Work Text:
She's tired, the day weighing her down like bricks tied to her limbs. The shins of her feet were rubbed raw by her new shoes, despite a careful application of Vaseline to the stiff rims. She should've gritted her teeth and shelled out the money for better shoes, she thought. But they were expensive, beyond her means for the moment — and she was already behind on the bills that month.
Her soles clacked in a march. A half-heard song followed her through the dimly-lit corridor, wafting in melancholy snatches from under the door of Apartment 7. Mr. Wilson must be having one of his good days, if he was playing his records. They said someday you'll find, all who love are blind, soared a male voice. She hummed along under her breath, the skirt of her nurse's uniform swaying with her movements.
Her apartment was empty — to her disappointment — and smelled of lemons. She checked the bowl of stew she left out that morning, covered with a chipped blue plate, a piece of bread wrapped in paper placed on top. They were gone from the table, the dinnerware washed and placed on the draining board beside the sink. She touched them to check. They were still wet, which meant that Sarah had come and gone only minutes before she stepped down from the bus.
Maybe Sarah wouldn't be by later, then. She put away the book she'd purchased for Sarah next to the vase of daisies on her windowsill, then unwrapped a ham hock. Split pea soup for the night, while there was still nip to the spring breeze.
Her window rattled, pushed up from the outside. She turned around, smiling—
Charles opened his eyes. His face felt damp.
Hank immediately appeared at his side, fussing over the helmet as he lifted it from Charles's head and muttering worriedly about the readings from Cerebro. His thoughts were an orderly march of numbers, woven through with anxiety over Charles's safety and more mundane concerns: mental notes on clipping his nails, the long-abandoned coffee cup on his desk, and oiling the squeaky hinges of his room door.
"I'm fine," Charles said. "Do you have the coordinates?"
Hank waved the readouts at him with a flourish. "Each and every one. Which one do you want to start with first?"
"The last one." Charles unlocked the brakes of his chair and started to wheel himself out. "She's a nurse in Manhattan — Amelia Voght. And she's living with another mutant."
*****
There were traces of Erik all over the room he slept in at the mansion, but Charles knew that what he left behind were things Erik considered easily discarded. Train schedules from across Europe, going ragged at the edges. An old newspaper folded into sharp creases. A pair of shoes tucked under the bed. Clothes of various styles, including an expensive and ever-so-slightly florid men's suit, each of them a disguise rather than a true reflection of their erstwhile owner.
He reached out to stroke the linen sheets. Cold. They'd alternated between his room and Erik's for their nightly trysts, a happenstance that was entirely unplanned. Waiting to see who would give in first and come knocking on the other's door was a game in itself, a little bit of push-and-pull they hadn't been able to resist. Here, Erik once wrestled him down, made him work for every bit of pleasure he gave to Erik, every moment of intimacy he wrung out of Erik's guarded heart. He wondered now whether he hadn't let himself see that it was more than a game to Erik — a test, perhaps, that he failed.
Charles wheeled over to the dresser and picked up a steel bangle. Shakily etched letters spelled out M-A-G-D, a word forever unfinished. Erik had purchased the bangle on their roadtrip, intent on practising the finer points of his control over his abilities. He never got around to it — power, and more of it, was deemed of paramount importance. What was the name of a lost lover worth, next to the death of a nemesis?
Briefly, Charles considered donating everything to charity. Erik himself would feel no sentimentality, were he here. After a minute's consideration, though, Charles set aside the bangle and the clothes Erik wore most often, placing them on his lap as he wheeled out of the room. Sean would know what to do with the rest.
His route took him past Raven's room. The sight of her door still filled him with a love that ached deep in his chest, tucked between their shared history and secrets. Charles, with Sean's help, had packed up Raven's belongings, but he couldn't bear to have them moved out from her room. One day, if his school took in as many students as he hoped it would, he knew that another child would inherit her sunlit bedroom. Perhaps he or she would run his or her fingers over the pencilled marks where he once kept track of the growing height of Raven's real body, and wondered at them.
Until then, though, the boxes and suitcases stayed where they ought.
*****
"You sure about this, Prof?" Alex glanced between the coordinates and the map spread out on Charles's desk. He was standing, holding his body in the stance Charles was beginning to understand as wariness, like a string pulled taut and waiting to be plucked. "What if she says no?"
"Then we'll find the next one on the list," Charles said reasonably. "Perhaps her friend will be more amenable to joining the school."
"Yeah, about that," Alex began, then halted, looking frustrated. Discomfort spiked through a babble of thoughts, overlaid by a fragile carapace of certainty. "I wanted to ask— no, shit, sorry, there's no other way to say it: are you gonna be training more mutants like us? As X-Men, I think."
Charles, very carefully, asked, "Do you think I have a reason to?"
Abruptly, a blaze of anger swept through Alex's mind. His eyes were hard, mutinous. "There's an 'us' and 'them' between mutants now, Prof. Hell, it's been that way since Shaw showed up in Virginia, and we'd be goddamn idiots if we thought Eri— Magneto isn't going the same way."
"Erik is nothing like Shaw," Charles cut in, sharp and cold. "Alex, we may want different things and go about achieving them in different ways, but Erik isn't our enemy."
Alex slapped a hand on Charles's desk, rattling pens and a tea saucer. "He made Darwin's death worthless!" he shouted. "I don't give a fuck what Magneto wants — he fucking abandoned us to be with the same people who killed one of us. Prancing around wearing that monster's helmet. He fucking abandoned you, and I'm not ever forgiving him for nothing."
He laughed, the sound bitter and ugly. "Not that Helmethead thinks there's anything to forgive."
"Alex. Please, listen to me." Charles squared his shoulders, looking up and straight into Alex's eyes. "If there are apologies and repentance to be made over what happened, I will be the one to ask for them. Be angry at what Erik did to you if you must, but not over me. I am capable of fighting my own battles on that front."
"But you're never angry," Alex mumbled, defeated.
It wouldn't hurt, surely, Charles thought, to admit it for once. "I was. I am. I'm angrier than I've ever been in my life. At myself, as well — I've just done a terrible thing to a woman I was proud to call a friend and an intimate."
"Ain't gonna lie, that wasn't a good thing, what you did to Miss MacTaggert."
"Yes." Regrets came too late. "But at least I know for certain they wouldn't — couldn't — torture her for information."
Alex's eyes widened, and Charles sighed. "Your idea has merit, Alex. We shouldn't train students to be soldiers, but we must be ready for all eventualities."
"For Magneto or for government goons busting down our door?" Alex asked, inconveniently perceptive.
"Whichever one arrives first, one supposes," Charles said. It took more effort than he thought, for his words to be so carelessly light.
*****
Amelia Voght lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side, in a New Law tenement building that backed out to a paved courtyard. The ornamental, vaguely Parisian facade of the building belied its grim, crowded interior — Charles skimmed the thoughts of the occupants and realised, with dismay, that the tenement was a walk-up. Impossible to ascend, in his state, without assistance. They would have to wait for Voght to arrive home from work, and hope that she was inclined to listen to two strangers accosting her on the street.
Charles had been here before, with Erik, trailing after Armando. It wasn't so long ago, but the memory already took on a sepia tinge, as if it happened in another lifetime. True enough, in a sense: at the time, Charles drew assessing stares because of his clothes and accent; now his wheelchair marked him out for strangeness in their eyes, regardless of everything else about him. Alex, standing guard beside him, glared at anyone who so much as paused for a good look.
He rubbed the armrest of his chair absently. Perhaps it had been a mistake to ask Hank to build a wheelchair for him without consulting his doctors — Hank was a genius, but he'd built a chair aimed at minimising human effort. Perhaps something more maneuverable, and demanded more of his body's strength and remaining mobility. Charles had been a runner and a boxer in Oxford, even at a time when his thesis consumed much of his waking hours.
And then there had been Korea.
A shimmer at the edge of his telepathic consciousness pulled him away from his memories, back to the street where a woman walked briskly towards them. For the first time, Charles saw her with his own eyes, without the filter of her self-image.
Amelia Voght was built along generous lines, a strong jawline juxtaposed against chocolate-box features. She was dressed in a white, starched nurse's uniform, a timepiece pinned to her bosom. Her red hair was graying in sweeping streaks, though Charles estimated that she was perhaps only a few years older than Erik.
A thrill flashed through him — Voght was the oldest mutant he'd ever encountered, Shaw aside. The brightness of her mind had the discipline of someone used to orderliness, in which her mutant ability was slotted neatly into her awareness of herself, without dominating it. How remarkable, he thought, the ways with which mutants found ways to cope on their own.
Charles wheeled towards her. She stopped, wary and unsure, looking at him up and down.
"Miss Voght," he said, "my name is Charles Xavier. I've come to see you about something you already know about yourself – I have... a gift that came from the same source."
She took a step back. "I don't think so, sir."
I'm a mutant like yourself, whose genes have given you an extraordinary power,, he spoke into her mind. I can read people's thoughts. I can make them see anything — or nothing, as it were. True to his word, passers-by made space around him without looking, not a flicker of a glance at the strange tableau.
Her eyes, a green as vivid as spring leaves, widened in surprise. Suspicion and not a little fear leaped to the forefront of her mind, but there was not a trace of them in her straight-backed posture, the gunslinger readiness of her stance.
"We shoulda brought Sean for this," Alex muttered.
Or Raven, Charles thought with a pang. To Voght, he said, "I give you my word: we didn't come here to hurt you, or to expose you – we'd like to talk to you, if possible."
Why don't you show us what you can do, Miss Voght? I can guarantee you that no one else will see us.
Her mind hung suspended between awed eagerness and fear for a long moment. Finally, though, she raised a hand towards a sandwich board, where garish lettering exhorted readers to try the day's special at Pete's Diner. The board seemed to dissolve into its component atoms, before reforming into its original structure.
"Ma'am," Alex said, "we're pleased to meet you. I'm Alex Summers."
*****
Voght led them to a shabby, compulsively-clean restaurant, where a man in chef's whites had just flipped the sign at the door to "Open". A murmur of words, and then they were ushered to a table the back of the dining room, next to a window. She met Charles's eyes without shirking, her mind a drumbeat of shifts on the clock and self-assured competence.
"How did you find me?" she said, after he spoke for some time on mutancy and evolution.
"We have a machine that augments my telepathy," Charles said. "Mutants—" he broke off, smiling. "I can see them, you know. Our minds — they're so much brighter than any of us truly know."
"Except you, I expect," Voght said. She held herself tightly, telegraphing nothing but attention. "Well, now that you found me, what do you want with me?"
Charles leaned forward. "I'm building a school for people like us, Miss Voght. We don't have to be alone in this, and I believe we need a safe haven where we can learn how to control our abilities. When the world learns about us, we'll be ready. And we'd like you to join us."
She raised a hand, compulsive, touching the cross she wore on a chain around her neck. "I didn't think— until a year ago I believed what my grandmother said about me. That I was a miracle."
"I don't know what I can tell you," he said honestly. "To my mind a marvel of evolution is as much as miracle as anything your grandmother might have told you."
"And you believe there are enough of us to warrant a school."
"I know it. I've seen all of our minds, touched their brightness. There were—" he barely paused "—more of us at the school until recently."
Alex, who'd been silent and tense ever since they stepped into the restaurant, visibly winced. Voght's eyes flicked towards him, then back to Charles. "How many students?"
Charles smiled, self-depreciating. "Three students, and myself as the sole teacher."
Her eyebrows rose, even as her mouth puckered with disapproval. "That’s not a healthy start to any school, Mr. Xavier. Not in this day and age."
"That's indeed why we’re hoping you'll join the staff, Miss Voght." Charles didn’t so much as let his smile falter. "We were slightly delayed in recruiting more students and teachers."
Voght studied his face, clearly trying to guess his age. "Korea?"
"I beg your pardon?"
She nodded at his wheelchair. "Where you were wounded."
"Ah. No, my injury was... rather more recent." Charles waved away her apology. "It was a good guess — as a matter of fact, I was in Korea as a medic."
"You must have been very young," she said. "Early twenties?" At his nod, she continued, "I was in Korea too, as a nurse, in a M.A.S.H unit."
"I was there for a year. You?"
"Two. After the war I left for England, to work at Stoke Mandeville. I stayed for a good long while." Voght smiled at his surprise, then waggled her eyebrows at him. "Oxford or Cambridge?"
He laughed. "Oxford."
"There you are, we have each other's measure." She set down her knife and fork, looking at him intently. "When you decided to recruit me, was it a consideration that I was a nurse at the NSIC?"
"No. That you were a nurse was enough," he admitted. "I wasn't thinking of myself, to be honest. I thought— I'm building a school, Miss Voght. It seemed prudent to have someone on the staff with medical knowledge."
She finally looked away from him, her thoughts deliberate and weighty in her mind. "I have conditions," she said slowly.
"Consider them met on your contract," he promised. "I can offer you a generous salary as Matron. You'll have to train your mutant ability alongside the others, but you'll be very much in a position of authority."
"Then you have yourself a Matron, Mr. Xavier," Voght said. She was thinking about money, and that even if he turned out to be crazy, at least she would have a steady income. She'd be able to care for— "I'd like to bring someone with me. A little girl.”
Charles’s smile stretched into a grin. "I thought you might."
*****
He refrained from reading too deep into Voght’s mind, but she didn't seem too concerned about the possibility. She moved quieter than he thought she would — but then, he thought, looking at her near-insubstantial feet, Voght had impressive control over her abilities. With training and creativity, her range would be formidable.
The narrow alleyway next to Voght's tenement was damp and filled with the chittering of rats, but someone had cleared a path through it. Charles navigated his wheelchair on the concrete with caution, resolving not to think too much about the occasional squelch under his wheels. He caught a glimpse of a mind, young and frightened.
"It's all right, Sarah," Voght said gently. "You don't have to be afraid — these men are like us."
A girl of about ten, skinny and hard-eyed, crept out from the shadows. She smelled of sewers and long neglect, though Voght's care was obvious in the cleanliness of her threadbare clothes, embroidered patches of flowers masking holes, and a rip in her dress carefully and lovingly mended. Equally clear was the girl's mutation: bone growth protruded from her forehead and body, jutting out in spikes and and calcified corals.
She skittered towards Voght, who put her arm around her skinny shoulders, carefully slotting her hand and fingers between the bony spikes. The girl — Sarah — lifted her chin, staring at Charles and Alex.
"No one's like me," she said, and in her words Charles heard echoes of a familiar loneliness, another girl's resigned anger.
"Kid," Alex butted in, before Charles could say anything. He bent his knees, putting himself and Sarah at equal height. "I'm betting a whole dollar you've never seen anybody like this guy we've got in our school either."
"Really?"
"He's got blue fur. All over."
Sarah crossed her arms. "I don't have a whole dollar. Anyway, you're lying."
"Cross my heart and hope to die." Alex grinned. "Tell you what: Miss Voght's gonna come with you and make sure we're telling the truth, okay?"
Her blue-eyed stare was distinctly skeptical. "But you look like everyone else. How can you be like me?"
"Uh..."
Charles lifted fingers to his temple, smiling. "Kindly demonstrate, Alex. Everyone else has something rather more scintillating to pay attention to, in the next few minutes."
Sarah stared, open-mouthed, as Alex's plasma beams sliced through the darkness, scorching a line on a brick wall. But she soon swung her attention to Charles, and the intensity in her eyes and mind held him still. Her gaze was fixed on his fingers, still pressed to his head.
"You're the one the ghost wants," she said.
*****
Seeing the world through Alex's eyes was fascinating. It wasn't the first time Charles had come along for the ride in someone else's mind, but this was the first time he'd done so with the consent and knowledge of the other person.
Alex had exceptional awareness of people and space. His ability to read Sarah's body language and anticipate her movements was almost entirely unconscious, but likely something he'd trained himself to do over years of rough living and his fears over his mutant ability. Charles watched through Alex's eyes as Alex followed Sarah down into the sewers, feeling his disgust at the stench.
Would you like me to switch off your sense of smell?, Charles sent to Alex.
Reluctance and uneasiness spiked in Alex's mind. It's okay, Alex thought back. I don't wanna meet this thing with one engine down, you get what I mean?
"Here," Sarah said, pointing to a spot. "This is where I saw the ghost. He had his fingers to his head just like the man in the chair."
Interesting, Charles thought aloud. Could it be that the ghost was miming me?
"Or something else," Alex said. He scuffed at the damp, lichen-nested spot with the toe of his boot. "Nothing here. Kid, you remember anything else about the ghost?"
Sarah shook her head. "He was shaped like a man." She added, reluctantly, "I guess he could've been a woman."
Charles skimmed Sarah's mind, picking up the memory. An insubstantial, human-like shape, tall and thin, with the tips of its mist-like fingers pressed to its temple.
Alex looked around, occasionally squelching as he stepped on something wet. Rats chittered around them, provoking disgust and a dark, half-forgotten memory. He was reluctant to leave, though.
We'll return soon, Charles projected to him. Let's get you and Sarah somewhere warm and dry.
*****
Charles knew he was dreaming, but in the night-landscape his awareness of it was of little consequence, subsumed under dream-logic. In the dream, he was once more fourteen and coltish, running into the back garden where Cook grew the herbs stuffed into roasted poultry. He was chasing after Justus the cat, Raven's first and last pet.
Raven was watching from her bedroom window, singing to herself — off-tune, as always. It grated in his ears. She was singing a childhood lullaby, except she always changed the words to Charlie's gonna buy me a mockingbird, and he always would. Anything and everything he thought she wanted, except what she desired most.
I'm sorry, he wanted to say, except he was lost in a maze and she was gone.
It was all right, though, because he knew where he was again. Now he was walking to his room, carrying a tray filled with breakfast: toast and eggs with bright yellow yolks, fruit in cubes and wedges, the dusky purple of grapes lolling obscenely against pristine white napkins. Sunlight glinted off the silverware in a Morse code of windowpanes and the morning sun.
Charles remembered this — it was a memory, not a dream. The morning after he and Erik spent the night together in his bed at the mansion for the first time, luxuriating in privacy and the lavender scent of Charles's sheets. Any moment now, he would open the door and Erik would sit up in bed, careless of his nudity. Erik had grinned at him, still guarded but happy, so happy, challenging Charles's adequacy as a cook.
Of course he cooked, Charles had said to him. Otherwise he and Raven would starve, or at least be forced to contend with a cuisine just beginning to shake off the long shadow of rationing.
The door swung open under his hands, but he couldn't feel his legs and he's falling again, the smell of brine and smoke choking in his throat. The tray hit the floor with a crash, porcelain shards and food scattering everywhere. It's been several months, though, and Charles knew how to fall without hurting himself beyond repair now — and he spied his wheelchair at the corner of his sight, so he knew he was safe, as soon as he gathered the strength to move to where it was placed.
The fluttering of the curtains made him look up, and the sight still hurt, even now: his empty bed, the sheets perfectly tucked in place, every wrinkle smoothened over. If he ripped out the blankets and sheets, would he see Shaw's body? It was the demarcation between before and after, between meeting and parting. Or perhaps he would only see his own mistakes spilling out, uncoiling themselves from the bed like snakes.
Even as he thought it, he wanted to laugh at himself for the unnecessary dramatics. If only the soldiers hadn't fired. If only Shaw — Schmidt, then — hadn't found Erik when he did. If only Nazi Germany hadn't murdered millions of Jews and so-called undesirables. If only the war hadn't happened. If only.
The polished wooden floor was cool under his palm. He lay down against it, watching his own reflection. But it wasn't his, not anymore. He traced the curve of a proud brow, the line of the mirror-image's cheekbones. A solemn mouth. Erik. Beloved.
The image cracked under his hand, turning into ash.
*****
Charles woke up to the ticking of the clock and his own heartbeat, loud in the dead of the night. He carefully pushed himself up and set aside the pillows from his legs. Still within reach, for when he returned from the bathroom and the arrangement of pillows — fascinatingly arcane, he thought — would have to be done all over again, to try and prevent pressure sores where his bones were close to the skin.
He transferred himself to his chair and wheeled himself to the bathroom, still half-drowsy and shaken from the dream. It took a few tries before he got the catheter inserted properly, and by the time he was done with everything, Charles was wide awake.
So was the hotel suite's other occupant.
Charles hesitated, then wheeled towards the balcony in the adjoining sitting room, where Alex's thoughts circled around themselves restlessly. The hotel was excessively solicitous towards Charles — he'd known the owner's son in Harvard — but he'd been glad for the spacious suite and the care the staff took in making sure he had room to maneuver. Alex had taken one look at their luxurious surroundings and asked snidely if they were going to be eating off gold plates, but meeting Sarah seemed to have settled him.
The one undeniable point of commonality between himself and Alex, Charles thought ruefully, was that they were both an elder brother. It took only minutes for Alex to revert to type, turning into the type of sibling Charles had half-glimpsed in Alex's memories, roughhousing with a boy named Scott and making sure that if only one of them could eat, it would be his little brother.
Alex was sitting at the balcony, knees drawn to his chest, watching the city through the banisters. He turned towards Charles, looking shame-faced, and said, "Sorry, Prof. Did I wake you?"
"Not at all. Rough night?"
"Yeah, kind of." Alex scratched at his knee. "Just thinking about Darwin again. But you already know that."
"Alex," Charles said, as gently as he could. "If there's anything you want to talk about, you'll always find a willing listener in me."
Alex met his gaze, steady and secretly afraid. "So I guess you know, huh."
"That you and Armando were lovers? Of course." Charles thought longingly of a drink, and the bottle of scotch in his study. "You aren't the only mutants who would find themselves facing the sharp end of the law for other reasons, should we be discovered. Your relationship would be deemed illegal in several states even if one of you were a woman, after all."
Charles knew, the way he knew about Hank's nightmares and said nothing about it, of the debilitating wave of grief that still overcame Alex, even now. Charles still could not make himself sleep at night without telepathically sweeping the mansion to make sure that all were safe and accounted for; Alex dealt with loss by running every morning until his legs burned and shook.
"What are the chances, though?" Alex said. "I mean, I didn't think Armando was— that. I woulda played along if he wanted it to be just guys fooling around. It wasn't as if we were gonna get married or whatever, but it could be. Could've been."
"I can assure you, Alex, that human sexuality is as diverse as human culture. There's no reason to think why mutants wouldn't reflect the nature of the species they're born into," Charles said dryly. "More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and all that."
"No offense, Prof, but what the fuck does that even mean?"
"It means, Alex, that we have met and will meet other mutants like you — like us," Charles said, stressing the last syllable. "Though I can't say that I share your preferences exactly. As a telepath, the beauty of one's mind, be it man or woman, is rather more important to me."
"What? You mean—" Alex blinked, his mouth falling open. "Wait, you and Magneto?"
Charles raised an eyebrow.
Alex's shoulders slumped. "I think I hate the fucking asshole even more now."
*****
Alex took Sarah's little mystery as badly as the revelation that the hated Magneto had been Charles's lover, pursuing answers with admirable single-mindedness. Charles reprimanded himself for being uncharitable, even if he'd been roused from bed far earlier than he wanted. Alex knocked on Charles's door almost as soon as the sun spilled through the tall windows next to the bed, insisting that they take another look at the place Sarah showed them.
Voght was sanguine. "There's no harm in it. Sarah likes him and it'll do her good to have the attention."
Charles installed himself at a quiet sandwich bar not far from the entrance to the sewer, his mind following Alex down into the darkness. Voght had spoken to the woman behind the counter quietly, explaining that Charles was a friend from England, and could he stay for a while until his nurse came for him?
Mrs. Roberts seemed happy to agree, as long as — and her eyes slid over the chair — Charles didn't get in the way of her customers. Charles gave her his most charming smile, fuming silently.
Sarah seemed to have taken to Alex as quickly as he took to her. Charles had always expected the possibility in the broadest sense, that Alex had grown up as the protector of his younger brother and would always remain as one to the world, but he hadn't quite envisioned it in his mind: Alex being his second, standing at his side as he searched for the mutants whose minds he touched.
Alex would never be Erik's replacement. But he shouldn't be, Charles thought, and he deserved nothing less than to be accepted as he was.
Professor, Alex thought. There's something here.
Charles focused, blinking in time with Alex as he peered into the dark.
The spot Sarah had led them to was empty, save for the odd, rotting lumps and rats. Now, though, on the wall, someone had scratched a large, scraggly X into the grimy wall.
Alex touched its center, where the two lines intersected. Okay, I don't know about you, Prof, but I'm paying attention.
*****
"I truly hope you're not a quack, Dr. Xavier, because I've burned my bridges behind me," Voght said. She met him after her shift ended, her eyes and mouth pulling taut at the corners.
"I did conceive of my school as a sanctuary," he said, and received a wry, surprised smile in return.
Voght sat down on a bench, tucking her skirt under her knees. Their meeting point this time was the Slocum memorial in Tompkins Square Park, which Charles only vaguely remembered despite the afternoon he spent there with Erik, playing chess under one of the elm trees. He'd been distracted then by Erik and the press of thousands upon thousands of minds, a cacophony of mundane concerns and unlimited potential.
He would never feel as he did that day again, teetering on the edge of something huge and wondrous. He'd floated through the rest of the day, wide-eyed and almost dizzy, until Erik anchored him to the earth beneath with a hard kiss, pressing him against the door to their hotel room.
Charles breathed in and out steadily, riding out the memory and the aching knot in his chest. Things were different now, in more ways than one. Making the trip to the park had been easier then, not the nerve-wracking effort it took to navigate the kerb and sidewalks, even if he had been without Erik to rely on for companionship and laughter at his expense.
Voght was looking at him — and his chair — with an air of professional assessment. Charles appreciated better now the value of meeting people half-way, so he gracefully acquiesced to her critical examination without comment, though he couldn't help the prickle of defensiveness.
"One of my students built this for me," he said.
"Then he'll appreciate some of the new designs, I am sure," Voght said easily. "I have sketches."
"Miss Voght—"
"Amelia, please. We're going to be colleagues soon, you may as well get used to it." Her thoughts were as brisk as her words, but not unkind. "There is no easy way to say this, Doctor—"
"Charles," he interrupted.
"Yes, thank you. I can't say this any other way except honestly: as Matron, your well-being falls under my purview. I need to know if your rehabilitation will be part of the work I'm doing in your school."
Charles looked down as his hands, flattening them out over his lap. He can't feel their touch on his legs. "I don't need more poking and prodding," he said tightly. "I am done with the surgeries."
"I think we both know that's not true, especially if you catch an infection, or get a sore, or any of the host of ailments common to paraplegics," she said gently. "This is part of your life now, Charles."
"I have been thoroughly disabused of the notion that I can retain any of my bodily dignity, yes."
"That's not quite what I mean." Amelia didn't touch him, but the warmth of her smile was infectious. "I wish you were at Stoke Mandeville — you would make a good archer."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Let me make a call, and we'll take a trip tomorrow." She contemplated the memorial for a minute, the sun stretching long and golden around them, then said, "What will you teach in this school of yours?"
"Our school. Well, the usual, I suppose: English, Science. I have a PhD in genetics." He waved a hand. "To be honest, you're our second staff member. Hank could teach Physics, but I wouldn't like to set teenagers loose on the poor man. There aren't many years between him and adolescence."
Amelia grimaced. "You really are building this place from the ground up."
"It was only in the last year that I found people like us. Of course I've always believed there were more than just the two of us — myself and my sister — but for years I wondered if I would meet another one in my lifetime."
"Biology, Physics, English, possibly Mathematics, training in the use of our powers," she ticked off a list. "I can teach French, if I need to — but really, Charles, mutant children need the same education as anyone else. Where would they go, once they leave school, if all they were ever taught is a handful of subjects?"
"I have a list of possible recruits, and some of them may be suitable teachers." He tapped his fingers against the armrest of his chair restlessly. "I had thought— perhaps the parents of some of the children. I wanted, as far as possible, to have only mutants in the school. But one must be pragmatic."
She glanced at him. Amelia was thinking of Sarah and the parents who cast her out, and Amelia's own parents, who knew about her mutation and loved her unstintingly. "I saw what people did to women accused of being collaborators, after the war."
"So did I." In the memories of a soldier, a farmer tending the fields and watching them march by, a woman who hid her face. "Should that time come, we'll be ready."
Alex and Sarah appeared as the sky was darkening, Sarah hiding in a long-sleeved dress and a scarf wrapped around her head. They looked as if they spent the entire afternoon playing hide and seek somewhere grubby — which, as Charles picked up from Alex's mind, was exactly what they did.
Charles gently blurred the perception of people around them. It's just another little girl, he told them to believe. He wondered what Raven would say about it, were she here, if she would be angry or sad, if she'd forgiven him yet. She used to lose her temper on his behalf when they were children together, railing against Sharon and Kurt, but somewhere in the intervening years he forgot that her anger was larger than the confines they shared.
He thought: Is she well? Is she happy? He missed Erik desperately, but Raven was a history that sank deep into his bones and hearth, impossible to extricate completely.
*****
Amelia was as good as her word. She bundled him into a taxi the next day, a vision of efficiency in a navy-blue and red dress. If meeting Erik was like a thunderbolt, Charles thought, Amelia was the bracing sharpness of first frost. She presented herself in neat, catalogue-cutout femininity — not without ambivalence — as part of her uniform, like swirls of vivid colours contained within a jar.
They alighted in front of a squat, single-storey building. It looked like a gym. Charles gave it a dubious once over as their driver, ever a gentleman, helped Amelia unload Charles's chair from the boot of his taxi.
She opened the wide doors of the building for Charles, nodding at two young men in their undershirts and boxing gloves tucked under their arms. "This place belongs to a friend of mine. She agreed to keep it open a little longer tonight."
Charles's eyebrows twitched upwards. "For what, exactly?"
"Finding out whether my guess was correct. How are you at archery?"
"Terrible. I keep missing the apple."
Amelia only smiled at his snippy tone, and pushed open another set of doors. They opened to an archery range, where two bows and a quiver of arrows were placed on a bench, Amelia's name on a note taped to the quiver.
"We did this in Stoke Mandeville with the patients there." She picked up one of the bows. "Archery helps strengthen your core muscles. You should try it for that alone."
Charles took the bow, weighing it in his hand.
"If I'm being presumptuous, I'm sorry." The usual briskness of her voice was deliberately blunted, but he recognised that she was all business here. "As a man of science, I thought you'd appreciate innovation — and here's one. There's even a sports competition for people in wheelchairs now."
"Is that so."
"If you want, we'll leave," she said, and he appreciated her sincerity even as she thought it flew against her professional judgment. "You don't strike me as someone who takes kindly to other people making your choices for you."
"I've been told," Charles said with a wry smile, "that my biggest fault, in fact, runs the other way — that I make people's choices for them."
Amelia picked up the other bow and turned, facing the targets, and nocked an arrow. "Archery was the first ever sport to be held in that competition Sir Ludwig started. Whether you're in a wheelchair or standing on two legs, it doesn't make a difference: a bow is a bow, and a target is a target. Do you want to try it out?"
*****
That night Charles dreamed of an ocean, vast and unknowable. The sun was hot on his neck, the sky ablaze with blue. He'd seen that sky once before, marred with smoke and the blur of his tears. His body rocked with the movement of the rowboat he's sitting in, and for a moment he was seized with the fear that the boat would capsize, drowning him.
There's a compass clutched in his hands. It's one he once saw his mother holding: a pocket compass in a silver hunter case, with a jewelled pivot and a rose etched onto the case. She'd been sitting in the library, elegant and put-together, except for her glassy eyes and the white-knuckled clutch of her fingers around an empty glass. Kurt was nowhere to be seen, so it was all right for him to go to her and put his arms around her, lay his head against her arm.
She kissed the top of his head, a little sloppily. "Be a dear and pour me another drink, Charles."
Raven handed him a bottle. Her eyes were yellow, looking at him with an intent he couldn't read. He kissed her cheek. Her skin was warm under his lips, but he blinked and she and his mother were gone, and he was alone again. He still had the compass, though. He held it up against the sun, wondering if he could find Erik with it. No — Erik was gone.
He gripped the compass. But where would he go? There were pinpoints of light in the water: a vision of human minds through Cerebro, constellations of stars in a galaxy. Charles dipped his fingers into the water. Surely then the answer would be to set his path where the children took him, the ones he found and would yet found.
He twitched. There's a noise in the distance, an insistent, irritating ringing. Something gripped him and shook hard, water sloshing into the boat, and Charles gasped and opened his eyes.
Alex was leaning over him. "Miss Voght called," he said, agitating underlining every word. "Sarah's gone missing."
*****
Amelia was a storm of worry for Sarah and angry recrimination at herself, painted over with a veneer of steely calm. She walked them to the alleys that were Sarah's home with a flashlight and a wicked-looking knife secretly tucked into her belt. The image of the weapon was bright in her mind, cutting as sharp as her determination.
Cautiously, deliberately, Charles cast out his telepathy, like fingers feeling out the surface of a rock cliff. Sarah's mind flickered in and out of his senses, along with the consciousness of another, elusively familiar to his memories.
"I told her not to go off on her own," Amelia muttered. "I didn't think she would — I thought she was afraid of the ghost."
"She was, but she's fascinated by it too," Charles said. "I fear that our coming here, and our curiousity, convinced her there was nothing to fear."
Alex hunched his shoulders. "She asked me if the ghost could be another mutant. I said... sure, why not?"
"You, young man, are in for a heap of trouble." Amelia pointed a finger at him. Alex looked guilty. "As soon as we find Sarah. Charles, I don't think we can bring you down into the sewers."
"It's fine," he assured her. "She's above ground, somewhere to the north."
"Huh." Alex scrunched his nose. "I think that's almost on top of where she brought me to in the sewers."
They must look peculiar to anyone who happened upon them, Charles thought: a red-haired woman in a shabby military coat, a man in a wheelchair and expensive shoes, and a young man with his shirt off. It was utterly absurd, and he wondered what his future school outings would look like, if there would be students with scales like Raven or were inclined to burst into flames at any given second.
Though if those with obvious physical mutations were unable to leave the school grounds without his telepathy to mask them, it would be terribly unfair if their classmates could come and go as they pleased. Charles rubbed his chin with a thumb. He didn't think he had an answer for the conundrum.
"Sarah!"
Amelia's cry echoed with the crack of a whip. Sarah had her back to them, but she turned around at Amelia's voice, looking safe and whole. Charles probed her mind delicately as Amelia ran to hug her, checking for any psychic tampering. Something buzzed and sparked at the edge of his telepathic vision, reminding him of electricity dancing around a Tesla coil. He felt a jolt run through Alex, standing at his side, and put out a hand to stop Alex from stepping forward.
Trails of mist snaked over the debris-strewn ground, gathering at a spot a few feet away from where they stood. It rose, shaping into human-like limbs from the feet up, culminating in a smooth, featureless face. Two bright spots dotted where the eyes would be on a human.
The creature twisted around, as if in pain. It reached out with one long arm, palm out, spreading five fingers from its insubstantial hand. Something that could be a mouth opened wide on its face. It was trying to communicate, then. Charles frowned and pressed his fingertips to his temple, mind seeking out mind.
If ever he could fall into the sum of a single human being, it might feel like this: hundreds of chains of memories, linking into and away from each other, sight tangled with smell tangled with sound. Charles rocked back in his chair, desperately pulling his mind back to the safety of superficial thoughts.
"It's Armando," Charles gasped, scarcely believing himself. "He survived — and he's trying to reassemble his body atom by atom."
"His mutation." Alex's face was pale. "He fucking adapted to Shaw."
"Yes, but at this rate it will be years before he's completely solid, and he can't wait that long."
"What's happening?" Amelia demanded. "Why not?"
"Armando was one of us. He transformed himself to a gaseous state to survive," Charles explained tightly. "But the human mind isn't made to survive that way, not for long. Not even for someone with his adaptive ability."
"You gotta do something, Professor," Alex pleaded, anguished.
Charles considered and discarded options at lightning speed, staring at Armando. The likelihood of failure for the only option possible was high, but— "Not me. Amelia. You can convert matter at will — and I think that could do the trick."
Amelia looked stricken.
"Pater noster, qui es in cælis," she murmured. But Amelia Voght was made of sterner stuff, and between one blink of the eye and another, she'd pushed her uncertainty deep into the back of her mind. She raised her hand.
The mist thickened, gaining shape and substance. Soon they could make out the shape of Armando's cheekbones, the muscles of his chest. He shivered, the motion exaggerated in his filmy body.
"I can't do it," Amelia panted, sweat streaming down her face. "I can't."
Charles took one of her hands and held it gently between his. "You can. You have the ability and you have the knowledge. You know human anatomy as well as any doctor — and you have my telepathy at your service, as a conduit between Armando and yourself."
In the years ahead, though Charles barely glimpsed it then, this was the moment he would point to and say: I heard the call of the universe again. And the calling was for a life dedicated to teaching, to inspiration, to drawing the best out of someone. He'd known it since he took five mutants to an empty mansion and made it a home again, but it took him a while, since the beach in Cuba, to find his way back to the truth again.
Charles vaguely sensed Alex behind him, holding on to Sarah, but the rest of him was focused on ArmandoandAmelia, bridging Armando's memories and Amelia's strength. Armando blinked in his half-formed face, his brown eyes wide and exultant.
I'm coming home, baby, he thought, and Charles laughed, tossing the words to Alex.
Welcome back, he thought. You were missed.
END