SX memorial Please! Curious to know what that means!
THANK YOU. and with this final draft the defense rests. it is....5k. sorry
“Charles,” Moira says sweetly, when he answers the phone, “you’re late.”
Charles, who started his day – yes, admittedly – a bit behind schedule, but was making good time until he came up against an absolutely biblical traffic jam ten minutes north of the city, then got out and ran to help when he saw the fifth ambulance race by on the shoulder in less than a minute, resents her tone.
“Actually,” he says, with his hand inside a man’s leg, literally pinching his femoral artery together while the ambulance screams through New York rush hour traffic – cell pressed between his shoulder and his ear, “I think you’ll find I’m actually early.”
It's then that Moira must hear the siren wailing in the background – and how loud it must be in the ER for her to have not noticed until now, Charles shivers to think – because she says, “Don’t tell me. That pile-up on 87?”
“The very same,” Charles says, and shoots the paramedic across from him an irritated look while the driver jerks them roughly around a corner – it’s not as if his slippery fingers are the only thing keeping a man from bleeding to death, or anything.
“Hey, I’m not the one drivin’,” the paramedic says innocently – covered in hair under his EMT uniform and, Charles can sense, a mutant just like the driver, though he hasn’t exactly had time this morning to go rummaging around in either of their brains to figure out what sort. “Take it up with Scotty.”
Charles doesn’t take it up with Scotty, but only because he’s occupied enough as it is keeping the man underneath him from feeling any of the screaming terror he ought to be, his mind like a possum squirming in a bag. He does raise his voice to request, “If you wouldn’t mind driving just a bit more carefully – ”
“Christ, are you always so goddamn polite?” drawls the man on the other side of the gurney – Logan, Charles learns from a quick skim over the surface of his brain, though he doesn’t see a surname.
“I find being polite is generally more effective than being rude,” Charles informs him, which most of the time is the only reason why he does it.
“Charles?” he realizes Moira’s saying in his ear – like she’s been trying to get his attention for a while. “Are you – ?”
Even though he can’t read her mind over the phone, Charles realizes what she must be thinking and feels an abrupt lurch of guilt that makes him rush to assure her, “I’m fine, Moira, I wasn’t involved – I only got caught in the aftermath. If you could send an intern to pick up my car before it gets towed, that would be lovely. And not that awful creature you sent to pick me up from the club last week – ”
“Alright, alright,” Moira says, but she sounds fondly irritated now instead of worried. “Just get your butt in here, Xavier, it’s not even nine and we’re about to be in Code Black already.”
“Lovely,” Charles says, and he can’t exactly move his hands to hang up the phone so he just moves his jaw and dumps it on the floor, trusting that Moira, reliably unsentimental, has ended the call herself.
They’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way to Stark-Xavier, and then they’re in some more of it once they turn into the ambulance bay, where they’re the third rig in line to be unloaded. Logan gets the doors open and hops out to go yell at some people about having a man with a severed femoral, which based on what Charles saw on the highway – a lot of twisted, smoking metal and not a lot of intact vehicles – is not going to be a unique case this particular morning, but if yelling makes him feel better then so be it. Charles puts a knee on the gurney and climbs up to straddle his patient, backwards – not a very dignified position, but it lets him keep his hands in the right place while Scott comes around and helps Logan unload them onto the asphalt. “Good?” Logan asks, as they jostle down, and Charles says, “Yes, good,” and they roll away fast into the chaotic, loving arms of the busiest trauma center on the Eastern Seaboard.
As always, the mental noise hits Charles like a raging tsunami.
It’s easier when he’s in a car, when he’s moving, to block it all out. Usually when he gets to work in the morning he takes a moment to himself in the employee parking garage to get himself in order, but there’s none of that today – it’s straight into the fray. He does his best to hold onto the squirming possum of his patient’s brain as they speed through the doors into the ER, but with Hank at his side nervously asking for a sitrep and Moira barking orders over the din and what looks like six or seven other patients crowded into center stage and being worked on frantically by an army of doctors and nurses, there are a number of other things vying for his attention. Surgery’s been paged but they’ve got just as much on their plate as everyone else, so Charles sends Hank for some clamps and steadies his hands while he performs a temporary repair. Probably he shouldn’t – he’s not always there to help, after all, and Hank has to learn to control his own nerves – but he didn’t sleep well last night and he hasn’t yet had his second cup of coffee, so he’s not really in the mood to be patient.
Once the clamps are in place he moves his fingers for what feels like the first time in days, shakes out a hand cramp, and clambers ungracefully down from the gurney – steadied by Moira, who’s standing behind him with a surgical gown to slip on over his civvies. The sleeves of his tailored button-down shirt are bright red up to the elbows, so it’s a bit of a lost cause, but he can certainly afford to replace it and anyway there’s no time to fret over his current sartorial disaster; he lets one of Moira’s nurses glove him up and then plunges back in, coming to the rescue of a first-year resident in way over her head with severe abdominal trauma.
“Call the blood bank!” he shouts, and sees Moira already on the phone, flashing him the OK. “Dr. Salvadore,” he says, trying to get the attention of the frazzled resident across from him – the old-fashioned way, for a second, before he goes into her brain and jerks a little, shocking her out of her funk. “Dr. Salvadore. With me, please.”
“Right,” Angel says, shaking herself, then – “Shit, she’s crashing.”
“I’m losing an airway!” Sean Cassidy yells from the other end of center stage, and there’s a woman screaming and crying hysterically behind him, and Charles only glances up for a second, long enough to see Dr. Muñoz running to help Sean, before he directs his attention back down to Angel’s patient.
It’s no surprise that Angel is as rattled as she is – this crop of first-year residents is barely a month old, and working a Code Black five minutes into a Monday morning, standing in a pool of blood, isn’t exactly a calm and peaceful introduction to emergency medicine, but Charles has been doing this for long enough that the chaos of it all barely registers. It’s almost meditative, the way he’s felt from some food service workers on a particularly busy night – no time to think, only time to do.
Except there’s not much he can do for Angel’s patient, whose abdomen looks like a handful of ground beef. “We need a surgeon,” he mutters, then raises his voice to call out to the room, “Where’s Dr. Quested?”
“He just took an emergency craniotomy up to the OR,” Moira says, appearing at Charles’ side. “And Dr. Azazel is in surgery, with a pulmonary embolism on an eight-year-old girl, and Dr. Darkholme is assisting Dr. McCoy. It’s you and me, Charles.”
“Wonderful,” Charles says, which is when Angel’s patient codes for the second time in as many minutes, and how he ends up meeting the new Chief of Surgery, one Dr. Erik Lensherr, while up to his elbows in a resected bowel.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” is the first thing Lensherr ever says to him, looming up stormily behind Angel like some evil fairtyale wolf in green surgical scrubs. “You can’t perform an emergency bowel resection in a trauma bay – ”
“Well, since the alternative was letting her die, I thought I’d give it a go – despite your delicate sensibilities.” Charles barely glances up from where he’s suturing the woman’s bowel back together. “Who are you, by the way?”
He feels the answer form in Erik’s mind the moment he asks the question, just before Moira says, “Charles, meet Dr. Lensherr – Dr. Shaw’s replacement as Chief of Surgery. Dr. Lensherr, Dr. Xavier.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Charles mutters, focused on his work.
Erik shoulders Angel out of the way and pulls on a pair of gloves, bending over to see what Charles is doing. His expression and his thoughts are both very condescending and very critical, but Charles elects nobly to ignore that in favor of continuing his sutures. “You can have her in a moment, Dr. Lensherr,” he says, focusing.
“Your stitches are terrible,” Erik tells him. “Did you attend medical school in a barn?”
“If you wanted to do them yourself,” Charles returns absently, “you should’ve gotten here sooner.”
“I was occupied,” Erik says, voice tight. “Don’t close – pack the wound, I’ll take her like that.”
“Don’t you think it’s better to close down here?”
“In the warzone you people call an ER, where I can barely hear myself think, let alone be sure you’ve cleared the field? No, not particularly.”
I can hear you think, Charles barely stops himself from saying – his filter tends to abandon him when he’s very focused. But maybe he ought not to have bothered biting his tongue, because as he finishes the last of his sutures he realizes that his stitchwork is…correcting itself as he works, arranging into neat, perfect rows. He pauses, briefly. He can feel from the quiet, deliberate machinations of Erik’s mind that he’s the one doing it – he’s a mutant, some sort of telekinetic. Charles doesn’t give any indication he’s noticed, though Erik must think him particularly dense if he doesn’t expect him to see that something is happening; the only explanation for such blatant behavior is that Erik wasn’t expecting to run into any other mutants at his new job. Joke’s on him – there are at least twelve of them at SX, not that they have a club or anything – not that any of the others even know Charles knows about them.
They’re out of Code Black and Charles can smell the coffee at the end of the tunnel, so he packs the wound like Erik wants without arguing and sends them on their way to the OR. Erik glares at him even as he’s wheeling the gurney out, which Charles thinks is a bit uncalled for, but oh well. He can’t get along with everyone.
Charles places one more central line, puts the hysterical screaming woman to sleep with a quick quirk of his mind – he can feel there’s nothing wrong with her physically, and Dr. Frost isn’t exactly the promptest psych consult in the world – then goes to change out of his surgical gown and his bloodsoaked civvies and finally finds that cup of coffee.
“So,” he says to Moira, leaning against the nurses’ station while they wait for the next wave of insanity to hit, “how was your weekend?”
“Oh, you know,” Moira says, gulping steaming hot coffee – he is, as ever, fascinated by her extraordinary pain tolerance in the pursuit of caffeine. “I let Sean take me out.”
“Sean,” Charles echoes, taking a second to place the name. “Sean Cassidy? The resident who warbles for help every time he needs to set an IV?”
“He’s cute,” Moira says defensively.
“As your friend, I reserve the right to question your taste,” Charles tells her, “and in this moment I am questioning very vehemently.”
“Oh please,” Moira says, “like you’re any better. When’s the last time you let anybody take you out? And it’s not like you’ve had any shortage of offers. You’re the goddamn belle of the ER.”
“Never say that again, thanks,” Charles says.
“Never say what again?” Alex Summers asks, appearing beside them, then – “Hey, Dr. Xavier, I think you rode along with my little brother this morning. Scott?”
“Ah yes,” Charles says. “Scott, the rally car driver. You two are brothers? I suppose that makes a lot of sense.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Alex says, defensive.
“Oh look, Dr. Summers,” Moira says, pointing. “Your O.D.’s waking up. Better go make sure he has a bucket to puke in.”
Alex swears darkly and hurries away.
“You have such a way with the children,” Charles tells Moira.
“Well, we are a teaching hospital.”
“Mm, quite. And what were you teaching Dr. Cassidy the other night?”
“No no,” Moira says, pointing. “We were talking about you.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“Nothing,” Moira complains, “which is exactly the point! The next person who asks you out, I want you to say yes. No matter who it is.”
“We work in an ER, darling, that’s a bit of a dangerous game,” Charles muses, which is when an ambulance screams into the bay outside and they have to jump to action again.
Charles hasn’t been on a date in four years, for what he considers perfectly good reasons. Regular, satisfying sex is all well and good, but you can only carry on with something like that for so long before the person you’re having regular, satisfying sex with starts to wonder why you aren’t interested in a more serious relationship. Charles could easily go fishing around in his dates’ minds, get a front-row seat to their likes, dislikes, red flags, dealbreakers, like a cheat code for romantic chemistry, and he has done as much in the past, but the idea of doing something like that long-term – when the other person couldn’t do the same in return, when they might not even know he was a mutant (and they wouldn’t, if he didn’t tell them, which he might never be brave enough to do) – just makes him feel tired and vaguely ill.
And the sex was all well and good, but he’d reached a point, four years ago – while he was seeing an Olympic swimmer who was fantastic in bed but alarmingly empty in the head – where he just couldn’t stomach it any more. Every time Charles was late to dinner and the swimmer resented him bitterly for it, he could feel it; every time he had to work late, every time he cancelled a date because he was too tired, every time he didn’t want to fuck and the swimmer thought to himself frigid bitch even while he was smiling and assuring Charles it was fine, or wanted to fuck too much and the swimmer thought slut and pictured unrealistic pornographic nonsense the whole time he was screwing him.
It’s not always a pleasant experience, being able to hear everything your partner is thinking in bed, and unfortunately Charles’ control is never all that good when he’s about to come.
So he just – doesn’t date. It’s fine, really. He has his work, which is very rewarding, and he has his enormous empty house in West Chester, where he’s far enough from the buzzing beehive of the city to actually sleep, and he has his friends, even if he only ever sees them inside the four walls of the hospital that bears his mother’s name.
Charles doesn’t need anything else; he doesn’t even want anything else.
Sometimes when he tells himself that he even believes it.
One of the oddest things about being a telepath is that Charles is almost constantly aware of himself in stereo, like the overlay of a 3D image; every time he meets someone, he can feel how they see him, too.
There’s the old woman with Alzheimer’s who comes into the ER after being sideswiped by a bike messenger and thinks he’s her deceased husband, her confusion over his accent since her George never had one and her helpless, terrified frustration when he tells her he’s only her doctor, despite Emma Frost’s insistence that he should play along. Charles can’t do anything for someone in her condition, not telepathically at least – her injuries are minor, just scrapes and bruises, no broken bones, so he patches her up and then leaves her in Emma’s care, escaping into the hall with that dark cloud of slow, muddled confusion still clogging up his own head, her longing and love and loss like a weight dragging at his own heart, until Raven comes down on her way to a consult and pauses to ask him if he’s alright.
“Fine,” he assures her, and then – because she’s one of the very, very few people on this earth who know what he is – adds, “an Alzheimer’s patient, that’s all. She thought I was her husband.”
“Scarred by mental images of old people sex,” Raven says wisely.
She squeezes his shoulder, smile fleeting. “Hey. One time I shifted into an Alzheimer’s patient’s daughter when she couldn’t get here fast enough before a surgery, just to calm him down. If that makes you feel any better.”
“Why would that make me feel any better?”
Raven shrugs. “Dunno. Don’t tell anyone, though. I’m not really sure what the ethics committee would do with that one.”
“You’re incorrigible,” Charles says.
Raven rolls her eyes on her way back down the hall. “Please. Like you’re any better.”
Which is, after all, completely true, so Charles can’t argue.
They’re not all as bad as that – there are the teenage girls with alcohol poisoning who think he looks like the romantic lead from the latest Jane Austen movie and won’t stop blushing furiously every time he comes to check on them, and the nurses popping in from other departments who think because he’s got an Oxford accent and no wife he must be tortured by some dark mysterious past and they might, if he would just notice them making eyes at him while they wheel patients up to the ICU, somehow heal him.
There’s Moira, the Stark-Xavier ER’s brilliant and stunningly belligerent head nurse, who runs her team like a military unit, mandatory leave and psych counseling included, and is at times so frustrated by her inability to order Charles around – despite many valiant attempts – that her head feels like it’s going to shoot straight off her shoulders; she hates him because she loves him, and she hates what he does to himself, and she knows that sometimes he spends his weekends riding along with paramedics because he’s seen something – felt something, really, but she doesn’t know that part – too terrible to take home with him and he has to wipe it out, and if she had her way she would check him into one of those rehabs masquerading as a health spa, never mind that he isn’t addicted to anything. The bags under his eyes are too dark, and he’s not eating enough, and it almost makes Moira miss his early days as a resident, when he’d roll up to work with his shirt mis-buttoned, sexily disgruntled in a different hook-up’s car every morning.
And there's Raven, of course, who was – unofficially, since Sharon Xavier lived in horror unto her death of the word Dickensian – his mother’s ward, who’d followed Charles into med school with the attitude that he was doing it all wrong, claiming she wasn’t bothered that he blasted her out of the water in terms of performance but secretly, tearfully frustrated by it all, since she actually had to put in the hours studying, and all he had to do – she said – was read the answers out of the teacher’s head. It was a bit more complicated than that; yes, Charles absorbed his teachers' knowledge like a sponge, and no, his university experience didn’t involve the cracking of many books, because why read about a dry thoracotamy when your professor had performed three during his time as a surgeon and you could just experience them – but he never really tried to explain, never tried to defend himself. Raven, to this day, as much as she loves him, resents him for how easy she thinks he has it, when he can see what a patient’s not telling him, when he can feel what they can’t put into words – she resents him for the New Yorker article last year that referred to him as THE GOD OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE, never mind that he’d declined to comment – the reporter had come into the ER as a patient and left with 10,000 words – and every time she looks at him he feels that, just a little.
Somehow what happened during his third year as a resident didn’t change any of that. Raven got an up-close and personal look at everything his gift costs him, everything this job costs him, and what she’d thought, with a flippancy that hit Charles like a swift fist to the gut, was that she would still make that trade, if she could.
But – if she weren’t thorny and complicated and determined to bite off more than she could chew, she wouldn’t be Raven.
He knows how he looks to his first-years, alternately challenging professor, heroic battlefield medic and patient mother-figure; and to his second-years, Hank and Armando, who after he took them out drinking to celebrate the end of their first year lost some of their respect for him and all of their fear. Not that there isn’t something terrifying about seeing your attending sloppy-drunk on cheap vodka and dancing on the bar, but that is, Charles supposes, a different sort of fear. The first time he’d met Hank – wet behind the ears and over-eager and, Charles had thought at first, way too twitchy to be pursuing a specialty in emergency medicine, he’d felt an overwhelming wash of hero-worship; Hank had read all his research, even his university dissertation, and was so honored to have the opportunity to work with him – which he’d told Charles about at alarming and great length while Armando watched in horror, until they’d all been put out of their misery by a merciful influx of casualties from a construction site accident in Midtown. Hank still feels that, when he’s with Charles – the admiration, the academic mythology – but now it’s all twisted up with the (to him) mortifying image of Charles sticking his tongue down that bartender’s throat.
He knows that Emma Frost thinks he’s the sort of headcase that would win her a lot of awards, if she could get him to sit down with her and then publish her findings, and that the surgeons are a mixed bag: Dr. Quested vacillates between respecting his abilities and not wanting to get anywhere near the blast radius of utter chaos that is his professional life, Dr. Azazel thinks of him as an irresponsible nepotism baby who from time to time manages to get lucky and save someone’s life; and then, of course, there’s Erik.
The hospital has adjusted to its new Chief of Surgery much the same way people adjust to a wasp in the house; half of them trying to hide from it, half of them pretending it isn’t there, and an intrepid few determined to kill it. Professionally, that is.
Erik, though, seems to be unkillable; he’s an impeccable surgeon and a brilliant doctor besides, and the only complaints any of his patients seem to have is that he has a bedside manner like a Bond villain – not that anyone minds by the time they come out of surgery completely, often improbably healed. He comes to them from Dusseldorf by way of a long matriculation at the Mayo Clinic, and no one can figure out why he chose to give up such a cushy job to come be Chief of Surgery at a small, scrappy hospital in Upper Manhattan – except Charles, who of course knew from the first second he saw him that Erik had come here initially to deliver testimony against Dr. Shaw at his disbarment, and stayed, in part, because he felt responsible for leaving Stark-Xavier without a captain, and in larger part because he’d been bored out of his mind at the Mayo Clinic and starting to develop an ulcer about the unfairness of it all: how they could perform cutting-edge, life-saving surgeries, but only for a select, privileged few.
“I don’t really think he belongs here,” Raven muses, while she and Charles are having a midnight lunch in the viewing room above the OR, watching Erik perform an emergency aortic valve repair in dead, focused silence with his operating team shifting awkwardly around him. “I think he should be, like, interrogating people at Guantanamo or something. Or tyrannically ruling a small country in eastern Europe. Or robbing banks.”
“Oh, he’s not as bad as all that,” Charles says, even though just this morning he’d seen Erik smile at a pediatric surgical patient with so many teeth that he’d scared the boy to tears, his mother clutching him protectively to her chest. Erik had, at least, been bewildered by the whole display, so he hadn’t meant to scare the boy – and Charles, standing across the ER checking his own patient’s charts, had felt his wounded flare of frustration.
“You’re only saying that because you can see inside his head,” Raven says, mouth full of bahn mi. “No one thinks they’re a horror show.”
“He’s not a horror show, Raven, honestly.”
Down in the OR, the anesthesiologist starts to hum absentmindedly – then squeaks and shuts up when Erik shoots her a glare.
Raven gives Charles a told you so look, chewing.
“You’re very judgmental,” Charles says.
“Are we pretending you’re not judgmental?” Raven asks.
Charles just sighs and goes back to watching the surgery, his telepathy blanketing the room, the careful, measured rhythm of Erik’s mutation soothing something inside him as he holds clamps shut and guides his scalpel more precisely than a human surgeon ever could, subtly controlling the blood flow inside his patient’s body in time with his own heartbeat. Erik is a thing of beauty when he’s working, even though Charles can feel the nagging irritation at the back of his mind at having an audience. If anyone asked, Erik would say that Charles and Raven are sitting in on his surgery to learn, to observe his technique, but privately he thinks they’re here to gossip and laugh at him, as if there’s anything to laugh at; he is an enigma of confidence and self-doubt, the utter serenity of focus in his work and the boiling inner sea of his emotions. Charles wants to slide deeper into him like burrowing down under the covers in bed; he wants to know where all that anger comes from, what made Erik, what hurts him, but despite what Raven believes he does have boundaries, and taking a deep dive into a stranger’s psyche would cross a lot of them.
Because that’s what Erik is to him – a stranger.
They work together, yes; they’ve come to respect each other down in the trenches of the ER; but Erik never lingers, only ever gives Charles a crisp nod when they pass each other in the hallways, eats alone in his office and never tags along with the other attendings when they grab breakfast or dinner after a particularly hard shift. Charles avoids hearing what Erik thinks about him, because in spite of himself he likes the man and he doesn’t want that thrown back in his face.
He can’t imagine that Erik has a positive opinion of him, for the most part because of one particular incident: Erik’s first week on the job, 36 hours in Code Black and not a moment to breathe in at least twelve, and Erik had come bleary and exhausted into the on-call room only to find Charles curled up on the bottom bunk, sobbing near-silently. He’d hovered in the open door, a shadow in the light from the hall, his hand on the knob for a long minute before he’d finally turned to leave – and he hadn’t said anything, but Charles had felt, in his brief, glancing contact with Erik’s mind – like accidentally putting his hand on a hot stove and then yanking it away – pity, and discomfort, and not a small amount of disdain.
It was no fault of Erik’s; if Charles had walked in on any other doctor in a similar situation he’d have felt the same way. But he’d just lost a patient, a three-year-old boy whose mother had been pronounced dead at the scene of a car crash, who was all alone and didn’t understand what was happening and was terrified, and Charles knew that they couldn’t do anything to save him and he knew that it would fuck him up royally to try it, but he couldn’t not, so he’d gone into the boy’s mind to soothe him, and called up memories of his mother, and kept the boy away from his own death even while it was happening – so that it was Charles who felt it, instead, Charles who felt that black nothingness creeping up around him, his heart kicking in his chest, like a horse fighting against being dragged over a cliff. He’d opened his eyes afterwards on a gasp, the machines flatlining, and it had been all he could do to pronounce time of death, his throat tight, choking, before he was fleeing the ER, looking for somewhere private to fly apart into a million pieces.
Which is how Erik found him, and how he probably still thinks about him, to this day: hiding and crying in the dark, like some sad, pathetic first year.
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