Work Text:
So often, she is afraid to go to sleep.
What the night and accompanying fatigue brings her has never truly been consistent. As long as she can remember, she has been greeted with images of joy or death, sometimes both in the same night. She can never trust what dark futures or deep, hidden desires her subconscious will unearth.
She tries to explain it to Scott in their brief, quiet moments of sunlit intimacy, out on the campus green. He lays his head on her stomach and she gazes up at the rays of sunlight peeking through the gnarled old tree, infinitely older than either of them. Jean runs her delicate fingers through his hair, and tries to explain what it's like to see your own mind as an enemy, to hold the contents of her powers together within the fragile container of her sanity, to keep them from spilling over the edges. Beneath all his well wishes and cadences of concern, she knows he does not understand.
Even with him nestled on top of her, she becomes acutely aware then, of just how alone she feels.
The Professor says he understands. Does he, though? She wonders about his infuriatingly earnest expression sometimes, if it belies a truth they both do not want to admit - that she is being torn apart from within and he is but a helpless bystander to it all.
The fact of the matter is though, that no one else could rightfully bear witness to her destruction amongst fire and brimstone.
For what she keeps buried deepest of all, and what inevitably is exhumed the nights when she wakes up with cold, ragged gasps cutting through her lungs like a knife, the nights she remembers her dreams, is that no matter what, Charles Xavier is one of their most prominent features.
He is always there, somehow.
Some nights, she sees him as she descends from the stairs, the cold stones chilling her bare feet. He is standing upright in the anteroom of the mansion, no wheelchair in sight. He is alone; there is not a soul here but he and she. Their eyes meet, and at once they are immersed in an almost deafening silence, somehow louder than the mansion had ever been.
These nights, she approaches him with the limbering grace of a predator. He does not flinch when she touches him, nor when she reaches up and presses her lips to his chastely. To satisfy a curiosity.
Some nights, he is patient and pliant as she opens his mouth with her tongue, dragging it over his incisors and remembering that he is a beast in his own right. But he is still silent and willing as her nails, her claws, (because here in her dreams, she is a bird of prey) rip open his shirt and leave red marks over his bare chest, over his back, as she digs into him as if to never let go. Some nights, he presses her against his desk, even then with a supreme gentleness, and he fills her, in a way Scott never could. To satisfy a hunger.
But some nights she sees herself die in fire and smoke.
She sees herself at the epicenter of carnage and bloodshed, hands raised to the sky, hair wild and untamed, being eaten alive from the inside out, a blood spattered and broken world at her feet. All broken, all dead. Charles is in those dreams, too. Just as in life, in these dreams, he keeps her from isolation.
She kills him in every one of these dreams.
His motionless body lies beside her, his fingers always loosely clasped around her bare ankle, as she burns to death on her own pyre.
Her eternal companion.