[ Charles mumbles something soft, fingers finding Erik's side and winding into the fabric there.
All he does is cause accidents. Hazy with the effects of sedation wearing him down, he doesn't know that he's doing it, exerting his influence across the hospital in his despair. Later, the stories come to him: orderlies found crouched in stairwells with their memories missing, nurses with their identities confused and going back to their families at the end of the day in the wrong body. All the while Charles sits in his bed, feeling like his head is swollen, a festering wound, slowly coming to the horrifying realization that he's listening to the hospital's sick and dying, spending the waking hours that he can handle turned into his tear soaked pillow, thoughts thick on painkillers and the gaping hole in his life where his father should be.
Learning to control it comes slowly, fraught with pain and bloody noses, so much blood that the doctors were baffled every visit that followed Mum casting off her mourning clothing and forced to pull him from school, collapsed from so many minds trying to speak to him, shouting.
She didn't deserve his inexperience, his hacking away at her mind. She didn't deserve the shock of losing Father, either, but Charles should have known better than to think that when he got better at blocking people out, that didn't mean he could use his ability for good deeds. His attempt at making the loss better ended up destroying her in the end, and what Charles never did for Erik was finish the story. He didn't just fail at reconstructing her memory around her husband: he didn't wire everything back correctly.
Another change of scene, this time Charles is older with little Raven, dear sweet Raven standing behind a young telepath on his way to puberty and already losing his other parent, this time to the mad house. It was their stepfather's decision, Mum having elected to remarry while some of her original personality still existed, and he was inoffensive enough but he was never Charles' father. And now Mum's mind had disintegrated that last bit and left her son a cold household and an inheritance for when he turned eighteen to go along with his guilty heart.
The memories fading out, there's a grave silence until Charles speaks, voice hoarse with unshed tears. ] I... I'd never change someone's mind until the most dire circumstances. Moira. I understand that now that I have the power and finesse to. I could never change the wills of the people I disagree with over mutants and humans, over war, anything, I just keep remembering.
no subject
All he does is cause accidents. Hazy with the effects of sedation wearing him down, he doesn't know that he's doing it, exerting his influence across the hospital in his despair. Later, the stories come to him: orderlies found crouched in stairwells with their memories missing, nurses with their identities confused and going back to their families at the end of the day in the wrong body. All the while Charles sits in his bed, feeling like his head is swollen, a festering wound, slowly coming to the horrifying realization that he's listening to the hospital's sick and dying, spending the waking hours that he can handle turned into his tear soaked pillow, thoughts thick on painkillers and the gaping hole in his life where his father should be.
Learning to control it comes slowly, fraught with pain and bloody noses, so much blood that the doctors were baffled every visit that followed Mum casting off her mourning clothing and forced to pull him from school, collapsed from so many minds trying to speak to him, shouting.
She didn't deserve his inexperience, his hacking away at her mind. She didn't deserve the shock of losing Father, either, but Charles should have known better than to think that when he got better at blocking people out, that didn't mean he could use his ability for good deeds. His attempt at making the loss better ended up destroying her in the end, and what Charles never did for Erik was finish the story. He didn't just fail at reconstructing her memory around her husband: he didn't wire everything back correctly.
Another change of scene, this time Charles is older with little Raven, dear sweet Raven standing behind a young telepath on his way to puberty and already losing his other parent, this time to the mad house. It was their stepfather's decision, Mum having elected to remarry while some of her original personality still existed, and he was inoffensive enough but he was never Charles' father. And now Mum's mind had disintegrated that last bit and left her son a cold household and an inheritance for when he turned eighteen to go along with his guilty heart.
The memories fading out, there's a grave silence until Charles speaks, voice hoarse with unshed tears. ] I... I'd never change someone's mind until the most dire circumstances. Moira. I understand that now that I have the power and finesse to. I could never change the wills of the people I disagree with over mutants and humans, over war, anything, I just keep remembering.