Chapter Text
They were in the middle of a meeting of the Mutant Coalition Club when Charles suddenly stopped midsentence and cocked his head to the side, his expression going blank.
Erik’s brows drew together. “Charles?” he prodded. Charles blinked several times, then shook his head, his typical smile snapping back into place.
“Sorry, sorry, I’m fine. Everyone all right ending a tad early today?”
The younger members glanced between themselves, confused, and Erik’s expression settled into a glare.
“But,” Hank said, “we haven’t finished the itinerary yet. There’s still the issue with Kitty’s locker, and the letter to the principal-”
Charles was already standing up. “I know, I’m sorry- maybe we can do a makeup meeting on Wednesday? Or you can finish up without me – Erik, you can lead, right? I’ll give you my notes-” He shuffled a stack of papers in his hands, and Erik stood, too.
“What’s the rush?” Erik took the notes, but his face remained set, stony. A hint of a grimace passed over Charles’s face.
“I’ll… I’ll tell you later. I’ve got to run- I’ll message the group chat later, and if someone could take notes I’d be much obliged-” Charles backed out the door, stuffing things into his backpack. “-I’m so terribly sorry, I- I’m sorry. I’ll see you all later.”
The door to the classroom fell shut behind him. Erik glared at it. The rest of the club – Hank, Alex, Kitty, Bobby, Angel, Sean, and Darwin, with Raven absent again – exchanged weighted glances. Erik turned his glare on them, and they all sat a little straighter in their seats.
“You heard him,” Erik said. “Hank, you take notes. Now, the locker issue…”
Charles hurried outside and all but ran to the sleek Mercedes that pulled up in front of the school, cursing under his breath. He hauled open the door on the passenger side, and the woman in the driver’s seat raised her eyebrows. Her mind muttered with wordless annoyance, and her thoughts swam from side to side, heavy with alcohol.
“ Mum ,” he hissed, “I mean- Mother. What are you doing?”
The driver’s side door opened, and Sharon Xavier stepped out. She was dressed in brand-new designer clothing, with diamond earrings dangling from her ears and block heels making her a good head taller than Charles. Her bleached hair was pulled loosely back in a clip, and she wore dark sunglasses, though it was nearly dusk. She walked around the car to stand in front of Charles, and barely swayed on her feet when she came to a stop.
“What do you think I’m doing, Charles?” she said drily. “I’m picking my child up from school.”
“But you’ve never- what?” he repeated incredulously. “What on earth are you- you’re not in any state to drive! Besides, I have my car, I was already planning to drive myself-”
“Please, darling, don’t be so dramatic,” Sharon cut him off. “I only came to pick up Raven. She said she was staying late with some friends, so I’m here to fetch her.”
Charles was struck temporarily dumb. He opened and closed his mouth several times before he found his voice again.
“I was going to drive her home myself,” he bit out.
“Kurt isn’t comfortable with you driving her anymore,” Sharon said blithely. “It was rather sweet how concerned he was, though I’d have preferred he come himself. You can’t really be surprised, can you? Especially given your recent behavior. Honestly.” Her thoughts were conflicted, an uncomfortable mixture of smug and deeply sad. Charles swallowed back nausea and tried not to imagine what would have happened if his stepfather had, in fact, come himself.
“Not comfortable w- but you can’t drive anyone like this!”
She frowned. “I’ve been driving for nearly thirty years, Charles. She’ll be a lot safer with me driving than a teenage boy.”
“What?! Mum, you’re drunk! I can’t believe you drove here in the first place! Please, give me the keys, I’ll-”
Before he could register what was happening, there was a bright spark of pain in his cheek, he was toppling to the side, and his hands slammed on the hood of the car behind him as he instinctually reached out to keep himself from falling. A trickle of warm liquid crept down the side of his face, and he automatically reached to clutch at his stinging cheek. Sharon’s face was dark as a thunderstorm, her hand trembling, the sharp gemstone on her wedding ring dotted with fresh blood.
“Out of my head,” she hissed.
He was frozen for a moment. Then, slowly, he straightened. He could not bring himself to meet his mother’s eyes. His head spun, and he could not tell how much of it was coming from Sharon.
“I don’t need to read your mind to know you’ve been drinking,” he said lowly. “Raven will know. Anyone would know. I can smell it from here.”
He was lying; Sharon was exceptionally good at hiding her intoxication. Her speech was smooth and clear, her steps careful but steady, and she wore perfume that neatly covered the heady scent of the red wine she drank like water.
But she couldn’t be sure of that. Uncertainty sparked in her head. She glanced down at her hand, the one she had backhanded Charles with, and stared at the blood on her ring as though it was alien to her. A thought skimmed across the surface – Did I hit him? Why did I do that? Oh, God, what am I doing? – and then sank away like a stone into water.
“Please, just let me drive you both home,” Charles pleaded. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want to make a scene, either. Please. Please, I’ll- I’ll owe you. I’ll do whatever you like. Just give me the keys.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket; he ignored it. After a long moment, Sharon let out a sigh.
“Fine.” She tossed the keys to Charles, and he fumbled to catch them. “I’ll indulge you. In return, you’ll help Kurt in the lab this weekend, all right? He’s been pestering me about convincing you; I don’t know why you’ve been so flighty about that, you always liked science.”
Charles’s heart dropped, and his stomach turned to ice. His fingers convulsed around the keys. “The- the lab? I- isn’t there something else I could-”
“God damn it, Charles,” Sharon hissed, and Charles flinched. “Stop being so lazy and follow through on a favor for once in your life. Or I’ll stop this coddling with your little clubs, and the car, and the phone, and the bloody laptop you’re so married to. Understand?” The sudden anger was overwhelming, a riptide pulling Charles’s feet out from under him, a lightning strike that lingered in the sky.
Charles stood very, very still. “Yes, Mother,” he tried to say, but it came out in a whisper.
“What was that?” she said sharply. Charles quickly cleared his throat.
“Yes, Mother,” he repeated. His throat was tight, painful; he swallowed hard.
“Good,” Sharon said, and slid into the passenger’s seat. “Whenever Raven bothers to show up, you’re going to explain to her that you’re too paranoid to let me drive my own car.” She was agitated, now, everything brought to the surface and unregulated. Charles wiped the blood from his cheek as subtly as he could and bit down on guilt. Now she was annoyed with Raven, too, and it was his fault. This whole situation was his fault. If he hadn’t started avoiding the laboratory, if he hadn’t been so cocky, if he hadn’t thought he was getting away with it… And now Raven was so upset with him that she hadn’t even told him someone else was coming to get her, just because of one stupid argument. He should have just lied, should have made something up, should have come up with a better answer to Raven’s request (‘ from now on, stay out of my head’ ) than the pathetic truth (‘ I can’t’ ). She may as well have asked him to put his hand in a fire and not feel its heat. He could block some thoughts, and he could nearly always keep himself from projecting, these days, but he couldn’t just turn it all off, no more than he could turn off his hearing or his sense of smell. And of course she was upset, because she was fifteen and she had a right to her privacy and Charles had pried about a crush on her classmate that he wasn’t meant to know about, and it was his own fault, really.
He felt her aggravation before he saw her. As soon as Raven saw him, she started stomping more loudly across the pavement of the parking lot.
“Charles,” she said. “What’re you doing here?”
He didn’t turn to face her. “Driving you home, Raven.”
She let out an exasperated groan. “The one day I think I won’t be stuck with you for another half hour.” She stormed past him, sparing him a glance that turned into a double-take. “What’s wrong with your face?”
He smiled wanly. “Walked into a door. Silly of me, really.” He caught her spark of disbelief and waved it away. He climbed into the driver’s seat, and she slid into the back.
Sharon waited until Charles started the car to say, “Charles, why don’t you tell your sister why you’re in the driver’s seat.”
Charles’s hands tensed on the steering wheel. His heart pounded. He couldn’t tell the truth, obviously; Sharon’s cool tone and sharp gaze forbade it quite clearly, though she offered no alternative, even in her surface thoughts. Raven glanced up from her phone and frowned.
“What?” Raven said.
Charles hedged. “Ah… I was just, um…” The silence stretched out, more uncomfortable by the moment. “I saw Mother pull up, and I was…” He glanced sidelong at his mother for an instant, then pretended to be very focused on turning left out of the parking lot.
“You were?” Sharon prompted. Paranoid , her mind helpfully supplied. Foolish, aggressive, delusional, cruel-
“Paranoid,” Charles blurted, and he felt his face redden.
Raven’s expression was hidden in the back seat. “What does that mean?” she asked flatly.
“I… wasn’t…” He was short of breath for some reason. Sharon’s mind was still listing things – doubted your mother who gave up a fulfilling life for you, ungrateful, I give you so much more than you think, probably doesn’t even see me as a real person, takes me for granted, barely tipsy and he thinks he knows better, he hates me I know he hates me, in exchange for all the love in the world … Her voice was everywhere, dizzying. Charles tried to tune it out. Raven shifted forward.
“Are you okay?” she said, and the concern in her voice made Charles want to cry.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said hastily. “It’s not a big deal, it’s fine, I was just- just paranoid, and wanted to drive you myself.”
He could barely hear her through the static of his mother beside him. Raven leaned back again slowly. Control freak, he heard echo softly, but he couldn’t quite tell which of them the thought came from. He stared at the road.
“For ‘not a big deal,’” Sharon said, “You made an awfully big deal of it.”
Charles’s flush deepened. Sharon looked at him, then went on, raising her voice a little so Raven could hear better.
“He tried to take my keys, physically take them from me! Can you believe that? People think you’re so nice, Charles, because you take everything out on your family instead of them. You’re lucky I let you get away with so much.”
His heart beat in his throat. His cheek stung. His phone buzzed in his pocket again. He merged onto the highway and tried to be calm.
Raven was silent in the back seat; Charles realized why a moment later when Sharon spoke again, sounding suddenly exhausted.
“Raven, put your phone away. When you’re with people, you should speak to them, not just stare at your little screen.”
“Sorry,” Raven mumbled, not sounding very sorry at all, and shoved her phone in her pocket. The rest of the drive home was silent.
When he got home, Charles went straight to his room, buried his face in his pillow, and tried to remember how to breathe. His eyes stung, and he kept his face pressed to the fabric for a good fifteen minutes before he sat up and found his way to the bathroom to wash his face. He paused at the sight of his reflection. The boy in the mirror looked exhausted, circles under his eyes accentuated by the neat little gash across his cheekbone and the surrounding bruise, which was thankfully just faintly red for now. Charles scrubbed his face with water and looked at himself again.
He squared his shoulders and tried to smile.
It didn’t look convincing in the slightest. But then, it never did to him. He wondered sometimes if he was controlling people without even realizing it, forcing them to believe what he expressed. He hoped not. He didn’t want to have to try and stop whatever that was, too.
He wandered back to his bed and collapsed into it, finally opening the messages on his phone. There were a handful in the club group chat, a few from Erik, a few from Raven, and one from Hank. He let out a sigh and opened the one from Hank first. It was a short message, ‘Here are the notes from the meeting! Should have everything you missed, ’ and an attached file, which was unfortunately a photo of handwritten notes. Charles scrubbed a hand over his face and resigned himself to the fact he would be spending his evening decoding Hank’s chicken scratch.
He opened the group chat next. Just a handful of ‘good meeting, guys’ messages, and nothing from Raven. She hadn’t spoken in the group chat since her argument with Charles a little over a week ago. He braced himself and opened the texts she had sent him directly.
mystique: hey sry abt ur mom. i didnt see dads text abt it until like right b4 she showed
mystique: wouldve warned u. im still mad but im not THAT mad yknow like im not evil
mystique: anyway im still not talking to u
mystique: also did u rly walk into a door wtf???
mystique: dont answer that were not talking
Charles swallowed, and closed his eyes briefly. He didn’t know if he was relieved or touched or frustrated or just sad. Everything he felt recently seemed to tumble into sadness one way or another. He stared at the ceiling for a while, until his phone buzzed again. He glanced at the screen; it was Erik. He opened the chat.
magneto: Finished the meeting. Went fine. What happened? Everything ok?
magneto: lmk so I know whether to be worried or annoyed.
magneto: I told Hank to send you his notes but it looked like he was hand writing them so I’ll catch you up tomorrow. Unless you can actually read his scrawl
magneto: Also, is Raven coming back? Can you talk to her already? You know that we really need the membership if we don’t want to get shut down
magneto: Check your phone.
magneto: Charles. Check your phone.
magneto: Charles answer me or so help me I will show up at your goddamn house
Charles sat up and hastily started typing.
profx: I’m fine!! What’s wrong
Charles’s phone immediately started ringing. A faint smile pulled at his lips, and he picked up.
“Hi, Erik.”
“Charles.” He sounded aggravated – maybe a little worried?
“That would be me.”
A sigh rattled through the receiver. “ Mein gott, where did you run off to? Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course I’m all right. I’m at home, where else?”
“Bullshit. Your car is still here.”
Charles’s heart sank. He’d forgotten about that. “Ah.”
“‘Ah’? Did you somehow drive home without it?” Erik said sarcastically.
“Oh- no, no. My mother came to the school to pick up Raven. I went back with them, in her car.” With a sinking feeling, he realized he wasn’t sure how he would get to school the next day without his car. He really didn’t want to fight for his mother’s keys again. Cain had a car, of course… he would probably take Raven without any fuss, but he wouldn’t let Charles anywhere near that car.
Another sigh. “God damn it, Charles. You couldn’t have waited until the meeting was over to drive home? What was the rush?”
Charles opened and closed his mouth a couple times. “It’s… complicated,” he settled on weakly. “My mother is… uh. Complicated.”
“Complicated?” Erik echoed. “Complicated how? You’ve barely ever mentioned her before.”
“It’s…” He grimaced, and stopped himself from saying ‘complicated’ again. “I… don’t like talking about it. About her, I mean, the whole… situation.”
Erik was quiet for a moment. “You did say you would tell me later why you were leaving,” he said. “If you don’t trust me enough as a friend, then… then I understand, but if this is something that’s going to interfere with the MCC-”
“It won’t,” Charles cut in hastily, “that won’t happen again. And I do trust you. I trust you more than anyone, Erik. I really do.”
“If you trust me, then why don’t you let me in? Let me help you, for god’s sake. You’re always bending over backwards for everyone else, let me do something for you, for a change.”
Charles closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “…Okay,” he murmured. “Okay. Just… give me a second.”
Erik went quiet, and Charles tried to breathe evenly. He had never told anyone about his family, never really thought to, never had anyone he could trust enough. There was Raven, of course, but she was too tangled up in everything, and he was too busy trying to shield her from the reality of their guardians to think of confiding in her. But Erik… Erik was different. Erik had always been different, ever since Charles had met him in sophomore year, barely two years ago and yet Charles trusted him. What would it hurt, to say a little more than he usually would? What was the harm? He was tired. He was so, so tired. And Erik was here, and he was asking.
“…Uh,” Charles said at last. “Okay. I just… my family situation is- it’s difficult, right now. I’ve mentioned my stepfather, yes?”
“In passing,” Erik said. “I got the sense you don’t care for him.”
“Yes, well. Yes. He’s quite like his son. You know Cain.”
Erik made a sound that was almost a growl. “I’m familiar,” he muttered.
“…Yes. So, they make things… delicate. My mother is- she’s not so bad, really, a far cry from either of them. She means well. But she also- she has her… issues.”
“Her issues?”
“She-” He took a deep breath, and lowered his voice. “She drinks. She… drinks a great deal.”
There was a brief silence. “I… see,” Erik said. Panic seized Charles – Erik was going to think he was lying, or that he was looking for pity, or he was going to think Charles was entitled and privileged because he was entitled and privileged and he wouldn’t have mentioned this if Erik hadn’t asked-
“I don’t mean- it’s fine,” Charles babbled, “it’s not- she’s not, you know, violent or anything-” (It wasn’t a lie. She wasn’t violent, not as a rule; she would never hit Raven, or Cain, or anyone else, it was only because he pushed her to it, because gave her no alternative, that she very occasionally lightly struck him.) “-I just, the car, I didn’t know she was coming, and she-”
“Calm down.”
“She was, she was driving, I- I heard her outside and I- I could tell she wasn’t fit to- I didn’t- I didn’t want her to- I just, I’m sorry, I just-”
“ Charles . Calm down.”
Charles fell silent. For a few moments, there was only the sound of his breathing and the soft static of the phone.
“Breathe,” Erik said quietly. “It’s okay.”
Charles breathed.
There was shuffling on the other end of the line, the sound of Erik moving the phone from one ear to the other. Birds chirped in the background alongside the quiet hum of traffic. Erik was walking home, it seemed. Probably nearly home by now.
“Better?” Erik asked after a little while.
Charles dropped his forehead into his hand, mild embarrassment trickling in as he started to calm down. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m such a mess today.”
“You’re fine,” said Erik. “And I’m sorry. About your mother.”
“It’s… not a big deal. I’m- I’m probably making it sound more dramatic than it is. I just… didn’t want her driving. Especially not with Raven.”
Erik scoffed. “No shit. You’re not being dramatic, Charles.”
Charles shrugged, remembered Erik couldn’t see him, and hummed noncommittally instead.
He enjoyed talking over the phone with Erik. It was so simple, so straightforward, hearing only what he said aloud. With most people, it made him anxious not to know with certainty what his conversation partner was feeling and thinking, but with Erik, he never had to guess. Erik said what he was feeling, straightforward and honest to a fault. He liked feeling what Erik felt, like the brush of Erik’s beautiful ironwrought mind against his own, but he liked this, too.
“I had wondered,” Erik said. “Why you never have people over, I mean. And why you never talk about home. I mean, aside from what you told me about your dad.” (It had been in the first year of their acquaintance. Erik’s grief for his own father had been fresh when he moved to New York with his mother, and that spring, Charles had found him on the school computers after school ended, in a panic about running his first Passover seder. “I don’t know what Haggadah to use,” he had said, “I’m supposed to find the right one and print it out or buy it but I don’t know which one to use- I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to run a seder, he never taught me, I don’t even know which Haggadah he used and I can barely read Hebrew and I’m going to screw it up-” And Charles didn’t know what any of those words meant, but he put his arm around Erik’s shoulders, and then the other arm, and he said, “Would you tell me about him?” And the light slowly came back into Erik’s eyes as he talked about Jakob Eisenhardt. Charles kept an arm around him when he told Erik in return about Brian Xavier. Erik’s story stopped before Jakob’s murder, and Charles’s stopped before Brian’s suicide. Things between them changed a little after that.)
“Ah. Well, now you know. Um- Erik?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you… keep this between us, please?”
“Of course, Charles,” Erik said, and Charles smiled. For the first time since he’d left the school building, he began to feel at ease.
“Thank you.”
“The next time something like this happens – you’ll tell me?”
Charles paused for a moment. “All right,” he said softly. “I’ll tell you.” He wasn’t sure whether or not he was telling the truth. He hoped he was.
“Good,” said Erik. “Now, let me catch you up about the meeting before you ruin your eyes with Hank’s scribbles.”
They stayed on the phone for another hour. By the end of it, Charles had almost managed to forget his promise to his mother. Almost.
When he put down the phone, he curled up on his side and tried to cradle the warmth of the conversation, tried to keep it from fading, tried to keep it from slipping away and turning to dread. But now that he wasn’t focused on talking to Erik, he could feel everyone else – his mother in her room pulling a mostly-empty bottle from her sock drawer, Cain downstairs talking over the sound of his roiling anxiety, loud-voiced insults traded with his football teammates, Raven three rooms over trying to drown out her worry with anger and her anger with some Scandinavian metal band. Charles put his pillow over his head and tried not to blot it all out with sadness.