Fanfiction: X-Misfits: Confrontation (X-Men: First Class/Misfits)
And here is the end of the X-Misfits mini-trilogy! Thank you so much for your encouragement, guys; this was originally just going to be the one experimental ficlet, but you woke up my writing drive and I've been having great fun with this universe.
I owe a bit of inspiration for this part to amazingly_me's excellent Groundhog Day First Class AU, I suspect, although I hope they're not too similar (the Groundhog Day AU is a brilliant work of art, after all, and this is just a very silly crossover, so the idea of being judged against amazingly_me's fic horrifies me). Curtis' power may as well be called 'Groundhog Day', so it was difficult to avoid some parallels.
All three parts can be found gathered in one post here at misfitsfic or here at thefirstclass.
Title: X-Misfits: Confrontation
Fandom: X-Men: First Class/Misfits
Rating: R
Wordcount: 1,500
Summary: Follows X-Misfits: Recruitment and X-Misfits: Training. It's time for the Misfits to save the world, or at least not screw up while other people try to save it.
“Wait,” Curtis says, on the eve of what may be a third world war. “What year is it?”
Erik gives Charles an incredulous look, but Charles isn’t entirely surprised; he has seen inside these students’ minds, after all, and he’s had an impression for a while that they’re not from this time. “It’s 1962,” he says.
Curtis puts a hand to his head. “Okay, I definitely remember learning about this. There was some kind of thing about missiles in Cuba.”
“The Cuban Missile Crisis,” Simon puts in.
“Right,” Curtis says.
At the edge of his vision, Charles sees an obviously bemused Nathan look at Kelly, then at Alisha. Both girls shrug. That’s reassuring, in a way; if not everyone in the future knows about the events of tomorrow, they can’t be as catastrophic as feared. Still, if time travel is possible they have no guarantee that the past cannot be changed.
“So d’you think that dickhead sent us back in time to, what, stop the missile crisis thing from happening?” Alisha asks.
“But there wasn’t any war,” Curtis says, frowning. “We don’t need to be here to stop it.”
“Perhaps it’s a stable time loop,” Simon says. “Perhaps there was no war because we were here in the first place.”
Charles, curious, examines Curtis’ memories to find out exactly what the circumstances of the dickhead sending them back in time were. There’s not much. They’re all at Curtis’ home, lounging around and mostly smoking, when a man appears in their midst. Curtis demands to know what he’s doing there. Kelly says, ‘He’s been watching us.’ Nathan calls him a pervert. And then the man waves a hand, and they all wake up in 1962.
Kelly said he had been watching them. Charles looks at her. Perhaps she was able to glean something more from his thoughts.
He’s barely brushed her mind before it slams shut.
“Oh, my God, stop doing that,” Kelly snarls, glaring at him. “Can’t you ever just fucking ask first?”
She has a point, he knows, but he still feels vaguely aggrieved. What do you make of this? he asks Erik instead, sending him the scene from Curtis’ memories.
The flareup of Erik’s mind is immediate and overwhelmingly loud. It brings back memories of Shaw, of the camp, of his mother. He must recognise the man.
“We should talk,” Charles says quickly, putting a hand on Erik’s shoulder to steer him out of the room. Kelly is staring at Erik now, her mouth slightly open in horror, and Charles feels a twist of guilt; he never meant to publicly expose something so personal about his friend.
-
“You knew him,” Charles says. They are sitting in tall chairs opposite each other, Charles leaning forwards, his hand on Erik’s knee. Feel that. You’re here. You’re not there any more. You’re here.
“Braun,” Erik says, not looking at him. “He was with Shaw, when-” He pauses. “I killed the others. He must have time-travelled to escape. I didn’t know he was a mutant.”
“So we can assume he’s not our friend, then,” Charles says, frowning. “Did he want them to end up here? Does he think having them on our side will ensure our failure?”
“Why else would they have been so close by?” Erik asks. “Five mutants within twenty miles of Cerebro? We couldn’t have missed them.”
“But I don’t think they’re planning to sabotage us.”
Erik looks back at him. More recent memories are unspooling in his mind now: Kelly saying, ‘Wait, I thought Cuba was in Africa’; Nathan insisting that he kill one of the others for fairness whilst Erik points out that, for them, it would be permanent. “I don’t think they need to try.”
-
This is the day that could save the world or destroy it. Charles walks through the cabin of the aircraft, making sure that everyone is there and wearing their suits. Erik: present. Raven: present. Hank, Moira, Kelly, Alisha, Simon: present. Nathan: clearly hungover (Charles hadn’t actually told them not to drink the night before, granted, but he’d rather thought it went without saying) but present. Curtis - Curtis?
“Curtis?” Charles asks. “Forgive me, but you’re not looking terribly well.”
Curtis is holding onto the side of the cabin as if it’s the only thing keeping him upright. When Charles peers into his mind, it’s too tired and jumbled to make any sense of.
“Curtis?”
“This time,” Curtis mumbles, the words blurring into each other, “we’re gonna get it right.”
-
One significant day in October 1962 lasts at least a week, although only one person knows it. In the end, when Curtis has managed to prevent Nathan from distracting Hank so much he swerves into the rising submarine, when he has persuaded Alisha to stay strapped in her seat before the plane crash-lands, it all comes down to the beach.
-
The missiles are speeding away from the beach. Curtis watches the struggle between Charles and Erik, his heart thumping so hard he’d almost swear someone had replaced it with an angry sledgehammer. Nobody’s died yet. Well, nobody who matters. And they’re so close to being safe, and maybe he’ll finally be able to go somewhere quiet and sleep...
The others are standing a little farther forward, also watching, before Nathan, impossibly, loses interest in the life-or-death conflict in front of him and sidles closer to Raven.
“So,” Nathan says, just loudly enough for Curtis to hear, as he rests his elbow on Raven’s shoulder, “as we’ve all just had a near-death experience, what do you say you and I...” and then he makes an incredibly obscene gesture with his tongue.
Charles must overhear Raven’s mental reaction to that or something, because he glances back, distracted, just for a second.
Too long.
The missiles slam into the ships.
Shit. Shit.
Everyone on the beach is frozen, staring at the flaming wreckage. Curtis feels on the verge of throwing up from frustration. “Nathan, you twat, what did you have to do that for?”
“Oops,” Nathan says, turning pale; then, plaintively, “Okay, I could not have predicted that. And they were trying to kill us!”
That’s true. Any chance of people accepting mutants has now gone completely to shit, but maybe this is an outcome Curtis doesn’t have to regret enough to rewind time. Maybe he can finally get out of this day.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Kelly demands, storming up to Erik like a mouse that thinks it’s a lion.
Or maybe not. Curtis has a bad feeling about this. “Kelly, get out of there!”
When Agent MacTaggert begins firing, Erik raises a hand and deflects the bullets with no effort at all. The first sinks into Kelly’s neck mid-tirade; everything slows down around Curtis as he sees her choke on her own blood, and then there’s the now-familiar blur of time running backwards and-
-
The missiles don’t hit the ships the next time, but Agent MacTaggert still fires, and the bullet thuds into thin air and there’s a tiny confused pause before Simon reappears, wide-eyed and bleeding and terrified, dying because Curtis told him to distract Erik and Alisha is screaming and-
-
The moment the missiles slow to a stop above them, Curtis grabs Agent MacTaggert’s gun and empties all the bullets into Nathan’s head.
Erik jerks around at the noise, and the missiles fall, and wait shit-
-
Erik looks up as he cradles Charles in his arms. Curtis can barely focus, but the desperate fury in Erik’s eyes still holds him. “Turn back time.”
Curtis actually giggles, swaying on his feet. “Probably was gonna do that anyway,” he says, or something along those lines. He thinks something along those lines. He’s not really aware of what he’s saying any more.
“Turn back time,” Erik commands, lifting a hand, and the world is blurring but Curtis isn’t sure it’s the right kind of blur, “or-”
No, definitely wrong blur. Threats are going to have to wait.
Curtis passes out.
-
“Hello,” Charles says, when Curtis visits him in the hospital. “Hank tells me you’ve been asleep for almost two days.”
Curtis nods, not quite looking him in the eye. “It was - you know, it was a long day.”
“Mmm,” Charles says. “Longer for you than for the rest of us, I think.”
There’s a pause, and then Curtis looks at him properly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I could have stopped it. I just couldn’t stay on my feet any longer, you know?”
Charles doesn’t respond at first, looking through Curtis’ memories of that day. It takes a while.
“Well,” Charles says, eventually, “it could have been worse.”
Curtis manages a slight smile at that.
Later, when Charles is sifting through what he learnt from Curtis’ memories again, noting the various factors that could have made it worse, he reaches the conclusion that Erik was probably right about Braun’s motives.
He decides, on balance, not to mention that to the group.
I owe a bit of inspiration for this part to amazingly_me's excellent Groundhog Day First Class AU, I suspect, although I hope they're not too similar (the Groundhog Day AU is a brilliant work of art, after all, and this is just a very silly crossover, so the idea of being judged against amazingly_me's fic horrifies me). Curtis' power may as well be called 'Groundhog Day', so it was difficult to avoid some parallels.
All three parts can be found gathered in one post here at misfitsfic or here at thefirstclass.
Title: X-Misfits: Confrontation
Fandom: X-Men: First Class/Misfits
Rating: R
Wordcount: 1,500
Summary: Follows X-Misfits: Recruitment and X-Misfits: Training. It's time for the Misfits to save the world, or at least not screw up while other people try to save it.
“Wait,” Curtis says, on the eve of what may be a third world war. “What year is it?”
Erik gives Charles an incredulous look, but Charles isn’t entirely surprised; he has seen inside these students’ minds, after all, and he’s had an impression for a while that they’re not from this time. “It’s 1962,” he says.
Curtis puts a hand to his head. “Okay, I definitely remember learning about this. There was some kind of thing about missiles in Cuba.”
“The Cuban Missile Crisis,” Simon puts in.
“Right,” Curtis says.
At the edge of his vision, Charles sees an obviously bemused Nathan look at Kelly, then at Alisha. Both girls shrug. That’s reassuring, in a way; if not everyone in the future knows about the events of tomorrow, they can’t be as catastrophic as feared. Still, if time travel is possible they have no guarantee that the past cannot be changed.
“So d’you think that dickhead sent us back in time to, what, stop the missile crisis thing from happening?” Alisha asks.
“But there wasn’t any war,” Curtis says, frowning. “We don’t need to be here to stop it.”
“Perhaps it’s a stable time loop,” Simon says. “Perhaps there was no war because we were here in the first place.”
Charles, curious, examines Curtis’ memories to find out exactly what the circumstances of the dickhead sending them back in time were. There’s not much. They’re all at Curtis’ home, lounging around and mostly smoking, when a man appears in their midst. Curtis demands to know what he’s doing there. Kelly says, ‘He’s been watching us.’ Nathan calls him a pervert. And then the man waves a hand, and they all wake up in 1962.
Kelly said he had been watching them. Charles looks at her. Perhaps she was able to glean something more from his thoughts.
He’s barely brushed her mind before it slams shut.
“Oh, my God, stop doing that,” Kelly snarls, glaring at him. “Can’t you ever just fucking ask first?”
She has a point, he knows, but he still feels vaguely aggrieved. What do you make of this? he asks Erik instead, sending him the scene from Curtis’ memories.
The flareup of Erik’s mind is immediate and overwhelmingly loud. It brings back memories of Shaw, of the camp, of his mother. He must recognise the man.
“We should talk,” Charles says quickly, putting a hand on Erik’s shoulder to steer him out of the room. Kelly is staring at Erik now, her mouth slightly open in horror, and Charles feels a twist of guilt; he never meant to publicly expose something so personal about his friend.
-
“You knew him,” Charles says. They are sitting in tall chairs opposite each other, Charles leaning forwards, his hand on Erik’s knee. Feel that. You’re here. You’re not there any more. You’re here.
“Braun,” Erik says, not looking at him. “He was with Shaw, when-” He pauses. “I killed the others. He must have time-travelled to escape. I didn’t know he was a mutant.”
“So we can assume he’s not our friend, then,” Charles says, frowning. “Did he want them to end up here? Does he think having them on our side will ensure our failure?”
“Why else would they have been so close by?” Erik asks. “Five mutants within twenty miles of Cerebro? We couldn’t have missed them.”
“But I don’t think they’re planning to sabotage us.”
Erik looks back at him. More recent memories are unspooling in his mind now: Kelly saying, ‘Wait, I thought Cuba was in Africa’; Nathan insisting that he kill one of the others for fairness whilst Erik points out that, for them, it would be permanent. “I don’t think they need to try.”
-
This is the day that could save the world or destroy it. Charles walks through the cabin of the aircraft, making sure that everyone is there and wearing their suits. Erik: present. Raven: present. Hank, Moira, Kelly, Alisha, Simon: present. Nathan: clearly hungover (Charles hadn’t actually told them not to drink the night before, granted, but he’d rather thought it went without saying) but present. Curtis - Curtis?
“Curtis?” Charles asks. “Forgive me, but you’re not looking terribly well.”
Curtis is holding onto the side of the cabin as if it’s the only thing keeping him upright. When Charles peers into his mind, it’s too tired and jumbled to make any sense of.
“Curtis?”
“This time,” Curtis mumbles, the words blurring into each other, “we’re gonna get it right.”
-
One significant day in October 1962 lasts at least a week, although only one person knows it. In the end, when Curtis has managed to prevent Nathan from distracting Hank so much he swerves into the rising submarine, when he has persuaded Alisha to stay strapped in her seat before the plane crash-lands, it all comes down to the beach.
-
The missiles are speeding away from the beach. Curtis watches the struggle between Charles and Erik, his heart thumping so hard he’d almost swear someone had replaced it with an angry sledgehammer. Nobody’s died yet. Well, nobody who matters. And they’re so close to being safe, and maybe he’ll finally be able to go somewhere quiet and sleep...
The others are standing a little farther forward, also watching, before Nathan, impossibly, loses interest in the life-or-death conflict in front of him and sidles closer to Raven.
“So,” Nathan says, just loudly enough for Curtis to hear, as he rests his elbow on Raven’s shoulder, “as we’ve all just had a near-death experience, what do you say you and I...” and then he makes an incredibly obscene gesture with his tongue.
Charles must overhear Raven’s mental reaction to that or something, because he glances back, distracted, just for a second.
Too long.
The missiles slam into the ships.
Shit. Shit.
Everyone on the beach is frozen, staring at the flaming wreckage. Curtis feels on the verge of throwing up from frustration. “Nathan, you twat, what did you have to do that for?”
“Oops,” Nathan says, turning pale; then, plaintively, “Okay, I could not have predicted that. And they were trying to kill us!”
That’s true. Any chance of people accepting mutants has now gone completely to shit, but maybe this is an outcome Curtis doesn’t have to regret enough to rewind time. Maybe he can finally get out of this day.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Kelly demands, storming up to Erik like a mouse that thinks it’s a lion.
Or maybe not. Curtis has a bad feeling about this. “Kelly, get out of there!”
When Agent MacTaggert begins firing, Erik raises a hand and deflects the bullets with no effort at all. The first sinks into Kelly’s neck mid-tirade; everything slows down around Curtis as he sees her choke on her own blood, and then there’s the now-familiar blur of time running backwards and-
-
The missiles don’t hit the ships the next time, but Agent MacTaggert still fires, and the bullet thuds into thin air and there’s a tiny confused pause before Simon reappears, wide-eyed and bleeding and terrified, dying because Curtis told him to distract Erik and Alisha is screaming and-
-
The moment the missiles slow to a stop above them, Curtis grabs Agent MacTaggert’s gun and empties all the bullets into Nathan’s head.
Erik jerks around at the noise, and the missiles fall, and wait shit-
-
Erik looks up as he cradles Charles in his arms. Curtis can barely focus, but the desperate fury in Erik’s eyes still holds him. “Turn back time.”
Curtis actually giggles, swaying on his feet. “Probably was gonna do that anyway,” he says, or something along those lines. He thinks something along those lines. He’s not really aware of what he’s saying any more.
“Turn back time,” Erik commands, lifting a hand, and the world is blurring but Curtis isn’t sure it’s the right kind of blur, “or-”
No, definitely wrong blur. Threats are going to have to wait.
Curtis passes out.
-
“Hello,” Charles says, when Curtis visits him in the hospital. “Hank tells me you’ve been asleep for almost two days.”
Curtis nods, not quite looking him in the eye. “It was - you know, it was a long day.”
“Mmm,” Charles says. “Longer for you than for the rest of us, I think.”
There’s a pause, and then Curtis looks at him properly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I could have stopped it. I just couldn’t stay on my feet any longer, you know?”
Charles doesn’t respond at first, looking through Curtis’ memories of that day. It takes a while.
“Well,” Charles says, eventually, “it could have been worse.”
Curtis manages a slight smile at that.
Later, when Charles is sifting through what he learnt from Curtis’ memories again, noting the various factors that could have made it worse, he reaches the conclusion that Erik was probably right about Braun’s motives.
He decides, on balance, not to mention that to the group.