Sponge Away the Writing, part 2
Part 1
Scott reminded Charles so much of Raven that it hurt. Not in any of the superficial ways, of course--Scott being a boy, and perfectly average-looking, and younger than Raven had been when Charles met her. But with the fear that lurked under even his happiest moods, and his painful gratitude for kindness of any sort, and in the wondrous potential that had been so stifled by the fear of those around him, Scott tore off all the scabs that had grown around the places in Charles's heart where Raven still dwelled, making them bleed anew.
Charles would probably never know what it felt like to be a father, but by God, he did know what it was like to be willing to do anything to protect someone. The moment he saw Scott realize that it wasn't a trick, that his brother really had come to take him away from this couple who hated him and called him a monster--the moment he saw the boy's skinny arms wrap around Alex's neck and his mouth tremble with disbelieving, tearful joy, Charles promised himself that he would do right by Scott. He'd learn from the business with Raven and Erik. He'd do better.
If past events had taught him anything, it was that excessive optimism did no one any good in the end, but thus far, Scott seemed to like him well enough, and Charles liked Scott well enough, too. He was a bit like Charles himself had been as a child, in that despite the hardships he'd endured, he seemed to believe that if he followed the rules laid out for him carefully enough, everything would be all right. Charles wasn't sure whether it would be kinder to disabuse him of this notion or allow the world to disillusion him--but after all, he didn't have to make that decision by himself. There was something quite reassuring about having Alex, Hank, Sean, and even Old Charles to consult with about these things.
Scott's arrival, though, had brought with it a number of questions about matters other than Scott himself. Charles's initial plan to send the boy to a local school had been rather stymied by a trio of discoveries: first, that it really wasn't so easy to fashion a pair of glasses out of ruby quartz, second, that Scott's power tended to show itself at extremely random moments, particularly when he was under emotional stress, and third, that Alex had retrieved the protective fraternal instincts he'd long thought lost and was determined to keep Scott from anything that might cause him the least bit of fear or pain. (Admirable, of course, but rather inconvenient considering how intimidating Scott found the idea of going to school.)
Charles found himself at a bit of a loss. He really had intended the school to be a high school, given that he knew next to nothing about elementary school education and, while he liked children well enough, the feeling was usually not mutual. Now, however, he frequently found himself taking time he would ordinarily have been devoting to curriculum design and finding instructors and instead reading James and the Giant Peach to Scott or playing what he supposed could have been termed "family" games of Monopoly. It concerned him a bit that he was losing his momentum when it came to getting his school off the ground; it concerned him even more that he couldn't muster more than "a bit" of concern.
*I wouldn't worry about it too much,* said Old Charles as Charles carefully stretched out his legs in the gym. *It's perfectly natural for a new father to want to spend more time with his family than his work.*
Have you lost your marbles? asked Charles, irritated. He hated it when Old Charles popped out of nowhere like that--it was very much like having someone sneak up on him, an experience which Charles had only ever really known through other people, he himself being rather difficult to sneak up on. Scott's not my son.
He got the distinct impression of some sort of injured feeling from Old Charles, who said, *Well. He's as close to it as you're ever likely to have.*
It wasn't as if Charles hadn't told himself, a thousand times, about the relative unlikelihood of his ever having a family of his own, other than Raven (ha bloody ha). It shouldn't have hurt any more coming from someone who was, effectively, also himself. It did, though.
Before he could retort, Old Charles said, *I apologize. I'm afraid I've been taking everything to do with Scott rather more personally than I ought.*
You've a funny way of showing it, said Charles. Old Charles rarely spoke to him in the presence of other people, but Charles was fairly certain he'd never spoken at all when Charles was with Scott.
*To be honest, dear boy,* said Old Charles, *when you're with Scott, I tend to wish you out of existence and pretend I'm the one reading to him or giving him wheelchair rides or what have you. It's such a strange thing, to be jealous of yourself.*
Charles had been wished out of existence before, and probably more often by himself than by anyone else, except perhaps his mother, so he didn't take it personally. Instead, he asked, Why? Have you been quarrelling with Scott in the future? That was actually rather sad. The old man was clearly very fond of Scott, and Charles found himself hoping rather fervently that he--that they--hadn't died before reconciling.
He heartily regretted even asking when his question was met by another of Old Charles's long silences. It's a sad, sad man, Charles Xavier, he said to himself, who can't hold a conversation without antagonizing even himself.
Eventually, though, Old Charles said, *It's not that. Scott was already dead when I died.*
He what?! Charles pulled out of his stretch a bit too fast and strained something in his back, but the pain felt distant, unimportant. How
Old Charles didn't wait so long before saying, albeit reluctantly, *He was killed by the same person who killed me.* Before Charles could work up a healthy cloud of anger and demand details so that they could prevent both deaths, Old Charles said hurriedly, *Please. Anger won't do anyone any good. And if you try to kill this person, I guarantee you will regret it.*
Something in Old Charles's voice made Charles uncomfortable--was it a bit of affection? For his killer? It seemed absurd, but then, Charles knew as well as anyone and better than most that emotions made no sense whatsoever sometimes. Just then, a terrible notion occurred to him. His mind trembled away from it--it was like touching a wound--but finally he managed to trace its shape in his thoughts. Was it Erik? he asked, a part of his mind escaping from the back to check in with the boys and listen to Westchester County gossip for miles in every direction. Anything but hear a "yes." Or... and this one hurt even more. Or Raven?
Old Charles sighed. *No,* he said. *Though I think I should warn you, both of them will try to kill you, as well.*
Charles felt like he'd been punched in the stomach. Oh, he said, unable to formulate a thought any more coherent than that.
Downstairs, the boys felt it, too. In whatever corner of his brain Old Charles was squatting in, he said, *Oh, dear. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that.*
Charles understood well enough that, underneath the surface layer of charm he'd managed to pick up by watching people, he wasn't very likeable. He presumed too much based on what he saw in people's minds, only to realize that those same thoughts and fears and wants changed when someone presented them in physical actuality. His speech was simultaneously too practiced, which sounded false, no matter how he tried to make it sound spontaneous, and too clumsy, which meant he was constantly sticking his foot in his mouth. But there was something really dreadful about knowing that he was such a failure at intimacy that even the two people he held dearest and closest to his heart would eventually wish him dead. Other people managed love so easily--why was it so beyond the grasp of Charles, who worked so very hard at it?
*It was never personal,* said Old Charles. He sounded quite worried, which was a change. *I really believe that. It was to do with politics. Erik especially is quite stubborn when it comes to mutant-human relationships--I don't know that it was ever about me. Us, I mean.*
Right, said Charles. He hit his left leg hard enough to bruise. He didn't feel it downstairs, of course, but the impact of flesh against his fist was pretty satisfying. My sister and the man I--my best friend try to kill me, you say, but it's not personal. Truly, your wisdom is astounding.
He was so distracted that he must have missed Sean's approach, because it came as a complete surprise when he pushed open the door and said, "Hey. What's wrong, Professor?"
"What's wrong," not "Are you all right?" He must have done a worse job at shielding his emotions than he'd thought.
"Nothing," said Charles, picturing his hurt and boxing it away, walling it behind a barrier between Sean and himself. "Nothing's wrong. I'm fine." Although apparently, I'm not so fine that I can convince people I love not to try to kill me.
Sean raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Sure. And that whole, like, huge pile of feeling horrible just came out of nowhere?"
Some bloody adult figure he made. Charles felt very small at the moment, still in his sweaty tee-shirt and loose exercise pants, sitting on the floor, his useless legs spread out in front of him. "I'm sorry," he said. "Got a bit of unpleasant news from Old Me."
"Can we do anything to stop it?" asked Sean. "I mean, that's got to be the upside of having a dead version of you hanging around, right? So we can change the future and stuff?"
*I don't wish to be the bearer of bad news,* said Old Charles, *but I've been pondering this same question for years, and I don't know that there's anything to do that I haven't already done. The real difficulty with Erik and Raven, you see, and maintaining a...a friendship with them, is that it's always got to be on their terms.*
If their terms include killing me, I'm not sure what kind of friendship we're discussing, said Charles tersely. Out loud, he said, "Old Charles doesn't have any suggestions. Maybe you've got some ideas, Sean. If you knew that someone was going to try to kill you, what would you do?"
*Really, Charles, neither Raven nor Erik actually succeeds----*
"Whoa," said Sean, taken aback. "Someone's going to try to kill you?"
*It isn't for years--, Charles, a great many things happen between now and then--*
"In the future," said Charles. He shrugged, but Sean's reaction told him that it had come off more angry than casual.
"Wow," said Sean. His face had gone sickly white under his freckles. "Well...I guess we could try to kill them first?" Under his fear for Charles, Sean really was unsettled by the idea of deliberately trying to kill someone. He still had bad dreams about Cuba.
If it would stop Charles from getting killed, though, he'd give it a try, and that thought was enough to stem some of Charles's anger and sorrow. He couldn't be so bad at intimacy, could he? He cared about Sean and Alex and Hank and Scott, and they seemed to care about him as well. "I don't think that's a good idea," he said. Future homicide attempts aside, the thought of actively trying to hurt either Erik or Raven made him sick to his stomach.
*That's the first clever thing you've said this entire conversation,* grumbled Old Charles.
Charles continued to ignore him.
"Okay." Sean nodded, relieved. "So...if Old Charles knows where you are when they're going to try to kill you, you could be someplace else." He frowned. "Well. But maybe they'd find you there, if they really wanted to kill you. Ergh." Charles wasn't in a laughing mood, but if he had been, he might have chuckled at the way Sean twisted his mouth, half thoughtfulness and half discomfort. "Do you know why they're going to try to kill you?"
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "They disagree with me about mutant-human relations." But perhaps that would have been too big of a clue as to the killers' identities. The boys had been shaken enough at losing Raven and Erik. They had their own anger and sense of betrayal and guilt for things done and undone. Charles didn't see how the knowledge that Erik and Raven would later reappear in their lives to try and kill him would help anyone. Instead, he said, "It's to do with the mutant thing," which was both true and, hopefully, sufficiently vague.
"Ugh, seriously?" asked Sean, distressed. "Is it the CIA? I thought you wiped out all their information on us."
And so he had, having determined through Moira's mind just who needed to have his memory erased and who needed his memory slightly altered and what files needed to be destroyed. Supposing he'd done a good enough job at it, that was. He liked to think that he had, though he regretted having had to use Moira to do it.
"No," he said. "It isn't the CIA." What are they up to in the future? he asked Old Charles. I would imagine that, however many years in the future you're from, the issue of mutants in America will have raised its head again at least once.
*That, I'm afraid, is a rather longer conversation than I'd prefer to have in front of Sean,* Old Charles replied.
"Huh," said Sean, and Charles redirected his attention. "Well, maybe you could get a bodyguard."
It was on the tip of Charles's tongue to say that he could take care of himself, but obviously that wasn't true--it hadn't been in Cuba, what with that wretched helmet of Shaw's and Erik's, and it certainly wasn't now. Instead, he said, "I don't know what sort of bodyguards I could get who'd be better than the friends I've got now."
He hadn't really meant it as flattery; whatever Sean, Alex, and Hank lacked in security know-how, they made up for in their knowledge of the mansion and its secrets and their acceptance of his telepathy. It made Sean flush from within with warm pleasure, though, and he said, "Well, obviously, nobody's getting through us. But what about when Alex and me go to college in the fall?" Both of them were going to the Teachers College at Columbia, which was quite close, but, what with city driving and all, still too inconvenient for the boys to commute every day. They'd be staying at the dormitories and driving back to Westchester on the weekends.
"I know it seems unlikely," said Charles, "but I suppose there's always the possibility I could make more friends."
A strange expression crossed Sean's face and a strange, sour feeling, God that's sad and He's so lonely crossed his mind. "I know we're all about secrecy and all," he said, "but maybe you should get back to trying to recruit teachers. If anybody's gonna understand the whole mutation thing, it's gonna be a science teacher, right?" He shrugged, suddenly awkward. "I mean, not that science teachers are usually all that good in a fight--though you were really good in Cuba--but, you know, the more friends the better, right?"
Charles took pity on Sean, who was getting quite flustered, and said, "You're right, Sean." He stretched his arms above his head and said, "Oh, my. I've rather fallen down on the job here. I'm supposed to do at least ten more toe-touches."
Grateful for the opportunity to leave and recollect his composure, Sean nodded eagerly and said, "Right, sure. I'll get out of your way. Just wanted to check on you, is all."
He left, and moments later Charles could feel the twin spikes of outrage and fear from Alex and Hank as Sean explained what Charles had told him. They didn't come in, though, and he was left with Old Charles. Which was just as well--his conversation with Sean had given him the barest hint of an idea.
So, he said to Old Charles, the CIA? The FBI? Congress? Do tell. What's the 'mutant issue' looking like in the future?
*Your exercises,* Old Charles objected, and Charles reached for his toes.
There. I can exercise and listen at the same time. Go on.
With a sigh, Old Charles gave a brief rundown of the status of mutants vis-a-vis the government: experimentation, the Mutant Registration Act, the Cure, but always, always anonymity, meeting in the shadows and taking on pseudonyms and discussed as something fearful on the news. It reminded Charles rather sharply of other sorts of groups he'd known who met in secret--not being a Communist, he'd only been to a few Mattachine Society meetings, but those few meetings had left rather an impression on him.
He organized his thoughts, which were starting to stray in a number of irrelevant directions, and said to Old Charles, So, what you're telling me is that the general public is primarily aware of mutants because of the damage they inadvertently or deliberately cause, and that there are very few people in positions of visibility who are willing to admit to being a mutant. I myself won't even admit to it. Or rather, you won't.
*Don't be a fool,* said Old Charles. *You know as well as I do that a higher profile would affect not only us but our students. Many of our students conceal their mutant ability from their parents for fear of being disowned--they're only allowed to come to the school because it's not openly advertised as a mutant establishment.*
Right, you recruit for it as if it were a secret club¸ said Charles. Perhaps it was hypocritical of him, given that he had intended to recruit the first class of students in just such a fashion, but the lack of progress mutants had made in Old Charles's lifetime struck him as incredibly demoralizing.
*So what do you want to do about it?* Old Charles demanded. *You're sounding rather like Mystique, putting abstract concepts like 'mutant pride' above the physical safety of our people's children.*
Mystique? asked Charles, rather more confused than upset by Old Charles's accusation. Who the bloody hell is that?
*Raven. She won't answer to that name any more, by the way--only 'Mystique.'*
Wait, in your time or in my time?
The question seemed to give Old Charles pause. *To be honest, I've had so little contact with her over the years that I'm not sure when she decided to wholly cast off the name of Raven Xavier and go exclusively by Mystique.*
Split infinitive, Charles pointed out pedantically. Before Old Charles could object to the taste of his own medicine, he continued. Irrelevant, he said, running the substance of Old Charles's accusation through his mind again for both of their benefits. You speak as if the abstract acceptance of--of mutanthood in society at large is completely separate from the physical safety of mutant children. It's not. So long as the only people willing to admit to being mutants are extremists and terrorists, of course the general public's not going to think much of mutants.
*One can campaign for mutant tolerance without painting a target on one's back,* said Old Charles. *You've thought of this yourself--reveal the existence of extreme mutations and your own status to a few carefully-chosen people, teachers at the school, who can be trusted to be discreet. That way you can gradually create a segment of the population who understand and accept mutants without putting the people under your protection at risk.*
Well, that's obviously not working quickly enough, said Charles, thinking about what Old Charles had told him about the rise of Senator Robert Kelly.
He felt the heat of Old Charles's anger the way he felt all of his future self's emotions, as a curious neither fish-nor-fowl sensation that seemed to come from just outside the bounds of his mind and body. *Who are you to disparage what our human allies have accomplished?* said Old Charles. *Both President McKenna and President Waterman were sympathetic to the mutant cause. You think the Mutant Registration Act was the only anti-mutant act that was ever proposed? It wasn't--dozens of others were smacked down by perfectly human congressmen who believed that mutants were as deserving of human rights as any other American citizens. And Moira, God, the advances she's made in the field of mutant medicine--*
Wait, wait, said Charles, again feeling rather at sea. Are we talking about the same Moira? Moira MacTaggert?
Old Charles calmed a bit. *Yes. And it's quite a testament to her character, given some of the actions she's witnessed on the part of mutants, that she was still willing to reconnect with me back...oh, I suppose it was in the eighties.*
Apparently Charles lived at least until the eighties--that was good to know. Did you restore her memories, or....? Honestly, Charles couldn't imagine why Moira would ever seek him out even if her memories were restored to her, unless it was to shoot him again or something.
*No,* said Old Charles, his voice full of...pride? Admiration? It was difficult to tell. *She largely restored them by herself over the years, bit by bit--hypnotherapy and that sort of thing. And thank God she did.*
And...and she wasn't angry? asked Charles tentatively. Moira was wonderful, a great friend and a competent CIA agent, and she'd probably be a great help in figuring out how to reveal the existence of mutants in a positive light, but the fact of the matter was that she had no reason whatsoever to trust him. He certainly wouldn't trust him if he were in her shoes.
*Oh, she was furious,* said Old Charles cheerfully. *I think it took about a decade after we began talking again for her to forgive me.*
Fabulous. But evidently she did forgive him in the end--and maybe, if he gave the memories back himself rather than making her find them over decades of what was probably very costly therapy, she might be more kindly disposed towards him. Old Charles, he asked, do you suppose if I tracked her down this minute, we might speed up the whole 'forgiveness' process?
Old Charles exuded a kind of baffled consternation. *Do you know,* he said, *I don't remember being like this when I was your age. You're awfully...impatient, aren't you?*
Charles gave the matter some serious thought, and came to a few conclusions: first, that without Scott around, he'd be much more depressed; second, that without Old Charles, he'd be much less energetically irritated all the time; third, that without Old Charles's knowledge of the future, he'd be much less motivated to change his original plan of action and have far fewer ideas. Who'd have thought it, he said. I think you've actually done me some good, old man.
*That remains to be seen,* Old Charles said primly, but he couldn't hide his amusement from Charles. They were, after all, the same person.
**
Charles's initial idea of "this minute" had to be postponed a bit due to a few unforeseen occurrences in May. The first was that one morning, while Charles was in the middle of eating his oatmeal, Old Charles had said out of the blue, *Oh, I think it was right around now that Armando came back.*
"I beg your pardon," said Charles, both in his mind and out loud, causing all four young men around the breakfast table to stare at him.
The conversation that followed had led to the revelation that Armando's mutation hadn't failed him after all--that it had instead converted all the matter in his body to energy in a process that Charles thought would probably have given Albert Einstein material for half a dozen new scientific breakthroughs. This energy, having traveled about for a while as undetectable radiation, had converted itself back to matter the evening of May 12th near the wreckage of Agent Mann's secret facility in Langley. In the original timeline, Old Charles hadn't been near enough to perceive the reappearance of Armando's consciousness. Armando had naturally been extremely disoriented and, not having any idea where to look for the rest of their little group, had gone back to stay for a while with his family in Chicago. They hadn't met again until 1967.
In this timeline, Charles sent Alex and Sean out to Langley while he and Hank stayed with Scott, who was quite excited about meeting someone who could stand up to his eye beams. Hank had made a preliminary pair of ruby quartz glasses, but they weren't really transparent enough to be all that useful at this point.
The next day, around supper time, all three of them returned to Westchester in Charles's 1961 Ford Galaxie. Armando was tired and confused and dressed in a tee-shirt and pair of sweatpants of Alex' s that were too small for him; Sean couldn't stop laughing and slapping Armando on the back; Alex's eyes were glued to Armando as if he feared the other man might disappear at any moment.
Charles felt some heavy, leaden part of him he hadn't even known was there fly away, light as a feather.
So that was Armando. He was eager and curious in his study of the seven or so months he had missed, and true to his nickname and his mutation, he adapted quickly to the new reality of things: Erik and Raven's splintering from the group, Charles's paralysis, Scott and Old Charles's presence. "Wow," he said when it had all been explained to him. "Did you ever hear about that, uh, that curse, 'May you live in interesting times'?" He shook his head with a smile. "Not that I'm complaining. I can't wait to see what happens next."
What happened next was that, despite his best efforts to drink lots of water and keep his catheter site clean and so on and so forth, Charles contracted a urinary tract infection.
(*Those were certainly not your best efforts,* said Old Charles sternly. *You can't just ignore your body like you did when you were in college. You've been pushing yourself far too hard.*
Yes, thanks, Dad, Charles said, who quite thought that the infection was punishment enough without a lecture on top of it. They then both took a moment to reflect on what a mistake addressing himself as 'Dad' had been.)
The long and short of it was, it was early June before Charles's efforts at tracking down Moira bore any fruit. When it came, said fruit was from a rather unexpected source.
Though Charles's correspondence with potential instructors had slowed as he and the boys struggled to rebuild their plans around the welcome but occasionally unpredictable presence of Scott, it certainly hadn't stopped altogether. In fact, one of Charles's former lab assistants, who now had a position at the University of Chicago, had given Charles the name and telephone number of a coworker whose sister, an elementary school teacher, could very well be a mutant herself, to judge by the maddeningly vague descriptions Charles's acquaintance had provided. The postman still had plenty to bring to the mansion's door.
One day, he brought Charles the news he had been looking for, in the form of a letter from
Yasuo Takiguchi.
Dear Professor Xavier, the letter began, I'm glad to hear your health is on the mend. My own department here has been decimated by the flu and is only now starting to resemble an engineering department and not a ghost town again.
Your offer with regards to lab space and materials is very generous. I'm a bit jealous of Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford; undoubtedly Professor Dugoni's blood pressure would be a great deal better if you sat on our Board of Trustees. I can obviously have no qualms there, and as I've stated in previous missives, I have no objections to teaching high school students; I began teaching in high schools in California and only became a university professor because it offered far better research opportunities, not because I found the quality of students in high schools inferior.
This, of course, remains my concern; as far as I can surmise from your previous letters, you've secured very few full-time faculty for your school, which will obviously put an above-average teaching burden on those faculty. You yourself come from a research background. Have you developed a schedule that would allow your instructors sufficient free time for independent research as well as sufficient preparation time for classes?
On a tangential note, one of my friends at Harvard tells me that there's a woman asking about applying for their graduate program in biophysics whose research interests coincide quite closely with your own. Perhaps you know her: Moira MacTaggert? Very limited scientific background, but she's apparently quite interested in working with some of the molecular bio people there, and she's got some very bold ideas about the potential of human mutation. She might be interested in collaborating with you on research, especially if her efforts to get into Harvard prove unsuccessful. If you'd like her contact information, please let me know. (If you're already in contact with her, disregard the above.)
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Yasuo Takiguchi, PhD
Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Charles folded the letter in his lap and retreated for a moment into the sanctuary of his thoughts. So Moira had left the CIA, then, and was gravitating towards academia--specifically, towards genetics. Some lingering traces of memory he had failed to erase, or perhaps some breadcrumbs he had left behind at the CIA?
*She was fired, actually,* Old Charles supplied helpfully. *They never trusted her there--old misogynist boys' club and all that--and what you and I did....*
Ugh, said Charles. It really is going to take twenty years for her to forgive me, isn't it?
*If ever she does,* said Old Charles, sounding far too cheerful about it. Charles supposed it was probably a bit more pleasant being the spectator through these things than it had been--and would be--living them.
It was the work of an instant to find Moira psychically, now that he knew what he was looking for. Whether it was simply a natural extension of his mind's restless expansion in the wake of his accident or something caused by the presence of sharing his skull with a ghost, Charles was becoming ever more comfortable in extending his telepathy at distances he wouldn't even dreamed of a year ago.
It was a bit more difficult to persuade the boys to drive him to Boston.
"Wait, what?" asked Alex, caught off guard. "Why do you want to talk to Moira? I thought the whole memory-wiping thing was to keep her and us safe. What's changed between then and now?"
"Wait, memory-wiping thing?" asked Armando, giving Charles a dubious look.
"Who's Moira?" asked Scott innocently.
Charles explained to Scott who Moira was and then gave Armando a heavily censored version of how they and Moira had parted ways. (Censored out loud, anyway, for Scott's benefit--he gave a rather more complete version via telepathy.)
When it had all been explained, Armando sat back in his seat and blinked. "Don't take this the wrong way, Professor," he said, "but you're kind of a scary guy sometimes. No offense."
"None taken," said Charles. It was true. The only reason more people weren't afraid of him was because they didn't understand what he was, so of course he was making plans to tell the public about all that. Raven and Old Charles were right, he was an idiot.
"Just so you know, if you ever try doing that to me, I bet my brain will take it as an attack." Armando tapped his head significantly. "Ain't nothing getting through there if the old mutation says it's not."
Scott bristled on Charles's behalf, but Charles shushed him and handed him another cookie, sending him a wave of calm understanding. "Duly noted," he said to Armando, and to Scott, "By the way, if you ever want me to stay out of your head, you've only to ask."
"Why would I want you to do that?" Scott asked with a frown, and Charles was struck with a sudden overwhelming urge to hug the boy. God bless those Summers lads, really.
"Any reason at all," he said. "We can talk about it more later if you'd like. But right now...." He looked across the table at Sean and Hank, who had yet to speak. "We've got the matter of Moira to discuss."
Sean looked up, his perturbed expression mirroring the turmoil of thoughts within. "Is this about...." He waved a hand vaguely. "That thing you told me about that one time? That we maybe thought you needed more friends for?" Can Moira protect you? Sean's mind asked, unable to verbalize the thought consciously. Can we save you from dying if we do this?
Charles felt guilty for burdening Sean over something that wasn't likely to happen for decades, so he sent out another wave of calm and said, "Not really. Old Charles says that, in his timeline, Moira becomes a brilliant researcher into mutant medicine. That's got to be terribly useful. When we were children, Raven didn't get hurt or sick very often, but when she did, it was always terrifying for us because we couldn't reveal the injury or sickness as it really was to a regular doctor. I mean, how do you say, 'My sister's scales aren't usually this grayish and her body temperature right now is that of a day-old corpse?' You can't. Whatever sort of advances Moira's making, we're bound to need them as the population of mutants increases, and I thought we'd be in a good position to help her make those discoveries sooner rather than later." There, he thought, satisfied. I think that came out rather well. It was even true, if not the whole truth.
Hank perked up at the idea of 'mutant medicine.' "My God, you're right, Charles," he said. "Each type of mutation comes with its own variations from a human norm, variations that could make traditional medicine useless or even harmful. Oh, my stars and garters, this could revolutionize the entire medical profession!"
"My stars and garters?" repeated Alex incredulously. "Are you serious, Hank?"
He shot Alex an irritated look. "I'm not going to curse in front of Scott," he said. Turning back to Charles, he said, "We already know that Moira's perfectly capable of accepting mutants as coworkers and friends." Shewas, anyway, thought Charles ruefully. "If she's really interested in genetics and medicine, we could be a great help to each other in the labs."
"Uh, not to rain on your parade, Hank," Armando put in, "but wasn't she a CIA agent until recently?"
"Yeah, so?" asked Sean.
"Well, am I the only one wondering why she's applying for PhD programs in Boston instead of, you know, doing spy stuff?"
"Maybe she didn't want to work for people who were gonna let her get killed by missiles," Alex said, his tone challenging.
"Yeah, or maybe her CIA bosses thought there were some holes in the Cuban Missile Crisis story and sent her to do a little investigating," said Armando, calm as ever. It really did take a great deal to disturb Armando's equanimity; Charles quite envied him.
"None of the above, I'm afraid," he said. "Though none of her superiors remembered any more than she did--and I made sure of that--apparently they still saw fit to blame her for what happened in Cuba. According to Old Charles, they fired her shortly after the Missile Crisis."
That stopped everyone cold, and put a definite damper on Hank's enthusiasm. "So, why would she come back here?" Sean asked after a moment. "You're not gonna mind-whammy her, are you?"
The doubt in Sean's mind--no, really, it was more like fear, a muted sort of fear--hurt Charles more than he would have expected it to. "No," he said. "I'm going to try apologizing."
Another long pause followed that announcement. Finally, Armando reached forward to grab another cookie from the plate on the table and said, "I'll drive you, if you want, but well...good luck with all that, Professor." His tone made it clear he had serious doubts about Charles's chances of success.
Which was fair enough. Charles didn't think much of them, either.
The weather in Cambridge was pleasant and warm when Armando and Charles pulled up outside the coffee shop three blocks from Moira's apartment, so it wasn't much of a surprise to see her and a couple of other young women chatting at an outdoor table, sipping their drinks under the shade of a pale lavender umbrella.
Armando helped Charles off and went to park the car. Charles wheeled himself up to the cluster of tables, ignoring the curious glances of some of the shop's other patrons, and took a deep breath, steeling himself.
*My word,* said Old Charles. *Moira was quite pretty back in the day, wasn't she? It's really a wonder--when you get old, you forget how people used to look and think of them as having always been the age that they are.*
Not helpful, Old Charles, thought Charles, and rolled over to Moira's table. "Miss MacTaggert?" he asked, putting on his best charming smile.
Moira's face didn't soften with pity the way her friends' did as they caught sight of the wheelchair; instead, it sharpened with curiosity. "Yes?"
"Doctor Charles Xavier," he said, extending his hand. She took it with brisk cordiality. "I did my undergraduate work at Harvard, in the biology program, and one of my former professors recently wrote me to let me know that he'd a potential student whose research seemed quite similar to mine." He nodded towards Moira in a gesture he hoped was more respectful than smarmy. "You, of course. I work with genetics, specifically mutations. He gave me your name, and since I happened to be in the area...."
"Professor Xavier," said Moira. "Of course. Your dissertation is what interested me in genetics in the first place."
"Oh. That's very flattering," said Charles. It was.
"I do admit being a bit curious as to how you knew what I looked like," Moira said, and under the sharp field of her curiosity emerged a knife-blade of suspicion.
"My friend at Harvard gave me a pretty good description," said Charles, lying through his teeth. "I took a guess."
"Good guess." Moira's gaze was cool and assessing. Her friends' discomfort began to rise.
"Well," said Charles with a shrug, "Molecular biology is still a fairly small field. I do like to keep abreast of any new blood." Ugh, 'abreast.' Bad word choice, now she was going to think he was hitting on her.
"I see," said Moira, and Charles immediately revised his original plan, which had been to ask her to go someplace more private with him now. She was far, far, too suspicious, and too smart a woman to go with a man she didn't recognize and had instinctive suspicions about.
"Here," he said, giving Moira one of the business cards he and Raven had gotten printed up the day after he successfully defended his dissertation. He'd scribbled the hotel's telephone number at the bottom. "My card. I'll be in Boston for the next three days. If you'd like to talk at all about your research or the application process, give me a call at my hotel. I'd be happy to offer any help I can."
She took it with a polite smile and stuck it in her wallet. "Thank you, Dr. Xavier." It was a dismissal if ever he'd heard one, so he bid her goodbye and went off to find Armando, who was parked a block away.
The next two days were nerve-wracking, to say the least. Charles didn't feel up to going out much, so he mostly ordered in at the hotel and drank a great deal more alcohol than he should have.
"Hey," Armando said one evening, turning his attention from the news, "aren't you still recovering? I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be drinking right now."
Charles was in no mood for a lecture. "Tell you what," he said. "You don't give me a hard time about my whiskey here, and I won't say a thing about the five ounces of marijuana you and Sean bought last week."
Armando looked taken aback for a moment, but no more than a moment, and he shrugged. "Whatever," he said. His expression as he turned back to the news was grim. "Jesus. That shit with George Wallace yesterday, and now this."
You didn't need to be a mind-reader to know what was bothering Armando, only someone who kept up with the news coming out of Alabama and Mississippi. Charles thought there was very little he, as a rich white man, could say at this moment to ease the complicated tangle of feelings weighing on Armando right now, so instead he simply handed Armando the bottle.
"Thanks," said Armando, and they sat in silence for the rest of the evening. It wasn't precisely tense, but it wasn't not tense, either.
Two days after they'd arrived in Boston, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, Charles received a message at the front desk of the hotel. According to the concierge, the contents of the message were simply: "Same coffee shop as the other day. 3:00. M. MacTaggert."
If Charles had actually been a professor trying to give a student a leg up, he might have been a bit offended at the brusqueness of the message, but as it was, he was too phenomenally grateful that she had gotten in contact with him to have any complaints about her manners.
He appeared at the appointed time, only for her to stand from her table and gesture for him to follow her as she walked across the street to a little park. Charles immediately saw the logic in her choice of location: the park was quiet enough that they could talk more privately than at the cafe, but not so isolated that she couldn't scream for help if it turned out he was a sexual predator or something of the sort. Clever. She always had been.
"So," she said, settling herself on a bench as Charles arranged himself so as to be able to talk to her face-to-face. "Dr. Xavier. Do I know you?"
Charles might have given her the patter about research again, but she cut him off before he could so much as open his mouth. "You don't have much of a poker face, Dr. Xavier. No professor of genetics looks that grateful to talk to a woman with a bachelor's degree in French and accounting."
"He might if he's in a wheelchair and hasn't gotten a woman to talk to him in six months," he shot back, but she shook her head.
"No. You don't look at me like a man hoping to get laid, you look at me like I'm your long-lost sister. So I'm going to ask again, Dr. Xavier. Do I know you?"
There was something under her confident tone, something both frightened and angry, and under it all the sucking, inexorable terror of knowing that there were major events in the past year of her life that made no sense, that she knew she wasn't remembering properly. The fear that she was losing her mind, the only weapon she'd ever been able to count on. Charles sighed. He'd really shot himself in the foot on this one, no joke intended. "Yes," he said. "You know me, even if you don't remember it at the moment." And then, before she could pull away, he reached for her hand--this always worked best if there were physical contact, though he didn't know why--and carefully uncovered all the memories he had buried in her mind. It was delicate work, uncomfortable for both her and for him, but as she squirmed and groaned he held on, brushing away the false memories he had fabricated and reconstructing the truth, as delicately as an archaeologist uncovering some ancient fragment of pottery.
There were tears running down her face by the time he was done, and he reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief with his free hand even as he let go of her with his other hand. She stared blankly at her lap for a moment as he pressed the handkerchief into her hand, tears dripping off the end of her nose, and then she reached up with the hand that wasn't holding the handkerchief and slapped him, hard, across the face.
A man crossing the street stared hard at them, wondering what kind of woman hit a guy in a wheelchair, but Charles waved him on with a little mental gesture and five seconds of oblivion. "I suppose I deserved that," he said to Moira. His face was still tingling, but warm pain had started to replace the tingling sensation.
"Damn right you did," she said through gritted teeth. "How could you do that to me? I trusted you, I stayed in your house for months, helping you, and you--you--"
Charles almost finished her sentence but thought better of it. He made a concerted effort to build a barrier between himself and Moira, as he couldn't imagine she'd forgive any invasion of her privacy now, however small. Instead, he simply said, "I'm sorry. I could tell you my reasons, but I don't know that that would help much."
Moira snorted. Charles tried to read her expression, tried to find in it anything other than anger and contempt. Finally he gave up and said, "Really. I'm terribly sorry."
"I got fired," said Moira. "My boss told me to go back to the typing pool. I spent a week sleeping in my childhood bedroom, listening to my parents tell me 'Maybe it's for the best!' and suggesting I go back to my ex-husband."
"I'm sorry," said Charles again, feeling a bit like a broken record but unable to think of anything more clever to say. "Really. I ought to have asked."
Moira's eyes blazed. Even Charles, who really was quite shit at interpreting facial expressions absent his telepathy, knew he'd said the wrong thing. "No. You shouldn't have. You shouldn't have done it, period. If you'd have asked, I would have said no. You know why, genius? Because normal people face a lot of problems in their lives, but one that they don't worry about is the sanctity and privacy of their own minds. They have a reasonable expectation that their thoughts and their memories are theirs. Thanks to you, I'm never going to be able to trust my own memory ever again. I can't trust that my thoughts are my own, or that you're not listening in to what I'm thinking. But, yeah, I guess you could have asked."
He would have preferred it if she'd hit him again. That, at least, hadn't affected his ability to breathe. Here he sat, photographic memory, three PhDs, quite a powerful telepath, and not a single clue what he should say. Not a single word sprang to his mind.
*Promise her you won't do it again.*
Charles hoped his surprise didn't show on his face. Glad you finally decided to show your face, you bastard. In a manner of speaking.
*Well. What else can you say? You had your reasons; she doesn't want to hear them. You did it, and then you undid it. You could psychically push her into forgiving you, but if she ever found out, then she'd really never forgive you.*
What did you say to your Moira? he asked, swallowing hard. He couldn't make himself meet Moira's eyes.
*Apples and oranges, dear boy. She was a PhD and quite an excellent researcher in her own right by then. She'd had twenty-five years for her anger to cool. My advice: promise you'll never do it again.*
Charles cleared his throat. "Would...would it help at all if I promised to stay out of your head?"
"Would I know if you broke your promise? Would there be any indications that you'd violated my mind again?"
Violated. Charles winced. "Um. Not unless I wanted there to be."
Moira shrugged eloquently. "Then, I guess I really don't have any reason to trust your word, do I?"
Four blocks away, a waitress from the cafe, off-duty, was breaking up with her fiancé. Charles focused on her pain for a moment. If he'd thought it wouldn't make him look like a lunatic in front of Moira, he would have pulled at his hair. Anything to distract him from this. "I guess you don't," said Charles. "Well. Anyway, I promise I'll stay out of your head. As best I can," he added. Though honesty as a concept (and certainly as a virtue) tended to confuse him, this seemed to be a situation that called for it. "Sometimes, if you're feeling something really strongly--for instance, if you were in pain--well, anyway, you don't want to hear about that. I'm guessing you don't want to hear about it. I didn't actually read your mind just then. Um, I should probably...." He began to roll himself backwards, turning his wheels to be parallel with the sidewalk again. "You know. I think that's all I had to say. I'm glad you're doing well. Good luck with graduate school."
*You're behaving like a coward,* said Old Charles.
She doesn't want to talk to me, you ass. It didn't seem likely, at this particular moment, that she'd want to talk to him again for a long while. Possibly for the rest of their natural lives.
*Then why is she reaching out for you?*
What?
Something shot out and grabbed one of the wheels of his chair--her hand--and he stopped immediately lest he pinch her with the wheel's rotation. "Wait," she said. Maybe her voice sounded a tiny bit less angry. It was difficult to tell. "You said you'd tell me your reasons."
He sighed and turned back around. "Which do you want first, the ones that were about me or the ones that were about you?"
She frowned. "Whichever."
"The ones about me were...well, honestly, I don't want to say that I didn't trust you, because you were wonderful after all that business in Cuba. But. You did work for the CIA, and I knew you couldn't help but tell them about Erik and Raven, and I...I couldn't let..." Words failed him, and he pulled at a bit of loose skin about his cuticle. "Raven's still my sister," he said, as if that were an explanation. "And it wasn't just--I knew that you'd leave us be, but your bosses never would. I needed you, your mind, your knowledge, to get to them and wipe their memories of us, and I knew you'd never agree if I told you that that was my plan."
"You're damn right I wouldn't," said Moira, but she wasn't as vehement as she'd been and she didn't seem inclined to argue further.
"Right. So, that was about protecting myself and the boys." He paused. "Here's the other bit. At the time I sent you back to the CIA, your facility at Langley was still holding Emma Frost, Shaw's telepath. I know she has no love for the Agency, but I thought...it didn't seem outside the realm of possibility that she'd read your mind and tell your superiors what you wouldn't tell them, sort of a revenge against both you and me for imprisoning her. And also--and this is the bit that's really more about you than about me--I thought...." If only he hadn't promised to stay out of her mind. Words really were failing him.
"You thought?" Moira prompted.
"I thought there was a not small chance that Erik would go back to the CIA. Not to work for them, obviously not, but--for revenge, or for self-defense. To get Emma Frost, at the very least. He's a very distrustful man. Once it became clear that the CIA had allowed both the Russians and the Americans to fire on us, the CIA was added to Erik's list of enemies. I didn't need to read Erik's mind to see that. I thought that if I made it abundantly clear that you had absolutely no idea about anything to do with mutants or Cuba or me or him or anything, perhaps I could...minimize the damage."
Moira nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's a good point." She stretched her legs out in front of her and folded her hands on her lap. "You really can't do anything to stop him?"
Charles shrugged. "I don't even know what he's doing. For all I know, he's engaging in a vigorous letter-writing campaign." He and Moira shared a wry grin over the mental image of Erik writing letters to the editor or something, before Moira seemed to realize what she was doing and dropped her eyes. Charles felt his own smile fade and said, "No. I really can't. I can't communicate with him through that helmet of his, and I really have no idea where he'd go, if he'd stay in the United States even."
"He hasn't gotten in touch with you at all?"
He shook his head. Obviously he'd see Erik again. The question was, when? Or rather, when they met again, would Erik be trying to kill him? He supposed it was possible that he'd be trying to kill Erik, depending on the circumstances. He thought not, though.
"Raven hasn't?" Moira asked, her voice a fraction softer.
"No," said Charles, more shortly than he'd meant to. He'd had a lot of scabs ripped open in the course of this conversation.
Moira let out a deep breath slowly. "So. Assuming I accept all that as a justification--which I don't, just to be clear....If you had all these reasons for erasing my memories like that, why come track me down and undo it all? What do you want?"
There was a wrinkle in Charles's pants; he smoothed it. A block away, a young man who worked at a bookstore was balancing his checkbook; Charles took a moment to lose himself in the soothing columns of numbers. "I wasn't lying before, not really," he said. "I really did hear from a colleague--well, more of a prospective colleague--that you were thinking of applying to Harvard's biophysics program. I really did think that, well, if you are actually interested in pursuing mutation as a research interest, I could be of help. Perhaps make up for all that business with the memory wiping."
She snorted a laugh at that. It was so much nicer than the first snort that Charles could have shouted for joy. "Don't tell me you felt bad about that, Charles, because I won't believe you."
"Well, no," Charles admitted. "I mean, I really do feel bad about getting you fired. That wasn't my intention at all. I'd always supposed that since your bosses didn't remember anything either, they couldn't possibly find a reason to cause problems for you."
"What makes you think they'd need a reason?" Moira said with another laugh. This one was more bitter.
"Right, of course," said Charles. "No, actually, the idea of reconnecting with you came from...a friend."
"A friend." She raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Really."
Charles straightened himself out in his chair. It didn't make him look any taller, he knew, but it made him feel a bit more dignified. "I have got some, you know."
As if summoned by the gods of comic timing, it was at that moment that Charles felt a familiar presence at the edge of his mind, thinking about him, wondering. Things seem to be going okay, I guess... and then a more direct address to Charles: Well, Professor, how's it going? You've been out here for a while, I thought I'd check to make sure she hadn't killed you. Ah. Armando. If he looked out of the corner of his eye, he could see the other man leaning against another bench a bit further along the sidewalk.
Despite his best efforts to block Moira out, he felt a sharp spike of surprise coming from her. She had turned her head to follow Charles's gaze and, well, obviously the sight of Armando, whole and hearty, had given her a bit of a shock. "Armando?" she gasped. "Armando Muñoz?" She whirled back around to Charles, eyes blazing again. "I swear to God, Charles, if this is one of your illusions, if you're making me see this, I will tear you limb from limb, see if I won't."
Um. Things were going considerably better a minute ago, Darwin, said Charles. I don't suppose you could come over here and help me explain things to Moira? He gave Moira his best soothing smile and said, "It's not an illusion. There are actually quite a few things to explain. It's been a very interesting few months."
Part 3
Scott reminded Charles so much of Raven that it hurt. Not in any of the superficial ways, of course--Scott being a boy, and perfectly average-looking, and younger than Raven had been when Charles met her. But with the fear that lurked under even his happiest moods, and his painful gratitude for kindness of any sort, and in the wondrous potential that had been so stifled by the fear of those around him, Scott tore off all the scabs that had grown around the places in Charles's heart where Raven still dwelled, making them bleed anew.
Charles would probably never know what it felt like to be a father, but by God, he did know what it was like to be willing to do anything to protect someone. The moment he saw Scott realize that it wasn't a trick, that his brother really had come to take him away from this couple who hated him and called him a monster--the moment he saw the boy's skinny arms wrap around Alex's neck and his mouth tremble with disbelieving, tearful joy, Charles promised himself that he would do right by Scott. He'd learn from the business with Raven and Erik. He'd do better.
If past events had taught him anything, it was that excessive optimism did no one any good in the end, but thus far, Scott seemed to like him well enough, and Charles liked Scott well enough, too. He was a bit like Charles himself had been as a child, in that despite the hardships he'd endured, he seemed to believe that if he followed the rules laid out for him carefully enough, everything would be all right. Charles wasn't sure whether it would be kinder to disabuse him of this notion or allow the world to disillusion him--but after all, he didn't have to make that decision by himself. There was something quite reassuring about having Alex, Hank, Sean, and even Old Charles to consult with about these things.
Scott's arrival, though, had brought with it a number of questions about matters other than Scott himself. Charles's initial plan to send the boy to a local school had been rather stymied by a trio of discoveries: first, that it really wasn't so easy to fashion a pair of glasses out of ruby quartz, second, that Scott's power tended to show itself at extremely random moments, particularly when he was under emotional stress, and third, that Alex had retrieved the protective fraternal instincts he'd long thought lost and was determined to keep Scott from anything that might cause him the least bit of fear or pain. (Admirable, of course, but rather inconvenient considering how intimidating Scott found the idea of going to school.)
Charles found himself at a bit of a loss. He really had intended the school to be a high school, given that he knew next to nothing about elementary school education and, while he liked children well enough, the feeling was usually not mutual. Now, however, he frequently found himself taking time he would ordinarily have been devoting to curriculum design and finding instructors and instead reading James and the Giant Peach to Scott or playing what he supposed could have been termed "family" games of Monopoly. It concerned him a bit that he was losing his momentum when it came to getting his school off the ground; it concerned him even more that he couldn't muster more than "a bit" of concern.
*I wouldn't worry about it too much,* said Old Charles as Charles carefully stretched out his legs in the gym. *It's perfectly natural for a new father to want to spend more time with his family than his work.*
Have you lost your marbles? asked Charles, irritated. He hated it when Old Charles popped out of nowhere like that--it was very much like having someone sneak up on him, an experience which Charles had only ever really known through other people, he himself being rather difficult to sneak up on. Scott's not my son.
He got the distinct impression of some sort of injured feeling from Old Charles, who said, *Well. He's as close to it as you're ever likely to have.*
It wasn't as if Charles hadn't told himself, a thousand times, about the relative unlikelihood of his ever having a family of his own, other than Raven (ha bloody ha). It shouldn't have hurt any more coming from someone who was, effectively, also himself. It did, though.
Before he could retort, Old Charles said, *I apologize. I'm afraid I've been taking everything to do with Scott rather more personally than I ought.*
You've a funny way of showing it, said Charles. Old Charles rarely spoke to him in the presence of other people, but Charles was fairly certain he'd never spoken at all when Charles was with Scott.
*To be honest, dear boy,* said Old Charles, *when you're with Scott, I tend to wish you out of existence and pretend I'm the one reading to him or giving him wheelchair rides or what have you. It's such a strange thing, to be jealous of yourself.*
Charles had been wished out of existence before, and probably more often by himself than by anyone else, except perhaps his mother, so he didn't take it personally. Instead, he asked, Why? Have you been quarrelling with Scott in the future? That was actually rather sad. The old man was clearly very fond of Scott, and Charles found himself hoping rather fervently that he--that they--hadn't died before reconciling.
He heartily regretted even asking when his question was met by another of Old Charles's long silences. It's a sad, sad man, Charles Xavier, he said to himself, who can't hold a conversation without antagonizing even himself.
Eventually, though, Old Charles said, *It's not that. Scott was already dead when I died.*
He what?! Charles pulled out of his stretch a bit too fast and strained something in his back, but the pain felt distant, unimportant. How
Old Charles didn't wait so long before saying, albeit reluctantly, *He was killed by the same person who killed me.* Before Charles could work up a healthy cloud of anger and demand details so that they could prevent both deaths, Old Charles said hurriedly, *Please. Anger won't do anyone any good. And if you try to kill this person, I guarantee you will regret it.*
Something in Old Charles's voice made Charles uncomfortable--was it a bit of affection? For his killer? It seemed absurd, but then, Charles knew as well as anyone and better than most that emotions made no sense whatsoever sometimes. Just then, a terrible notion occurred to him. His mind trembled away from it--it was like touching a wound--but finally he managed to trace its shape in his thoughts. Was it Erik? he asked, a part of his mind escaping from the back to check in with the boys and listen to Westchester County gossip for miles in every direction. Anything but hear a "yes." Or... and this one hurt even more. Or Raven?
Old Charles sighed. *No,* he said. *Though I think I should warn you, both of them will try to kill you, as well.*
Charles felt like he'd been punched in the stomach. Oh, he said, unable to formulate a thought any more coherent than that.
Downstairs, the boys felt it, too. In whatever corner of his brain Old Charles was squatting in, he said, *Oh, dear. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that.*
Charles understood well enough that, underneath the surface layer of charm he'd managed to pick up by watching people, he wasn't very likeable. He presumed too much based on what he saw in people's minds, only to realize that those same thoughts and fears and wants changed when someone presented them in physical actuality. His speech was simultaneously too practiced, which sounded false, no matter how he tried to make it sound spontaneous, and too clumsy, which meant he was constantly sticking his foot in his mouth. But there was something really dreadful about knowing that he was such a failure at intimacy that even the two people he held dearest and closest to his heart would eventually wish him dead. Other people managed love so easily--why was it so beyond the grasp of Charles, who worked so very hard at it?
*It was never personal,* said Old Charles. He sounded quite worried, which was a change. *I really believe that. It was to do with politics. Erik especially is quite stubborn when it comes to mutant-human relationships--I don't know that it was ever about me. Us, I mean.*
Right, said Charles. He hit his left leg hard enough to bruise. He didn't feel it downstairs, of course, but the impact of flesh against his fist was pretty satisfying. My sister and the man I--my best friend try to kill me, you say, but it's not personal. Truly, your wisdom is astounding.
He was so distracted that he must have missed Sean's approach, because it came as a complete surprise when he pushed open the door and said, "Hey. What's wrong, Professor?"
"What's wrong," not "Are you all right?" He must have done a worse job at shielding his emotions than he'd thought.
"Nothing," said Charles, picturing his hurt and boxing it away, walling it behind a barrier between Sean and himself. "Nothing's wrong. I'm fine." Although apparently, I'm not so fine that I can convince people I love not to try to kill me.
Sean raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Sure. And that whole, like, huge pile of feeling horrible just came out of nowhere?"
Some bloody adult figure he made. Charles felt very small at the moment, still in his sweaty tee-shirt and loose exercise pants, sitting on the floor, his useless legs spread out in front of him. "I'm sorry," he said. "Got a bit of unpleasant news from Old Me."
"Can we do anything to stop it?" asked Sean. "I mean, that's got to be the upside of having a dead version of you hanging around, right? So we can change the future and stuff?"
*I don't wish to be the bearer of bad news,* said Old Charles, *but I've been pondering this same question for years, and I don't know that there's anything to do that I haven't already done. The real difficulty with Erik and Raven, you see, and maintaining a...a friendship with them, is that it's always got to be on their terms.*
If their terms include killing me, I'm not sure what kind of friendship we're discussing, said Charles tersely. Out loud, he said, "Old Charles doesn't have any suggestions. Maybe you've got some ideas, Sean. If you knew that someone was going to try to kill you, what would you do?"
*Really, Charles, neither Raven nor Erik actually succeeds----*
"Whoa," said Sean, taken aback. "Someone's going to try to kill you?"
*It isn't for years--, Charles, a great many things happen between now and then--*
"In the future," said Charles. He shrugged, but Sean's reaction told him that it had come off more angry than casual.
"Wow," said Sean. His face had gone sickly white under his freckles. "Well...I guess we could try to kill them first?" Under his fear for Charles, Sean really was unsettled by the idea of deliberately trying to kill someone. He still had bad dreams about Cuba.
If it would stop Charles from getting killed, though, he'd give it a try, and that thought was enough to stem some of Charles's anger and sorrow. He couldn't be so bad at intimacy, could he? He cared about Sean and Alex and Hank and Scott, and they seemed to care about him as well. "I don't think that's a good idea," he said. Future homicide attempts aside, the thought of actively trying to hurt either Erik or Raven made him sick to his stomach.
*That's the first clever thing you've said this entire conversation,* grumbled Old Charles.
Charles continued to ignore him.
"Okay." Sean nodded, relieved. "So...if Old Charles knows where you are when they're going to try to kill you, you could be someplace else." He frowned. "Well. But maybe they'd find you there, if they really wanted to kill you. Ergh." Charles wasn't in a laughing mood, but if he had been, he might have chuckled at the way Sean twisted his mouth, half thoughtfulness and half discomfort. "Do you know why they're going to try to kill you?"
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "They disagree with me about mutant-human relations." But perhaps that would have been too big of a clue as to the killers' identities. The boys had been shaken enough at losing Raven and Erik. They had their own anger and sense of betrayal and guilt for things done and undone. Charles didn't see how the knowledge that Erik and Raven would later reappear in their lives to try and kill him would help anyone. Instead, he said, "It's to do with the mutant thing," which was both true and, hopefully, sufficiently vague.
"Ugh, seriously?" asked Sean, distressed. "Is it the CIA? I thought you wiped out all their information on us."
And so he had, having determined through Moira's mind just who needed to have his memory erased and who needed his memory slightly altered and what files needed to be destroyed. Supposing he'd done a good enough job at it, that was. He liked to think that he had, though he regretted having had to use Moira to do it.
"No," he said. "It isn't the CIA." What are they up to in the future? he asked Old Charles. I would imagine that, however many years in the future you're from, the issue of mutants in America will have raised its head again at least once.
*That, I'm afraid, is a rather longer conversation than I'd prefer to have in front of Sean,* Old Charles replied.
"Huh," said Sean, and Charles redirected his attention. "Well, maybe you could get a bodyguard."
It was on the tip of Charles's tongue to say that he could take care of himself, but obviously that wasn't true--it hadn't been in Cuba, what with that wretched helmet of Shaw's and Erik's, and it certainly wasn't now. Instead, he said, "I don't know what sort of bodyguards I could get who'd be better than the friends I've got now."
He hadn't really meant it as flattery; whatever Sean, Alex, and Hank lacked in security know-how, they made up for in their knowledge of the mansion and its secrets and their acceptance of his telepathy. It made Sean flush from within with warm pleasure, though, and he said, "Well, obviously, nobody's getting through us. But what about when Alex and me go to college in the fall?" Both of them were going to the Teachers College at Columbia, which was quite close, but, what with city driving and all, still too inconvenient for the boys to commute every day. They'd be staying at the dormitories and driving back to Westchester on the weekends.
"I know it seems unlikely," said Charles, "but I suppose there's always the possibility I could make more friends."
A strange expression crossed Sean's face and a strange, sour feeling, God that's sad and He's so lonely crossed his mind. "I know we're all about secrecy and all," he said, "but maybe you should get back to trying to recruit teachers. If anybody's gonna understand the whole mutation thing, it's gonna be a science teacher, right?" He shrugged, suddenly awkward. "I mean, not that science teachers are usually all that good in a fight--though you were really good in Cuba--but, you know, the more friends the better, right?"
Charles took pity on Sean, who was getting quite flustered, and said, "You're right, Sean." He stretched his arms above his head and said, "Oh, my. I've rather fallen down on the job here. I'm supposed to do at least ten more toe-touches."
Grateful for the opportunity to leave and recollect his composure, Sean nodded eagerly and said, "Right, sure. I'll get out of your way. Just wanted to check on you, is all."
He left, and moments later Charles could feel the twin spikes of outrage and fear from Alex and Hank as Sean explained what Charles had told him. They didn't come in, though, and he was left with Old Charles. Which was just as well--his conversation with Sean had given him the barest hint of an idea.
So, he said to Old Charles, the CIA? The FBI? Congress? Do tell. What's the 'mutant issue' looking like in the future?
*Your exercises,* Old Charles objected, and Charles reached for his toes.
There. I can exercise and listen at the same time. Go on.
With a sigh, Old Charles gave a brief rundown of the status of mutants vis-a-vis the government: experimentation, the Mutant Registration Act, the Cure, but always, always anonymity, meeting in the shadows and taking on pseudonyms and discussed as something fearful on the news. It reminded Charles rather sharply of other sorts of groups he'd known who met in secret--not being a Communist, he'd only been to a few Mattachine Society meetings, but those few meetings had left rather an impression on him.
He organized his thoughts, which were starting to stray in a number of irrelevant directions, and said to Old Charles, So, what you're telling me is that the general public is primarily aware of mutants because of the damage they inadvertently or deliberately cause, and that there are very few people in positions of visibility who are willing to admit to being a mutant. I myself won't even admit to it. Or rather, you won't.
*Don't be a fool,* said Old Charles. *You know as well as I do that a higher profile would affect not only us but our students. Many of our students conceal their mutant ability from their parents for fear of being disowned--they're only allowed to come to the school because it's not openly advertised as a mutant establishment.*
Right, you recruit for it as if it were a secret club¸ said Charles. Perhaps it was hypocritical of him, given that he had intended to recruit the first class of students in just such a fashion, but the lack of progress mutants had made in Old Charles's lifetime struck him as incredibly demoralizing.
*So what do you want to do about it?* Old Charles demanded. *You're sounding rather like Mystique, putting abstract concepts like 'mutant pride' above the physical safety of our people's children.*
Mystique? asked Charles, rather more confused than upset by Old Charles's accusation. Who the bloody hell is that?
*Raven. She won't answer to that name any more, by the way--only 'Mystique.'*
Wait, in your time or in my time?
The question seemed to give Old Charles pause. *To be honest, I've had so little contact with her over the years that I'm not sure when she decided to wholly cast off the name of Raven Xavier and go exclusively by Mystique.*
Split infinitive, Charles pointed out pedantically. Before Old Charles could object to the taste of his own medicine, he continued. Irrelevant, he said, running the substance of Old Charles's accusation through his mind again for both of their benefits. You speak as if the abstract acceptance of--of mutanthood in society at large is completely separate from the physical safety of mutant children. It's not. So long as the only people willing to admit to being mutants are extremists and terrorists, of course the general public's not going to think much of mutants.
*One can campaign for mutant tolerance without painting a target on one's back,* said Old Charles. *You've thought of this yourself--reveal the existence of extreme mutations and your own status to a few carefully-chosen people, teachers at the school, who can be trusted to be discreet. That way you can gradually create a segment of the population who understand and accept mutants without putting the people under your protection at risk.*
Well, that's obviously not working quickly enough, said Charles, thinking about what Old Charles had told him about the rise of Senator Robert Kelly.
He felt the heat of Old Charles's anger the way he felt all of his future self's emotions, as a curious neither fish-nor-fowl sensation that seemed to come from just outside the bounds of his mind and body. *Who are you to disparage what our human allies have accomplished?* said Old Charles. *Both President McKenna and President Waterman were sympathetic to the mutant cause. You think the Mutant Registration Act was the only anti-mutant act that was ever proposed? It wasn't--dozens of others were smacked down by perfectly human congressmen who believed that mutants were as deserving of human rights as any other American citizens. And Moira, God, the advances she's made in the field of mutant medicine--*
Wait, wait, said Charles, again feeling rather at sea. Are we talking about the same Moira? Moira MacTaggert?
Old Charles calmed a bit. *Yes. And it's quite a testament to her character, given some of the actions she's witnessed on the part of mutants, that she was still willing to reconnect with me back...oh, I suppose it was in the eighties.*
Apparently Charles lived at least until the eighties--that was good to know. Did you restore her memories, or....? Honestly, Charles couldn't imagine why Moira would ever seek him out even if her memories were restored to her, unless it was to shoot him again or something.
*No,* said Old Charles, his voice full of...pride? Admiration? It was difficult to tell. *She largely restored them by herself over the years, bit by bit--hypnotherapy and that sort of thing. And thank God she did.*
And...and she wasn't angry? asked Charles tentatively. Moira was wonderful, a great friend and a competent CIA agent, and she'd probably be a great help in figuring out how to reveal the existence of mutants in a positive light, but the fact of the matter was that she had no reason whatsoever to trust him. He certainly wouldn't trust him if he were in her shoes.
*Oh, she was furious,* said Old Charles cheerfully. *I think it took about a decade after we began talking again for her to forgive me.*
Fabulous. But evidently she did forgive him in the end--and maybe, if he gave the memories back himself rather than making her find them over decades of what was probably very costly therapy, she might be more kindly disposed towards him. Old Charles, he asked, do you suppose if I tracked her down this minute, we might speed up the whole 'forgiveness' process?
Old Charles exuded a kind of baffled consternation. *Do you know,* he said, *I don't remember being like this when I was your age. You're awfully...impatient, aren't you?*
Charles gave the matter some serious thought, and came to a few conclusions: first, that without Scott around, he'd be much more depressed; second, that without Old Charles, he'd be much less energetically irritated all the time; third, that without Old Charles's knowledge of the future, he'd be much less motivated to change his original plan of action and have far fewer ideas. Who'd have thought it, he said. I think you've actually done me some good, old man.
*That remains to be seen,* Old Charles said primly, but he couldn't hide his amusement from Charles. They were, after all, the same person.
**
Charles's initial idea of "this minute" had to be postponed a bit due to a few unforeseen occurrences in May. The first was that one morning, while Charles was in the middle of eating his oatmeal, Old Charles had said out of the blue, *Oh, I think it was right around now that Armando came back.*
"I beg your pardon," said Charles, both in his mind and out loud, causing all four young men around the breakfast table to stare at him.
The conversation that followed had led to the revelation that Armando's mutation hadn't failed him after all--that it had instead converted all the matter in his body to energy in a process that Charles thought would probably have given Albert Einstein material for half a dozen new scientific breakthroughs. This energy, having traveled about for a while as undetectable radiation, had converted itself back to matter the evening of May 12th near the wreckage of Agent Mann's secret facility in Langley. In the original timeline, Old Charles hadn't been near enough to perceive the reappearance of Armando's consciousness. Armando had naturally been extremely disoriented and, not having any idea where to look for the rest of their little group, had gone back to stay for a while with his family in Chicago. They hadn't met again until 1967.
In this timeline, Charles sent Alex and Sean out to Langley while he and Hank stayed with Scott, who was quite excited about meeting someone who could stand up to his eye beams. Hank had made a preliminary pair of ruby quartz glasses, but they weren't really transparent enough to be all that useful at this point.
The next day, around supper time, all three of them returned to Westchester in Charles's 1961 Ford Galaxie. Armando was tired and confused and dressed in a tee-shirt and pair of sweatpants of Alex' s that were too small for him; Sean couldn't stop laughing and slapping Armando on the back; Alex's eyes were glued to Armando as if he feared the other man might disappear at any moment.
Charles felt some heavy, leaden part of him he hadn't even known was there fly away, light as a feather.
So that was Armando. He was eager and curious in his study of the seven or so months he had missed, and true to his nickname and his mutation, he adapted quickly to the new reality of things: Erik and Raven's splintering from the group, Charles's paralysis, Scott and Old Charles's presence. "Wow," he said when it had all been explained to him. "Did you ever hear about that, uh, that curse, 'May you live in interesting times'?" He shook his head with a smile. "Not that I'm complaining. I can't wait to see what happens next."
What happened next was that, despite his best efforts to drink lots of water and keep his catheter site clean and so on and so forth, Charles contracted a urinary tract infection.
(*Those were certainly not your best efforts,* said Old Charles sternly. *You can't just ignore your body like you did when you were in college. You've been pushing yourself far too hard.*
Yes, thanks, Dad, Charles said, who quite thought that the infection was punishment enough without a lecture on top of it. They then both took a moment to reflect on what a mistake addressing himself as 'Dad' had been.)
The long and short of it was, it was early June before Charles's efforts at tracking down Moira bore any fruit. When it came, said fruit was from a rather unexpected source.
Though Charles's correspondence with potential instructors had slowed as he and the boys struggled to rebuild their plans around the welcome but occasionally unpredictable presence of Scott, it certainly hadn't stopped altogether. In fact, one of Charles's former lab assistants, who now had a position at the University of Chicago, had given Charles the name and telephone number of a coworker whose sister, an elementary school teacher, could very well be a mutant herself, to judge by the maddeningly vague descriptions Charles's acquaintance had provided. The postman still had plenty to bring to the mansion's door.
One day, he brought Charles the news he had been looking for, in the form of a letter from
Yasuo Takiguchi.
Dear Professor Xavier, the letter began, I'm glad to hear your health is on the mend. My own department here has been decimated by the flu and is only now starting to resemble an engineering department and not a ghost town again.
Your offer with regards to lab space and materials is very generous. I'm a bit jealous of Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford; undoubtedly Professor Dugoni's blood pressure would be a great deal better if you sat on our Board of Trustees. I can obviously have no qualms there, and as I've stated in previous missives, I have no objections to teaching high school students; I began teaching in high schools in California and only became a university professor because it offered far better research opportunities, not because I found the quality of students in high schools inferior.
This, of course, remains my concern; as far as I can surmise from your previous letters, you've secured very few full-time faculty for your school, which will obviously put an above-average teaching burden on those faculty. You yourself come from a research background. Have you developed a schedule that would allow your instructors sufficient free time for independent research as well as sufficient preparation time for classes?
On a tangential note, one of my friends at Harvard tells me that there's a woman asking about applying for their graduate program in biophysics whose research interests coincide quite closely with your own. Perhaps you know her: Moira MacTaggert? Very limited scientific background, but she's apparently quite interested in working with some of the molecular bio people there, and she's got some very bold ideas about the potential of human mutation. She might be interested in collaborating with you on research, especially if her efforts to get into Harvard prove unsuccessful. If you'd like her contact information, please let me know. (If you're already in contact with her, disregard the above.)
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Yasuo Takiguchi, PhD
Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Charles folded the letter in his lap and retreated for a moment into the sanctuary of his thoughts. So Moira had left the CIA, then, and was gravitating towards academia--specifically, towards genetics. Some lingering traces of memory he had failed to erase, or perhaps some breadcrumbs he had left behind at the CIA?
*She was fired, actually,* Old Charles supplied helpfully. *They never trusted her there--old misogynist boys' club and all that--and what you and I did....*
Ugh, said Charles. It really is going to take twenty years for her to forgive me, isn't it?
*If ever she does,* said Old Charles, sounding far too cheerful about it. Charles supposed it was probably a bit more pleasant being the spectator through these things than it had been--and would be--living them.
It was the work of an instant to find Moira psychically, now that he knew what he was looking for. Whether it was simply a natural extension of his mind's restless expansion in the wake of his accident or something caused by the presence of sharing his skull with a ghost, Charles was becoming ever more comfortable in extending his telepathy at distances he wouldn't even dreamed of a year ago.
It was a bit more difficult to persuade the boys to drive him to Boston.
"Wait, what?" asked Alex, caught off guard. "Why do you want to talk to Moira? I thought the whole memory-wiping thing was to keep her and us safe. What's changed between then and now?"
"Wait, memory-wiping thing?" asked Armando, giving Charles a dubious look.
"Who's Moira?" asked Scott innocently.
Charles explained to Scott who Moira was and then gave Armando a heavily censored version of how they and Moira had parted ways. (Censored out loud, anyway, for Scott's benefit--he gave a rather more complete version via telepathy.)
When it had all been explained, Armando sat back in his seat and blinked. "Don't take this the wrong way, Professor," he said, "but you're kind of a scary guy sometimes. No offense."
"None taken," said Charles. It was true. The only reason more people weren't afraid of him was because they didn't understand what he was, so of course he was making plans to tell the public about all that. Raven and Old Charles were right, he was an idiot.
"Just so you know, if you ever try doing that to me, I bet my brain will take it as an attack." Armando tapped his head significantly. "Ain't nothing getting through there if the old mutation says it's not."
Scott bristled on Charles's behalf, but Charles shushed him and handed him another cookie, sending him a wave of calm understanding. "Duly noted," he said to Armando, and to Scott, "By the way, if you ever want me to stay out of your head, you've only to ask."
"Why would I want you to do that?" Scott asked with a frown, and Charles was struck with a sudden overwhelming urge to hug the boy. God bless those Summers lads, really.
"Any reason at all," he said. "We can talk about it more later if you'd like. But right now...." He looked across the table at Sean and Hank, who had yet to speak. "We've got the matter of Moira to discuss."
Sean looked up, his perturbed expression mirroring the turmoil of thoughts within. "Is this about...." He waved a hand vaguely. "That thing you told me about that one time? That we maybe thought you needed more friends for?" Can Moira protect you? Sean's mind asked, unable to verbalize the thought consciously. Can we save you from dying if we do this?
Charles felt guilty for burdening Sean over something that wasn't likely to happen for decades, so he sent out another wave of calm and said, "Not really. Old Charles says that, in his timeline, Moira becomes a brilliant researcher into mutant medicine. That's got to be terribly useful. When we were children, Raven didn't get hurt or sick very often, but when she did, it was always terrifying for us because we couldn't reveal the injury or sickness as it really was to a regular doctor. I mean, how do you say, 'My sister's scales aren't usually this grayish and her body temperature right now is that of a day-old corpse?' You can't. Whatever sort of advances Moira's making, we're bound to need them as the population of mutants increases, and I thought we'd be in a good position to help her make those discoveries sooner rather than later." There, he thought, satisfied. I think that came out rather well. It was even true, if not the whole truth.
Hank perked up at the idea of 'mutant medicine.' "My God, you're right, Charles," he said. "Each type of mutation comes with its own variations from a human norm, variations that could make traditional medicine useless or even harmful. Oh, my stars and garters, this could revolutionize the entire medical profession!"
"My stars and garters?" repeated Alex incredulously. "Are you serious, Hank?"
He shot Alex an irritated look. "I'm not going to curse in front of Scott," he said. Turning back to Charles, he said, "We already know that Moira's perfectly capable of accepting mutants as coworkers and friends." Shewas, anyway, thought Charles ruefully. "If she's really interested in genetics and medicine, we could be a great help to each other in the labs."
"Uh, not to rain on your parade, Hank," Armando put in, "but wasn't she a CIA agent until recently?"
"Yeah, so?" asked Sean.
"Well, am I the only one wondering why she's applying for PhD programs in Boston instead of, you know, doing spy stuff?"
"Maybe she didn't want to work for people who were gonna let her get killed by missiles," Alex said, his tone challenging.
"Yeah, or maybe her CIA bosses thought there were some holes in the Cuban Missile Crisis story and sent her to do a little investigating," said Armando, calm as ever. It really did take a great deal to disturb Armando's equanimity; Charles quite envied him.
"None of the above, I'm afraid," he said. "Though none of her superiors remembered any more than she did--and I made sure of that--apparently they still saw fit to blame her for what happened in Cuba. According to Old Charles, they fired her shortly after the Missile Crisis."
That stopped everyone cold, and put a definite damper on Hank's enthusiasm. "So, why would she come back here?" Sean asked after a moment. "You're not gonna mind-whammy her, are you?"
The doubt in Sean's mind--no, really, it was more like fear, a muted sort of fear--hurt Charles more than he would have expected it to. "No," he said. "I'm going to try apologizing."
Another long pause followed that announcement. Finally, Armando reached forward to grab another cookie from the plate on the table and said, "I'll drive you, if you want, but well...good luck with all that, Professor." His tone made it clear he had serious doubts about Charles's chances of success.
Which was fair enough. Charles didn't think much of them, either.
The weather in Cambridge was pleasant and warm when Armando and Charles pulled up outside the coffee shop three blocks from Moira's apartment, so it wasn't much of a surprise to see her and a couple of other young women chatting at an outdoor table, sipping their drinks under the shade of a pale lavender umbrella.
Armando helped Charles off and went to park the car. Charles wheeled himself up to the cluster of tables, ignoring the curious glances of some of the shop's other patrons, and took a deep breath, steeling himself.
*My word,* said Old Charles. *Moira was quite pretty back in the day, wasn't she? It's really a wonder--when you get old, you forget how people used to look and think of them as having always been the age that they are.*
Not helpful, Old Charles, thought Charles, and rolled over to Moira's table. "Miss MacTaggert?" he asked, putting on his best charming smile.
Moira's face didn't soften with pity the way her friends' did as they caught sight of the wheelchair; instead, it sharpened with curiosity. "Yes?"
"Doctor Charles Xavier," he said, extending his hand. She took it with brisk cordiality. "I did my undergraduate work at Harvard, in the biology program, and one of my former professors recently wrote me to let me know that he'd a potential student whose research seemed quite similar to mine." He nodded towards Moira in a gesture he hoped was more respectful than smarmy. "You, of course. I work with genetics, specifically mutations. He gave me your name, and since I happened to be in the area...."
"Professor Xavier," said Moira. "Of course. Your dissertation is what interested me in genetics in the first place."
"Oh. That's very flattering," said Charles. It was.
"I do admit being a bit curious as to how you knew what I looked like," Moira said, and under the sharp field of her curiosity emerged a knife-blade of suspicion.
"My friend at Harvard gave me a pretty good description," said Charles, lying through his teeth. "I took a guess."
"Good guess." Moira's gaze was cool and assessing. Her friends' discomfort began to rise.
"Well," said Charles with a shrug, "Molecular biology is still a fairly small field. I do like to keep abreast of any new blood." Ugh, 'abreast.' Bad word choice, now she was going to think he was hitting on her.
"I see," said Moira, and Charles immediately revised his original plan, which had been to ask her to go someplace more private with him now. She was far, far, too suspicious, and too smart a woman to go with a man she didn't recognize and had instinctive suspicions about.
"Here," he said, giving Moira one of the business cards he and Raven had gotten printed up the day after he successfully defended his dissertation. He'd scribbled the hotel's telephone number at the bottom. "My card. I'll be in Boston for the next three days. If you'd like to talk at all about your research or the application process, give me a call at my hotel. I'd be happy to offer any help I can."
She took it with a polite smile and stuck it in her wallet. "Thank you, Dr. Xavier." It was a dismissal if ever he'd heard one, so he bid her goodbye and went off to find Armando, who was parked a block away.
The next two days were nerve-wracking, to say the least. Charles didn't feel up to going out much, so he mostly ordered in at the hotel and drank a great deal more alcohol than he should have.
"Hey," Armando said one evening, turning his attention from the news, "aren't you still recovering? I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be drinking right now."
Charles was in no mood for a lecture. "Tell you what," he said. "You don't give me a hard time about my whiskey here, and I won't say a thing about the five ounces of marijuana you and Sean bought last week."
Armando looked taken aback for a moment, but no more than a moment, and he shrugged. "Whatever," he said. His expression as he turned back to the news was grim. "Jesus. That shit with George Wallace yesterday, and now this."
You didn't need to be a mind-reader to know what was bothering Armando, only someone who kept up with the news coming out of Alabama and Mississippi. Charles thought there was very little he, as a rich white man, could say at this moment to ease the complicated tangle of feelings weighing on Armando right now, so instead he simply handed Armando the bottle.
"Thanks," said Armando, and they sat in silence for the rest of the evening. It wasn't precisely tense, but it wasn't not tense, either.
Two days after they'd arrived in Boston, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, Charles received a message at the front desk of the hotel. According to the concierge, the contents of the message were simply: "Same coffee shop as the other day. 3:00. M. MacTaggert."
If Charles had actually been a professor trying to give a student a leg up, he might have been a bit offended at the brusqueness of the message, but as it was, he was too phenomenally grateful that she had gotten in contact with him to have any complaints about her manners.
He appeared at the appointed time, only for her to stand from her table and gesture for him to follow her as she walked across the street to a little park. Charles immediately saw the logic in her choice of location: the park was quiet enough that they could talk more privately than at the cafe, but not so isolated that she couldn't scream for help if it turned out he was a sexual predator or something of the sort. Clever. She always had been.
"So," she said, settling herself on a bench as Charles arranged himself so as to be able to talk to her face-to-face. "Dr. Xavier. Do I know you?"
Charles might have given her the patter about research again, but she cut him off before he could so much as open his mouth. "You don't have much of a poker face, Dr. Xavier. No professor of genetics looks that grateful to talk to a woman with a bachelor's degree in French and accounting."
"He might if he's in a wheelchair and hasn't gotten a woman to talk to him in six months," he shot back, but she shook her head.
"No. You don't look at me like a man hoping to get laid, you look at me like I'm your long-lost sister. So I'm going to ask again, Dr. Xavier. Do I know you?"
There was something under her confident tone, something both frightened and angry, and under it all the sucking, inexorable terror of knowing that there were major events in the past year of her life that made no sense, that she knew she wasn't remembering properly. The fear that she was losing her mind, the only weapon she'd ever been able to count on. Charles sighed. He'd really shot himself in the foot on this one, no joke intended. "Yes," he said. "You know me, even if you don't remember it at the moment." And then, before she could pull away, he reached for her hand--this always worked best if there were physical contact, though he didn't know why--and carefully uncovered all the memories he had buried in her mind. It was delicate work, uncomfortable for both her and for him, but as she squirmed and groaned he held on, brushing away the false memories he had fabricated and reconstructing the truth, as delicately as an archaeologist uncovering some ancient fragment of pottery.
There were tears running down her face by the time he was done, and he reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief with his free hand even as he let go of her with his other hand. She stared blankly at her lap for a moment as he pressed the handkerchief into her hand, tears dripping off the end of her nose, and then she reached up with the hand that wasn't holding the handkerchief and slapped him, hard, across the face.
A man crossing the street stared hard at them, wondering what kind of woman hit a guy in a wheelchair, but Charles waved him on with a little mental gesture and five seconds of oblivion. "I suppose I deserved that," he said to Moira. His face was still tingling, but warm pain had started to replace the tingling sensation.
"Damn right you did," she said through gritted teeth. "How could you do that to me? I trusted you, I stayed in your house for months, helping you, and you--you--"
Charles almost finished her sentence but thought better of it. He made a concerted effort to build a barrier between himself and Moira, as he couldn't imagine she'd forgive any invasion of her privacy now, however small. Instead, he simply said, "I'm sorry. I could tell you my reasons, but I don't know that that would help much."
Moira snorted. Charles tried to read her expression, tried to find in it anything other than anger and contempt. Finally he gave up and said, "Really. I'm terribly sorry."
"I got fired," said Moira. "My boss told me to go back to the typing pool. I spent a week sleeping in my childhood bedroom, listening to my parents tell me 'Maybe it's for the best!' and suggesting I go back to my ex-husband."
"I'm sorry," said Charles again, feeling a bit like a broken record but unable to think of anything more clever to say. "Really. I ought to have asked."
Moira's eyes blazed. Even Charles, who really was quite shit at interpreting facial expressions absent his telepathy, knew he'd said the wrong thing. "No. You shouldn't have. You shouldn't have done it, period. If you'd have asked, I would have said no. You know why, genius? Because normal people face a lot of problems in their lives, but one that they don't worry about is the sanctity and privacy of their own minds. They have a reasonable expectation that their thoughts and their memories are theirs. Thanks to you, I'm never going to be able to trust my own memory ever again. I can't trust that my thoughts are my own, or that you're not listening in to what I'm thinking. But, yeah, I guess you could have asked."
He would have preferred it if she'd hit him again. That, at least, hadn't affected his ability to breathe. Here he sat, photographic memory, three PhDs, quite a powerful telepath, and not a single clue what he should say. Not a single word sprang to his mind.
*Promise her you won't do it again.*
Charles hoped his surprise didn't show on his face. Glad you finally decided to show your face, you bastard. In a manner of speaking.
*Well. What else can you say? You had your reasons; she doesn't want to hear them. You did it, and then you undid it. You could psychically push her into forgiving you, but if she ever found out, then she'd really never forgive you.*
What did you say to your Moira? he asked, swallowing hard. He couldn't make himself meet Moira's eyes.
*Apples and oranges, dear boy. She was a PhD and quite an excellent researcher in her own right by then. She'd had twenty-five years for her anger to cool. My advice: promise you'll never do it again.*
Charles cleared his throat. "Would...would it help at all if I promised to stay out of your head?"
"Would I know if you broke your promise? Would there be any indications that you'd violated my mind again?"
Violated. Charles winced. "Um. Not unless I wanted there to be."
Moira shrugged eloquently. "Then, I guess I really don't have any reason to trust your word, do I?"
Four blocks away, a waitress from the cafe, off-duty, was breaking up with her fiancé. Charles focused on her pain for a moment. If he'd thought it wouldn't make him look like a lunatic in front of Moira, he would have pulled at his hair. Anything to distract him from this. "I guess you don't," said Charles. "Well. Anyway, I promise I'll stay out of your head. As best I can," he added. Though honesty as a concept (and certainly as a virtue) tended to confuse him, this seemed to be a situation that called for it. "Sometimes, if you're feeling something really strongly--for instance, if you were in pain--well, anyway, you don't want to hear about that. I'm guessing you don't want to hear about it. I didn't actually read your mind just then. Um, I should probably...." He began to roll himself backwards, turning his wheels to be parallel with the sidewalk again. "You know. I think that's all I had to say. I'm glad you're doing well. Good luck with graduate school."
*You're behaving like a coward,* said Old Charles.
She doesn't want to talk to me, you ass. It didn't seem likely, at this particular moment, that she'd want to talk to him again for a long while. Possibly for the rest of their natural lives.
*Then why is she reaching out for you?*
What?
Something shot out and grabbed one of the wheels of his chair--her hand--and he stopped immediately lest he pinch her with the wheel's rotation. "Wait," she said. Maybe her voice sounded a tiny bit less angry. It was difficult to tell. "You said you'd tell me your reasons."
He sighed and turned back around. "Which do you want first, the ones that were about me or the ones that were about you?"
She frowned. "Whichever."
"The ones about me were...well, honestly, I don't want to say that I didn't trust you, because you were wonderful after all that business in Cuba. But. You did work for the CIA, and I knew you couldn't help but tell them about Erik and Raven, and I...I couldn't let..." Words failed him, and he pulled at a bit of loose skin about his cuticle. "Raven's still my sister," he said, as if that were an explanation. "And it wasn't just--I knew that you'd leave us be, but your bosses never would. I needed you, your mind, your knowledge, to get to them and wipe their memories of us, and I knew you'd never agree if I told you that that was my plan."
"You're damn right I wouldn't," said Moira, but she wasn't as vehement as she'd been and she didn't seem inclined to argue further.
"Right. So, that was about protecting myself and the boys." He paused. "Here's the other bit. At the time I sent you back to the CIA, your facility at Langley was still holding Emma Frost, Shaw's telepath. I know she has no love for the Agency, but I thought...it didn't seem outside the realm of possibility that she'd read your mind and tell your superiors what you wouldn't tell them, sort of a revenge against both you and me for imprisoning her. And also--and this is the bit that's really more about you than about me--I thought...." If only he hadn't promised to stay out of her mind. Words really were failing him.
"You thought?" Moira prompted.
"I thought there was a not small chance that Erik would go back to the CIA. Not to work for them, obviously not, but--for revenge, or for self-defense. To get Emma Frost, at the very least. He's a very distrustful man. Once it became clear that the CIA had allowed both the Russians and the Americans to fire on us, the CIA was added to Erik's list of enemies. I didn't need to read Erik's mind to see that. I thought that if I made it abundantly clear that you had absolutely no idea about anything to do with mutants or Cuba or me or him or anything, perhaps I could...minimize the damage."
Moira nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's a good point." She stretched her legs out in front of her and folded her hands on her lap. "You really can't do anything to stop him?"
Charles shrugged. "I don't even know what he's doing. For all I know, he's engaging in a vigorous letter-writing campaign." He and Moira shared a wry grin over the mental image of Erik writing letters to the editor or something, before Moira seemed to realize what she was doing and dropped her eyes. Charles felt his own smile fade and said, "No. I really can't. I can't communicate with him through that helmet of his, and I really have no idea where he'd go, if he'd stay in the United States even."
"He hasn't gotten in touch with you at all?"
He shook his head. Obviously he'd see Erik again. The question was, when? Or rather, when they met again, would Erik be trying to kill him? He supposed it was possible that he'd be trying to kill Erik, depending on the circumstances. He thought not, though.
"Raven hasn't?" Moira asked, her voice a fraction softer.
"No," said Charles, more shortly than he'd meant to. He'd had a lot of scabs ripped open in the course of this conversation.
Moira let out a deep breath slowly. "So. Assuming I accept all that as a justification--which I don't, just to be clear....If you had all these reasons for erasing my memories like that, why come track me down and undo it all? What do you want?"
There was a wrinkle in Charles's pants; he smoothed it. A block away, a young man who worked at a bookstore was balancing his checkbook; Charles took a moment to lose himself in the soothing columns of numbers. "I wasn't lying before, not really," he said. "I really did hear from a colleague--well, more of a prospective colleague--that you were thinking of applying to Harvard's biophysics program. I really did think that, well, if you are actually interested in pursuing mutation as a research interest, I could be of help. Perhaps make up for all that business with the memory wiping."
She snorted a laugh at that. It was so much nicer than the first snort that Charles could have shouted for joy. "Don't tell me you felt bad about that, Charles, because I won't believe you."
"Well, no," Charles admitted. "I mean, I really do feel bad about getting you fired. That wasn't my intention at all. I'd always supposed that since your bosses didn't remember anything either, they couldn't possibly find a reason to cause problems for you."
"What makes you think they'd need a reason?" Moira said with another laugh. This one was more bitter.
"Right, of course," said Charles. "No, actually, the idea of reconnecting with you came from...a friend."
"A friend." She raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Really."
Charles straightened himself out in his chair. It didn't make him look any taller, he knew, but it made him feel a bit more dignified. "I have got some, you know."
As if summoned by the gods of comic timing, it was at that moment that Charles felt a familiar presence at the edge of his mind, thinking about him, wondering. Things seem to be going okay, I guess... and then a more direct address to Charles: Well, Professor, how's it going? You've been out here for a while, I thought I'd check to make sure she hadn't killed you. Ah. Armando. If he looked out of the corner of his eye, he could see the other man leaning against another bench a bit further along the sidewalk.
Despite his best efforts to block Moira out, he felt a sharp spike of surprise coming from her. She had turned her head to follow Charles's gaze and, well, obviously the sight of Armando, whole and hearty, had given her a bit of a shock. "Armando?" she gasped. "Armando Muñoz?" She whirled back around to Charles, eyes blazing again. "I swear to God, Charles, if this is one of your illusions, if you're making me see this, I will tear you limb from limb, see if I won't."
Um. Things were going considerably better a minute ago, Darwin, said Charles. I don't suppose you could come over here and help me explain things to Moira? He gave Moira his best soothing smile and said, "It's not an illusion. There are actually quite a few things to explain. It's been a very interesting few months."
Part 3