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[primesdontparty]

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[mind_over_metal]

Charles is a little overwhelmed and in awe of Leto and Ghanima's love for each other. It's relate-able enough -- the sense of soul-completion he has with Erik, the home that he once had with Raven -- that Charles is able to have some conception of it, just enough to know how much he can't understand what it must be like for Leto to go through what he's going through with Ghani now.

And he is sincerely not jealous of it at all. Much to the contrary. Charles may be a masochist, but his own pain is enough for him to bear.

So anyways, Charles kind of has this... openness to Ghanima. She's part of Leto, part that Charles hadn't had the chance to know yet. And she's also her own person, this fascinating new person. Charles loves people in general, but he was already prepared to love Ghani specifically before she ever arrived in camp.

What he does feel a little jealous of is... the enormity of Ghani's relationship to Leto. It's a completely resigned little bit of jealousy, as Charles has always felt that he's a relatively small part of Leto's life, particularly compared to Ghani, but he's only human (...well) and it can't help but sting to have it shoved right into his face. But just as the sting is present, so is his very real happiness for Leto. Charles understands co-dependency all too well, and what it is to have a better part of oneself missing -- he can't help but sympathize with both the loss and, now, the regaining.

...so what is life in the Cabin McAvoy going to be like now?

[bromantic]

GOOD QUESTION. Leto and Ghani are fairly quiet house-mates, but if the mutants are stopping over, not to mention Rain and Machika, then it's probably going to be busy. Leto generally doesn't like causing ruckus in the places where he lives and he respects Charles' privacy enough not to invite anyone over either.

State of the Charles!

[mind_over_metal]

Mutants probably don't visit too awfully much -- Charles tries to steer them away from the Cabin McAvoy, both for Leto's and his own sake. Charles goes to them more often. At the same time, he also wants the kids to feel comfortable coming to him at any time (and thinks that it's probably not bad for Leto to have some company other than himself sometimes anyways), so someone probably drops by once in a while.

...how much do you want to bet that it's usually Jesse St. James.

Anyways.

As for the State of the Charles... god. I touched on it a bit when I mentioned how Charles has been kind of quietly fucked in the head ever since Erik stepped foot in camp and then took off that blasted helmet in their very first conversation together. That's the general background for the current state of the Charles, which has him coming off of a couple weeks of not speaking with Erik.

I described it this way to jeeps a few nights ago: "Charles actually does have a very good grasp on objective reality, on practicalities -- he is a scientist, after all, he knows his facts. He just also always has those hopes and ideals and dreams, and it's like... each hope is a different light, held closer or further away from the reality that he's dealing with, which affects how he sees it and, thus, how he approaches it. And Erik suddenly showing up in camp and then taking off the helmet THREW EVERYTHING WAY OUTTA WHACK and everything has been skewed. Avoiding each other these past weeks has kind of... made that very, very evident to himself, and he's a little bit at a loss right now. Not back at ground zero, because he never really started there to begin with, but it does feel a bit like a regrouping and figuring out where to go from here. Because even if it hasn't been all government business and missile crises and war, even though it's just been personal stuff, every interaction with Erik is just so... intense, it's still been sort of a non-stop wild ride."

So these past couple of weeks, being away from Erik and diving into Julian's depression, have really re-centered Charles. Not in the sense of stabilizing him, because lord knows that that isn't what's been happening, but in shifting his center of gravity, his perspective. There's this sense of a giant tangle of dirt sorting itself out into separate paths and having reached a crossroads. It's not an end of the road by any means, but there's the feeling of having to decide how to proceed. It's intimidating but there's also a sort of... calm that goes along with it. Steeling oneself to move forward.

...and, well, we'll see how the mistletoe thread ends up playing out. For all that Charles and Erik have been so much to each other over such a short, concentrated span of time, their relationship has never been physical like this. And for all that Charles has learned from seeing into the minds of others his whole life, for all of his compassion and bravery, for all that camp society is what it is -- being a godless crippled mutant queer isn't nothing. Charles is actually pretty amazingly lacking in internal hang-ups, given the social environment that his brain has been steeping in in the decades leading up to him arriving in camp, but it's an aspect of things that his mind will be consciously processing. To say nothing of it being the start of reclaiming a part of himself that he hasn't fully embraced since the accident, for reasons both personal (physicality, body image, romance/sexuality, etc.) and non (embracing the "Professor X" persona, leaving behind parts of the old Charles out of a sense of duty, etc.).

tl;dr Charles is at a kind of a terrifying tipping point right now and is being pretty zen about it because really, what else is there to be?

FIVE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE X-MEN: FIRST CLASS DVD COMMENTARY... AS DONE BY LETO ATREIDES II.