[fic] xm: fc - the mystery which binds me still - pg13 - charles, moira, erik
Title: the mystery which binds me still
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Charles, Moira, Erik, Shaw (Charles/Erik, Moira/Nick Fury)
Rating: PG13
Length: ~18,000
Summary: It's been seventeen years since Charles lived at the house in North Salem. It's big and imposing and filled with memories he thinks he's repressed for a reason. But after a strange man breaks in during a storm, demanding to see people Charles is sure died years ago, Charles finds himself investigating his past for the first time, venturing into the burnt out catacombs that hold the secret to the childhood he doesn't remember.
Notes: Gosh. This started as a ficlet based on a picture prompt that momebie posted for last year's NaNo. It grew exponentially from there. Thanks to everyone who cheerleaded the last week and a half as I decided to get this finished by Halloween. Huge thanks to bessiemaemucho for her helpful beta job (and for her jerky beta job) and to quatredeathlady for judging the creepiness factor. Title from "Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe. Happy Halloween, fandom! I hope you enjoy :)
October, 2002
"I have a story," Moira says against the distant rolling of thunder.
Moira's a good storyteller. She keeps her voice hushed. She pauses to add heightened suspense. There are eight of them wedged into the dorm room, and they're all hanging off her every word as the wind and rain batter the sides of the building.
"This is true," she says. They've all started their stories that way, but something about her tone makes Charles more likely to believe it. "There's a big, abandoned house outside of New York City. It's an hour or so north, where the neat little cardboard-box suburban homes turn into sprawling mansions. If you get to the end of the miles of craggy pavement that make up the driveway, the building you see is more like a castle than a house. There are tall turrets and ivy growing up the sides. It's huge and ominous and you can't help but feel that if you screamed, if you needed help, the house would laugh and no one would ever come.
"That's because, for dozens of children, no one ever did."
Someone gasps. It might be Lilly, who's a freshman and only here because she has a crush on Charles. No one speaks, though. Charles inches closer to Moira on her lofted bed. His stomach is churning and his heart is racing and he's not sure why.
"They say that the old man who lives there was a scientist once. They say that, during World War II, he developed a serum for the government that would fill the army with super soldiers capable of stomping the Nazis out in one sweep. But the serum was stolen and his plans were destroyed. He spent the rest of his life trying to recreate the chemicals from memory, but the Allies were suddenly winning the war and they no longer had soldiers for him to test on. They no longer had a need for his miracle drug. They sent him packing back to his estate, but he was crazed, determined to make it right.
"One night, a little girl broke into his kitchen in the middle of the night. She was hungry and homeless and he was ready to throw her out when he had an idea. He smiled at her. He offered her food and a place to stay. He promised to take care of her. It really only took him a few weeks to win her trust, and after that it was easy to lead her down through the long, dark catacombs under the house, into his lab. No one missed a little orphan girl. No one heard her screaming as the newest version of his serum turned her blue and left her skin peeling off her bones."
Another whimper, this time from one of the girls from the suite. Charles can't blame her. Normally, he brushes these stories off without a second thought. Moira's the fourth person tonight to take advantage of the flickering old wiring in their dorm building and the October storm in order to tell ghost stories. Moira currently holds the title of Best Storyteller on their hall, and with good reason. Charles spent most of the last three stories making faces at Moira in the candlelight, scoffing at the trite tales from the rest of their friends. Now he just wants it to stop, he wants Moira to be quiet. He's getting a terrible headache. His hands are shaking.
"No one missed any of the other children, either," Moira continues. "The little Irish boy who wandered away from his family's camping trip and screamed until the walls shook, but was never rescued. The runaway brothers, one of whom was forced to watch the other bleed out from his chest until he clawed his own eyes out. There was a girl whose poisoned blood made her veins glow like grotesque tattoos as her body rejected the poison and vomited it up, burning her skin like acid. Lost, lonely children who were never seen again, whose bodies he pumped full of chemicals, screaming at them, cursing them for not doing as he wished, for not--"
A flash of lightning outside and then darkness.
Lilly screams.
The room is still lit by candles, but the rest of the lights have gone out; Charles can tell just from looking out the window to where he should be able to see the glow from the other rooms. Lilly is crying, Gabrielle is screaming, and the room has descended into chaos. Charles would be relieved that Moira's stopped talking, but his palms are sweating and when he closes his eyes, he sees long stone hallways lit by single bulbs. He hears someone telling him it's almost right, it's just a little longer and it will be right. He hears someone screaming and the screech of metal and--
The lights flicker back on outside and Darwin leaps to his feet and hits the switch on the wall. The fluorescent light is too much and Charles closes his eyes quickly, covers his face with shaking hands. Everyone is talking at once, shouting at Moira, shouting at each other, and Charles lets it all fade into the background. He breathes deeply, lowers his hands and tries to act casual. It helps that they are mostly ignoring him, as Moira's friend Therese leads Lilly and Gabby out of the room with Darwin, Rob, and Joe on their heels, talking about hitting up the coffee shop before it closes, leaving Charles sitting stockstill on Moira's bed.
"Wimps," Moira says.
Charles doesn't reply. The bed shifts and Moira turns to scrutinize him. He must look as awful as he feels, because she frowns, a furrow of concern appeared between her eyebrows.
"Are you okay?" she asks. "You look spooked."
"I'm fine," Charles says, and Moira snorts.
"It must have been some story if I've scared the great Charles Xavier," she says. "You're unshakable. It wasn't even that good."
Charles closes his eyes and sees the long hallways again before he opens them quickly.
"I just...I'm not sure," Charles says. He doesn't want to examine the pictures behind his eyelids. "The house you described...it's very much like the house I grew up in. I think I must be associating...I don't know."
"It's just a story," Moira says. "I made it up."
"You said it was true," Charles says, running his hands through his hair.
"I always say they're true," Moira says. "It makes them scarier. It was based on some stupid thing I read once and some story my cousin told me." She rubs his shoulder. "Are you sure you're okay? This is weird for you."
"I'm fine," Charles says, breathing out noisily. He shakes himself and forces a smile. "I'm fine. You got me, it seems. You win this time."
"Yeah," Moira says, but she doesn't look convinced.
"Do you still have that vodka?" he asks her. She stares at him for a moment. There's a whisper through his head, like an echo of a memory, and he shakes hard to dislodge it. Great. The mental whispers are always the precursor to an anxiety attack or a migraine or both. He grabs his wallet and slips out his pill case, shaking out his anxiety medication into his cupped open palm. He probably shouldn't drink before a migraine, but the migraines are brought on by anxiety and the quickest way to calm his nerves, outside of his medication, will be a drink. Moira leans over the edge of her bed and pulls up a backpack. She unzips it and reveals a bottle of Smirnoff that's nearly full. "Excellent," he says.
"I have my doubts about this plan," Moira replies, but she unscrews the top and takes the first drink before wincing and passing it to Charles.
"It's fine," Charles lies. "I'm fine, I'm past it." He takes a long pull from the bottle to wash down his medication and wills the alcohol to work its magic. "Now. Do we want to follow the rest of them to the coffee shop?"
Instead they end up down the hall at a low-key party in the boys' suite. Charles drinks until Moira's story is out of his mind and seduces one of the boys on the lacrosse team so he doesn't have to go to bed alone. After he wakes up, he has a terrible migraine and when he's finally fit for civilized company, Moira's story is nothing more than a distant shiver down his spine.
***
October, 2012
It's been two weeks since Charles moved back to North Salem to work on his book and he still feels like a stranger in the house. To be honest, he even felt like a stranger as a child. He's sure that at some point it felt like home--maybe his very early childhood, before his father passed. Those days are so far, though, so distant that the only memories he has are detached--hiding from Kurt, staying up in his room or the library on that floor, keeping indoors instead of exploring the vast grounds of the estate. It's his home, but every day brings new discoveries, rooms and items he's forgotten entirely, if they were ever familiar in the first place.
He misses his cramped flat in Manhattan, but only distantly. That wasn't really home either, though he knew all of the nooks and crannies by necessity. If he's honest with himself, what he misses is Moira and the companionship of being with another person. It's funny--for all he doesn't have many friends, he's never been happy on his own. He's more comfortable with other people, with people he trusts. These days, Moira is where that list begins and ends. They've been inseparable since they met freshman year at Harvard. After school, they relocated to New York together while Charles worked towards his PhD and Moira obtained her Master's and then a job with the FBI. They've shared apartments through their schooling and their first jobs, through Charles getting tenure and Moira being promoted to field agent. They're getting older, though. Charles is twenty-seven. Moira will be thirty in six months and has made it clear she wants a family one day. He understands that there's a progression to these things. He just--well, he wasn't quite expecting it this quickly.
Moira and Nick have only been dating for a year. He likes Nick. Nick is smart and sarcastic and a little taciturn, but in a way that makes him seem mysterious and intriguing rather than rude. He's good for Moira--he respects her, gives her shit when she needs it, listens to her when she doesn't, and is frequently impressed by what she can do. Moira's dated enough men of dubious quality that Charles is happy for her. He is. But, well. Charles hates change. Or maybe he just doesn't like being alone. It's hard to know for sure.
"Listen," Moira had said to him one night in late May. They were splitting a bottle of wine and toasting to the end of the school year and the start of Charles' break from students, his sabbatical to finish his book. "So, I know you're taking a year off and I know you were thinking about going somewhere for a while to work."
"Yes?" Charles said when it was clear Moira wasn't going to elaborate.
"Well," she said. "Last night I was talking to Nick--well, commiserating, since he didn't get that promotion. And he admitted that one of the reasons he wanted Detective was because the hours were better and more conducive to...married life. And I said I'd been meaning to bring that up for a while recently and--"
"Marriage?" Charles blurted out. "Already?"
Moira shrugged. "Yeah," she said. "And we talked and it's definitely something we feel like we're moving towards. And I thought--with the lease up in August and you taking some time off to work on your book, maybe it would be a good time for Nick and I to move in together. To see if we can stand being around each other 24-7 before we commit to it."
And it did make sense, of course. It was practical and logical and completely understandable, but it had been a long time since Charles had lived on his own. He'd never lived on his own, really. He briefly considered staying in the city and getting a roommate, but he wasn't thrilled about living with a stranger and he didn't have very many friends. It was more expensive to live on his own, not that he couldn't afford it, and he spent so much time debating boroughs and neighborhoods and pros and cons that, in the end, it seemed silly not to just head up to the house in North Salem at least until he got himself sorted out. The quiet, he thought, would be more conducive to working than spending months acclimating to someone new and calming his nerves enough to be able to focus with them banging around the flat.
So Moira has a new apartment with her boyfriend and Charles has a huge, empty house that he lives in on his own and regards with no small amount of fear and loneliness. Moira would tell him there's a solution to that. Moira would remind him that people sometimes use other people for things other than sex, that perhaps he should consider a serious romantic relationship instead of a series of good-natured hook-ups with anyone willing. He appreciates her concern and he understands, in theory, that it's a good idea but...well. It's hard to find someone he likes, who likes him, who doesn't have so many questions. Charles hates talking about himself, and all of his past attempts at relationships have delved into that rather quickly.
"Not your work," Lilly Neramani had said to him when they dated in his last year at Harvard. "You, Charles. I want to know about your life."
Charles hadn't had a good answer for her, and the relationship fizzled out before winter break.
It's not so bad like this. He has Moira. He has his work and his students. He'll be finishing up his book this year, and then he'll have that. He's moderately sure that he'll limp into his thirties as a well-regarded young man, respected in his field at a young age, with a best friend who's like a sister to him and a promising career ahead of him. Well-adjusted. Normal.
There's a distant crack of thunder and he jumps, slamming his knee on the underside of the desk he's clearing out.
Well. Mostly well-adjusted. Everyone has their quirks.
When he first moved back, a part of him wanted to limit his movements to one part of the house. He told himself it was easier that way, that he was used to a string of tiny dorm rooms and then a string of slightly larger apartments, that spreading out over the vast space of the house would just lead to him losing things that might be important in rooms he's only been in once. It was a silly thought, one borne of childhood fears that he couldn't quite substantiate in his mind. They were distant and muted and he kept them that way--what he does remember of those years, the years with his mother in little more than a gin-induced coma and Kurt and Cain ruling cruelly in her absence, he wishes he could forget as it is. He's alone here, now, and there is nothing to stop him from making use of all of the space, or at least examining it for the first time since his mother's funeral. He has a whole year off from teaching and only has to be in the lab twice a month. He needs something to do in his spare time.
Thunder crashes again and Charles starts to think this is a task better suited to daytime.
He thinks this office belonged to Kurt and maybe his father before that. He only knows it was one of the rooms he was forbidden to enter in his childhood, not that he strayed far from his sanctuary on the third floor, the corner wing that contained his bedroom, his classroom, and a library. Mostly it seems to contain empty filing cabinets and a desk filled with odds and ends, scraps of paper, nothing he can make sense of. Charles is frankly surprised that Kurt was able to clear so much of this out--he was packing to leave the house the day after Charles' mother's will was read, the day he found out that he inherited nothing and Charles everything.
He wonders where all of these things ended up after Kurt's own untimely death only days after Sharon's. He stops and listens to the storm battering the house and then decides those thoughts are best left to morning.
The whole task is best left to morning. Charles' hands are shaking when he closes the desk drawer and gets to his feet. He'll go to the kitchen and make himself a nice cup of tea, maybe add a little something extra. There are brownies somewhere, a treat for himself that he couldn't resist when he stopped at the coffee shop in town yesterday. He'll have a cup of tea and a snack and then take some of his papers and retire for the evening and--
There's a crack of thunder that feels like it shakes the house to its foundation. There's a flash from outside, and then Charles is plunged into darkness.
He doesn't scream, but only because his voice has fled entirely. There's no light to speak of--the outside lights are gone, the inside lights are gone, and the storm has covered up any moonlight or starlight that may have led him to a candle or a lantern. He tries to ignore his thumping heart as he closes his eyes and maps out the room in his mind. There were candles on the mantle and long fireplace matches in a box on the bookshelf. He opens his eyes again, though it does no good--the room is just as dark with his eyes open as it is when they're shut. Still, he begins to pick his way across the room, his eyes straining to adjust, to take in just the barest hint of light. His questing hands close around the edge of the mantle and he quickly feels his way over to bookshelf. His hands are shaking so badly that the first match flickers and dies, but the second takes and he manages to light first one candle, then the other.
He leaves one on the mantle and holds the other out to get his bearings. It's fine. Everything is fine. The room is just as he left it. His eyes scan over his surroundings, taking in the hulking dark shadows of filing cabinets and shelves and the man in the doorway.
Charles' heartbeat quickens. He swallows a gasp. Maybe if he pretends he didn't see the man, maybe if he closes his eyes everything will be okay. Maybe it was just a trick of the light.
There's another strike of lightning, illuminating the room, and the man is suddenly right in front of him.
Charles drops his candle. It fizzles out when it hits the carpet, leaving him with only the dim glow from the candle behind him to see by. He wants to scream, but his throat is thick with fear. The man is taller than him, his features sharply carved into his face. He looms over Charles with something like rage in his eyes, which are dominated by his pupils in the dark. Charles makes a quiet, frightened noise.
"Where is Klaus Schmidt?" the man all but growls.
Charles takes an involuntary step back and trips into one of the armchairs. It puts him at a further disadvantage that the man quickly leaps upon. He leans over, resting his weight on the arms of the chair and effectively trapping Charles in place.
"I--I don't--take what you want, I don't--please don't--"
He doesn't know what he's saying, what he's begging for. He's going to be murdered. He's going to be murdered in his own home and no one will find him for weeks. He'll be another bloody ghost story, another one of the urban legends that have always surrounded this house.
"Where," the man hisses, his face inches from Charles' own, "is Klaus Schmidt?"
Charles swallows again and again. He's hearing the words now, possibly for the first time. Schmidt. Oh god, Schmidt.
"I don't know!" Charles says desperately. "I don't know, he died! He died the same time as my stepfather, he died in the laboratory fire, I swear, he's not here, I don't know!"
The man stares at him, but he moves no closer and makes no further demands. In a back part of his mind, Charles thinks he'd be very handsome if his face wasn't contorted in such anger.
"Schmidt survived the fire," the man finally says. He still sounds furious, but the anger is no longer directed at Charles.
"He--he couldn't have," Charles says. "I saw--Kurt was--all of the laboratories burned. They were trapped. They were--he couldn't have--" The fear curling in Charles' gut is of a different sort, now. He remembers Klaus Schmidt, and a world with Schmidt in it is significantly worse off. He shudders.
The man stares at him again and then grabs the front of Charles' shirt in his fist, lifting him off of the chair until their noses are almost touching.
"If you're lying to me...."
"I'm not, I swear!" Charles says. "God, fuck, I wouldn't, not about him, not about Kurt--it can't be true, he can't be--" Charles snaps his mouth closed before he goes hysterical, his breath still coming too quickly. Something shifts in the man's face. He's still staring at Charles, and Charles stares back. There's something familiar about him. Something resonant. Charles has seen that expression. He's seen it in the mirror.
He touches the man's hand where it clutches his shirt. He doesn't know why. It's foolish--possibly suicidal. But the man doesn't flinch, he just looks down at Charles' hand and then back up at Charles. They stay there, unmoving, until another strike of lightning illuminates the room and another crack of thunder shakes the house.
The man drops Charles' shirt and Charles falls back into the chair with a thump. Before he can say a word, the man turns and flees into the darkness.
Charles knows he should follow, should get up and phone the police, but he doesn't think he could stand if he tried. He sits in the chair, breathing hard, with his eyes squeezed shut.
Oh god, there was a stranger in his house. A stranger asking questions about Klaus Schmidt. Someone broke into his house and Schmidt might not be dead and--
He blindly tears out of the room, tripping and stumbling along the way, feeling out desperately for anything in his path until he's out in the hallway, then down to the foyer and around to the sitting room he's been using as his office. He tears inside, knocking over an end table and groping madly for his bag. He brushes everything else on the coffee table onto the floor in his haste, his fingers finally closing around the strap, his hands digging inside for his cellphone--
He winces at the brightness of the display as he taps in his password with shaking fingers. He finds Moira's name and prays that reception won't cut off from the storm.
"Hey," Moira says after endless seconds of tinny ringing. "What's up?"
Charles chokes back a sob. "Can you--" come up here? he wants to ask, but the man might still be in his house and if anything happened to Moira, he'd never forgive himself. "Can I come down there tonight? Now? Please, Moira?" he asks instead.
There's a slight pause, but that's the only hesitation. "Of course," she says. "Charles, you sound--"
"Thank you," Charles says breathlessly. "Thank you, I'm leaving now."
He doesn't wait for her to reply. He ends the call and uses the remaining light from the display to make sure he has his keys, then grabs his bag, shoves the phone in his pocket, and stumbles towards the front door.
It's still pouring outside, and Charles drops his keys when he tries to lock the door behind him. It takes three tries to get the door locked and by then he's already soaked. He doesn't pause, though. He sprints through the puddles towards his car and by the time he's on the highway headed towards the city, he's almost stopped shaking.
***
"Jesus fuck!" Moira says when she sees him, soaked and bedraggled and standing outside the door to her new apartment. "Did you forget your umbrella or something?"
"No time to stop," he mumbles through chattering teeth. Moira shakes her head and pulls him inside, closing the door behind him.
Moira and Nick's new apartment is in Astoria. It's light and airy and much more open than the series of apartments Charles and Moira shared in Manhattan. It's a bit of a hike to get down to the Federal Building for work, but Charles privately thinks that if Moira didn't have her commute to complain about, she'd get bored.
She leads him into the kitchen and shoves him into a chair. "I'll be right back," she says, then disappears down the hall. She returns less than a minute later carrying a pair of his trousers and a hoodie that he suspects belongs to her boyfriend.
"The pants are yours--I keep finding your clothes mixed in with mine. Nick'll want the sweatshirt back eventually. Put them on," she says.
Charles does as he's told. He has no shame left when it comes to Moira, and peels off his slacks in the middle of the kitchen.
"Nick's working the graveyard shift," she continues, "So it's just you and me. And when you're done dressing, you're going to tell me what made you drive all the way to Queens in the middle of a storm, soaking wet and white as a sheet."
Charles expected as much, but he still moves slowly, peeling the wet clothes from his body and replacing them with Moira's loaners. He's drying his hair with a hand towel when Moira kicks his ankle and glares at him. He drops it onto the table and sighs.
"Can we...?" He gestures towards the sofa in the living room. Moira nods and leads the way, but once they're both settled, Charles knows he's out of stalling tactics.
"A...a man--" He swallows. "This evening, a man--"
Moira's eyes go hard.
"Did someone hurt you, Charles?" she asks. "Were you on a date? Did someone--I can call the police, we can file a report--"
"No!" Charles says quickly. "Oh, god, no. Not like that. No, I wasn't--no." He shakes his head and Moira relaxes, but only slightly. "I was home, going through some things in the office and...the lights went out and this man--he broke into the house. He asked me questions about my stepfather and his--business partner. And then he left. And I just--I needed to get out of there."
"Fuck," Moira says. "Please tell me you called the police."
Charles winces.
"You're like the police," he hedges, but Moira just groans.
"Charles! A man broke into your house and--did he hurt you? Are you sure you're okay?"
"He didn't touch me," Charles lies, because he doesn't know how to explain that the anger, the violence wasn't directed at him, even when he was hanging in the stranger's grip. "He just asked questions. And when it became clear I had no answers, he left."
He can feel a headache building and his heart is still hammering, but getting up to get his bag is an insurmountable obstacle. Luckily, years of living with Charles has made Moira rather well trained at picking up his cues. She shakes her head and gets up to retrieve his things, shaking out one of his anxiety pills and passing it to him.
"I can't believe you didn't call the police," she says. "Honestly, Charles. You can't be that stupid."
Charles dry swallows the pill.
"It's hard to explain," Charles says. "You don't--I panicked." It's not a complete lie. He doesn't know how to explain to Moira that he can't bring himself to think of someone looking for Schmidt, looking to hurt Schmidt, as a bad guy.
Moira sighs.
"Fine," she says. "Stay here tonight. Tomorrow morning I'll go back over there with you and scope the place out and call the police. And you'll tell me the whole story, okay? I can tell you're holding back on something."
"Thank you," Charles says. He rubs his forehead and sighs. "I'm sorry about all this. It was just--things happened in that house and I--" He stares at Moira plaintively. He doesn't know if he could explain if he tried.
"It's fine," Moira says. "I'm just glad you're alright. Come on, you can bunk with me. It'll be just like college all over again."
"That's the most frightening thing I've heard all night," Charles says, but he follows her into the bedroom, his heartbeat finally returning to a normal pace.
***
Moira follows Charles back to the house at a distance that would make her superiors at the FBI wince in shame. They're both lucky that nothing causes Charles to step on the brakes unexpectedly, because they would undoubtedly collide if he did so. He knows that Moira is concerned and he feels, in the light of day, like a world-class idiot for running to her instead of calling the police, but it's all done now and they're all safe. There's no reason for her to attach herself to him quite so closely.
Once they pull up at the house, Moira tries to make him wait outside until he reminds her that the inside is a labyrinthine mess that even he hasn't properly broached since he was about ten years old. She reluctantly allows him to follow, instructing him to stay close behind her as she inches through the place, gun first.
"Is that really necessary?" he asks quietly after she swings into another room, eyes flickering quickly over every corner, weapon never wavering.
"Is it necessary for me to have my weapon out while looking for possible intruders in your house?" Moira asks. "Yes, Charles. It's necessary."
Charles doesn't protest again, merely follows her from room to room. It takes almost an hour, but at the end of it, they're back in the foyer with nothing to show for their inspection save for dust on their clothes and cobwebs in their hair.
"First off," Moira says, "this place is insane. I can't believe you grew up here."
"I can't either," Charles murmurs. "I mean, granted, I lived in London until I was five and moved back there when I was eleven, so I didn't properly grow up here, but I understand your skepticism."
"Secondly," Moira continues, "did you see anything missing? Would you even know if anything was missing?"
Charles shakes his head. "The rooms I haven't been in since I moved back looked undisturbed. The rooms I have been in seemed to be intact. Do we really need to call the police? I mean, what will we say? Someone came in, didn't take anything, didn't hurt me, and then left?"
Moira crosses her arms. "Charles. Don't downplay this. You were white as a sheet and shaking last night, and that was after you had an hour's drive to get your shit together."
"And now that it's daylight and I have my wits about me, I see that I might have blown it out of proportion," Charles says. "Look," he continues before she can object further. "It was dark. The power was out. You've seen how big and intimidating this house is. Imagine being alone in it at night during a storm with no power. The man clearly took my words to heart. When I told him I didn't know where Schmidt was, he left. He clearly believed me. And it was frightening, yes, but I overreacted. You can see how easy it would be to do that, here."
Moira scrutinizes him and he does his best not to flinch under her gaze. She relaxes eventually, though, and and pulls out her phone, handing it to him.
"Fine," she says. "But you're going to call the police and let them know what happened and I'm going to sit here and make sure you do it. Just in case, Charles."
He ignores the phone and pulls out his own. The local police department is pre-programmed in after one too many sensationalist newscasts about the perils of dialing 911 from a cell phone. He calls the office number for the North Salem police department and leads Moira into the kitchen as he waits to be connected to an officer after explaining the situation. He gives a report, sounding as dismissive as he can without making Moira suspicious, and the whole thing is over in less than ten minutes.
"There," he says as he hangs up. "Are you satisfied?"
"Not really," Moira says, "but I'm meeting Nick for dinner, so as long as there's not a serial killer hiding in your pantry, I need to get back to the city."
"There's not," Charles assures her, leading her back through the halls towards the front door, where they came in. "I'm sorry if I scared you last night."
"I just want to know you're safe," Moira says. "I worry about you, Charles. More than I should, really. I think some time away from the city is going to be good for you, but I guess I didn't realize how far you really were and how isolated it is out there."
They stop at the front door and Moira hugs him tightly. When she pulls back, she holds him in place by his shoulders.
"Call me if anything else happens, okay? In fact, call me once a day to let me know you're alive."
"I will," Charles agrees. He looks forward to it, actually. It is rather lonely out here and it's been difficult transitioning from having Moira constantly underfoot to being entirely on his own. "Drive safely!"
He follows Moira out and watches her get back into her car and loop around down the driveway, watches her until her car is out of sight and the hum of the engine blends into the rest of the noises of the day. He returns to the house and closes the door behind him, leaning back against it. The house is still as ominous, as eerie as it always has been.
"If," he says out loud to the lingering specter of his intruder, "you turn out to be dangerous after I went through all that to defend you, I'm going to be rather cross."
The silence of the house is all he hears in return. He sighs and heads back to his office to try and get some work done.
***
Charles tries to put the whole incident out of his mind. He has a book to focus on, work he should be doing, research he needs to verify. He makes himself a daily schedule to get back into the routine of working regularly now that he doesn't have the structure of teaching classes to guide him.
Predictably, the schedule lasts all of two days. Or, more specifically, the schedule lasts through two nights of quiet contemplation in the dark of his bedroom, hours spent turning the home invasion over in his head. There was something so familiar about the man. The terror at the mention of Schmidt, yes, but something else. God, he hadn't even thought about Kurt and Schmidt in so long, not really, and now that he tries to think harder, everything seems to slip through his fingers. He remembers awkward family dinners full of Kurt and Schmidt laughing and talking in sharp, hushed voices while his mother listlessly stared into space and Cain glared at Charles mutinously, jealous of his special privileges.
Special privileges? Did Cain really get that jealous of Charles' invitations to go down to the lab to watch Kurt work? He can't remember. It's hardly important. He can't even remember what it was he did in the labs.
Kurt couldn't have taken everything. There wasn't time. Charles barely had time to pack all of the things he wanted to take with him to London. He'd expected he would be forced to stay with Kurt and Cain. There was the funeral and then they went straight to the lawyer's to hear the will and then they were home and packing, Kurt and Cain as good as evicted, just like that. They only had the late afternoon and evening. The fire was started before midnight and then....
The thoughts twist and turn in Charles' head as he tries to sleep each night. He has such clear memories of London, of his uncle and aunt and cousins, of boarding school and of college. His memory has always been excellent, but he supposes it's true what they say about the brain protecting itself by repressing trauma.
It doesn't stop him from wanting to know more, though, and on the third day, as he steeps his tea, he says to the empty kitchen, "Oh, fuck it."
He finds a set of small screwdrivers, a crowbar, and an ancient keyring in the outside shed. He doubts the keys open anything useful, but he collects all of these things and brings them back to the house. He starts in Kurt's old office, the one he was working in the night of the trespasser. It's as good a place as any, and, if he's being honest with himself, he's not eager to be back there after dark and he has a feeling this might take a while.
He opens every drawer, looks through every scrap of paper. He pries open the locked cabinet and finds nothing but a few very, very nice bottles of whiskey. When he's satisfied, he moves on to the next room, then the next, until he's hit every office and spare bedroom he can find and amassed a whole lot of nothing.
It's late. He's dirty and tired and aching and he can feel a headache coming on. He's been having them every night, now, and he owes that to his friend the intruder, who's ratcheted up his anxiety to levels he hasn't seen since he was finishing his dissertation. He looks at the pile of notebooks and documents he's found and then he looks at the clock. Whatever it is can surely wait one more night.
He takes a bottle of wine from the kitchen and grabs his medication, an empty glass, and the latest notes on his book and takes them all upstairs where he draws himself a warm bath. A week ago, he's not sure he would have seen himself retreating to work in order to calm himself down, but it seems like the simplest choice, now. He sits in the water until it's gone tepid and his skin is pruny, then dries off and puts on a pair of boxers before curling up in his bed, asleep nearly before his head hits the pillow.
***
It turns out that work was actually the best choice to distract himself. Even in the bright light of morning, fully rested and working on a second cup of tea, Charles can't make any sense of the notes he's pulled together from all around the house.
"My god, I'm glad I learn lab procedures from them," he mutters to himself as he looks through the--admittedly truncated--pages he's rescued. None of the formulas make sense. His father worked with genetics and Kurt was in the same field, the same field that Charles chose to pursue. Most of the documents read like straight chemistry and not any chemistry he's familiar with. The others are strange supply orders and what look like observation logs from some sort of lab test, though it's not clear what type of animal was being tested or what sort of tests were being completed.
It's gibberish without context. It leaves Charles scratching his head. A day's worth of creeping around the house, forcing his way into rooms and drawers, sneezing and coughing from the dust, and all he has to show for it is a pile of papers that, despite a PhD and quite a bit of practical experience in his field, seem entirely nonsensical.
It was a wasted day. He should go back to his book.
He pours himself a glass of wine and stares outside instead.
He can almost see the door from where he's sitting. The entrance to the catacombs. There used to be one in the house, but Kurt had it sealed up and the remaining passageway turned into a bomb shelter. He said it was too dangerous, that it was too easy for Charles or Cain to wander in by accident and hurt themselves. The outside door needed a keycard to get through. Charles asked for his own when he started accompanying Kurt down there, but he never got one. You needed to swipe the key to open the door and then there was another door that needed a code. 7-6-2-6-9. Strange that he can remember that so clearly while other things elude him.
There's no keycard now. The fire department broke the lock and bent the door out of shape. It doesn't close all the way anymore. Charles walked by it once when he returned to the house, just to check that it was there. The second door, he could see through the gap where the outer door was mangled, was gone completely. That was as close as he'd gotten to the labs before turning around and walking quickly back towards the house.
No one's been down there in years. There's nothing left, probably, but if there is something that can add context to these random documents, if there is some sort of key to all of this...well. It would be down there.
He lets himself stare a little longer.
"Charles," he finally says. "You've gone round the bend."
He didn't come out here to solve some insane fifteen-year-old mystery or to snoop around in his dead stepfather's affairs. He came out here to work on his book. He came out here to get away from the city, to focus on himself for a few months and not his students or Moira or his colleagues. He'd hoped he could eliminate the distractions that were around every corner in the city, and clearly his brain has been working overtime to create new ones.
He needs to focus. He needs to work. He needs to stop thinking about things that happened so long ago that the memories are nothing more that a fog in the back of his mind.
He takes the glass of wine and resolutely marches back towards his laptop. He's going to finish another chapter tonight and look at the notes his research assistant sent over. He has a pile of documents to read through in the week before he's due to stop by the lab again, and it's best to get started now.
He'll keep busy. He'll forget all about this insanity. He can't live in the past.
***
He dreams about the intruder. Of course he does.
He dreams that the man is back, but this time, when he shakes Charles and asks where Schmidt is, Schmidt appears beside him. He yanks the man away from Charles, and though Charles thinks he should be grateful, he finds himself terrified and scrambling to get away, reaching for the stranger who is just beyond his reach.
"I think he's sweet on you," Schmidt says. "I can work with that."
The words make Charles sick, but he can't get away and the stranger looks horrified and the room is bright, too bright, he can't see and his head is killing him and he wakes up in agony.
He scrambles for the bedside table and manages to find his pills and a bottle of ibuprofen. He swallows his anxiety medication despite his dry throat and the ibuprofen follow. He's still shaking when he realizes that the ringing phone woke him up.
"M-Moira?" he stutters when he hits accept.
"Hey, I--are you okay?"
He swallows. "I'm sorry," he says. "I just--I had an attack. I'm fine now. I'm going to be fine."
"Jesus, Charles," she says. Charles pushes himself up and leans against the headboard, untangling himself from the sheets. "Are you sure you're okay? I can come out. I was just calling to tell you I have to go up to Danbury tomorrow and see if you wanted to get lunch or something, but--"
"No, that sounds lovely," Charles says. "I'm really fine, Moira. I had a nightmare. I took my medication."
"Good," Moira says, and Charles feels the world starting to come back into focus. "Are you sure you're okay out there by yourself? I'm starting to think this isn't as good an idea as we initially thought. You can come stay with me and Nick if you want. I mean, the place isn't big, but it might be better for you."
"Moira, really," Charles says, though he's starting to agree with her. "I'd love to have lunch with you tomorrow. Would you like me to meet you in Danbury or would you like to come out here?"
"I'll come to you," Moira says. "Danbury sucks. Do you need anything?"
He's sure she means for around the house, but he finds himself saying, "Yes, actually--can you do me a favor?"
"What kind of favor?" she asks.
"Can you...can you look up Klaus Schmidt for me?" he asks. "At work, I mean."
There's a short silence on the other line.
"I...guess that wouldn't be a problem," she says. She doesn't comment further, which means she's suitably intrigued by this whole thing and is going to hold off on the lecture until she satiates her own curiosity. "Do you know anything besides his name?"
"Not really," Charles admits. He's not sure he's ready to disclose how blank his childhood memories really are. "I know that he and Kurt had a government contract, but that's about it."
"Okay," Moira says. "I'll find what I can and bring it up tomorrow."
"Thank you, Moira," Charles says. "It's--" He suddenly doesn't want to talk about it more than he has to. He coughs a little. "Anyway, uh, what time should I expect you?"
"One thirty," Moira says. "I'll give you a call when I'm leaving Danbury?"
"Yeah, thanks," Charles says. "Have a good day, Moira."
"You too," she says. "Take care. Feel better."
He hangs up and rubs his eyes. His headache is better. He can breathe and think again. He's not sure how to interpret the level of horror felt in his dream. He hasn't had a night terror in years, and he doesn't actually know the intruder, but the despair he felt at being pulled away...he can still feel echoes of it. He doesn't know if it was his fear of Schmidt or the unease that's been stirred up at being back in the house, but the dream felt real and he's still having trouble shaking it, even as he rolls out of bed--it's already almost noon, he's practically slept the day away--and stumbles towards the shower.
He intends to get to work, he really does, but he can't focus. His mind wanders after every line. He re-reads words two or three times before he absorbs the meaning. It's no use; nothing is getting done. Three weeks he's been out at the house and he's done less than he normally accomplishes in half the time.
He tells himself a walk will be helpful. He tells himself the cool autumn air will clear his head. He tells himself he's not obsessing, he's not going to think about Schmidt or the intruder or his dreams or his childhood. He's just going to admire the scenery and let himself unwind.
The problem is, the more he thinks about those years, the less there is to get lost in. There are things he remembers about his early childhood, about playing in the house in London, that seem odd when he stops to think about it. Odd that he can remember some of those days so clearly, when so much of the time in the states is a blur. They moved into the house in Westchester when he was five, and so much of his memory from those years is torn to shreds, right up until he moved back to London after his mother's death.
The air smells like fall as Charles wanders through the grounds. Smell is usually a powerful memory trigger for him, but almost nothing of the autumns in this house are coming to mind. He thinks of college, of the day he met Moira, of the autumns spent wandering around Cambridge, but he should have some clear memories of New York, shouldn't he? He understands how repression works, but all the days couldn't have been so bad, not when the ones he remembers seem rather terrible in their own right.
He reaches a bench by what was once a small reflecting pool. The water is green and murky, now, and any fish in it have long since died or been devoured by predators, but the bench is still standing and seems sturdy when he sits on it.
The problem is that the holes in his memory don't feel entirely natural. His mother's funeral is a blur, a fog, but in a way that's different than the rest of it. The same with his father's. Some of Cain's worst beatings fall under the same umbrella, but the majority of the rest of his missing memories feel more jagged.
He picks one and tries to trace it back, closing his eyes and tipping his head back. He picks up from being shaken awake that night by his nanny and pulled from the house, watching the labs burn, terrified about...something. He's not sure what. The fire, he supposes, but the missing source of the terror has the same sharp edges as the rest of his missing memories. He tries going further back, examining more closely. They came home from the lawyer and Kurt shoved him roughly aside. It hurt. He remembers it hurt. He remembers that Cain went to hit him and Kurt smacked Cain across the room, yelled at him to pack his things. Charles' nanny tsked quietly at that, but said nothing, hurrying Charles along to pack himself. They were leaving the next day for London, she told him. Kurt and Cain needed to be out by then, she told him.
He remembers Schmidt came by. He argued with Kurt about something, something that Charles only heard snatches of until he was brought back upstairs to finish his packing.
He remembers hearing only snatches, but not what those snatches were.
He gets lost in the memories for endless minutes that stretch and stretch until something--
There's a noise and Charles sits up. The sun is noticeably lower than it was when he closed his eyes. He looks at his watch to confirm that, yes, he just fell asleep outside for a good hour. Fuck, he has to get back to the city. Another whole day wasted and--
The man is standing at the tree line, maybe twenty feet away.
Charles swallows and slowly looks up, making eye contact with the man. He seems different in daylight. Softer, maybe. Maybe it's the rage that's missing, making his face almost entirely different than it was the last time Charles saw him. Charles tries to keep his breathing even. His pills are still inside.
They don't speak. The man's gaze is steady and almost warm. He's really quite handsome, which is a ridiculous thing to focus on. Charles crosses his arms over his chest, but doesn't look away.
"What makes you so sure that Schmidt is alive?" he finally asks. His voice is quieter than he intends, almost vulnerable. He doesn't like that, but he can't take it back now that the words are out there. "I saw what was left after the fire. I know what was left of Kurt. How can you be sure he got out?"
The man regards Charles with a dark intensity. Charles tries hard not to squirm.
"Because I started the fire," he finally says. "And I only escaped because Schmidt took me and ran."
The man turns, then, and walks off into the trees. Charles is too stunned to follow him.
Charles stays on the bench until the sun starts to dip further down into the sky. He doesn't know what to think. Was the man on the property even then, down in the labs while Charles was sleeping up at the house? The man can't be that much older than Charles, he would have been nothing more than a boy then. What the hell was he doing down in those labs? Why would he start the fire?
Charles' head is aching. He needs to take a pill. He needs to have a drink. He needs to find a time machine so he can go back and warn himself off of ever coming back here.
He pushes himself to his feet. He's dizzy with an impending attack, his heart out of control, his nerves leaving him a shaking mess as he stumbles back towards the house. Has this man been watching him his whole life? Has he been here at the house for all these years? Is he Schmidt's son, his protege? Why the hell does he look so damned familiar and why the fuck was he in the labs that night?
Charles manages to make it inside and takes two anxiety pills and a handful of ibuprofen. He washes them down with the last of the wine in a glass on the table, takes a moment to breathe, and then decides he needs something stronger if this is going to continue to make so little sense.
The whiskey is still in the cabinet that Charles pried open the other night. He doesn't bother with a glass, just opens the bottle and drinks deeply, sputtering only a little. He holds it close to his chest as he staggers unsteadily from the room and into the more familiar library he's been using as an office. He hits the couch hard, curling up and squeezing his eyes shut.
He can't make sense of any of this, none of it at all, voices loud in his head, ideas tangling into knots, huge gaps in his memory, and the constant whispers in his mind that he can never focus on fully. He's lost control of this, if it was ever his to lose.
He drinks until he stops thinking and sleeps so deeply he doesn't dream.
***
Part Two
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Charles, Moira, Erik, Shaw (Charles/Erik, Moira/Nick Fury)
Rating: PG13
Length: ~18,000
Summary: It's been seventeen years since Charles lived at the house in North Salem. It's big and imposing and filled with memories he thinks he's repressed for a reason. But after a strange man breaks in during a storm, demanding to see people Charles is sure died years ago, Charles finds himself investigating his past for the first time, venturing into the burnt out catacombs that hold the secret to the childhood he doesn't remember.
Notes: Gosh. This started as a ficlet based on a picture prompt that momebie posted for last year's NaNo. It grew exponentially from there. Thanks to everyone who cheerleaded the last week and a half as I decided to get this finished by Halloween. Huge thanks to bessiemaemucho for her helpful beta job (and for her jerky beta job) and to quatredeathlady for judging the creepiness factor. Title from "Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe. Happy Halloween, fandom! I hope you enjoy :)
October, 2002
"I have a story," Moira says against the distant rolling of thunder.
Moira's a good storyteller. She keeps her voice hushed. She pauses to add heightened suspense. There are eight of them wedged into the dorm room, and they're all hanging off her every word as the wind and rain batter the sides of the building.
"This is true," she says. They've all started their stories that way, but something about her tone makes Charles more likely to believe it. "There's a big, abandoned house outside of New York City. It's an hour or so north, where the neat little cardboard-box suburban homes turn into sprawling mansions. If you get to the end of the miles of craggy pavement that make up the driveway, the building you see is more like a castle than a house. There are tall turrets and ivy growing up the sides. It's huge and ominous and you can't help but feel that if you screamed, if you needed help, the house would laugh and no one would ever come.
"That's because, for dozens of children, no one ever did."
Someone gasps. It might be Lilly, who's a freshman and only here because she has a crush on Charles. No one speaks, though. Charles inches closer to Moira on her lofted bed. His stomach is churning and his heart is racing and he's not sure why.
"They say that the old man who lives there was a scientist once. They say that, during World War II, he developed a serum for the government that would fill the army with super soldiers capable of stomping the Nazis out in one sweep. But the serum was stolen and his plans were destroyed. He spent the rest of his life trying to recreate the chemicals from memory, but the Allies were suddenly winning the war and they no longer had soldiers for him to test on. They no longer had a need for his miracle drug. They sent him packing back to his estate, but he was crazed, determined to make it right.
"One night, a little girl broke into his kitchen in the middle of the night. She was hungry and homeless and he was ready to throw her out when he had an idea. He smiled at her. He offered her food and a place to stay. He promised to take care of her. It really only took him a few weeks to win her trust, and after that it was easy to lead her down through the long, dark catacombs under the house, into his lab. No one missed a little orphan girl. No one heard her screaming as the newest version of his serum turned her blue and left her skin peeling off her bones."
Another whimper, this time from one of the girls from the suite. Charles can't blame her. Normally, he brushes these stories off without a second thought. Moira's the fourth person tonight to take advantage of the flickering old wiring in their dorm building and the October storm in order to tell ghost stories. Moira currently holds the title of Best Storyteller on their hall, and with good reason. Charles spent most of the last three stories making faces at Moira in the candlelight, scoffing at the trite tales from the rest of their friends. Now he just wants it to stop, he wants Moira to be quiet. He's getting a terrible headache. His hands are shaking.
"No one missed any of the other children, either," Moira continues. "The little Irish boy who wandered away from his family's camping trip and screamed until the walls shook, but was never rescued. The runaway brothers, one of whom was forced to watch the other bleed out from his chest until he clawed his own eyes out. There was a girl whose poisoned blood made her veins glow like grotesque tattoos as her body rejected the poison and vomited it up, burning her skin like acid. Lost, lonely children who were never seen again, whose bodies he pumped full of chemicals, screaming at them, cursing them for not doing as he wished, for not--"
A flash of lightning outside and then darkness.
Lilly screams.
The room is still lit by candles, but the rest of the lights have gone out; Charles can tell just from looking out the window to where he should be able to see the glow from the other rooms. Lilly is crying, Gabrielle is screaming, and the room has descended into chaos. Charles would be relieved that Moira's stopped talking, but his palms are sweating and when he closes his eyes, he sees long stone hallways lit by single bulbs. He hears someone telling him it's almost right, it's just a little longer and it will be right. He hears someone screaming and the screech of metal and--
The lights flicker back on outside and Darwin leaps to his feet and hits the switch on the wall. The fluorescent light is too much and Charles closes his eyes quickly, covers his face with shaking hands. Everyone is talking at once, shouting at Moira, shouting at each other, and Charles lets it all fade into the background. He breathes deeply, lowers his hands and tries to act casual. It helps that they are mostly ignoring him, as Moira's friend Therese leads Lilly and Gabby out of the room with Darwin, Rob, and Joe on their heels, talking about hitting up the coffee shop before it closes, leaving Charles sitting stockstill on Moira's bed.
"Wimps," Moira says.
Charles doesn't reply. The bed shifts and Moira turns to scrutinize him. He must look as awful as he feels, because she frowns, a furrow of concern appeared between her eyebrows.
"Are you okay?" she asks. "You look spooked."
"I'm fine," Charles says, and Moira snorts.
"It must have been some story if I've scared the great Charles Xavier," she says. "You're unshakable. It wasn't even that good."
Charles closes his eyes and sees the long hallways again before he opens them quickly.
"I just...I'm not sure," Charles says. He doesn't want to examine the pictures behind his eyelids. "The house you described...it's very much like the house I grew up in. I think I must be associating...I don't know."
"It's just a story," Moira says. "I made it up."
"You said it was true," Charles says, running his hands through his hair.
"I always say they're true," Moira says. "It makes them scarier. It was based on some stupid thing I read once and some story my cousin told me." She rubs his shoulder. "Are you sure you're okay? This is weird for you."
"I'm fine," Charles says, breathing out noisily. He shakes himself and forces a smile. "I'm fine. You got me, it seems. You win this time."
"Yeah," Moira says, but she doesn't look convinced.
"Do you still have that vodka?" he asks her. She stares at him for a moment. There's a whisper through his head, like an echo of a memory, and he shakes hard to dislodge it. Great. The mental whispers are always the precursor to an anxiety attack or a migraine or both. He grabs his wallet and slips out his pill case, shaking out his anxiety medication into his cupped open palm. He probably shouldn't drink before a migraine, but the migraines are brought on by anxiety and the quickest way to calm his nerves, outside of his medication, will be a drink. Moira leans over the edge of her bed and pulls up a backpack. She unzips it and reveals a bottle of Smirnoff that's nearly full. "Excellent," he says.
"I have my doubts about this plan," Moira replies, but she unscrews the top and takes the first drink before wincing and passing it to Charles.
"It's fine," Charles lies. "I'm fine, I'm past it." He takes a long pull from the bottle to wash down his medication and wills the alcohol to work its magic. "Now. Do we want to follow the rest of them to the coffee shop?"
Instead they end up down the hall at a low-key party in the boys' suite. Charles drinks until Moira's story is out of his mind and seduces one of the boys on the lacrosse team so he doesn't have to go to bed alone. After he wakes up, he has a terrible migraine and when he's finally fit for civilized company, Moira's story is nothing more than a distant shiver down his spine.
***
October, 2012
It's been two weeks since Charles moved back to North Salem to work on his book and he still feels like a stranger in the house. To be honest, he even felt like a stranger as a child. He's sure that at some point it felt like home--maybe his very early childhood, before his father passed. Those days are so far, though, so distant that the only memories he has are detached--hiding from Kurt, staying up in his room or the library on that floor, keeping indoors instead of exploring the vast grounds of the estate. It's his home, but every day brings new discoveries, rooms and items he's forgotten entirely, if they were ever familiar in the first place.
He misses his cramped flat in Manhattan, but only distantly. That wasn't really home either, though he knew all of the nooks and crannies by necessity. If he's honest with himself, what he misses is Moira and the companionship of being with another person. It's funny--for all he doesn't have many friends, he's never been happy on his own. He's more comfortable with other people, with people he trusts. These days, Moira is where that list begins and ends. They've been inseparable since they met freshman year at Harvard. After school, they relocated to New York together while Charles worked towards his PhD and Moira obtained her Master's and then a job with the FBI. They've shared apartments through their schooling and their first jobs, through Charles getting tenure and Moira being promoted to field agent. They're getting older, though. Charles is twenty-seven. Moira will be thirty in six months and has made it clear she wants a family one day. He understands that there's a progression to these things. He just--well, he wasn't quite expecting it this quickly.
Moira and Nick have only been dating for a year. He likes Nick. Nick is smart and sarcastic and a little taciturn, but in a way that makes him seem mysterious and intriguing rather than rude. He's good for Moira--he respects her, gives her shit when she needs it, listens to her when she doesn't, and is frequently impressed by what she can do. Moira's dated enough men of dubious quality that Charles is happy for her. He is. But, well. Charles hates change. Or maybe he just doesn't like being alone. It's hard to know for sure.
"Listen," Moira had said to him one night in late May. They were splitting a bottle of wine and toasting to the end of the school year and the start of Charles' break from students, his sabbatical to finish his book. "So, I know you're taking a year off and I know you were thinking about going somewhere for a while to work."
"Yes?" Charles said when it was clear Moira wasn't going to elaborate.
"Well," she said. "Last night I was talking to Nick--well, commiserating, since he didn't get that promotion. And he admitted that one of the reasons he wanted Detective was because the hours were better and more conducive to...married life. And I said I'd been meaning to bring that up for a while recently and--"
"Marriage?" Charles blurted out. "Already?"
Moira shrugged. "Yeah," she said. "And we talked and it's definitely something we feel like we're moving towards. And I thought--with the lease up in August and you taking some time off to work on your book, maybe it would be a good time for Nick and I to move in together. To see if we can stand being around each other 24-7 before we commit to it."
And it did make sense, of course. It was practical and logical and completely understandable, but it had been a long time since Charles had lived on his own. He'd never lived on his own, really. He briefly considered staying in the city and getting a roommate, but he wasn't thrilled about living with a stranger and he didn't have very many friends. It was more expensive to live on his own, not that he couldn't afford it, and he spent so much time debating boroughs and neighborhoods and pros and cons that, in the end, it seemed silly not to just head up to the house in North Salem at least until he got himself sorted out. The quiet, he thought, would be more conducive to working than spending months acclimating to someone new and calming his nerves enough to be able to focus with them banging around the flat.
So Moira has a new apartment with her boyfriend and Charles has a huge, empty house that he lives in on his own and regards with no small amount of fear and loneliness. Moira would tell him there's a solution to that. Moira would remind him that people sometimes use other people for things other than sex, that perhaps he should consider a serious romantic relationship instead of a series of good-natured hook-ups with anyone willing. He appreciates her concern and he understands, in theory, that it's a good idea but...well. It's hard to find someone he likes, who likes him, who doesn't have so many questions. Charles hates talking about himself, and all of his past attempts at relationships have delved into that rather quickly.
"Not your work," Lilly Neramani had said to him when they dated in his last year at Harvard. "You, Charles. I want to know about your life."
Charles hadn't had a good answer for her, and the relationship fizzled out before winter break.
It's not so bad like this. He has Moira. He has his work and his students. He'll be finishing up his book this year, and then he'll have that. He's moderately sure that he'll limp into his thirties as a well-regarded young man, respected in his field at a young age, with a best friend who's like a sister to him and a promising career ahead of him. Well-adjusted. Normal.
There's a distant crack of thunder and he jumps, slamming his knee on the underside of the desk he's clearing out.
Well. Mostly well-adjusted. Everyone has their quirks.
When he first moved back, a part of him wanted to limit his movements to one part of the house. He told himself it was easier that way, that he was used to a string of tiny dorm rooms and then a string of slightly larger apartments, that spreading out over the vast space of the house would just lead to him losing things that might be important in rooms he's only been in once. It was a silly thought, one borne of childhood fears that he couldn't quite substantiate in his mind. They were distant and muted and he kept them that way--what he does remember of those years, the years with his mother in little more than a gin-induced coma and Kurt and Cain ruling cruelly in her absence, he wishes he could forget as it is. He's alone here, now, and there is nothing to stop him from making use of all of the space, or at least examining it for the first time since his mother's funeral. He has a whole year off from teaching and only has to be in the lab twice a month. He needs something to do in his spare time.
Thunder crashes again and Charles starts to think this is a task better suited to daytime.
He thinks this office belonged to Kurt and maybe his father before that. He only knows it was one of the rooms he was forbidden to enter in his childhood, not that he strayed far from his sanctuary on the third floor, the corner wing that contained his bedroom, his classroom, and a library. Mostly it seems to contain empty filing cabinets and a desk filled with odds and ends, scraps of paper, nothing he can make sense of. Charles is frankly surprised that Kurt was able to clear so much of this out--he was packing to leave the house the day after Charles' mother's will was read, the day he found out that he inherited nothing and Charles everything.
He wonders where all of these things ended up after Kurt's own untimely death only days after Sharon's. He stops and listens to the storm battering the house and then decides those thoughts are best left to morning.
The whole task is best left to morning. Charles' hands are shaking when he closes the desk drawer and gets to his feet. He'll go to the kitchen and make himself a nice cup of tea, maybe add a little something extra. There are brownies somewhere, a treat for himself that he couldn't resist when he stopped at the coffee shop in town yesterday. He'll have a cup of tea and a snack and then take some of his papers and retire for the evening and--
There's a crack of thunder that feels like it shakes the house to its foundation. There's a flash from outside, and then Charles is plunged into darkness.
He doesn't scream, but only because his voice has fled entirely. There's no light to speak of--the outside lights are gone, the inside lights are gone, and the storm has covered up any moonlight or starlight that may have led him to a candle or a lantern. He tries to ignore his thumping heart as he closes his eyes and maps out the room in his mind. There were candles on the mantle and long fireplace matches in a box on the bookshelf. He opens his eyes again, though it does no good--the room is just as dark with his eyes open as it is when they're shut. Still, he begins to pick his way across the room, his eyes straining to adjust, to take in just the barest hint of light. His questing hands close around the edge of the mantle and he quickly feels his way over to bookshelf. His hands are shaking so badly that the first match flickers and dies, but the second takes and he manages to light first one candle, then the other.
He leaves one on the mantle and holds the other out to get his bearings. It's fine. Everything is fine. The room is just as he left it. His eyes scan over his surroundings, taking in the hulking dark shadows of filing cabinets and shelves and the man in the doorway.
Charles' heartbeat quickens. He swallows a gasp. Maybe if he pretends he didn't see the man, maybe if he closes his eyes everything will be okay. Maybe it was just a trick of the light.
There's another strike of lightning, illuminating the room, and the man is suddenly right in front of him.
Charles drops his candle. It fizzles out when it hits the carpet, leaving him with only the dim glow from the candle behind him to see by. He wants to scream, but his throat is thick with fear. The man is taller than him, his features sharply carved into his face. He looms over Charles with something like rage in his eyes, which are dominated by his pupils in the dark. Charles makes a quiet, frightened noise.
"Where is Klaus Schmidt?" the man all but growls.
Charles takes an involuntary step back and trips into one of the armchairs. It puts him at a further disadvantage that the man quickly leaps upon. He leans over, resting his weight on the arms of the chair and effectively trapping Charles in place.
"I--I don't--take what you want, I don't--please don't--"
He doesn't know what he's saying, what he's begging for. He's going to be murdered. He's going to be murdered in his own home and no one will find him for weeks. He'll be another bloody ghost story, another one of the urban legends that have always surrounded this house.
"Where," the man hisses, his face inches from Charles' own, "is Klaus Schmidt?"
Charles swallows again and again. He's hearing the words now, possibly for the first time. Schmidt. Oh god, Schmidt.
"I don't know!" Charles says desperately. "I don't know, he died! He died the same time as my stepfather, he died in the laboratory fire, I swear, he's not here, I don't know!"
The man stares at him, but he moves no closer and makes no further demands. In a back part of his mind, Charles thinks he'd be very handsome if his face wasn't contorted in such anger.
"Schmidt survived the fire," the man finally says. He still sounds furious, but the anger is no longer directed at Charles.
"He--he couldn't have," Charles says. "I saw--Kurt was--all of the laboratories burned. They were trapped. They were--he couldn't have--" The fear curling in Charles' gut is of a different sort, now. He remembers Klaus Schmidt, and a world with Schmidt in it is significantly worse off. He shudders.
The man stares at him again and then grabs the front of Charles' shirt in his fist, lifting him off of the chair until their noses are almost touching.
"If you're lying to me...."
"I'm not, I swear!" Charles says. "God, fuck, I wouldn't, not about him, not about Kurt--it can't be true, he can't be--" Charles snaps his mouth closed before he goes hysterical, his breath still coming too quickly. Something shifts in the man's face. He's still staring at Charles, and Charles stares back. There's something familiar about him. Something resonant. Charles has seen that expression. He's seen it in the mirror.
He touches the man's hand where it clutches his shirt. He doesn't know why. It's foolish--possibly suicidal. But the man doesn't flinch, he just looks down at Charles' hand and then back up at Charles. They stay there, unmoving, until another strike of lightning illuminates the room and another crack of thunder shakes the house.
The man drops Charles' shirt and Charles falls back into the chair with a thump. Before he can say a word, the man turns and flees into the darkness.
Charles knows he should follow, should get up and phone the police, but he doesn't think he could stand if he tried. He sits in the chair, breathing hard, with his eyes squeezed shut.
Oh god, there was a stranger in his house. A stranger asking questions about Klaus Schmidt. Someone broke into his house and Schmidt might not be dead and--
He blindly tears out of the room, tripping and stumbling along the way, feeling out desperately for anything in his path until he's out in the hallway, then down to the foyer and around to the sitting room he's been using as his office. He tears inside, knocking over an end table and groping madly for his bag. He brushes everything else on the coffee table onto the floor in his haste, his fingers finally closing around the strap, his hands digging inside for his cellphone--
He winces at the brightness of the display as he taps in his password with shaking fingers. He finds Moira's name and prays that reception won't cut off from the storm.
"Hey," Moira says after endless seconds of tinny ringing. "What's up?"
Charles chokes back a sob. "Can you--" come up here? he wants to ask, but the man might still be in his house and if anything happened to Moira, he'd never forgive himself. "Can I come down there tonight? Now? Please, Moira?" he asks instead.
There's a slight pause, but that's the only hesitation. "Of course," she says. "Charles, you sound--"
"Thank you," Charles says breathlessly. "Thank you, I'm leaving now."
He doesn't wait for her to reply. He ends the call and uses the remaining light from the display to make sure he has his keys, then grabs his bag, shoves the phone in his pocket, and stumbles towards the front door.
It's still pouring outside, and Charles drops his keys when he tries to lock the door behind him. It takes three tries to get the door locked and by then he's already soaked. He doesn't pause, though. He sprints through the puddles towards his car and by the time he's on the highway headed towards the city, he's almost stopped shaking.
***
"Jesus fuck!" Moira says when she sees him, soaked and bedraggled and standing outside the door to her new apartment. "Did you forget your umbrella or something?"
"No time to stop," he mumbles through chattering teeth. Moira shakes her head and pulls him inside, closing the door behind him.
Moira and Nick's new apartment is in Astoria. It's light and airy and much more open than the series of apartments Charles and Moira shared in Manhattan. It's a bit of a hike to get down to the Federal Building for work, but Charles privately thinks that if Moira didn't have her commute to complain about, she'd get bored.
She leads him into the kitchen and shoves him into a chair. "I'll be right back," she says, then disappears down the hall. She returns less than a minute later carrying a pair of his trousers and a hoodie that he suspects belongs to her boyfriend.
"The pants are yours--I keep finding your clothes mixed in with mine. Nick'll want the sweatshirt back eventually. Put them on," she says.
Charles does as he's told. He has no shame left when it comes to Moira, and peels off his slacks in the middle of the kitchen.
"Nick's working the graveyard shift," she continues, "So it's just you and me. And when you're done dressing, you're going to tell me what made you drive all the way to Queens in the middle of a storm, soaking wet and white as a sheet."
Charles expected as much, but he still moves slowly, peeling the wet clothes from his body and replacing them with Moira's loaners. He's drying his hair with a hand towel when Moira kicks his ankle and glares at him. He drops it onto the table and sighs.
"Can we...?" He gestures towards the sofa in the living room. Moira nods and leads the way, but once they're both settled, Charles knows he's out of stalling tactics.
"A...a man--" He swallows. "This evening, a man--"
Moira's eyes go hard.
"Did someone hurt you, Charles?" she asks. "Were you on a date? Did someone--I can call the police, we can file a report--"
"No!" Charles says quickly. "Oh, god, no. Not like that. No, I wasn't--no." He shakes his head and Moira relaxes, but only slightly. "I was home, going through some things in the office and...the lights went out and this man--he broke into the house. He asked me questions about my stepfather and his--business partner. And then he left. And I just--I needed to get out of there."
"Fuck," Moira says. "Please tell me you called the police."
Charles winces.
"You're like the police," he hedges, but Moira just groans.
"Charles! A man broke into your house and--did he hurt you? Are you sure you're okay?"
"He didn't touch me," Charles lies, because he doesn't know how to explain that the anger, the violence wasn't directed at him, even when he was hanging in the stranger's grip. "He just asked questions. And when it became clear I had no answers, he left."
He can feel a headache building and his heart is still hammering, but getting up to get his bag is an insurmountable obstacle. Luckily, years of living with Charles has made Moira rather well trained at picking up his cues. She shakes her head and gets up to retrieve his things, shaking out one of his anxiety pills and passing it to him.
"I can't believe you didn't call the police," she says. "Honestly, Charles. You can't be that stupid."
Charles dry swallows the pill.
"It's hard to explain," Charles says. "You don't--I panicked." It's not a complete lie. He doesn't know how to explain to Moira that he can't bring himself to think of someone looking for Schmidt, looking to hurt Schmidt, as a bad guy.
Moira sighs.
"Fine," she says. "Stay here tonight. Tomorrow morning I'll go back over there with you and scope the place out and call the police. And you'll tell me the whole story, okay? I can tell you're holding back on something."
"Thank you," Charles says. He rubs his forehead and sighs. "I'm sorry about all this. It was just--things happened in that house and I--" He stares at Moira plaintively. He doesn't know if he could explain if he tried.
"It's fine," Moira says. "I'm just glad you're alright. Come on, you can bunk with me. It'll be just like college all over again."
"That's the most frightening thing I've heard all night," Charles says, but he follows her into the bedroom, his heartbeat finally returning to a normal pace.
***
Moira follows Charles back to the house at a distance that would make her superiors at the FBI wince in shame. They're both lucky that nothing causes Charles to step on the brakes unexpectedly, because they would undoubtedly collide if he did so. He knows that Moira is concerned and he feels, in the light of day, like a world-class idiot for running to her instead of calling the police, but it's all done now and they're all safe. There's no reason for her to attach herself to him quite so closely.
Once they pull up at the house, Moira tries to make him wait outside until he reminds her that the inside is a labyrinthine mess that even he hasn't properly broached since he was about ten years old. She reluctantly allows him to follow, instructing him to stay close behind her as she inches through the place, gun first.
"Is that really necessary?" he asks quietly after she swings into another room, eyes flickering quickly over every corner, weapon never wavering.
"Is it necessary for me to have my weapon out while looking for possible intruders in your house?" Moira asks. "Yes, Charles. It's necessary."
Charles doesn't protest again, merely follows her from room to room. It takes almost an hour, but at the end of it, they're back in the foyer with nothing to show for their inspection save for dust on their clothes and cobwebs in their hair.
"First off," Moira says, "this place is insane. I can't believe you grew up here."
"I can't either," Charles murmurs. "I mean, granted, I lived in London until I was five and moved back there when I was eleven, so I didn't properly grow up here, but I understand your skepticism."
"Secondly," Moira continues, "did you see anything missing? Would you even know if anything was missing?"
Charles shakes his head. "The rooms I haven't been in since I moved back looked undisturbed. The rooms I have been in seemed to be intact. Do we really need to call the police? I mean, what will we say? Someone came in, didn't take anything, didn't hurt me, and then left?"
Moira crosses her arms. "Charles. Don't downplay this. You were white as a sheet and shaking last night, and that was after you had an hour's drive to get your shit together."
"And now that it's daylight and I have my wits about me, I see that I might have blown it out of proportion," Charles says. "Look," he continues before she can object further. "It was dark. The power was out. You've seen how big and intimidating this house is. Imagine being alone in it at night during a storm with no power. The man clearly took my words to heart. When I told him I didn't know where Schmidt was, he left. He clearly believed me. And it was frightening, yes, but I overreacted. You can see how easy it would be to do that, here."
Moira scrutinizes him and he does his best not to flinch under her gaze. She relaxes eventually, though, and and pulls out her phone, handing it to him.
"Fine," she says. "But you're going to call the police and let them know what happened and I'm going to sit here and make sure you do it. Just in case, Charles."
He ignores the phone and pulls out his own. The local police department is pre-programmed in after one too many sensationalist newscasts about the perils of dialing 911 from a cell phone. He calls the office number for the North Salem police department and leads Moira into the kitchen as he waits to be connected to an officer after explaining the situation. He gives a report, sounding as dismissive as he can without making Moira suspicious, and the whole thing is over in less than ten minutes.
"There," he says as he hangs up. "Are you satisfied?"
"Not really," Moira says, "but I'm meeting Nick for dinner, so as long as there's not a serial killer hiding in your pantry, I need to get back to the city."
"There's not," Charles assures her, leading her back through the halls towards the front door, where they came in. "I'm sorry if I scared you last night."
"I just want to know you're safe," Moira says. "I worry about you, Charles. More than I should, really. I think some time away from the city is going to be good for you, but I guess I didn't realize how far you really were and how isolated it is out there."
They stop at the front door and Moira hugs him tightly. When she pulls back, she holds him in place by his shoulders.
"Call me if anything else happens, okay? In fact, call me once a day to let me know you're alive."
"I will," Charles agrees. He looks forward to it, actually. It is rather lonely out here and it's been difficult transitioning from having Moira constantly underfoot to being entirely on his own. "Drive safely!"
He follows Moira out and watches her get back into her car and loop around down the driveway, watches her until her car is out of sight and the hum of the engine blends into the rest of the noises of the day. He returns to the house and closes the door behind him, leaning back against it. The house is still as ominous, as eerie as it always has been.
"If," he says out loud to the lingering specter of his intruder, "you turn out to be dangerous after I went through all that to defend you, I'm going to be rather cross."
The silence of the house is all he hears in return. He sighs and heads back to his office to try and get some work done.
***
Charles tries to put the whole incident out of his mind. He has a book to focus on, work he should be doing, research he needs to verify. He makes himself a daily schedule to get back into the routine of working regularly now that he doesn't have the structure of teaching classes to guide him.
Predictably, the schedule lasts all of two days. Or, more specifically, the schedule lasts through two nights of quiet contemplation in the dark of his bedroom, hours spent turning the home invasion over in his head. There was something so familiar about the man. The terror at the mention of Schmidt, yes, but something else. God, he hadn't even thought about Kurt and Schmidt in so long, not really, and now that he tries to think harder, everything seems to slip through his fingers. He remembers awkward family dinners full of Kurt and Schmidt laughing and talking in sharp, hushed voices while his mother listlessly stared into space and Cain glared at Charles mutinously, jealous of his special privileges.
Special privileges? Did Cain really get that jealous of Charles' invitations to go down to the lab to watch Kurt work? He can't remember. It's hardly important. He can't even remember what it was he did in the labs.
Kurt couldn't have taken everything. There wasn't time. Charles barely had time to pack all of the things he wanted to take with him to London. He'd expected he would be forced to stay with Kurt and Cain. There was the funeral and then they went straight to the lawyer's to hear the will and then they were home and packing, Kurt and Cain as good as evicted, just like that. They only had the late afternoon and evening. The fire was started before midnight and then....
The thoughts twist and turn in Charles' head as he tries to sleep each night. He has such clear memories of London, of his uncle and aunt and cousins, of boarding school and of college. His memory has always been excellent, but he supposes it's true what they say about the brain protecting itself by repressing trauma.
It doesn't stop him from wanting to know more, though, and on the third day, as he steeps his tea, he says to the empty kitchen, "Oh, fuck it."
He finds a set of small screwdrivers, a crowbar, and an ancient keyring in the outside shed. He doubts the keys open anything useful, but he collects all of these things and brings them back to the house. He starts in Kurt's old office, the one he was working in the night of the trespasser. It's as good a place as any, and, if he's being honest with himself, he's not eager to be back there after dark and he has a feeling this might take a while.
He opens every drawer, looks through every scrap of paper. He pries open the locked cabinet and finds nothing but a few very, very nice bottles of whiskey. When he's satisfied, he moves on to the next room, then the next, until he's hit every office and spare bedroom he can find and amassed a whole lot of nothing.
It's late. He's dirty and tired and aching and he can feel a headache coming on. He's been having them every night, now, and he owes that to his friend the intruder, who's ratcheted up his anxiety to levels he hasn't seen since he was finishing his dissertation. He looks at the pile of notebooks and documents he's found and then he looks at the clock. Whatever it is can surely wait one more night.
He takes a bottle of wine from the kitchen and grabs his medication, an empty glass, and the latest notes on his book and takes them all upstairs where he draws himself a warm bath. A week ago, he's not sure he would have seen himself retreating to work in order to calm himself down, but it seems like the simplest choice, now. He sits in the water until it's gone tepid and his skin is pruny, then dries off and puts on a pair of boxers before curling up in his bed, asleep nearly before his head hits the pillow.
***
It turns out that work was actually the best choice to distract himself. Even in the bright light of morning, fully rested and working on a second cup of tea, Charles can't make any sense of the notes he's pulled together from all around the house.
"My god, I'm glad I learn lab procedures from them," he mutters to himself as he looks through the--admittedly truncated--pages he's rescued. None of the formulas make sense. His father worked with genetics and Kurt was in the same field, the same field that Charles chose to pursue. Most of the documents read like straight chemistry and not any chemistry he's familiar with. The others are strange supply orders and what look like observation logs from some sort of lab test, though it's not clear what type of animal was being tested or what sort of tests were being completed.
It's gibberish without context. It leaves Charles scratching his head. A day's worth of creeping around the house, forcing his way into rooms and drawers, sneezing and coughing from the dust, and all he has to show for it is a pile of papers that, despite a PhD and quite a bit of practical experience in his field, seem entirely nonsensical.
It was a wasted day. He should go back to his book.
He pours himself a glass of wine and stares outside instead.
He can almost see the door from where he's sitting. The entrance to the catacombs. There used to be one in the house, but Kurt had it sealed up and the remaining passageway turned into a bomb shelter. He said it was too dangerous, that it was too easy for Charles or Cain to wander in by accident and hurt themselves. The outside door needed a keycard to get through. Charles asked for his own when he started accompanying Kurt down there, but he never got one. You needed to swipe the key to open the door and then there was another door that needed a code. 7-6-2-6-9. Strange that he can remember that so clearly while other things elude him.
There's no keycard now. The fire department broke the lock and bent the door out of shape. It doesn't close all the way anymore. Charles walked by it once when he returned to the house, just to check that it was there. The second door, he could see through the gap where the outer door was mangled, was gone completely. That was as close as he'd gotten to the labs before turning around and walking quickly back towards the house.
No one's been down there in years. There's nothing left, probably, but if there is something that can add context to these random documents, if there is some sort of key to all of this...well. It would be down there.
He lets himself stare a little longer.
"Charles," he finally says. "You've gone round the bend."
He didn't come out here to solve some insane fifteen-year-old mystery or to snoop around in his dead stepfather's affairs. He came out here to work on his book. He came out here to get away from the city, to focus on himself for a few months and not his students or Moira or his colleagues. He'd hoped he could eliminate the distractions that were around every corner in the city, and clearly his brain has been working overtime to create new ones.
He needs to focus. He needs to work. He needs to stop thinking about things that happened so long ago that the memories are nothing more that a fog in the back of his mind.
He takes the glass of wine and resolutely marches back towards his laptop. He's going to finish another chapter tonight and look at the notes his research assistant sent over. He has a pile of documents to read through in the week before he's due to stop by the lab again, and it's best to get started now.
He'll keep busy. He'll forget all about this insanity. He can't live in the past.
***
He dreams about the intruder. Of course he does.
He dreams that the man is back, but this time, when he shakes Charles and asks where Schmidt is, Schmidt appears beside him. He yanks the man away from Charles, and though Charles thinks he should be grateful, he finds himself terrified and scrambling to get away, reaching for the stranger who is just beyond his reach.
"I think he's sweet on you," Schmidt says. "I can work with that."
The words make Charles sick, but he can't get away and the stranger looks horrified and the room is bright, too bright, he can't see and his head is killing him and he wakes up in agony.
He scrambles for the bedside table and manages to find his pills and a bottle of ibuprofen. He swallows his anxiety medication despite his dry throat and the ibuprofen follow. He's still shaking when he realizes that the ringing phone woke him up.
"M-Moira?" he stutters when he hits accept.
"Hey, I--are you okay?"
He swallows. "I'm sorry," he says. "I just--I had an attack. I'm fine now. I'm going to be fine."
"Jesus, Charles," she says. Charles pushes himself up and leans against the headboard, untangling himself from the sheets. "Are you sure you're okay? I can come out. I was just calling to tell you I have to go up to Danbury tomorrow and see if you wanted to get lunch or something, but--"
"No, that sounds lovely," Charles says. "I'm really fine, Moira. I had a nightmare. I took my medication."
"Good," Moira says, and Charles feels the world starting to come back into focus. "Are you sure you're okay out there by yourself? I'm starting to think this isn't as good an idea as we initially thought. You can come stay with me and Nick if you want. I mean, the place isn't big, but it might be better for you."
"Moira, really," Charles says, though he's starting to agree with her. "I'd love to have lunch with you tomorrow. Would you like me to meet you in Danbury or would you like to come out here?"
"I'll come to you," Moira says. "Danbury sucks. Do you need anything?"
He's sure she means for around the house, but he finds himself saying, "Yes, actually--can you do me a favor?"
"What kind of favor?" she asks.
"Can you...can you look up Klaus Schmidt for me?" he asks. "At work, I mean."
There's a short silence on the other line.
"I...guess that wouldn't be a problem," she says. She doesn't comment further, which means she's suitably intrigued by this whole thing and is going to hold off on the lecture until she satiates her own curiosity. "Do you know anything besides his name?"
"Not really," Charles admits. He's not sure he's ready to disclose how blank his childhood memories really are. "I know that he and Kurt had a government contract, but that's about it."
"Okay," Moira says. "I'll find what I can and bring it up tomorrow."
"Thank you, Moira," Charles says. "It's--" He suddenly doesn't want to talk about it more than he has to. He coughs a little. "Anyway, uh, what time should I expect you?"
"One thirty," Moira says. "I'll give you a call when I'm leaving Danbury?"
"Yeah, thanks," Charles says. "Have a good day, Moira."
"You too," she says. "Take care. Feel better."
He hangs up and rubs his eyes. His headache is better. He can breathe and think again. He's not sure how to interpret the level of horror felt in his dream. He hasn't had a night terror in years, and he doesn't actually know the intruder, but the despair he felt at being pulled away...he can still feel echoes of it. He doesn't know if it was his fear of Schmidt or the unease that's been stirred up at being back in the house, but the dream felt real and he's still having trouble shaking it, even as he rolls out of bed--it's already almost noon, he's practically slept the day away--and stumbles towards the shower.
He intends to get to work, he really does, but he can't focus. His mind wanders after every line. He re-reads words two or three times before he absorbs the meaning. It's no use; nothing is getting done. Three weeks he's been out at the house and he's done less than he normally accomplishes in half the time.
He tells himself a walk will be helpful. He tells himself the cool autumn air will clear his head. He tells himself he's not obsessing, he's not going to think about Schmidt or the intruder or his dreams or his childhood. He's just going to admire the scenery and let himself unwind.
The problem is, the more he thinks about those years, the less there is to get lost in. There are things he remembers about his early childhood, about playing in the house in London, that seem odd when he stops to think about it. Odd that he can remember some of those days so clearly, when so much of the time in the states is a blur. They moved into the house in Westchester when he was five, and so much of his memory from those years is torn to shreds, right up until he moved back to London after his mother's death.
The air smells like fall as Charles wanders through the grounds. Smell is usually a powerful memory trigger for him, but almost nothing of the autumns in this house are coming to mind. He thinks of college, of the day he met Moira, of the autumns spent wandering around Cambridge, but he should have some clear memories of New York, shouldn't he? He understands how repression works, but all the days couldn't have been so bad, not when the ones he remembers seem rather terrible in their own right.
He reaches a bench by what was once a small reflecting pool. The water is green and murky, now, and any fish in it have long since died or been devoured by predators, but the bench is still standing and seems sturdy when he sits on it.
The problem is that the holes in his memory don't feel entirely natural. His mother's funeral is a blur, a fog, but in a way that's different than the rest of it. The same with his father's. Some of Cain's worst beatings fall under the same umbrella, but the majority of the rest of his missing memories feel more jagged.
He picks one and tries to trace it back, closing his eyes and tipping his head back. He picks up from being shaken awake that night by his nanny and pulled from the house, watching the labs burn, terrified about...something. He's not sure what. The fire, he supposes, but the missing source of the terror has the same sharp edges as the rest of his missing memories. He tries going further back, examining more closely. They came home from the lawyer and Kurt shoved him roughly aside. It hurt. He remembers it hurt. He remembers that Cain went to hit him and Kurt smacked Cain across the room, yelled at him to pack his things. Charles' nanny tsked quietly at that, but said nothing, hurrying Charles along to pack himself. They were leaving the next day for London, she told him. Kurt and Cain needed to be out by then, she told him.
He remembers Schmidt came by. He argued with Kurt about something, something that Charles only heard snatches of until he was brought back upstairs to finish his packing.
He remembers hearing only snatches, but not what those snatches were.
He gets lost in the memories for endless minutes that stretch and stretch until something--
There's a noise and Charles sits up. The sun is noticeably lower than it was when he closed his eyes. He looks at his watch to confirm that, yes, he just fell asleep outside for a good hour. Fuck, he has to get back to the city. Another whole day wasted and--
The man is standing at the tree line, maybe twenty feet away.
Charles swallows and slowly looks up, making eye contact with the man. He seems different in daylight. Softer, maybe. Maybe it's the rage that's missing, making his face almost entirely different than it was the last time Charles saw him. Charles tries to keep his breathing even. His pills are still inside.
They don't speak. The man's gaze is steady and almost warm. He's really quite handsome, which is a ridiculous thing to focus on. Charles crosses his arms over his chest, but doesn't look away.
"What makes you so sure that Schmidt is alive?" he finally asks. His voice is quieter than he intends, almost vulnerable. He doesn't like that, but he can't take it back now that the words are out there. "I saw what was left after the fire. I know what was left of Kurt. How can you be sure he got out?"
The man regards Charles with a dark intensity. Charles tries hard not to squirm.
"Because I started the fire," he finally says. "And I only escaped because Schmidt took me and ran."
The man turns, then, and walks off into the trees. Charles is too stunned to follow him.
Charles stays on the bench until the sun starts to dip further down into the sky. He doesn't know what to think. Was the man on the property even then, down in the labs while Charles was sleeping up at the house? The man can't be that much older than Charles, he would have been nothing more than a boy then. What the hell was he doing down in those labs? Why would he start the fire?
Charles' head is aching. He needs to take a pill. He needs to have a drink. He needs to find a time machine so he can go back and warn himself off of ever coming back here.
He pushes himself to his feet. He's dizzy with an impending attack, his heart out of control, his nerves leaving him a shaking mess as he stumbles back towards the house. Has this man been watching him his whole life? Has he been here at the house for all these years? Is he Schmidt's son, his protege? Why the hell does he look so damned familiar and why the fuck was he in the labs that night?
Charles manages to make it inside and takes two anxiety pills and a handful of ibuprofen. He washes them down with the last of the wine in a glass on the table, takes a moment to breathe, and then decides he needs something stronger if this is going to continue to make so little sense.
The whiskey is still in the cabinet that Charles pried open the other night. He doesn't bother with a glass, just opens the bottle and drinks deeply, sputtering only a little. He holds it close to his chest as he staggers unsteadily from the room and into the more familiar library he's been using as an office. He hits the couch hard, curling up and squeezing his eyes shut.
He can't make sense of any of this, none of it at all, voices loud in his head, ideas tangling into knots, huge gaps in his memory, and the constant whispers in his mind that he can never focus on fully. He's lost control of this, if it was ever his to lose.
He drinks until he stops thinking and sleeps so deeply he doesn't dream.
***
Part Two