Prompt Post: ROUND FIVE
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<< ROUND FOUR | ALL ROUNDS | ROUND SIX >>
Rules post.
Posting Guidelines.
Flat view.
Updates Post (WIPs only)
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damalur's firstclasskink on Delicious.
Volunteers always welcome.
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Both Xavier and Erik know about the movie. They've read the script, talked to two leading actors (Michael and James) but don't really follow the whole process of making it. They're both busy people, using their knowledge as mutant rights experts (they still have their powers but they don't need to use them very often - at least not in fights etc). Their world view has become much more similar, but they aren't friends - there is too much bad blood between them, too many bad things happened, things that they cannot forget or forgive. They talk about each other with respect, sometimes even work together, but they aren't really close ---
--- And then they both get invitations for the movie premiere.
I want to see them both watching "X-Men: First Class" and having their memories brought back, remembering once again how they become friends and lovers. And - for the first time in many years - feeling that they really need each other, that their lives aren't full without their real love, that they've both tried to trick themselves - pretend that everything was fine, that they didn't need each other - to not get hurt again.
Bonus points for Xavier starting to cry at the premiere.
Double bonus points if Charles and/or Erik learn about James and Michael's relationship.
NOTE: In this universe James and Michael look really similar to young Erik and Charles.
Xavier and Magneto are old but they don't have to look old - they've been de-aged and time-travelled so many times that their appearance can be very deceiving...
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He hadn't read the book, although Mystique had flung it across the room often enough for him to suspect that it was fairly accurate. He had no interest in the film, dismissed the filmmakers out of hand when they approached him, and yet here he is.
They had sent a mutant to persuade him to attend - one of the producers, certainly, and apparently a driving force behind the making of the film, but it reeks of the tokenism he sees in every profession. But, as Charles always finds time to gently remind him, these days he is for mutants, not against humans. The young man swore that they would not press for his endorsement of the film, that they were simply offering him the courtesy of a preview. Singer also said that they won't pull the film if he disagrees with it, but they will listen to his objections. He still doesn't believe it, but the more he heard, the more his curiosity was piqued.
And now Erik finds himself in a darkened screening room in LA, seated beside Charles and with a nervous huddle of producers and writers behind them.
Charles, of course, greeted him as if it was a foregone conclusion that he would attend.
~
The opening scene is overly dramatic. He remembers the - manifestation of his powers as being far more banal. All the same, he can't help but feel relieved by the filmmakers' inaccuracy - the actor playing Shaw looks and sounds nothing like the man he remembers.
~
The first scene in Westchester makes Charles chuckle. "There was a lot more screaming, if I recall correctly," he says.
"From her or from you?"
"From us both," replies Charles.
~
"I'm sure I never used the word 'groovy'," huffs Charles.
Then, after a moment, "And you were never quite so well-dressed."
"You, on the other hand," counters Erik, "they seem to have captured quite well."
~
The main thing that strikes him is how like them the two actors are.
"It's uncanny, isn't it? I was quite taken aback when I met them," says Charles.
"You met them?" Surprise makes his voice loud, and Charles hushes him. Of course Charles met them, he thinks. They filmed at the house in Westchester, after all.
"You should, Erik. They're both eager to meet you. And young James has some slight mutant ability himself, I'm sure you'd be interested -"
"Fassbender does not," he snaps, because it's galling that the filmmakers have made such a noise about casting a mutant in their film, but he's being portrayed by a human -
"Which makes it all the more uncanny, does it not?" says Charles gently.
~
The film oversimplifies everything - from the science behind their mutations to their struggle to recruit mutants for the CIA program.
"I notice they don't show the two dozen mutants we failed to recruit -" he starts to mutter to Charles, only for his words to be undercut by the last scene in the sequence. It sends Charles into a fit of helpless laughter.
"Oh, you have no idea how much it infuriates Logan that he's played by a tall Australian," says Charles, gasping for breath. It makes Erik smile despite himself. After all, the revelation of the horrors of the Weapon X program did much to turn the tide of popular opinion in their favour, and while the film of those events had more in common with the so-called X-ploitation films of the seventies than this new film, it did even more to raise their profile.
~
"Did Emma really dress like that?" He finds himself rather appalled at the way she's portrayed, but it's easy to forget, now that they all share an uneasy truce, how Emma used to switch allegiances as easily as she shifted between flesh and diamond forms.
"I doubt it. Not in that weather, anyway. And I'm sure Raven never wore skirts that short."
"Moira did."
"Oh, that I remember."
~
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"A week? If I remember correctly, after a week of training we were still going through two fire extinguishers every day."
"They do seem to have a high regard for our efficiency," agrees Charles.
~
Sometimes, though, the film captures a moment so well that Erik is struck dumb. He wants to ask Charles if he spoke to the actors about the moment unfolding on screen, knows he must have, because how else could it match so exactly his memory, that feeling of boundless potential?
He wants to ask Charles why he shared this moment, of all the time they spent together, training for the fight that tore them apart. He can't. He can barely breathe.
And then the moment is shattered by expeditious plotting, and the characters on screen go to watch Kennedy make a speech on a television that he doesn't remember being in the house.
~
He sinks a little in his chair at the scene in 'his' bedroom. "Nothing happened," he mutters. He doesn't remember it as some stirring ideological dialogue, simply words of comfort to an insecure girl.
"I -" starts Charles, before breaking off as the next scene starts. It doesn't seem like much, but the actor's startled embarrassment at encountering 'Mystique' in all her glory is so utterly Charles that Erik finds himself laughing. But Charles beside him is tense, and Erik finds himself shocked that the film is so openly damning of Charles' attitude.
"Charles -"
"I should - I should never have -" says Charles.
"She forgave you a long time ago, Charles," he says, but Charles shakes his head.
"She shouldn't have had the need, Erik. She's my sister. She was all I had for so long, and I just -"
"You were scared of what would happen to her. Understandable, given how the world first reacted to our presence."
"You weren't afraid," counters Charles.
"I was terrified, Charles," he says, and feels Charles turn to look at him for the first time since the film started. He keeps his own eyes firmly on the screen.
~
The climactic battle is almost laughably inaccurate - the two fleets were not so neatly arrayed, the fight not so elegantly choreographed. Their version of Shaw's submarine is absurd - it was an ex-Soviet model, modified for Shaw's purpose, certainly, but Shaw was no aesthete and it was as greyly utilitarian as anything else the Soviets built.
The film tries to make something grand and Shakespearean out of that final confrontation between himself and Shaw, and Erik would laugh, but it sticks in his throat. He mutters, "His accent is slipping," to Charles, hoping to break the spell the film seems to have cast, but Charles doesn't respond.
He turns to look, and sees Charles, utterly transfixed, breath shallow. "Charles," he says, and reaches out to him, hesitates, his own gaze drawn back to the screen as he - 'Erik' - sends an old coin through the head of his enemy.
It's a cinematic trick, he tells himself, a clever piece of editing, the juxtaposition of Shaw and Charles as the coin passes through Shaw's head. He's heard people scream in pain, he chides himself. This isn't real, he thinks.
But he reaches for Charles' hand, and Charles grips it tightly, never looking away from the screen. And the scene that follows, that he cannot deny is true.
A part of him wonders who they spoke to, whose memory of the day is as clear as his own. Hank, most likely. Charles - he hopes Charles' memory of that moment is dimmer. But what does it matter, if he's seeing it on screen, Erik's words, that sounded so right at the time, that he believed so devoutly, so bitter in his own ears after all this time.
He wants to yell at them, storm out in disgust. He wants to pull Charles from the screening room, to stop the minute tremor that wracks his friend as they watch. He cannot move.
~
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Loving this, though, anon!
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(It should have been a classy HBO series ):
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*and the anon author*
Awesome story. I can't wait to read the next part <3
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