seeing Charles rumpled and annoyed, answering the door with a gruff, half-living mumble, reminiscent of all the early mornings on their recruitment trip. It’s something Erik had become accustomed to, and missed, strangely enough.
But knocking on the door, there is no response. No Charles at the door. No telltale fumbling from inside the room signaling Charles trying to get to his feet, to untangle himself from his cocoon of blankets. He waits another moment and then tries the handle, and finds the door unlocked.
He hesitates a moment, wondering if this will be too much of a breach of Charles’ privacy before he remembers how Charles looked the night before. How strange he acted. His worry suddenly overwhelms his sense of propriety, and he opens the door and steps inside.
He expects gloom and shadow, the sun shut out by the massive curtains that adorn the windows of every room in the mansion, but instead the room is full of light, the curtains pushed back, the windows thrown open. Erik frowns. On his run the grass had still been wet from the downpour the night before, and on closer inspection he can see a drying puddle of water on the floor beneath the windowsill.
He looks to the bed, intending on jokingly chastising Charles for his carelessness, but instead sees the blankets crumpled as they were before, the same balled up cardigan falling half off the edge of the bed. No Charles.
A slow growing panic takes root around the area where Erik’s heart sits in his chest, but he swallows it down, scans the room for any sign of Charles. Not in the chair where Erik had seen him last night. Not in the bathroom, where the door sits wide open and the lights are off.
Deciding he must be up already, and somewhere else in this massive mausoleum he insists on calling a house, Erik turns to leave. But before he gets to the door, he spots something out of the corner of his eye, a flash of white in a dark, shadowed corner of the room. He looks again and there, there he is.
Charles, lying on the ground, his limbs bent strangely around his body, his white shirt stained in red.
Erik doesn’t know how he moves. Doesn’t remember his feet crossing the distance it takes to get to that corner, doesn’t know how his body is functioning when his heart has stopped. When his brain is empty of everything but a low-pitched wailing that is coming from somewhere far away.
He only knows that when he puts his hands on Charles’ face, expecting it to be cold and it is still warm with the flush of blood, and life, the sound that punches from his chest is inhuman, and unlike anything he’s ever heard before. Charles’ eyes are open, but glassy and staring vacantly at nothing, and Erik fumbles, checking for a pulse. It’s there, but slow, as though his body is frozen in a bizarre facsimile of sleep.
He grabs onto Charles’ cheeks, brushing his thumbs under eyes and shakes him, gently, trying to get Charles to look at him. Someone is saying “Charles, Charles,” over and over again, and distantly he is aware that it is his own voice, but it’s not until someone shouts,
“Erik!” that the world snaps back into any color other than the blue of Charles’ eyes, and he can register someone standing next to him gripping his shoulder. Looking up, he sees Moira, her face pale, her hair tangled as though she just got out of bed. She opens her mouth to say something, but Erik shouts at her, his voice coming back to him in a loud swell of emotion,
“Get Hank!” Moira hesitates for a moment, looking down at Charles, and Erik thinks he might hit her, might grab her and shove her toward the door, but then she is moving, she is running out the room, the belt of her robe flapping a goodbye at him as she goes.
He looks back to Charles, sees the blood staining the sleeves of his shirt, and gently takes one arm in his hands and rolls up his cuff. There are shallow cuts all along the pale inside of his forearm, and Erik can see now that there is blood under his nails, as though he scratched and clawed at himself until he bled.
“Why, Charles?” he murmurs and takes in Charles’ eyes again, catatonic and unblinking, none of the familiar spark, the brimming intelligence and curiosity. If Charles isn’t all right, Erik knows those eyes will haunt him for the rest of his life.
He doesn’t know what to do. Usually he is relentlessly capable in these situations, but not now. Now he feels himself coming apart at the seams.
“Oh my God,” someone says from the doorway, and he can see Sean standing there, rumpled and half dressed, and he looks like he might pass out, “Professor?”
He comes a step closer, and Erik barks,
“Help me get him to the bed,” but Sean does nothing, only stares fixedly at Charles and the blood on his arms, one hand covering his mouth, and so Erik scoops Charles up awkwardly in his own arms, and hoists himself to his feet. Charles is limp, dead weight, and he reminds Erik of a corpse no matter how much Erik tries to banish the comparison from his mind.
By the time he gets him settled on the bed, Hank is bursting into the room, and Erik isn’t sure he’s ever been happier, or more relieved to see him.
“What is it? What’s happened?” He crosses over to Charles’ bedside, and Erik reluctantly moves out of the way so he can get a closer look. He hadn’t realized, but he is holding Charles’ hand, and he squeezes his fingers before stepping back, as though Charles might feel the pressure and come to with a smile and a laugh at their expense for being so worried about him.
Hank glances at the wounds on Charles’ arms before gently tilting his head back and examining his eyes, checking his pulse, palpating his chest.
“Charles?” someone shouts from the hallway, and Erik looks up to see Raven shoving her way past Moira and Alex who are standing in the doorway. She rushes into the room and looks from Charles and Hank on the bed, to Erik, and breathlessly asks,
“What happened? Is he alright?” Hank looks at Erik as well, and Erik struggles to speak, to pull his words back from where they seem to have abandoned him,
“I don’t know,” he says finally, “I came in to check on him, and I found him like this, on the…on the floor.”
Hank goes back to carefully rolling up Charles’s sleeves to better inspect the cuts there, and Erik hears Raven gasp, but he can’t seem to look away from the jagged lines of red.
“Why were you checking him?” Hank asks, “Was something wrong last night?” Erik shakes his head, and then remembers,
“Yes. Yes, he was acting strange, and he said he was tired, but…” Hank nods, and turns on the lamp at the bedside, shining it in Charles eyes, and Erik watches as Charles blinks once, slowly, his pupils contracting. Hank chews on his lip and pushes his glasses back up his nose,
“I don’t know. I think it must have something to do with his telepathy?” Raven makes a small noise, and when they all look at her, she says,
“I remember…one time when we were kids, he was kind of like this…but not—nothing this bad…”
She pushes past Erik, and then Hank and suddenly grabs Charles by the shoulders, shaking him, hard. Erik shouts at her to stop, and Hank stutters,
“Raven—maybe you shouldn’t—“ but when Raven shouts over them,
“Charles! Charles snap out of it!” Hank reaches for her, about to tear her hands away from her brother when suddenly Charles convulses once, twice, and then sits up, gasping.
“Raven?” He says, and then groans, clutching his head, and falling backwards. Like a child, he tucks his knees up, curling into ball, his entire body shaking as though he’s in immense pain. Erik’s heart is in his throat, and he wants to go to Charles, to hold him, to make sure he’s okay, but Hank is waving them back, even Raven who reaches out to Charles, placing a hand on his ankle before he retracts his feet, coiling tighter into himself.
“Give him some space,” Hank says, trying to keep his voice quiet, and level, and they back up to the doorway all of them clustered there, and Erik thinks that if he can feel the nervous tension, the palpable anxiety in air, he can’t imagine what it must be like for Charles. It is the last thing he wants right now, but he forces himself to turn away and shuffle everyone out the door.
“Let’s let Hank speak to him,” he says, and pulls a resisting Raven outside, shutting the door behind him, but not before one last look at Charles, his head buried in his pillow, eyes squeezed shut, speaking to Hank in a tone that is too quiet for Erik to hear.
***
“What was that?” Sean sounds shaken, and when Erik looks at him, his face is drained of all colour, freckles standing out starkly over the bridge of his nose, across his cheeks. He thinks maybe he should offer some words of comfort, but he feels off kilter himself, and he clenches the back of the chair in front of him to try and hide how his hands are shaking. Besides, words of comfort were Charles’ area of expertise and Charles…Charles…
They are gathered in the dining room, where they had fled after Hank had kicked them out of the hallway outside Charles’ room, saying Charles needed some mental space to pull himself together. Pull his mind back together, Erik thinks, pull all the pieces of his scattered mind back together, where he had almost lost them. He remembers in a flash, Charles’ body, cold and lifeless, twisted strangely on the floor, and feels a disorienting sense of weakness, like he knees are going to drop out from underneath him. He clutches the chair tighter until the wood creaks beneath the pressure of his fingertips.
“What was that??” Sean repeats, a sharp twist of mania under the words, and he knows someone has to say something soon before the kid loses it, but he can’t think, can’t make himself speak, he just needs a minute--
“Let’s wait for Hank. I’m sure he can explain,” and that is Moira, her voice low and steady, authoritative. Erik immediately feels the words as a balm, and shoots her a begrudging look of gratitude. She nods at him subtly, and crosses her arms across her chest, and seems for a moment larger than life.
Hank returns in a matter of minutes, though it feels like hours, and they all perk up at his entrance, watching as he settles himself into his chair, wiping the lenses of his glasses off on the loose ends of his shirt.
“So bozo,” Alex says, tipping precariously backwards on his chair and balancing on two legs, “what’s the prognosis?”
Hank huffs a sigh and shoots a glare in his direction before sliding his glasses back onto his nose.
“It appears the professor attempted to seal his telepathy off so that it was fully internalized. He didn’t realize the ramifications of doing so until it was too late, as he had never tried it to such an extent before.”
“So he has been reading our minds all this time,” Raven says, but before Erik can get angry, Sean asks, uncharacteristically timid,
“But why…why were his arms all cut up?”
Hank sighs again and rubs his eyes wearily, knocking his glasses askew.
“Apparently…well, Charles says that it was because he lost track of reality, and the pain…grounded him.”
“Why?” Erik asks from between clenched teeth, and he sees Hank startle at the rough sound of his voice, “Why would he do something like that to himself? Cut off his mutation?”
Hank flickers a glance in Raven’s direction, and Erik can see a certain understanding dawning on her face,
“Charles says that he was trying not to read…well, anyone. But without his telepathy, I believe what he underwent something like extreme sensory deprivation.” He shakes his head. “I think if he had kept it up any longer, he might have completely lost his mind.”
There’s a long pause, and then Alex snorts and says,
“Way to go, Raven.” Raven gapes at him and shouts,
“What! Why is it my fault?” Alex rolls his eyes, and rocks back and forth on his balanced chair,
“You were pissed at him, and that was his way of saying sorry—congratulations, you almost killed your brother.”
“Alex—“ Erik warns, because he can recognize the fear running underneath Raven’s blue skin, knows that it is the same as the fear he feels in his own chest, suffocating and unavoidable, reminding them both how close they almost came to losing Charles. Instead of acknowledgement though, Raven, proud and stubborn Raven, gets defensive,
“I didn’t ask him to do that! I just asked him not to read my mind! Is that so hard?”
“Clearly it is hard, considering he almost went off the deep end,” Alex returns flatly.
“Well obviously he went too far, but I don’t see why he can’t just control it like the rest of us and stay out,” Raven says, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms. “He’s never struggled with it before!”
Erik wants to strangle her. He can’t understand how someone could witness what happened this morning, to her own brother no less, and be so callous. He’s about to intervene when Hank pipes up, voice steady, and says,
“It’s not the same for Charles.” When Raven scoffs and leans forward, preparing for a debate, Hank surprises Erik by standing his ground and cutting her off with a firm,
“It’s not. Don’t you see?” Raven falters, and when she doesn’t say anything Hank continues, tentatively, as though making sure he’s using the right words. “We, all of us, we can choose to use our mutations, like Sean, or Alex, once they’re under control of course, or our mutations are something that exist as our natural state of being, like you…and me, I guess.” He flushes, and Erik feels the familiar twinge of annoyance he gets whenever Hank shows embarrassment over being grouped in with the rest of them.
“Charles is actively working every day to reign in his mutation, to keep it under control—“
“But that’s what I’m doing!” Raven shouts, finally unable to contain herself, “I’m constantly having to keep up a false, normal image because Charles doesn’t want his sister to be a freak—“
“Raven!” Alex yells, tipping forward so that his chair slams back onto the hardwood, “So what if the professor doesn’t want you being blue. Who cares? Why do you have to do what he says?”
“If I listened to every man who told me what to do, I’d still be answering phones at the CIA.” Moira murmurs, and it catches Erik’s attention for a moment, and Raven’s too, and he can tell they’re all taken aback. None of them think of Moira as one of them, not really, and he’s certainly never thought of her as something subversive, as an outsider.
“And you made the Prof…you made him do that to himself,” Sean looks sallow, like he might be sick, “you’re just as bad as him—you’re worse because he never made you hurt yourself—“
Raven looks wounded, and misunderstood, and so Hank cuts Sean off as his voice escalates higher, becoming shrill and panicked, and Erik thinks it’s only a moment more before the glass in the windows starts to shatter,
“It’s not the same as you,” Hank repeats, speaking to Raven as though no one else is in the room, resolute now, and determined, “your natural state of being is…is blue. Is your natural form. If Charles allowed himself to revert to his most comfortable, natural state of being, I think…well, this is just conjecture, but I imagine he might be able to casually control all the minds in the state of New York. Maybe even farther than that.”
There is a stunned silence, and Erik can’t help but feel like they’ve all done Charles a massive injustice. Raven looks lost, and Erik sees a flash of sudden guilt pass across her face before she buries it stubbornly away.
“You shouldn’t have to hide who you are,” he says, and she looks at him, eyes full of gratitude, and something like hope, and he spares a moment to think about how Raven must have been hurt her entire life to get to a point of such desperate self doubt, before he continues,
“but neither should Charles.” He glances at Moira, who is looking at him with something unreadable in her expression, and then Hank who meets his eyes steadily. “None of us should ever have to hide who we are,” he looks back to Raven, and she shrinks slightly under the sharp focus of his gaze,
“and you are going to have to find some way of dealing with Charles’ telepathy, because what you forced him to go through last night and today,” he stops, the words choked with anger in his throat before he can swallow them down, speak past them, “I never want to see that happen again. Understand?”
Raven looks defiant for one more moment before she deflates, and nods.
“I want to talk to him now, if you think that’s okay?” she asks Hank, who smiles and pushes his glasses back up his nose,
“He might need to sleep it off, but I think it will probably be beneficial to have someone else there in the meantime.” She nods and pushes to her feet, looking at Erik once more before turning to go. He wishes he could follow her, wants to be the one at Charles’ bedside with a sudden depth of yearning he didn’t know he possessed. Want to have his fingers on Charles wrist, measuring his pulse, watching him breathe, making sure he’s still present, and whole.
But this is something between Raven and Charles, a wound that needs to be cleaned out before it can heal. And as much as he wants to, he can’t help them with that.
They all watch her as she leaves, but no one says a thing, and the sound of her feet on the hardwood echo through the house as she heads up the stairs, step by step.
***
Raven stands for a long moment outside of Charles’ room, staring at the blank wood paneling as though it will give her answers, or aid. When nothing is forthcoming, she sighs, and pushes the door open, sticking her head tentatively inside.
Charles is curled up under the blankets, and for a moment her heart clenches, because he looks so much like the little boy she used to know, small and pale and painfully fragile.
She tries to close the door quietly behind her, but when she turns back to the bed, Charles’ eyes are open and he’s looking at her from over the blankets.
“Sorry,” she says, keeping her voice low so she doesn’t aggravate what is sure to be a brutal headache, “I didn’t want to wake you.”
He smiles at her and slowly pulls himself upwards, leaning back against his headboard with a sigh.
“No, I’m glad to see you,” he says, rubbing at his forehead, wincing slightly.
She comes closer and runs her fingers across the bedspread, alongside the line his leg makes under the covers.
“How are you feeling?”
He suddenly blushes self consciously, and brushes a hand over the fresh bandages on his arms, smiling ruefully.
“Feeling a bit embarrassed, actually. I guess I over did it.”
Her exasperation breaks the tension in the room and she flops down next to him on the bed,
“Over did it!? Charles! You nearly killed yourself!” Charles scoffs and rolls his eyes,
“Oh darling, it wasn’t as bad as all that,”
“Charles.” And the tone of her voice, flat and deadly serious catches his attention, and he swallows back whatever other flippant excuse he was about to make.
“Oh,” he says, and looks down at his hands, “I’m sorry if I frightened you.”
“Well good,” she says and crawls forward, tucking herself against him, and feeling relieved when he wraps his arm around her shoulder as always. “It reminded me of when we were little, and Kurt first got here.” He sighs,
“Yes, well I’d tried it that one time, and it seemed to work well enough…I guess my telepathy has evolved quite significantly since then, and I wasn’t prepared for the results.”
She snorts a laugh into his collarbone,
“You think?” He doesn’t say anything, only rests his cheek on her head, and she suddenly feels so guilty, so wrong-footed, she can barely breathe. She never meant for Charles to get hurt, to hurt himself.
“I’m sorry Charles,” she blurts, and feels every inch the scared little girl she was when she first got to the mansion, clinging to him, trying to hide how frightened and desperately alone she feels. He grabs hold of her hand resting on his stomach and squeezes it tight, murmurs something comforting, but she doesn’t want to be comforted.
“No, I never meant for this to happen, I was just so, so angry--”
“I know Raven,” he says, his voice soothing, “I think we can safely say we both screwed up.”
They hold each other for a long moment, and Raven stubbornly tries to will back the tears that are gathering in her eyes. Charles is fine. He’s here and he’s holding her like always, and he’s going to be all right.
Eventually Charles breathes in deep, like he always does when he’s about to say something he’s been thinking over for a while.
“I was thinking about how I’ve been treating you, Raven,” he starts, and then breaks off, and she can almost hear his mind churning, trying to align his words properly. “I don’t think I’ve explained myself to you very well…nor you to me. I think that’s why so much of this has happened.” She nods.
“When you asked me if I would date you….looking as you are…well, besides the fact that you’re my sister, the honest answer to that question is no.”
She feels a sharp sting of true hurt shoot through her, and he must see it on her face, or feel it in the sudden rigidness of her body, and he clutches her hand tighter.
“no, no darling. Not because you aren’t beautiful,” and his voice is suddenly strangled with thick, cloying emotion, “because you are so, so beautiful…it’s…it’s because I’ve always been so afraid of someone hurting us because we are different. For us to reveal who we are in public, well. I can’t say the backlash would be positive. I never wanted to court controversy, or bring trouble upon ourselves. Maybe that was selfish, or cowardly, I don’t know.”
Maybe. But she sees the distinction now. That Charles is just as different as her, and working to hide it each and every day.
“So much of what I hear, what I’ve heard my whole life is the fear people feel about people that are different. It’s irrational most of the time, it’s bred out of a fear of their own differences—it makes them want to strike first, strike before someone discovers their secrets, their perversions, the ways in which they are unique.”
“So Erik is right then—they want to hurt us…they will hurt us, Charles-“
He shakes his head,
“No, don’t you see, we’re all the same in that we’re all different. We’re all afraid, and full of doubt and memories of sorrow, and of joy. How can I know all that about a person and do them harm? I can’t hurt them anymore than I could hurt you, or Erik or the boys.”
She can’t think of anything to say to that. Too much has happened, and she feels suddenly, unaccountably exhausted. She understands Charles, she can finally say that with a fair amount of certainty, but she isn’t sure she can agree with him. He seems to sense her mental debate, and squeezes her hand again.
“But Raven, I was wrong to ask you to hide yourself, and I am so sorry.”
She shrugs and tries to hide how much that means to her, how much she has waited to hear him say those very words for so long. She turns and buries her face into his chest, and holds him tighter.
“I’m sorry too,” she says, and when Charles winds his arms around her, lays a kiss in her hair, it feels like when they were children and it was the two of them against the world. And suddenly, Raven realizes how close she came to losing Charles today, and knows with a swell of fear and conviction that she doesn’t want to push him away anymore. She wants him in her life. And maybe, she wants him in her head too. Not all the way in, she needs to keep some things to herself, but she thinks it might be nice to have Charles close by, to know that he’s looking out for her still, after all these years.
“I shall try my best to keep to surface thoughts,” he says, and she can’t see his face, but she can hear the smirk in his voice and she punches him hard in the side.
“Ow—hey! I’m convalescing here!”
Yeah. She thinks they might be all right.
EPILOGUE
Later, Charles is still tucked in bed as per Raven’s request (violent demand on pain of death), reading through the most recent publication to come out of his old alma mater. He’s remarkably behind, having only been gone a matter of months, and he’s starting to wonder if his time and effort isn’t better spent doing something else with his education. Since returning home the mansion seems less like a nightmarish labyrinth of his childhood, and more like something hopeful for the future. Now when he looks at the dusty, empty rooms, the large dining hall, and he begins to see children with remarkable gifts, able to live free and comfortable in a way he and Raven were never able to. A school, maybe.
He’s musing over this still when a tentative knock sounds at the door. A quick brush past the turmoil boiling in the hall tells him who it is, and he calls out,
“Come in!” giving Erik a moment to center himself before pushing the door open.
He looks tired when he comes in, still in his jogging trousers and sweatshirt, and Charles wonders if maybe Erik has been pushing himself too hard. He knows he gets up at the crack of dawn, and doesn’t retire until late at night, and Charles feels a momentary flash of guilt knowing he’s partially to blame for Erik not getting to bed at a more decent hour. As much as he treasures their quiet, private time together at the end of the day, maybe he shouldn’t be monopolizing Erik’s time…
Out loud he asks,
“Hello, Erik! Everything alright?”
Erik stops in the middle of the room, and stares at Charles, his face going slack, and he gapes at Charles for so long, that Charles begins to grow concerned, setting aside his papers, and prodding, tentatively,
“Erik?”
Erik shakes his head muttering, “Am I alright,” before suddenly he leaps into motion. In a flash he is across the room and onto the bed next to Charles, crumpling the scattered paper there, knocking aside books until he’s kneeling next to Charles’ hip, reaching out his hands to grasp Charles’ shoulders tightly beneath his fingers.
“Charles,” he says, and it sounds like it’s wrenched from his throat, and he swallows hard, his eyes flickering to Charles’ and then away, and he can’t seem to dredge up any words as he looks back at Charles again, looks him dead in the eye and says,
“Read my mind.” Charles stares at him, feeling off kilter and confused. But he knows Erik, or at least he thinks he does, and he trusts him, and he’s not going to pass up a chance to step into the beautiful, shining steel girder maze that is Erik’s mind.
And when he reaches up to his temple, his eyes locked on Erik’s, and brushes tentatively past the boarder that separates them, he is nearly knocked over by the tidal wave of pure emotion Erik is pouring towards him. A bright, brilliant flood of worry and overwhelming relief, nervous tension and fear of rejection, and stronger, like a blot of lightning, a crippling fear of loss and the memory of Charles, pale as a corpse, motionless on the floor. But beyond that, rising higher and higher until Charles can’t believe it isn’t being trumpeted from heaven, for all the world to hear, telepath or not, is a never-ending recitation of love. Love love love.
“Charles,” Erik whispers, and Charles knows his hand is still at his temple but his fingers feel numb, his entire body feels detached, and he thinks he might float away, so he grounds himself. He reaches out to Erik and wraps his hand around the back of his neck and hauls him forward. Their mouths crash together with slightly less grace than Charles usually aims for, but the sound Erik makes more than makes up for the clumsy awkwardness of the kiss, and soon enough they are in perfect sync, devouring each other whole.
Later, when they are curled up in bed together, Charles isn’t sure he’s ever experience such bliss before. Holding Erik now, the soft tick tick of his thoughts as soothing as the sound of his heart, he remembers how Erik had wrenched him out of his clothes, paying careful attention to the bandages over his arms, and how he had layered kiss after kiss over Charles’ thighs until Charles was nearly mindless with wanting. He remembers how right before Erik had swallowed him down he had looked at Charles and said, “come in,” and Charles had poured himself into Erik, and taken back everything Erik had for him in return, and the two of them at spiraled higher and higher until there was only ecstasy and a purity of emotion and endless light.
He runs his hand over Erik’s chest, and Erik grabs it in his own and winds their fingers together. Charles tilts his head to watch him as he raises their entwined hands to his lips and places a kiss on Charles fingers, and then on his wrist above the white strip of bandages there, and Charles can’t help but smile.
I never thought you’d be so romantic, he teases, and Erik nips at the soft pad of his thumb in retaliation. Charles sits up, twists to see him better and brushes his thumb across Erik’s lips, asking,
“Why did you wait until today? I’m pretty sure I wanted you since the first day we met,” Erik looks at him, surprised,
“You did?” When Charles nods, he suddenly grins, bright and beautiful, and laughs,
“I had no idea—when I came here tonight, I didn’t know what you’d say when I told you.” Charles stares at him, and then thinks, incredulously,
How could you not know? How is that possible?
Erik smiles and sits up, releases his hand, reaches forward and runs both of his hands through Charles’ hair, twisting his fingers through the strands to hold him in place. Charles reaches up with his own hands and winds his fingers tightly around Erik’s wrists, the two of them bound and intertwined together body and mind.
You were hiding yourself from me, Erik thinks, and when he draws Charles forward into a kiss, a thought puffs into his mind, dark purple and shimmering,
Don’t. Not any more. Charles grins into the kiss, and thinks back If I had known almost losing my mind would get me this, I would have done it a long time ago.
Erik growls and bites down on his bottom lip, rolling him over onto his back in a swift movement that knocks the breath out of him. He laughs and whispers apologies that turn into more kisses, growing slower, and deeper, the two of them investigating each other in close detail now that the time for urgency has passed.
They’re going to have to set up boundaries and parameters, he thinks, Raven and Erik both. He’s not naïve enough to think they’re going to want him in their heads all the time. But lying there, surrounded by Erik, their thoughts interwoven, more intimate than he’s ever been with anyone before, he thinks, it’s a start.
It’s a beautiful, promising beginning.