Chapter Text
There’s something wrong with Charles Xavier.
It’s a fact that Charles has known for as long as he can remember, because people feel so much and he feels so little.
Maybe if he were more normal, he wouldn’t realize this until much later—that how he feels and how other people feel are so fundamentally disconnected. But Charles knows. He knows how they feel.
He can sense it.
Wherever he goes, their emotions surround him like colored ink swirling through water. It’s almost…overwhelming how vibrant they are. Charles can see them with a sense beyond sight. He can almost touch them, feel the shape of them, but he doesn’t quite feel them.
It’s maddening. (And relieving. Sometimes he wonders if he’s not better off the way he is.)
Charles feels more like the water—that calm, clear emptiness that things can pass through.
(He doesn’t want to be empty. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, why he can’t feel things the way normal people do. They make it look so easy, and he thinks a part of him hates them for that.)
It’s not that Charles doesn’t feel anything, because he does. He feels. Charles feels happiness like a fleeting ray of light piercing through an overcast sky. Interest. Curiosity. Annoyance or irritation, and is there really a difference between the two? Sometimes he’s sad. Alone. (Lonely.)
But Charles can feel everyone’s emotions. He knows how they’re feeling—how they feel.
(He knows that how he feels is nothing at all compared to that.)
Charles is seven years old when his father dies.
Charles is seven and he learns the shape of grief like a blind man describing an elephant by touch.
Grief feels…blue. A deep, drab, dark blue that’s sadder than sad. Grief is a monster, a shadow, and its claws hook deep in the people around him.
But not him. (Why not him?)
Maybe, Charles reasons, he’s in shock. Maybe it’ll hit him later. Maybe he’ll feel it then.
(He never does.)
Charles is seven, and his mother is grieving. She’s crying. It must feel terrible.
He tries to help.
Charles doesn’t know what he’s doing, really—he doesn’t know how to describe it, this strangeness that’s a part of him.
But that day he focuses on his mother—on those dark, churning, oppressive emotions. He dives right into them, going deeper and deeper until they become a sea of tangled threads.
He finds the one called grief and he…moves it. Shifts it. He presses it down, burying it under all the rest, and suddenly his mother is gasping and he’s launched back into himself and his wide eyes meet hers.
Charles is surprised. His mother is horrified.
(She knows. She knows what he did—knows that he did something.)
The grief in her is gone, and fear takes its place. She looks at Charles like…like he’s a monster. Like he’s a monster.
No, Charles thinks helplessly. (Cast adrift, the world spinning out of control.) Grief’s the monster. Can’t you see?
She doesn’t see.
“You…y-you…” Sharon Xavier turns and flees, racing up the carpeted mahogany stairs.
She’s wearing heels—she trips, catches herself on the bannister. Keeps moving. (Keeps running. She’s running from him.)
Charles stares.
He feels…he feels…
He doesn’t know. But he reaches out for his mother, for her horror and her fear. He rips it all away, pulls the grief back around her like a curtain, tries to undo what he’s done.
She’s rather drunk—maybe she’ll forget. Maybe she’ll forget this ever happened.
And she does. Sharon forgets.
(She doesn’t forget quite nearly enough.)
Charles doesn’t like Kurt Marko.
Kurt feels…off. Wrong, but not in the same way that Charles is wrong. Kurt’s emotions are…normal, Charles thinks. He just feels all the wrong things.
Charles’ father was Kurt’s friend. Shouldn’t Kurt be sad that he’s dead? Shouldn’t he feel that…that grief? Dark and heavy and blue. (Kurt doesn’t. Charles stares at him and all he can sense is satisfaction and cruelty and greed.)
Kurt Marko is often angry. He’s often angry at Charles.
He knows how wrong Charles is because he’s wrong, too. But not the same. They’re not the same.
(No one in the world, it seems, is quite like Charles. No one at all.)
Charles is nine years old when he kills his family.
He doesn’t mean to.
But Kurt is a bad, cruel man, and Charles can’t avoid him forever. He can’t avoid his anger forever.
(He tries. He really does—fills the air with disinterest when the man passes by, does his best to pretend he’s invisible. For a while, it works.)
It works for a while. And then it doesn’t.
Charles is nine, and his mother is drunk, and Kurt is angry.
He's lost a fair bit of money—something about stocks—and today he takes his anger out on Charles.
Charles tries to grab the anger with his powers, tries to push it down. Smother it. He tries, but Kurt is right there, looming above him with violence in every line of his face. He tries, and the anger slips away from him and grows, and Kurt’s expression twists as a new emotion blooms through the rage—disgust. (And fear. Nothing, Charles finds, is more dangerous than fear.)
Kurt takes off his belt, holding it above his head in a threat he will surely deliver. He takes a step forward.
There’s so much rage, and it’s all directed at Charles. (It’s sickening, and he almost imagines that he can feel it too—that Charles is angry too. Maybe he is. And maybe that anger is all his own.)
Charles tries to run. He makes it three steps up the stairs before a large hand snags the back of his shirt and pulls.
Charles falls, and there’s pain now. The pain belongs to him. He gasps, clutching one arm with the other. (His wrist is broken, and it hurts.)
Kurt looks down at him in anger. In disgust. (In fear.) He scoffs. (The belt is still in the air, still held above his head.)
“Fucking mutant freak.”
The belt moves.
Charles screams.
Kurt screams too.
(There’s a fainter, shriller echo that Charles can barely hear—a sound he realizes much later belongs to his mother.)
Charles is nine and in pain. He’s screaming, and Kurt is screaming too.
Kurt drops the belt, staggers backwards, clutches his head. He’s screaming, screaming, screaming, raw and animalistic and…
Pain. Charles can feel his own pain mirrored in Kurt. Mirrored and amplified, bouncing around unnaturally and…
It’s strangling him—Kurt. The pain. It’s like a living thing, that pain—like the flame from a magnifying glass grown into a raging inferno. (Charles can’t stop it. He can’t decide if he wants to.)
It happens so fast.
Kurt falls and twitches and Charles can’t look away.
Kurt stops moving, and his emotions fade to nothing, and Charles is screaming now for an entirely different reason.
Charles is nine when he finds out what death looks like. (What it feels like to that strange, unnatural sense he possesses.)
Charles knows the shape of nothing—the shape of death. (Darker than black. Emptier than air. Shapeless and wrong.)
Kurt Marko is dead.
He was killed.
Charles killed him.
(He didn’t mean to.)
Charles stands with a wince, still cradling his wrist. He looks away from—from the body.
He frowns. (The house is empty. The house feels empty. The house never feels empty.)
“Mom?” Charles calls out tentatively, stepping around Kurt’s body, slipping out into the hallway.
There’s no response.
Charles listens. (Nothing. No clink of a bottle, no shuffling of feet, just nothing.)
And he knows. He knows right then that what he did to Kurt, he did to his mother too. He knows before he finds her body in the parlour, the sharp bite of alcohol infecting the air from a knocked-over wineglass. She’s half on the floor, slumped against the couch, hair spilling across her face like blood.
Charles stares at her numbly.
(He didn’t mean to kill her either.)