[fic] Not Half As Blinding 2/6
Jul. 18th, 2011 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keTitle: Not Half As Blinding 2/6
Rating: 14
Genre: drama, fix-it fic
Pairings: Erik/Charles
Wordcount: 30k
Warnings: I choose not to warn
Summary: Cuban beach AU. Charles discovers that death does, in fact, solve everything.
Author’s Note: X-men canon, it has been said, resembles a plateful of spaghetti in terms of continuity and coherence. Most of my knowledge comes from the movies. Also? American spelling is hard! ):
Betaed byyami_tai and twelve_pastels. <3
Waking up is the hardest thing he had ever done. His mind is blanketed. Usually when he wakes his mind is already up, feeling the movements of people in the immediate vicinity, brushing against theirs as they go about their business. Now, all he knows is that he desperately needs water as his mouth is parched and rough.
“Matthew?” someone says. Her mind is a fluffy cloud of concern, beaming at him with the occasional flash of trepidation.
Charles twitches. The light hurts his eyes, but he stubbornly blinks them open.
There is a ceiling overhead. He cannot place this ceiling. He should, he feels like he should, but he draws a blank. It is familiar, somehow, but it has no place in his memory.
“Matthew?” the warm cloud of concern at his side becomes alight with wonder. “Praised be the Lord, it’s a miracle! Can you hear me, Matthew?”
“Who are you?” Charles wants to ask, but his throat is dry and his tongue feels several sizes too large.
“Here, let me help you,” the cloud says and slowly Charles begins to see her face, up to this point obscured by the edges of her simple mind. She wears a wimple, a nurse’s wimple. It is a hospital, then.
There is water on his lips and Charles drinks greedily.
“Careful now, we wouldn’t want you to choke.”
He wants to assure her he will do no such thing, that he had mastered drinking at the tender age of two, and that skill has served him well throughout his adult years. He doesn’t manage to say anything, which is just as well, as he coughs and suddenly he can’t breathe and the liquid is everywhere, filling his nose, his mouth, his mind.
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” the woman says. Her hand is rubbing circles on his chest until his breathing slows and he is no longer choking. “It is perfectly fine. Relax, just relax. You are safe here.”
Charles wonders where is here. He wonders what precisely happened that landed him in this sterile place, which feels like a hospital, but cannot be one, because there are colors on the walls and plants on the far end of the room. The air smells clean and pure, and the smell of disinfectant is much more subdued and not quite so overpowering as it would be in a hospital.
What happened? he asks himself.
He looks at the white ceiling, at the yellow walls and the cut-up windows, beyond which there are trees and the sky. His gaze falls on a spot of sunlight, which presently sets a square section of the wall alight, and an image flows to the forefront of his memory. A beach in Cuba, he thinks. Blinding white sky and sand.
Erik.
Dear Lord, Erik!
Charles tries to sit up, but he is too weak. Something happened on that beach. He remembers the sand, the sky -- why is he looking at the sky? -- and he remembers Erik’s face, inhuman in anguish and anger.
“What happened?” he manages to force out of his throat at last. He is shocked to discover the actual words sound nothing like he intended, but become a slur of vowels, with a lone th standing out in the middle.
The cloud of maternal concern envelops him one more and his eyes close, involuntarily. He must rest, he thinks, and doesn’t know if it’s her thought, or his.
*****
The second time he wakes the world seems a little less bright, a little more real. He is alone in the room and though he hears footsteps in the corridor, he can’t feel anything from them. He panics, but then someone comes closer, the same nurse as before, and her mind is once again open and awed, so Charles relaxes. This time he can see the thoughts that flicker on the surface. He is somewhat grateful that this is not a quick-witted woman. Her thoughts are slow, fully formed and yet simple, moving across her mind at a leisurely pace.
She prays, constantly. The Lord’s prayer is a constant hum in the background and among the prayers Charles sees her joy, that the Lord has graced them all with a miracle, her relief that there is no war, her gentle annoyance at the doctor, who dismissed her reports, her faith.
“It’s alright, Matthew,” she says when she sees his half-open eyes. “The doctor will be here in a few minutes. He didn’t believe me, but you are really here, aren’t you?”
Charles closes his eyes, which is meant to convey a nod, and feels her beaming smile. Something is not quite right. He is so tired, but he must stay awake, if for no other reason, than to know what happened.
His patient struggle to remain conscious is rewarded when he hears a gruff male voice at the door and a consciousness enters his field of cognition. The doctor is prickly and tired, but he is genuine and he approaches the bed with a pastel-colored air of fondness.
“How are we doing today, Matthew?” the doctor asks, and Charles opens his eyes.
It is almost gratifying to see the man drop his chart and leap to his side to peer into his eyes and check his pulse.
“Bless the Lord,” the nurse says happily.
“This is remarkable,” the doctor says. “Can you hear me, Matthew?”
Charles frowns and opens his mouth. “Yea,” he manages. He feels parched.
“Remarkable! Now, stay put,” the doctor says. “It is far too early to try getting up.”
Charles winces, but the doctor is right -- his body will not obey him. He casts a questioning look at the two above them and some of it filters through, because the doctor leans over him with a paternal smile on his face.
“Now, lad. I know it won’t be easy for you. You have been asleep for almost thirty years.”
Charles stares, forgetting the ache (how can his eyelids ache?) and silently begs the doctor to repeat himself.
“You have been asleep for almost thirty years,” the doctor says again, and frowns. “Dear boy, this is nothing short of a miracle. Your brother will be delighted.”
“Sir, Mr Xavier is presently in Europe. At least that’s the last fixed address of his we had.”
“That is a problem. Well, good news can wait, I’m sure he will be happy all the same. Let’s run some tests, shall we? We wouldn’t want to get Charles excited before we know for sure.”
Charles laps at the water the nurse spills into his mouth greedily and, though he is relatively sure he would be able to talk, says nothing. His head is spinning and the vision becomes tangled with his sense of the human mind, resulting in an image that is too bright and confusing for him to handle.
He remembers something. They keep calling him Matthew, but how can that be, Matthew died, didn’t he? That’s what mother said. Charles has only been taken to see him once, he was so little, and the sight of the slight body among the white sheets meant nothing to him. His brother, mother said without an ounce of feeling. He’s called Matthew. He’s asleep and he won’t ever wake up.
Charles holds the memory, disjointed and foggy as it is, and examines it in minute detail. She said, “He’s called Matthew.” She said, “He’s asleep.”
“He won’t ever wake up,” was something Charles heard, but her lips did not move then. “Well, at least one of them won’t be a hassle.”
He remembers crying then, for no apparent reason. He remembers being soothed by the nanny. He doesn’t remember anything about his brother. He looked at the hospital bed, saw the body there, didn’t make a note of the resemblance, because he was too young to have a fully formed image of himself, and moved on, because he felt nothing there. He saw a doll swaddled in white sheets, a doll that breathed, but a doll nonetheless.
He suspects at this point it is irrelevant to wonder how has this happened.
Not when he still doesn’t know what exactly happened.
The nurse smiles at him and pets his hair. “Roberts will be here soon for your therapy. Don’t be scared of him, he’s a dear. He helps you stay fit.”
Charles watches her carefully, with his eyes and his mind, and something inside him drops when he realizes she thinks of him as a child. It drops further when the reasons for it filter through -- Matthew was brought here at the age of two. He hasn’t woken up since.
She disappears through the door and Charles thinks sleep sounds like a wonderful idea right about now, but of course just as he thinks he might finally drift off Roberts arrives.
“Good morning, Matthew,” he says. “I hear you have woken?”
Charles’ mouth twitches in a smile. Roberts is over six feet tall. He is powerfully built and his voice is booming in the small, sunny room, which is a lot brighter now that he is in it. His mind is bright and open, no less maternal than that of the nurse and Charles is happy to bask in its glow.
“Careful now, Roberts,” the kind nurse says and a grayish tinge of worry flickers through the fleecy cloud of her thoughts, “Matthew is only two years old.”
“No worries, ma’am,” he says, and Charles feels a twinge of regret when a flash of well-worn hurt covers up the man’s sunny thoughts. He wishes he could say the nurse means nothing by it, and it’s true -- she doesn’t. She likes Roberts, but she is not terribly progressive and in her mind a giant black man is a scary thing to a child.
Charles smiles, instead, and holds the smile in place even when Roberts’ gentle hands take hold of his arm and Charles catches a sight of his palm.
He looks skeletal. He fights not to recoil in horror when he sees, out of the corner of his eyes, the thinness of his arms and legs, and, when Roberts helps him sit up, the pronounced ribs. Thirty years, he thinks in horror. I have been here, in this sunny little room for almost thirty years!
And yet he hasn’t, he knows this as he knows his name is Charles. He went to school. He lived in a mansion, then he went to college. He got his degrees. He has a sister called Raven, who is often blue.
He has a friend called Erik, who is no longer his friend, who can bend metal. They met in the icy waters of the sea, when Erik was trying to stop a submarine with the power of will alone, and Charles jumped in after him.
“There you go,” Roberts says, nestling Charles’ left leg among the covers. Charles keeps the silly smile plastered to his face even as he screams inside.
Roberts winces and his sunny disposition is shaken for a moment. He’s not sure why, and it scares him a little, so Charles focuses on the smile, until it reaches down into the core of him and is therefore almost real. “Thank you,” he musters and Roberts smiles.
His name is Abraham, Charles picks up. He’s been an orderly here for ten years now. He likes his job, it’s quiet and the staff don’t harbor much in the way of racial prejudice. They know he is good at what he does and no one hardly ever feels the need to monitor him any more. The patients like him, because he is kind to them. He likes his wife’s meatloaf most of all foods. At home he has a collection of books by Jane Austen, because his wife, Wendy, read one and enjoyed it, so he bought her the whole series, read them, and now reads them over and over, whenever he has the chance. He does it when she isn’t home.
“Good afternoon, Matthew,” he says when he leaves the room.
Charles stares at the ceiling, blinking away the moisture that gathers at the corners of his eyes. Abraham is a good person, a thoroughly good person, and yet he was beaten up at school, his co-workers periodically make sure he did everything correctly, even though he is by rights every bit as qualified as they are.
It’s not fair, he thinks.
He falls asleep and dreams of sand and the sky and terror. It is new -- usually he dreams of sunshine and a childhood room that’s yellow and has plants in the corner.
Oh, he thinks when he wakes up to a sunny yellow room with a ficus in the corner. Oh.
Charles tries to curl in on himself, hide from the world, go to sleep and never wake again, but his limbs are heavy and he can’t force them to move.
Instead, he closes his eyes and remembers the sand. He remembers a sky that’s too bright to be real and Erik, frightful, terrified Erik. He remembers darkness licking up the edges of his vision and the sand that sticks to everything. He remembers the stripe of blood smeared across Erik’s face and the shadows cast by the helmet, looming over them both like a mausoleum of everything they ever were and everything they never would be again.
He remembers dying. The brain tissue lacks the capacity to feel physical sensation, so he only felt the coin break the skin and the bone underneath, then it should have been painless, it should have been… It shouldn’t have been a roaring storm of panic, of pain magnified by terror, brought upon by the realization of one’s own mortality, of the power coiling in his gut, of own his flesh burning as he held it back, squashed it back down, and god, his whole body burned with the effort of feeling the waves of fire engulfing him and he had nothing but his own hands to hold them down.
Then the pain blossomed in the back of his skull and the flames poured into a dark abyss and he teetered on its edge, but there was no more fire to contain, no more fear, he was free.
He walked out of the plane feeling light-headed. Then the world moved, spun and he was lying down, cradled in Erik’s arms, watching the sky grow brighter and brighter and the abyss open before him. Except this time there had been a light there, a speck of brightness at its centre, weak and fluttering, but guiding him. Charles was falling, but it wove itself around his hand and pulled him through to the other side.
Charles opens his eyes in the present and stares at the bright ceiling.
He hasn’t expected that, he thinks before the memories start pouring in through the fog, filling him and overflowing, until his spine arches and he lets out a gargled scream.
He remembers the helmet descending and sealing Erik away, forever. He remembers missiles and ships and his own words -- oh god, what had he said? -- and the world exploding in a cascade of pain, fire and, inexplicably, the smell of coconut.
Outside the room he hears a crash and a whimper, and hurriedly he pulls his mind back, gathers it close, gritting his teeth because the ragged folds drip with anger and pain, and they are sharp as knives, but he curls himself around it, even though they hurt, so that nothing leaks out, not even a drop.
There is precious little he can do to shield himself from the memories that keep coming, arranging themselves into a neat little collage of horror and failure. Charles would weep, but he can’t gather the strength to do so. All the men, Russians, Americans; the cultural differences don’t matter so much, because terror is a universal language.
He doesn’t unfold for the following week, dutifully going through the motions of being mentally two years old and unaware of anything that has gone on in the world in the intervening twenty-eight years, or the past few days. That is a knowledge best left for when is capable of facing the world on his own terms. The only time he ventures out of his shell is when the doctor becomes too excited over his progress and declares it is time to contact Charles, to let him know his brother is awake. It doesn’t take much to gently hint to the man that contacting Charles Xavier could do more harm than good and that Matthew Xavier is best kept secret for the time being. The Xaviers are very odd people, after all, and they lave been very lax with visiting, even though the generous cheques kept coming, like clockwork, every month, to keep Matthew in luxury. Foisting upon them a two year old in the body of a wasted thirty year old would be a nuisance for a gregarious man of Charles’ age. There’s no harm in keeping the cheques coming for a little while longer, and the boy is well-cared for here…
Charles falls back onto the bed in exhaustion, but the doctor stops thinking about calling the Xaviers, except when his scrupulous honesty reminds him that this is a breakthrough and family should be notified. He reasons the honesty away; surely the Xaviers would leave him where he is, anyway, they are such busy people, it would surely be best if they were only notified when Matthew is capable of walking on his own.
*****
The days float by lazily. Every day war fails to break out. Every day nurse Patricia O’Maley enters Charles’ room pleasant and bright, and every day Abraham Roberts comes to help Charles’ skeletal limbs along a regime of simple exercises that should, in time, give him the strength to move on his own.
It is a month before he can sit up. It is another week before he can swing his legs over the edge of the bed and stand.
It is another week before he can do so without falling to the floor.
By the end of the third month he successfully manages to walk around the room unassisted without falling down once. This is when he decides enough is enough, and signs the release forms.
A car is made available to him, partly because he is, presently, Charles Xavier taking his little, wasted, twin brother Matthew home, partly because he can no longer stand the sunny dispositions of people surrounding him and his aggravation threatens to overwhelm his surroundings, and this is a place where an angry rich man gets his will done.
Inside the vehicle, he collapses onto the leather seat as the driver puts the wheelchair -- just in case, the nurse says -- in the back.
“Where to, Mister Xavier?” the driver asks.
“Westchester,” Charles says before the exhaustion of having walked ten yards unassisted takes its toll. His head hurts with the effort of projecting the illusion into the mind of the receptionist. She is a diligent woman, unburdened with too much education or a suspicious mind, and it still takes an honest effort to convince her that the man before her is not a patient, but his twin brother.
New brain, Charles thinks sleepily. It doesn’t make much sense until he lets the thought ripple and bloom into something more concrete. The powers are genetic, so whatever talent he had Matthew likely has as well, but the difference is that his mind has been trained for thirty years. It takes a psyche to absorb or to project, and Matthew, it would seem, had none.
Charles sleeps the whole way.
Someone shakes him by the shoulder and Charles startles himself awake. His childhood home looms in the distance, imposing as ever, possibly more so, when the air is biting and the surrounding trees are naked and black against the pale clouds. Charles sighs and picks himself from the back seat of the car, even as the driver opens the trunk and pulls out the wheelchair.
There is a tense moment when the man gets ready to leave and Charles can’t let go of the roof, for fear of falling over, but a compromise is reached when he staggers away and signals he is fine and the car pulls away.
Then someone screeches and Charles looks up so quick his vision fails him, his head spins and he falls into the gravel, cutting his palm as he lands.
“Charles! Oh my god, Charles!”
It takes a moment, but eventually Charles’ eyes focus on Moira’s frantic and tearful face. “Moira,” he says pleasantly. “Nice to see you.” There are marks on her neck, scars left by a thin chain, and over them a thin metal band, of very strange design. He finds it hard to focus.
There are more voices around them as she envelops him in a hug, and Charles feels touched by the display, even though he is kneeling in the snow and the gravel beneath is digging into his knees.
Alex slaps his shoulder, nearly sending him sprawling. “Way to come back from the dead, Professor!” he says and laughs, and Sean yodels, which is terribly grating on the ears. Only Hank has the good grace to remain silent and help him up.
Altogether Charles has half a mind to scold them, for immediately assuming he is alive and that this is not a trick by some other mutant. Or Raven. Or another telepath out to hurt them all. How can they not be suspicious at his appearance, he wonders, but he is touched by their joy, all the same, so he allows himself finally to open up a little and brush their minds, finding there pure relief and happiness, with a faint aftertaste of terror.
“What happened?” he asks, but then something miraculous happens, something wonderful, because Raven is there, and her gasp carries all the way through the courtyard and into his mind. Charles blinks away tears and then Raven is in his arms, her skin alternatively smooth and scaly under his fingertips, her mind an ever-changing landscape of love, blue, waffles and hope. He should try to resist, he knows, but this is Raven, and he cannot help but sink into her welcome, to let her relief and wonder fill him as well, banishing the fear and worry.
“Charles,” she says and there are tears in her eyes as she kisses his cheek and holds him. He sees the question in her mind before she shakes it away and grabs his hand. “Come, quickly.”
He forgets briefly about the tiredness and the fact that he is about to faint when she strides barefoot over snow and gravel -- the cold slides off her body like water would, he glimpses, and she walks in the snow as comfortable as she would be on a sunny beach -- and pulls him behind her, to the back of the house. There is a clearing among the trees, which he recalls as being one of his favorite spots when he was young, because one needed to leap over a hedge which his mother would never do and therefore she didn’t know it was there.
Now the path has been cleared and in the clearing there is a headstone. It’s metallic, which is the most Charles can tell from this distance.
It is also not alone. There is a desk, and something much like a play pen, in which there is a child of about four, poking tiny snowmen with brightly colored blobs of light emanating from its fingers.
There are words on the headstone. His name, Charles realizes, and dates.
He wishes that this was a shock.
“I’m touched,” he says tiredly. “But why the desk and the child?”
His vision must be swimming, because at this point the desk unravels into something very pointy and fast, and there is much screaming over his head, and the sounds somehow manage to be sharp and pointy as well, and most of it hits the inside of his skull.
“Erik!” Raven screams, “Stop it, it’s really Charles!”
The world stops. Oh, the shards of metal remain in the air and somewhere the child is crying, but as far as Charles is concerned everything ceases.
“Erik?” he whispers tentatively and Erik is really there, furious, what a surprise, but there, free of the coffin-helmet. The fury and pain radiates off him, and its not even a pulse, like it usually is, but a steady stream of concentrated hatred, directed at him, because how dare he, how dare anyone, pretend to be Charles? When Charles is dead, when he buried Charles himself, when he lies rotting underneath the headstone.
“Calm down,” Charles half-says half-thinks, and without meaning to brings the image of the menorah and flickering flames to the forefront of his mind and projects it at Erik.
Everything stops. Everything except the child, who is still crying.
“Who is this?” Charles asks quietly.
“Her name is Jubiliation Lee,” Moira says, because Erik is still staring and he doesn’t seem to be capable of speech. “Erik found her in an orphanage in California.”
“Oh,” Charles says, and closes his eyes. He must be more tired than he thinks he is, because something is very wrong with his balance and he is on the ground, with a circle of concerned faces blocking the view of the clearing between the naked, spidery branches of the black trees. A raven looks down on him from the crown of the tree and opens its beak.
“Nevermore,” Charles whispers. “I think I need to lie down,” he adds, and really, there’s no need for the panic, he says in his head, he is quite comfortable here, on the snow.
He blinks and he is in his own bed. Hank is leaning over him, but his head is turned towards the others, who remain by the door, as he speaks. “Professor is exhausted and dangerously underweight. He needs rest and food.”
“I’m fine,” Charles says and tries to get up, which is when a candelabra lifts itself from the table in the corner, twists, and pins him to the bed by the shoulders. It’s a snug fit, though not uncomfortable. Charles could almost be proud.
“Thank you, Erik,” he says instead, shocked at the venomous sarcasm spilling from his mouth. “But could you make it a little tighter, I think I can still breathe and I’m reasonably sure there are more spare bodies I could use in the event of sudden death.”
He expects a comeback, fury, a rain of missiles or a lifelong grudge, something. Instead, Erik turns on his heel and marches out of the room, surrounded by a cloud of dark feelings Charles doesn’t care to decipher, as the candelabra falls to the side of the bed in a useless, tangled heap.
“Charles,” Raven says in the hush that follows, voicing the question that has been growing on everybody’s minds. “What happened? How is this even possible?”
“Does anyone care?” Alex asks. “He’s back, score for us, finally we won’t have to skulk about the place in terror!” Sean nods vehemently. Charles can just make out the remnants of glue on his cheeks, in the shape of a piece of tape, and he knows that Erik put it there.
“The grave was undisturbed,” Hank says. “And you smell different.”
“I had a twin brother,” Charles says tiredly, filing away Hank’s comment for future investigation, because olfactory identification would be a fascinating power to have. “He was in a coma from the age of two, no higher brain functions, apparently. As it turns out, he wasn’t really my brother, he was me.” His eyes close. He remembers, now, talk of his early childhood, sparse though it had been. Only as nonverbal infants they were ever awake at the same time, then they would alternate and then, around their second birthday, a choice was made, and Matthew simply fell to sleep, never to wake, never to be. “All my life I’ve had dreams of a yellow room. Then it turned out they weren’t dreams, I was waking up there, briefly seeing through Matthew’s eyes.”
“Is this a part of your mutation?” Moira asked, but Hank, blessed, brilliant Hank, was already ushering people out the door.
“He needs rest. If he’s been in a coma for thirty years, he needs sleep, food and exercise.”
Charles feels the storm cloud at the edge of his consciousness and it is raining heavily, but he’s too tired and how he hates his body right now.
Then comes the realization that his body is presently six feet under a playpen, and he is so confused sleep sneaks in, unbidden.
*****
There is a devil and an angel standing over him. The window admits just enough light to paint them orange. How thoughtful, Charles thinks, if a little late.
“Hello,” he says cautiously. He feels the weight of their minds, the solemnity of the moment in the shapes of them. The devil is surprisingly cool to the touch, metaphorically speaking. No overt passions, just a cause to which he is currently attached. He shifts and there is another figure behind him, one much slighter than he. “Angel, pleasure to see you, as always.”
“Professor,” she says, inclining her head nervously. Her wings flutter against her back. The man standing on the other side of the devil -- he is called Azazel, Charles remembers now -- nods and his mind is a veritable hurricane of emotions and lusts, currently presided over by amusement.
They seem cautiously friendly. It is a surprise.
“Erik told us to introduce ourselves,” Azazel says and grins. “Since we are now housemates.”
“I’m touched. Charles Xavier,” he says before he can process. “You are Azazel, Riptide, and Angel I already know.”
“Yes.”
“Housemates?” he inquires cautiously, when the conversation catches up with his tired mind.
“Erik invited us to stay. Congratulations on your resurrection.” Azazel smirks at him and his tail lashes out behind him like that of a prowling tiger, cutting through the sunlight like a knife.
Charles is a little too thrown by the surrealism of this conversation to manage more than a weak “thank you”.
There seems to be nothing left to say and they turn to leave. Angel lingers in the door and looks at him. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s quite alright.”
He falls asleep again. It seems like the best thing to do.
three
Rating: 14
Genre: drama, fix-it fic
Pairings: Erik/Charles
Wordcount: 30k
Warnings: I choose not to warn
Summary: Cuban beach AU. Charles discovers that death does, in fact, solve everything.
Author’s Note: X-men canon, it has been said, resembles a plateful of spaghetti in terms of continuity and coherence. Most of my knowledge comes from the movies. Also? American spelling is hard! ):
Betaed by
yami_tai and twelve_pastels. <3Waking up is the hardest thing he had ever done. His mind is blanketed. Usually when he wakes his mind is already up, feeling the movements of people in the immediate vicinity, brushing against theirs as they go about their business. Now, all he knows is that he desperately needs water as his mouth is parched and rough.
“Matthew?” someone says. Her mind is a fluffy cloud of concern, beaming at him with the occasional flash of trepidation.
Charles twitches. The light hurts his eyes, but he stubbornly blinks them open.
There is a ceiling overhead. He cannot place this ceiling. He should, he feels like he should, but he draws a blank. It is familiar, somehow, but it has no place in his memory.
“Matthew?” the warm cloud of concern at his side becomes alight with wonder. “Praised be the Lord, it’s a miracle! Can you hear me, Matthew?”
“Who are you?” Charles wants to ask, but his throat is dry and his tongue feels several sizes too large.
“Here, let me help you,” the cloud says and slowly Charles begins to see her face, up to this point obscured by the edges of her simple mind. She wears a wimple, a nurse’s wimple. It is a hospital, then.
There is water on his lips and Charles drinks greedily.
“Careful now, we wouldn’t want you to choke.”
He wants to assure her he will do no such thing, that he had mastered drinking at the tender age of two, and that skill has served him well throughout his adult years. He doesn’t manage to say anything, which is just as well, as he coughs and suddenly he can’t breathe and the liquid is everywhere, filling his nose, his mouth, his mind.
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” the woman says. Her hand is rubbing circles on his chest until his breathing slows and he is no longer choking. “It is perfectly fine. Relax, just relax. You are safe here.”
Charles wonders where is here. He wonders what precisely happened that landed him in this sterile place, which feels like a hospital, but cannot be one, because there are colors on the walls and plants on the far end of the room. The air smells clean and pure, and the smell of disinfectant is much more subdued and not quite so overpowering as it would be in a hospital.
What happened? he asks himself.
He looks at the white ceiling, at the yellow walls and the cut-up windows, beyond which there are trees and the sky. His gaze falls on a spot of sunlight, which presently sets a square section of the wall alight, and an image flows to the forefront of his memory. A beach in Cuba, he thinks. Blinding white sky and sand.
Erik.
Dear Lord, Erik!
Charles tries to sit up, but he is too weak. Something happened on that beach. He remembers the sand, the sky -- why is he looking at the sky? -- and he remembers Erik’s face, inhuman in anguish and anger.
“What happened?” he manages to force out of his throat at last. He is shocked to discover the actual words sound nothing like he intended, but become a slur of vowels, with a lone th standing out in the middle.
The cloud of maternal concern envelops him one more and his eyes close, involuntarily. He must rest, he thinks, and doesn’t know if it’s her thought, or his.
*****
The second time he wakes the world seems a little less bright, a little more real. He is alone in the room and though he hears footsteps in the corridor, he can’t feel anything from them. He panics, but then someone comes closer, the same nurse as before, and her mind is once again open and awed, so Charles relaxes. This time he can see the thoughts that flicker on the surface. He is somewhat grateful that this is not a quick-witted woman. Her thoughts are slow, fully formed and yet simple, moving across her mind at a leisurely pace.
She prays, constantly. The Lord’s prayer is a constant hum in the background and among the prayers Charles sees her joy, that the Lord has graced them all with a miracle, her relief that there is no war, her gentle annoyance at the doctor, who dismissed her reports, her faith.
“It’s alright, Matthew,” she says when she sees his half-open eyes. “The doctor will be here in a few minutes. He didn’t believe me, but you are really here, aren’t you?”
Charles closes his eyes, which is meant to convey a nod, and feels her beaming smile. Something is not quite right. He is so tired, but he must stay awake, if for no other reason, than to know what happened.
His patient struggle to remain conscious is rewarded when he hears a gruff male voice at the door and a consciousness enters his field of cognition. The doctor is prickly and tired, but he is genuine and he approaches the bed with a pastel-colored air of fondness.
“How are we doing today, Matthew?” the doctor asks, and Charles opens his eyes.
It is almost gratifying to see the man drop his chart and leap to his side to peer into his eyes and check his pulse.
“Bless the Lord,” the nurse says happily.
“This is remarkable,” the doctor says. “Can you hear me, Matthew?”
Charles frowns and opens his mouth. “Yea,” he manages. He feels parched.
“Remarkable! Now, stay put,” the doctor says. “It is far too early to try getting up.”
Charles winces, but the doctor is right -- his body will not obey him. He casts a questioning look at the two above them and some of it filters through, because the doctor leans over him with a paternal smile on his face.
“Now, lad. I know it won’t be easy for you. You have been asleep for almost thirty years.”
Charles stares, forgetting the ache (how can his eyelids ache?) and silently begs the doctor to repeat himself.
“You have been asleep for almost thirty years,” the doctor says again, and frowns. “Dear boy, this is nothing short of a miracle. Your brother will be delighted.”
“Sir, Mr Xavier is presently in Europe. At least that’s the last fixed address of his we had.”
“That is a problem. Well, good news can wait, I’m sure he will be happy all the same. Let’s run some tests, shall we? We wouldn’t want to get Charles excited before we know for sure.”
Charles laps at the water the nurse spills into his mouth greedily and, though he is relatively sure he would be able to talk, says nothing. His head is spinning and the vision becomes tangled with his sense of the human mind, resulting in an image that is too bright and confusing for him to handle.
He remembers something. They keep calling him Matthew, but how can that be, Matthew died, didn’t he? That’s what mother said. Charles has only been taken to see him once, he was so little, and the sight of the slight body among the white sheets meant nothing to him. His brother, mother said without an ounce of feeling. He’s called Matthew. He’s asleep and he won’t ever wake up.
Charles holds the memory, disjointed and foggy as it is, and examines it in minute detail. She said, “He’s called Matthew.” She said, “He’s asleep.”
“He won’t ever wake up,” was something Charles heard, but her lips did not move then. “Well, at least one of them won’t be a hassle.”
He remembers crying then, for no apparent reason. He remembers being soothed by the nanny. He doesn’t remember anything about his brother. He looked at the hospital bed, saw the body there, didn’t make a note of the resemblance, because he was too young to have a fully formed image of himself, and moved on, because he felt nothing there. He saw a doll swaddled in white sheets, a doll that breathed, but a doll nonetheless.
He suspects at this point it is irrelevant to wonder how has this happened.
Not when he still doesn’t know what exactly happened.
The nurse smiles at him and pets his hair. “Roberts will be here soon for your therapy. Don’t be scared of him, he’s a dear. He helps you stay fit.”
Charles watches her carefully, with his eyes and his mind, and something inside him drops when he realizes she thinks of him as a child. It drops further when the reasons for it filter through -- Matthew was brought here at the age of two. He hasn’t woken up since.
She disappears through the door and Charles thinks sleep sounds like a wonderful idea right about now, but of course just as he thinks he might finally drift off Roberts arrives.
“Good morning, Matthew,” he says. “I hear you have woken?”
Charles’ mouth twitches in a smile. Roberts is over six feet tall. He is powerfully built and his voice is booming in the small, sunny room, which is a lot brighter now that he is in it. His mind is bright and open, no less maternal than that of the nurse and Charles is happy to bask in its glow.
“Careful now, Roberts,” the kind nurse says and a grayish tinge of worry flickers through the fleecy cloud of her thoughts, “Matthew is only two years old.”
“No worries, ma’am,” he says, and Charles feels a twinge of regret when a flash of well-worn hurt covers up the man’s sunny thoughts. He wishes he could say the nurse means nothing by it, and it’s true -- she doesn’t. She likes Roberts, but she is not terribly progressive and in her mind a giant black man is a scary thing to a child.
Charles smiles, instead, and holds the smile in place even when Roberts’ gentle hands take hold of his arm and Charles catches a sight of his palm.
He looks skeletal. He fights not to recoil in horror when he sees, out of the corner of his eyes, the thinness of his arms and legs, and, when Roberts helps him sit up, the pronounced ribs. Thirty years, he thinks in horror. I have been here, in this sunny little room for almost thirty years!
And yet he hasn’t, he knows this as he knows his name is Charles. He went to school. He lived in a mansion, then he went to college. He got his degrees. He has a sister called Raven, who is often blue.
He has a friend called Erik, who is no longer his friend, who can bend metal. They met in the icy waters of the sea, when Erik was trying to stop a submarine with the power of will alone, and Charles jumped in after him.
“There you go,” Roberts says, nestling Charles’ left leg among the covers. Charles keeps the silly smile plastered to his face even as he screams inside.
Roberts winces and his sunny disposition is shaken for a moment. He’s not sure why, and it scares him a little, so Charles focuses on the smile, until it reaches down into the core of him and is therefore almost real. “Thank you,” he musters and Roberts smiles.
His name is Abraham, Charles picks up. He’s been an orderly here for ten years now. He likes his job, it’s quiet and the staff don’t harbor much in the way of racial prejudice. They know he is good at what he does and no one hardly ever feels the need to monitor him any more. The patients like him, because he is kind to them. He likes his wife’s meatloaf most of all foods. At home he has a collection of books by Jane Austen, because his wife, Wendy, read one and enjoyed it, so he bought her the whole series, read them, and now reads them over and over, whenever he has the chance. He does it when she isn’t home.
“Good afternoon, Matthew,” he says when he leaves the room.
Charles stares at the ceiling, blinking away the moisture that gathers at the corners of his eyes. Abraham is a good person, a thoroughly good person, and yet he was beaten up at school, his co-workers periodically make sure he did everything correctly, even though he is by rights every bit as qualified as they are.
It’s not fair, he thinks.
He falls asleep and dreams of sand and the sky and terror. It is new -- usually he dreams of sunshine and a childhood room that’s yellow and has plants in the corner.
Oh, he thinks when he wakes up to a sunny yellow room with a ficus in the corner. Oh.
Charles tries to curl in on himself, hide from the world, go to sleep and never wake again, but his limbs are heavy and he can’t force them to move.
Instead, he closes his eyes and remembers the sand. He remembers a sky that’s too bright to be real and Erik, frightful, terrified Erik. He remembers darkness licking up the edges of his vision and the sand that sticks to everything. He remembers the stripe of blood smeared across Erik’s face and the shadows cast by the helmet, looming over them both like a mausoleum of everything they ever were and everything they never would be again.
He remembers dying. The brain tissue lacks the capacity to feel physical sensation, so he only felt the coin break the skin and the bone underneath, then it should have been painless, it should have been… It shouldn’t have been a roaring storm of panic, of pain magnified by terror, brought upon by the realization of one’s own mortality, of the power coiling in his gut, of own his flesh burning as he held it back, squashed it back down, and god, his whole body burned with the effort of feeling the waves of fire engulfing him and he had nothing but his own hands to hold them down.
Then the pain blossomed in the back of his skull and the flames poured into a dark abyss and he teetered on its edge, but there was no more fire to contain, no more fear, he was free.
He walked out of the plane feeling light-headed. Then the world moved, spun and he was lying down, cradled in Erik’s arms, watching the sky grow brighter and brighter and the abyss open before him. Except this time there had been a light there, a speck of brightness at its centre, weak and fluttering, but guiding him. Charles was falling, but it wove itself around his hand and pulled him through to the other side.
Charles opens his eyes in the present and stares at the bright ceiling.
He hasn’t expected that, he thinks before the memories start pouring in through the fog, filling him and overflowing, until his spine arches and he lets out a gargled scream.
He remembers the helmet descending and sealing Erik away, forever. He remembers missiles and ships and his own words -- oh god, what had he said? -- and the world exploding in a cascade of pain, fire and, inexplicably, the smell of coconut.
Outside the room he hears a crash and a whimper, and hurriedly he pulls his mind back, gathers it close, gritting his teeth because the ragged folds drip with anger and pain, and they are sharp as knives, but he curls himself around it, even though they hurt, so that nothing leaks out, not even a drop.
There is precious little he can do to shield himself from the memories that keep coming, arranging themselves into a neat little collage of horror and failure. Charles would weep, but he can’t gather the strength to do so. All the men, Russians, Americans; the cultural differences don’t matter so much, because terror is a universal language.
He doesn’t unfold for the following week, dutifully going through the motions of being mentally two years old and unaware of anything that has gone on in the world in the intervening twenty-eight years, or the past few days. That is a knowledge best left for when is capable of facing the world on his own terms. The only time he ventures out of his shell is when the doctor becomes too excited over his progress and declares it is time to contact Charles, to let him know his brother is awake. It doesn’t take much to gently hint to the man that contacting Charles Xavier could do more harm than good and that Matthew Xavier is best kept secret for the time being. The Xaviers are very odd people, after all, and they lave been very lax with visiting, even though the generous cheques kept coming, like clockwork, every month, to keep Matthew in luxury. Foisting upon them a two year old in the body of a wasted thirty year old would be a nuisance for a gregarious man of Charles’ age. There’s no harm in keeping the cheques coming for a little while longer, and the boy is well-cared for here…
Charles falls back onto the bed in exhaustion, but the doctor stops thinking about calling the Xaviers, except when his scrupulous honesty reminds him that this is a breakthrough and family should be notified. He reasons the honesty away; surely the Xaviers would leave him where he is, anyway, they are such busy people, it would surely be best if they were only notified when Matthew is capable of walking on his own.
*****
The days float by lazily. Every day war fails to break out. Every day nurse Patricia O’Maley enters Charles’ room pleasant and bright, and every day Abraham Roberts comes to help Charles’ skeletal limbs along a regime of simple exercises that should, in time, give him the strength to move on his own.
It is a month before he can sit up. It is another week before he can swing his legs over the edge of the bed and stand.
It is another week before he can do so without falling to the floor.
By the end of the third month he successfully manages to walk around the room unassisted without falling down once. This is when he decides enough is enough, and signs the release forms.
A car is made available to him, partly because he is, presently, Charles Xavier taking his little, wasted, twin brother Matthew home, partly because he can no longer stand the sunny dispositions of people surrounding him and his aggravation threatens to overwhelm his surroundings, and this is a place where an angry rich man gets his will done.
Inside the vehicle, he collapses onto the leather seat as the driver puts the wheelchair -- just in case, the nurse says -- in the back.
“Where to, Mister Xavier?” the driver asks.
“Westchester,” Charles says before the exhaustion of having walked ten yards unassisted takes its toll. His head hurts with the effort of projecting the illusion into the mind of the receptionist. She is a diligent woman, unburdened with too much education or a suspicious mind, and it still takes an honest effort to convince her that the man before her is not a patient, but his twin brother.
New brain, Charles thinks sleepily. It doesn’t make much sense until he lets the thought ripple and bloom into something more concrete. The powers are genetic, so whatever talent he had Matthew likely has as well, but the difference is that his mind has been trained for thirty years. It takes a psyche to absorb or to project, and Matthew, it would seem, had none.
Charles sleeps the whole way.
Someone shakes him by the shoulder and Charles startles himself awake. His childhood home looms in the distance, imposing as ever, possibly more so, when the air is biting and the surrounding trees are naked and black against the pale clouds. Charles sighs and picks himself from the back seat of the car, even as the driver opens the trunk and pulls out the wheelchair.
There is a tense moment when the man gets ready to leave and Charles can’t let go of the roof, for fear of falling over, but a compromise is reached when he staggers away and signals he is fine and the car pulls away.
Then someone screeches and Charles looks up so quick his vision fails him, his head spins and he falls into the gravel, cutting his palm as he lands.
“Charles! Oh my god, Charles!”
It takes a moment, but eventually Charles’ eyes focus on Moira’s frantic and tearful face. “Moira,” he says pleasantly. “Nice to see you.” There are marks on her neck, scars left by a thin chain, and over them a thin metal band, of very strange design. He finds it hard to focus.
There are more voices around them as she envelops him in a hug, and Charles feels touched by the display, even though he is kneeling in the snow and the gravel beneath is digging into his knees.
Alex slaps his shoulder, nearly sending him sprawling. “Way to come back from the dead, Professor!” he says and laughs, and Sean yodels, which is terribly grating on the ears. Only Hank has the good grace to remain silent and help him up.
Altogether Charles has half a mind to scold them, for immediately assuming he is alive and that this is not a trick by some other mutant. Or Raven. Or another telepath out to hurt them all. How can they not be suspicious at his appearance, he wonders, but he is touched by their joy, all the same, so he allows himself finally to open up a little and brush their minds, finding there pure relief and happiness, with a faint aftertaste of terror.
“What happened?” he asks, but then something miraculous happens, something wonderful, because Raven is there, and her gasp carries all the way through the courtyard and into his mind. Charles blinks away tears and then Raven is in his arms, her skin alternatively smooth and scaly under his fingertips, her mind an ever-changing landscape of love, blue, waffles and hope. He should try to resist, he knows, but this is Raven, and he cannot help but sink into her welcome, to let her relief and wonder fill him as well, banishing the fear and worry.
“Charles,” she says and there are tears in her eyes as she kisses his cheek and holds him. He sees the question in her mind before she shakes it away and grabs his hand. “Come, quickly.”
He forgets briefly about the tiredness and the fact that he is about to faint when she strides barefoot over snow and gravel -- the cold slides off her body like water would, he glimpses, and she walks in the snow as comfortable as she would be on a sunny beach -- and pulls him behind her, to the back of the house. There is a clearing among the trees, which he recalls as being one of his favorite spots when he was young, because one needed to leap over a hedge which his mother would never do and therefore she didn’t know it was there.
Now the path has been cleared and in the clearing there is a headstone. It’s metallic, which is the most Charles can tell from this distance.
It is also not alone. There is a desk, and something much like a play pen, in which there is a child of about four, poking tiny snowmen with brightly colored blobs of light emanating from its fingers.
There are words on the headstone. His name, Charles realizes, and dates.
He wishes that this was a shock.
“I’m touched,” he says tiredly. “But why the desk and the child?”
His vision must be swimming, because at this point the desk unravels into something very pointy and fast, and there is much screaming over his head, and the sounds somehow manage to be sharp and pointy as well, and most of it hits the inside of his skull.
“Erik!” Raven screams, “Stop it, it’s really Charles!”
The world stops. Oh, the shards of metal remain in the air and somewhere the child is crying, but as far as Charles is concerned everything ceases.
“Erik?” he whispers tentatively and Erik is really there, furious, what a surprise, but there, free of the coffin-helmet. The fury and pain radiates off him, and its not even a pulse, like it usually is, but a steady stream of concentrated hatred, directed at him, because how dare he, how dare anyone, pretend to be Charles? When Charles is dead, when he buried Charles himself, when he lies rotting underneath the headstone.
“Calm down,” Charles half-says half-thinks, and without meaning to brings the image of the menorah and flickering flames to the forefront of his mind and projects it at Erik.
Everything stops. Everything except the child, who is still crying.
“Who is this?” Charles asks quietly.
“Her name is Jubiliation Lee,” Moira says, because Erik is still staring and he doesn’t seem to be capable of speech. “Erik found her in an orphanage in California.”
“Oh,” Charles says, and closes his eyes. He must be more tired than he thinks he is, because something is very wrong with his balance and he is on the ground, with a circle of concerned faces blocking the view of the clearing between the naked, spidery branches of the black trees. A raven looks down on him from the crown of the tree and opens its beak.
“Nevermore,” Charles whispers. “I think I need to lie down,” he adds, and really, there’s no need for the panic, he says in his head, he is quite comfortable here, on the snow.
He blinks and he is in his own bed. Hank is leaning over him, but his head is turned towards the others, who remain by the door, as he speaks. “Professor is exhausted and dangerously underweight. He needs rest and food.”
“I’m fine,” Charles says and tries to get up, which is when a candelabra lifts itself from the table in the corner, twists, and pins him to the bed by the shoulders. It’s a snug fit, though not uncomfortable. Charles could almost be proud.
“Thank you, Erik,” he says instead, shocked at the venomous sarcasm spilling from his mouth. “But could you make it a little tighter, I think I can still breathe and I’m reasonably sure there are more spare bodies I could use in the event of sudden death.”
He expects a comeback, fury, a rain of missiles or a lifelong grudge, something. Instead, Erik turns on his heel and marches out of the room, surrounded by a cloud of dark feelings Charles doesn’t care to decipher, as the candelabra falls to the side of the bed in a useless, tangled heap.
“Charles,” Raven says in the hush that follows, voicing the question that has been growing on everybody’s minds. “What happened? How is this even possible?”
“Does anyone care?” Alex asks. “He’s back, score for us, finally we won’t have to skulk about the place in terror!” Sean nods vehemently. Charles can just make out the remnants of glue on his cheeks, in the shape of a piece of tape, and he knows that Erik put it there.
“The grave was undisturbed,” Hank says. “And you smell different.”
“I had a twin brother,” Charles says tiredly, filing away Hank’s comment for future investigation, because olfactory identification would be a fascinating power to have. “He was in a coma from the age of two, no higher brain functions, apparently. As it turns out, he wasn’t really my brother, he was me.” His eyes close. He remembers, now, talk of his early childhood, sparse though it had been. Only as nonverbal infants they were ever awake at the same time, then they would alternate and then, around their second birthday, a choice was made, and Matthew simply fell to sleep, never to wake, never to be. “All my life I’ve had dreams of a yellow room. Then it turned out they weren’t dreams, I was waking up there, briefly seeing through Matthew’s eyes.”
“Is this a part of your mutation?” Moira asked, but Hank, blessed, brilliant Hank, was already ushering people out the door.
“He needs rest. If he’s been in a coma for thirty years, he needs sleep, food and exercise.”
Charles feels the storm cloud at the edge of his consciousness and it is raining heavily, but he’s too tired and how he hates his body right now.
Then comes the realization that his body is presently six feet under a playpen, and he is so confused sleep sneaks in, unbidden.
*****
There is a devil and an angel standing over him. The window admits just enough light to paint them orange. How thoughtful, Charles thinks, if a little late.
“Hello,” he says cautiously. He feels the weight of their minds, the solemnity of the moment in the shapes of them. The devil is surprisingly cool to the touch, metaphorically speaking. No overt passions, just a cause to which he is currently attached. He shifts and there is another figure behind him, one much slighter than he. “Angel, pleasure to see you, as always.”
“Professor,” she says, inclining her head nervously. Her wings flutter against her back. The man standing on the other side of the devil -- he is called Azazel, Charles remembers now -- nods and his mind is a veritable hurricane of emotions and lusts, currently presided over by amusement.
They seem cautiously friendly. It is a surprise.
“Erik told us to introduce ourselves,” Azazel says and grins. “Since we are now housemates.”
“I’m touched. Charles Xavier,” he says before he can process. “You are Azazel, Riptide, and Angel I already know.”
“Yes.”
“Housemates?” he inquires cautiously, when the conversation catches up with his tired mind.
“Erik invited us to stay. Congratulations on your resurrection.” Azazel smirks at him and his tail lashes out behind him like that of a prowling tiger, cutting through the sunlight like a knife.
Charles is a little too thrown by the surrealism of this conversation to manage more than a weak “thank you”.
There seems to be nothing left to say and they turn to leave. Angel lingers in the door and looks at him. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s quite alright.”
He falls asleep again. It seems like the best thing to do.
three
