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[oakenshields13]

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FILL: (To Me) You're Strange and You're Beautiful 2

[anonymous]

Homeroom, Charles thought morosely when a paper ball hit the back of his head with unexpected accuracy, especially considering that Charles had chosen a seat in the front while his tormentors naturally lolled in the back. Charles wanted to look, but instead he did absolutely nothing. Not even when they hit him two more times, and the girl behind him-bless her kind little heart-sighed loudly in annoyance.

In the hall, one of the boys shoved passed him and said, “nice tits, fatty,” and Charles pretended like he didn’t hear it. Pretended, anyway.

Charles had gone to school prepared, at least, because he’d studied the halls and the position of the classroom doors and surmised which hallways would be hidden or untouched by the eyes of the teachers. All he had left to do was pretend he was invisible, but pretending only worked for so long.

To be fair, Charles knew his problem wasn’t entirely as bad as he made it out to be-his mother agreed, anyway. It was only once a month or so back in middle school that Charles came home roughened up, and any other time almost always involved only psychological harm, which seemed to be the preferred method of bullying as opposed to just physically hurting him (and the jury was still out on which one he actually preferred). Other than all that-all Charles ever received were cold looks and uncomfortable silence, but he didn’t mind that so much because he didn’t look at anyone and he certainly didn’t talk to anyone.

After going through three classes relatively unscathed, Charles realized that high school probably wouldn’t be any worse than middle school-it wouldn’t be any better either, and that was mildly discouraging despite his terrible anxiety all through the summer, but he could deal with it. He’d spent two years already dealing with it, and he’d gotten pretty good in that amount of time.

He was so good at it, in fact, that when he took his assigned seat in biology, the first thing he noticed about his lab partner was that he was tall and feral-eyed, and the most obvious candidate to bully him considering his intimidating appearance and their relative positions in the classroom.

Charles tried to keep his head down and his mind shut up, too busy putting distance between the two of them by scooting his stool a few inches away from the other boy to notice that, instead of looking at him with pity or resent or disgust, the boy sitting next to him gave him a quiet look of open curiosity before returning his attention to the front of the room.

By the time the bell rang, Charles realized with a start that an entire class period had passed without as much as a snarky whisper from the boy next to him.

He didn’t know what it meant at the time-thinking perhaps he’d been lucky, that his lab partner-Erik Lensherr-if he remembered correctly, had found Charles to be so beneath him that he’d left him alone entirely. Charles thought it made sense at any rate. Erik seemed entirely too precisely handsome to be the type to put his hands in something as juvenile as picking on the ugly fat kid that sat next to him in biology.

At any rate, Charles didn’t particularly care about Erik’s motivations outside of the fact that Erik left him well enough alone, and without even really consenting to it, Charles realized that biology suddenly became his absolute favorite class to sit in.

Two weeks later, another surprise came. In the middle of class, while working on a diagram of the contents of a cell, Erik leaned over and said, “Charles, may I borrow a pencil?” and Charles didn’t know what else to do but to carefully slide the pencil he had been using across the table where Erik could reach it before producing a new pencil from his pencil case.

Later, when Charles was alone at home working on Biology homework, he thought about that few seconds of his life over and over, trying not to remember that it had been the first… well, he couldn’t say that Erik had been kind to him, but his blatant indifference to Charles’ appearance and his overbearing telepathy were a welcome comfort after all the hostility he’d experienced.