Prompt Post: ROUND THREE
ROUND THREE IS CLOSED
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<< ROUND TWO | ALL ROUNDS | ROUND FOUR >>
Rules post.
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Volunteers always welcome.
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He's eight years old, though, and he doesn't know words like 'manifest,' but he knows it hurts like nothing else and he knows it's so terribly loud all the time and he knows something is horribly wrong when his pretty, sweet teacher crumples to the ground in front of the chalkboard and the other Year Fours are crying but it's nowhere near as loud as it is inside his head.
('Projecting,' he'll learn later, and immediately set about stopping himself doing it. It takes two uncomfortable weeks, two weeks of shutting off and shutting down before it becomes habit. It aches sometimes, all those thoughts pressed into the back of his skull, both his and borrowed. His head feels too full, but no one crumples around him anymore, no one weeps involuntarily. It's worth it.)
What did you do, Mummy said and How did you do that, Dad said, and Charles can't answer any of it, because he doesn't know. Mummy cries and Dad shouts and Charles, he understands.
No one wants a freak for a son.
Miss Temple doesn't come back to class for a month. They have Miss Rath instead, a dour, cruel lump of a woman and it's barely a week before Charles makes her collapse, too.
He didn't mean to, he really didn't, it's just that she makes him so nervous. He knows the answer to every question she asks, but when those cruel grey eyes fix on him, his throat closes up and the words crumble to dust on his tongue. And she sneers at him and mocks him and calls him stupid so he wishes she would just stop and then she does.
Charles is sent off to boarding school after that. It's a cold, frightening place where the motto may as well be grit your teeth and bear it because the masters are cruel and the other boys crueller, and Charles is a small, delicate little thing. He smiles his brightest and he thinks as quietly as he can, but he doesn't make friends easily. He never has.
The most important lesson he learns is hide.
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This is amazing already!
I love the idea of a BB!Charles not in control of his abilities so much, especially as a source of isolation.
The most important lesson he learns is hide. Perfect.
In short, Author-non, this is wonderful and I am dying for more : ) Yay!
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It isn't until later--years later, much later, past the awkward adolescent years--that he learns to control it. Oh he tries, certainly, but it's tenuous and stretched, too much like walking a half-mad tiger on a thin leash. It snaps sometimes (too often) and he wonders, guiltily, if he means to do it. Because he doesn't want to hurt anyone but sometimes--
God, sometimes he's just so very alone.
('Puberty,' he'll explain later to a sleepy-eyed scientist with a shy smile and opposable toes, 'is the bane of the untrained mutant.')
And sometimes it's that he really, honestly doesn't notice what he's doing. He's so used to the ache of it, the hurt, the constant press of it that it doesn't register until the boy slumped over in the chair next to him begins to weep silently. It's unnerving, watching that, watching the way he can make someone feel without even trying.
It's hateful, that stark reflection of the inside of his head. God, is that what he feels like all the time? Is that how it would feel if he wasn't so resigned to it, so numbed?
'I'm sorry,' Charles mumbles to the boy--a skinny, redheaded thing tilted precariously on that blurred line between 'boy' and 'man,' with bright, curious eyes--and the boy blinks the tears away. He touches his face, looking puzzled and why am I crying? and why is he apologizing? flick through Charles' skull, whisperquick.
'It's okay,' the boy--Michael, Charles thinks--says. Charles clamps down hard on his own thoughts, pulls and wrenches them back into himself so that it really is. Michael smiles at him, then, scrubs at his face with the back of his hand.
No one's ever smiled at Charles like that before.
It takes him a second to puzzle through what he's supposed to do with his face--smile back, what's wrong with you, smile back--but by the time he's managed it, Michael's turned back towards the front of the room. And Charles missed his chance. If he'd just been quicker, if he'd done something normal instead of just staring blankly, like an idiot, like a freak--
It's okay, though, because a week later, Charles gets another chance. Michael crowds him against their dorm wall with no fanfare, no explanation, just an odd heat in his eyes and an unsure quirk to his mouth, and kisses Charles, hard. It's messy, it's wet, Michael bites too hard, but Charles had no idea how much his skin ached for touch. How would he? He's never missed it because he's never had it. He's never been kissed before this. He's never held hands before. He's certainly never been pushed urgently to his knees, had desperate, clinging fingers curl into his hair as he--
And Charles doesn't thinks it's him, doesn't think he would--could--force this (but he'll always wonder, won't he, if Michael wanted it more than he did, or if he wanted it more than Michael).
Michael's kind about it, friendlier after that, but they're not--well, they're not even really acquaintances, so they certainly can't be anything more. But Michael smiles at him in the hallway, crooked and understanding, so even though it never happens again, Charles is kind of glad it was his first.
His only, Charles thinks for a long time, because of course the strangeness couldn't stop at the way he bleeds into other people's minds, lets them bleed into his. Of course he couldn't just want women, of course, of course it would have to be more complicated. And he's too soft as it is. There doesn't need to be truth to the slurs and the hisses of faggot that follows him down the hall.
Charles is nothing, if not adaptable.
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This is wonderful.
I love, love, love your Charles. He's so broken and sad and insanely powerful...
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Seriously though, Charles' depression and his resignation to it bleeds though every sentence, and the resultant atmosphere is so vivid that I'm left here looking at the screen going 'guh' at how perfect this is.
I can't wait for Erik to make an appearance : )
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This broke my heart. Beautiful story. :)
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He’s fourteen before he really connects that it’s probably not normal to think in the third person. Was there a point where he started thinking he instead of I? Because it’s all just a rambling thrum of narration, thoughts and memories and little snatches of things that might be memories or his memories of those memories. He can’t be sure what’s him, half the time.
Charles gets jumped outside his dorms once-more than, of course, but this one sticks out-and it’s the first time he fights back, really. Thrashes and kicks and bites because he’s little and pretty so he fights dirty as he can. There’s a boy named Brent whose father beat him every day of his life kicking him in the gut over and over until he vomits. Matthew, who has Charles’ arms wrenched behind his back had a priest who touched him in ways he didn’t understand liking, and he’s pulling so hard that Charles’ shoulders scream.
It hurts of course. He can’t see out of his left eye for three days straight and he can’t sleep on his back, but there’s the deep calm of their exorcism, too. He doesn’t know how to separate the two, so they snarl together behind his eyes and even when he’s old enough to understand it, they never quite come untangled. The bite of pain sings bright against his nerve endings and even if he hates it, it’s the closest thing he has to worship.
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