Work Text:
1963
"Don't panic," Charles said, though he couldn't seem to move his hands, fisted into the knitted blanket over his lap. The lights had gone out without a sound, their absence slicing through the teatime merriness.
"It gets dark so early in winter here," Suzanne said from his left, radiating dissatisfaction. She found the matches on the mantelpiece and struck one alight. Her eyes gleamed red in the flickering fire. "You all right, Xavier?"
"I'm fine. See to the children, please." He cast about for dynamo-and-alkaline feel of Hank's mind, wheeling himself out of the teachers' common room. Hank?
I'm working on it, Professor, came the quick reply. I might take an hour, two maybe.
The dim corridor yawned before him like the endless throat of an animal. Strange that this was the same place where he walked with Raven countless times as an adolescent, and where he spent the past year leading his students as they came through the door for the first time.
The wheels of his chair made little noise on the polished floor, but the fabric of his jacket rasped loudly against the armrests, in time with his breathing. This was not his home. He counted the doors — one, two, three — and the bright signal flares of minds moving through the school. All there. Not one more than there should be.
He tried not to think about what he would've done if he found something there. If there was something lurking where he could not see. Charles pressed on, seeking the explosion of fear and alarm he sensed when the lights went out. He turned a corner, finding himself ridiculously relieved to hear the voices of Alex and Armando, bumping into each other as they sought candles and matches.
Ice swirled through the open doors leading out to the balcony. The wind was beginning to pick up with the movement of dark clouds across the sky, shot through with electricity. Distantly, thunder rumbled out a warning from the small, white-haired girl standing by the balustrade, her feet sunk into snow.
Charles hesitated, then wrapped his blanket around his shoulders and gamely wheeled himself out. "Ororo?"
"I do not want to 'come back inside'," she spat out. An image of Amelia's pale face flashed through Ororo's mind, her voice a faint, unwelcome impression on Ororo's memories.
"It's all right," Charles said. "I thought— aren't you cold?"
The look she shot him was full of scorn as she flicked a burst of warm air towards him. He tried not to smile.
"Message received. Your control is truly awe-inspiring, my dear, but I don't think even you can sleep in the snow."
They contemplated icy landscape below them, stretching to the garden walls and trees beyond. Charles said, gently, "Amahl Farouk is gone, Ororo."
"I know that. But he is still inside," she raged, pressing her fists against her forehead. "He is still in here. How do I throw him out forever?"
"Good question," Charles murmured. Once he stood here with another mutant, on the cusp of a new age for humanity, and believed himself capable of casting out someone else's ghosts. A day later he learned that intimacy was not the same thing as trust, nor knowledge a shorthand for wisdom — but something else remained of the morning with Erik, lodged deep and warm in his chest.
Lightning split the sky, thunder rattling the glass of the windows. Ororo crackled with static, her hair rising wildly around her face. She'd dropped her hands from her head, wrapping her arms around herself.
"It's not a bad thing to be angry," Charles said, watching her. "Or afraid. I still am — that's why I came to find you. Would it be all right if you come and sit with me for a while, until Hank has the electricity working?"
She stared at him, suspicious and hopeful all at once.
"We can go to the greenhouse," he added. "It's warm there and we can look at how the lettuce are doing."
The clouds lifted slightly, though Ororo was clearly wary of expressing her eagerness. She said, as diffidently as a ten-year-old could manage, "Can I push your wheelchair, Professor?"
"'May I'," Charles corrected. "Yes, you may. Let's go before Alex comes along to yell at us."
And Ororo?
He felt her eyes boring into the back of his head as she pushed him forward. Yes?
Right now, what we are — the most overwhelming thing we feel — is fearful, he sent to her, careful and slow. But there's more to us, more to each and every one of us, than pain and anger. I know it doesn't feel that way right now, but can you believe me when I say that I sense it in you?
... I suppose, she thought back.
"One step at a time," Charles said, as they slid on the snow. From the corner of his eyes, the candlelit depths of the school beckoned, no longer quite as terrifying. "Take as long as you need."