nextraordinaire submitted: here’s the smol!charle for you! i am the slowest there is this is a week late but–
*tries to lean against door jamb but slips and falls out of frame*
Later on, when the initial panic had died down to something more of a simmer, Hank would admit that there had been a ( – only theoretical, very remote, not likely at all, it really shouldn’t have gone so far, I don’t know why – ) risk of this happening.
The serum was meant for an entire body. So the formula had to be a strong one, even in small doses. It was also initially a two-stage deal – first regressing the effects of his ‘cure’, then returning his feet to a human shape. From the beginning it had been in two separate doses, but pretty early on, Hank had combined them into one due to a low-level fear of needles, and increased the concentration in the process.
Here was the thing though: Charles may have lost his legs at twenty-seven, but his telepathy had been with him from the very start. Too weak for him to really notice, he’d passed it off as as tinnitus until the white noise turned into actual voices.
The thing was also that Hank wasn’t aware of this fact.
But the most important part was probably that Charles hadn’t bothered telling him before he injected the serum into his arm.
*
In all of the clusterfuck there was at least one thing that could be said in Charles’ favour. For a small child, he was quite happy and docile, although he chatted to himself in gibberish a lot. Most of the time, he slept, and when he cried, it was over fairly quickly – as long as the person in charge of him at the time didn’t panic and set off his telepathy.
It took a few days until everyone agreed that Sean was ironically best equipped to deal with Charles; being oldest in a big family gave you quite a lot of experience when dealing with wailing infants, whether you wanted it or not.
They didn’t know how much Charles understood, how much he heard from their heads or how long it was going to last. Hank had, in the secrecy of the basement lab, made several atheistic prayers that it would just – you know – wear off, but at the end of the third day, he gave up hope and began working on an antidote.
Out of either embarrassment or safety’s sake, Alex kept himself away from Charles, while Darwin, it turned out, also had a good hand with him – as did Raven when she finally showed up from wherever she’d been when Alex had managed to track her down with the number she’d given to him in Vietnam.
But still, the tension that was very much palpable the moment she stepped through the door, tanned, blond and brown-eyed just as Hank came out from the kitchen, not blue and in his lab coat that was currently splashed with a speckle of mashed carrots, only grew when she laid eyes on Charles in his arms.
There was moment of stillness, where Raven’s eyes were huge and yellow and almost scared – but it disappeared when Charles raised his hands and exclaimed, “Raven! Raven, Raven, Raven.” It didn’t come out sounding like he usually said her name, but with the way Charles’ eyes lit up, the message was clear as day.
“Charles,” she said, eyes going fond and shiny as he grabbed her hair in a tiny fist when she leaned down towards him.
Hank eyed her varily, still unsure. Charles, however, didn’t seem to either remember, or he was simply too happy to have her back, as he looked at Hank with his big blue eyes and said, “Up.”
They still had no idea how much was still left of Charles’ capacity – if he felt everything as strongly as he had before, or if it had regressed just as much as his age. It was now clear that he understood more than the usual two year old, even if he couldn’t express it properly. The only question was just how much.
So after another moment of hesitation, Hank handed Raven Charles, who immediately latched onto her hair and started babbling again. Raven smiled down at him. Not stopping, Charles returned it and pressed his little fist to her smiling mouth.
For a while, none of them said anything. Raven let Charles “talk” to her which mostly consisted of saying her name, gesticulating and saying vowel sounds, while Sean sat right beside her. None of them wanted to leave them alone, but neither did they ask where she’d been staying, what she’d been doing or the other obvious questions.
Darwin leant against the kitchen counter, overlooking the scene. He cleared his throat.
“Have you been in contact with him?” he asked first when Charles’ eyes had drooped shut and he was snoring lightly against Raven’s shoulder. Further explantion was not needed.
She stared back at him, eyes hard but not confrontational. “No,” she said, cradling Charles close. “I haven’t. Not for a long time.”
Darwin chanced a look at Alex and Sean, who looked grim, but nothing else. He shrugged.
And that was that.
*
It took a week until someone uttered the words again, if slightly altered. In the end, it was Hank that gathered his courage, blue and bushy from lack of sleep, and said,
“I think we should contact Erik.”
They were once again in the kitchen; sitting around the table, eating, Raven with Charles in her lap. He’d taken to her and now got rather fussy whenever someone else was holding him. Raven didn’t seem to mind that much, although she’d started putting her hair up in a ponytail rather than having it down to frame her face.
A face which was now frowning; her hands going tighter around her spoon. “Why?” she said, immediately defensive. “It’s not like he can help with anything; he’d only make matters worse, if Charles remembers anything.”
“You’re one to talk. It’s not like we want traitors back,” Alex said, fists clenching atop the table. Raven’s jaw got tight and she stabbed viciously into her cereal. “He shot the Prof. We don’t want him near here.”
“I have told you, I wish I hadn’t left. And why are you even posing it as an alternative?” Raven riveted her eyes on Hank, who met her gaze, steady and bloodshot and very fed up with everything.
“Because,” he said, “this is his fault. Ultimately, Erik is to blame for all of this. And now is the best time to make him see it.”
Raven opened her mouth when Charles tilted his head up, tugging at her white shirt. “Ewik? Ewik here?”
A needle could have been dropped and heard in the silence that followed. The pipes pinged inside the walls.
Then Sean leant forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. “No, Charles,” he said, shaking his head. “He’s not.”
Charles stared at him, gaping, before his face then scrunched up and he started crying. High, piercing and utterly, ridiculously loud. It was like a boombox in the kitchen and inside their heads all at once.
But apart from all other times, however, this time Charles didn’t stop. Like someone had unleashed all of his anger, frustrations and hurt in it’s most primal form, he just kept screaming all day. In the morning, he started right up, continued into the afternoon and well past six pm when Sean finally took him from Raven’s shaking hands and went upstairs.
“He will start again as soon as he wakes,” Sean said, as he came down the stairs after spending nearly an hour calming Charles down enough to get him to go the fuck to sleep. “Trust me, he will. He won’t stop.”
Darwin scratched his neck, where a mane had started to form as protection against the constant noise. He glanced over at Alex, who gave a terse nod, his mouth a thin line. So he turned back to Raven, who was pulling the ear plugs out with a grimace. “Do you know where to find him?”
Raven popped the yellow plastic out of her ear. Then she glanced over at Hank, shaking her head minutely.
“No. But I know where we can start.”
*
In the end, they did find Erik not long from the mansion at all. The Brotherhood’s new headquarters – the second one in five years – was in an old warehouse. All thanks to Emma, who kept them all hidden in plain sight. It was rather ingenious (and so, probably Emma’s idea altogether to be perfectly honest) and it was safe to say that it would have been impressive – if Erik hadn’t greeted them in the same horrible outfit as always.
(Really, I don’t know what is with him and capes, Raven had whispered to Darwin as Hank explained the situation; outbulking the self-proclaimed Master of Magnetism quite a bit in his furry form. But it has gone above and beyond sanity at this point.)
At first, he’d been furious, of course. Demanding to know who had done this to Charles and where he could find them, all spit out between clenched teeth. But the longer Hank went on with his explanation (interspersed with passive-aggressive accusations) the more blank the look on Erik’s face got; he’d never been the type to go white, or even pale in the face of horrible news.
When Hank was done, he was quiet for a long time. Then, after a short nod at Emma, he held out his arm and said, “Azazel, take us back to the Xavier Mansion.”
“But what about our car?” Raven asked, even though she was already taking a step forward, her hand still on Darwin’s elbow.
Erik took one long look at her. Then, he turned to Emma again. “Janos will drive it back. Now, let’s go.”
They lined up – Darwin their link to Azazel – and with a puff a feeling not unlike being sucked into a wormhole, they appeared just outside the main entrance. Azazel disappeared and for a moment, it seemed like they were all overtaken by just how bizarre the whole situation actually was.
Raven was the first to snap out of it, shaking her head slightly. “I’ll go get Sean,” she said and slipped inside the double doors, leaving Darwin, Alex and Erik on the steps.
While they’d been away, Sean had somehow managed to get Charles to quiet down. Not wholly, but at least he wasn’t screaming as much as he was quietly sniffling into the cuffs of the sweater they had found in one of the boxes in the absolutely terrifying attic. As Raven came back out with him in her arms, Sean trailing behind looking more like a ghost than anything else, he had buried his face in the crook of her neck.
“Here,” she said.
Erik just stared at her – and then at the back of Charles’ head. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Not until Charles seemed to realize someone stared at him and he lifted his head and turned to look and Erik, who was still in his helmet and cape.
Charles gaped up at him, blue eyes wide and amazed. The rest of them held their breaths as the outcome was suddenly less than predictable, and hoped that this was –
– when Charles burst into hysterical tears once again.
This time, the internal voice of confusion and fear was much louder than before. Raven, who still held Charles, almost dropped him. Darwin and Alex both doubled over as it caught them off-guard. Sean’s body, which had dealt with the piercing internal as well as external wailing for the better part of two days, simply dropped on the spot, out cold.
Erik managed to catch Charles from Raven’s outstretched hands, before she pushed her hands over her ears.
“Take it off!” she shouted, gritting her teeth. “You’re scaring him! Take the fucking thing off!”
With a flick, Erik pushed the helmet off. In the same moment It clattered to the ground with loud clonk, and the noise finally stopped. Charles stared up at Erik like a startled deer, as of seeing him for the very first time and Erik couldn’t do much else but to look back. It would have been a lie to not admit that Charles had been a very cute child – all rosy cheeks and with the same floppy hair he would carry with him well into adulthood. Still, it was also madness to not admit how odd this was.
Erik was about to hand him back a Raven who was struggling onto her feet, when with and exhausted little sigh, Charles put his head against Erik’s shoulder. Where the internal voice had been screaming just seconds before, there was now only a warm contentment.
Hank, who was letting Raven clutch his arm for support, then said, “Should we take him?”
“No.” Erik just shook his head, looking down at his shoulder, where Charles had lightly started to snore. “We’re alright.”
