Hello! I’m looking for a fic where Brian Xavier experiments on Charles as a child by having him read his emotions while not making facial expressions, and it messes up his ability to read emotions from people’s faces without telepathy? It also goes on a quite a bit into Charles/Erik as adults but I can only remember the beginning 😭
Hi Anon - the fic you're looking for is this one - happy reading :D
Smile (The worst is yet to come) by hllfire
Charles' telepathy developed when he was a baby. His father, driven by his desire to know more about his son's abilities, experiments on him, causing Charles to learn to ignore visual and social cues in order to rely heavily on his telepathy to interact with others.
When Erik doesn't allow him to see his mind like Charles would normally do, Charles is lost.
So, I just want to take the opportunity once again to call attention to the incredibly robust search capabilities of the Ao3 site. I found this fic in less than one minute, by plugging in 'Brian Xavier' in the 'Other tags to include' field and 'telepathy' in the 'Search within results' field. 9 results came up and it was the 2nd one on the list. It takes a little fiddling around sometimes with the various search parameters (and it's easier/harder depending on how much you remember from the story and what tags/words you search under) but I would highly recommend playing around with the tool to get comfortable with finding those lost fics you love!!!
