ЛилиСев

Просто прекрасно. Вообще не поклонница, но мне заплакалось.

@темы: video, HP

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Классный виддер

@темы: True Blood, video

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Ключ к успеху via nataly_lenskaya & vechniyzov

@темы: Картинки

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James Marsters 2012

29 января 2012 - Wizard World Comic Con - Новый Орлеан, Луизиана

первое фото

@темы: _James_Marsters, photo

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17 аgain

Опять пересматриваю, все таки интересный фильм. Я всегда на первых кадрах реветь начинаю но они мне очень нравятся. Зак прекрасен.
АПД: ещё раз смотрю слава кабельному тв Мишель с Заком так хороши, что я, грешно дело, подумываю об инцесте

запись создана: 28.01.2012 в 12:38

@темы: Кино

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очень нужна помощь!

Кто-нибудь в высшей математике что-нибудь понимает? У меня в пятницу эту экзамен.

8ые и 9ые задания надо решить и пятые. Вернее я буду пробовать разобраться как решать, но может кто-нибудь умеет?

запись создана: 24.01.2012 в 13:07

@темы: Вопрос, Пч, Я

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Дрю и Астро из х-фактора забрали моё сердце. Ну, ещё Маркус симпатично поёт.

@темы: tv

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Dawson's Creek/Roswell

m.fanfiction.net/s/348454/1/

@темы: Ссылки, fanfiction

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X-Men

Fill: Limited Release (50/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-08-05 23:58 (UTC)
Behavior like that obviously needs to be rewarded, and Charles curls a fist around Erik, sighs into his mouth, and loops his other arm over Erik's shoulders, dragging him down until Erik is a breathless weight against Charles, pinning him to the bed.

"I only want you," Charles gasps, grinding them together as much as he could with them curled toward one another on their sides, the light of the digital clock and the street lamps the only illumination in the room. "I've only ever wanted you."

"Such a fucking liar," Erik accuses, but he's still laughing, voice shaking. He wraps his hands around both of them, jerks them off together so roughly it almost hurts, but that intensity — where it balances on that knife edge between sharp and too-sensitive pain and lavish pleasure — sparks behind Charles's eyes, going off like fireworks along his brain where it's hooked into Erik's building orgasm, too, tangling together.

And Charles says, "But I want it to be true," because he means it, he wishes sometimes that he could dissolve himself into Erik and live there forever. He feels overcome, rapturous, all the Harlequin bingo words strung up like carnival lights inside his head, and Charles gasps it all into Erik's mouth, the heady rush of gratitude and affection and how it hurts like a constantly deepening wound to love someone the way he loves Erik: with pathetic desperation, without regard for dignity, needful and begging.

"God," Erik swears, and it sounds like it's getting scraped out of him, ripped out of the marrow, "I fucking love you," and that's it, that's all Charles needed. He makes a sobbing noise as Erik jerks it out of him, chanting, "Yeah, yeah — just like that, let me see it, Charles, let me have it, open up, just like that," and when Charles comes, it feels like it blazes out of him, Erik's hands and his mouth and the weight of his body keeping him grounded, keeping him from flying away completely.

***

TBC
Fill: Limited Release (51/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:01 (UTC)
(A/N: ...Yeah that was some major numbering fail from the last section. BUT I AM JUST GOING TO HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT FOR NOW. Sorry guys. Hope it's not too confusing!)

When Raven gets to the house in the morning, there's a familiar, distinct, and terrible awkwardness in the air, thrumming between Hank and Alex, who are situated at far opposite ends of the massive kitchen counter in the massive kitchen. Previously, Raven hadn't ever seen them more than an arm's length apart unless there was incarceration involved, which of course means she smirks, helps herself to a cup of coffee, and asks:

"So let me guess — nobody's ever taught you guys how to shield before."

Hank drops his face into his hands. "No," he mumbles into his palms. He's so red Raven bets you could see his face from space.

"There were…dreams," Alex says, awkwardly, hands clutched around a mug.

Raven stirs in some creamer and two packets of Splenda, which Charles keeps in the house exclusively for her use. "Trust me," she assures them. "You're just lucky you didn't have to survive his adolescence in this house. Both is telepathy and his horndog tendencies were peaking simultaneously — we had to have a lot of fucking awkward discussions about what exactly counted as incest."

"Thank you for that, Raven," Charles says, zipping into the room on silent wheels, looking flushed and only a little irate, which means Erik was kind enough to preemptively fuck the bitchiness out of him last night.

Alex, who Raven has always suspected of being made of stronger stuff, recovers admirably from being by-proxy-orgied by Charles and Erik enough to say, "Hey! You knocked me out yesterday!" pointing an accusing finger at Charles.

Charles arches a brow. "You were going to burn down a government facility."

"You invited me there specifically to piss me off, didn't you?" Alex asks, voice tight.

"Well, yes," Charles admits. "But it was more to see how finely tuned your existing control is and less to be a bastard."

Alex's expression when he turns an appealing stare at Raven makes it pretty clear he doesn't see the difference there. Most of the time, neither does Raven, except for in cases of emotionally unstable cons with massively destructive mutations.

"He's trying to teach you a life lesson," Raven explains. "It all feels shitty and invasive and sort of wrong now, but if you just let him have his way with you, eventually you get used to it."

At this point, she gets clipped by a stack of magazines that must have come overnight in the mail, and Raven's still squawking, "Fucking — God damn it!" and trying to claw her mussed blonde curls out of her face when it's Erik's turn, this time, to say, "Thank you for that, Raven," followed by wet noises and palpable disgust from Alex, which makes Raven momentarily glad she can't see her brother sucking face with her boss at the moment. She's endured them as a couple for so long already, this newest scar would be lost in the ocean of others.

"You may look now, Raven," Charles says at long last, sounding huskier than before.

Raven does, but at Alex instead, who looks haunted. "Prison's looking better and better in comparison, huh?"

Hank goes momentarily distressed, and Raven feels a beat of apology for that before Erik interrupts to ask, "Raven, do you have anything for us from yesterday or are you here specifically for the free show."

"Your show is gross and terrible and has been stuck on reruns for at least three years," Raven quips in response, and reaches into her Mary Poppins bag, returning with a stack of files an inch deep, sliding them across the counter and into Erik's waiting hands.
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Fill: Limited Release (52/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:02 (UTC)
Xavier House has always felt to big — the less said about the Westchester Mansion, the better — and even with Hank shyly reading the paper and eating toast that's fairly sagging under the weight of the peanut butter, even with Alex scowling darkly enough to fill up an entire room, Erik creating OCD-neat piles of documentation across the tiled breakfast counter in his shirtsleeves, cuffs unbuttoned, and Charles making himself tea, it's only barely beginning to scrape away at the space. It's a leftover cobweb from childhood, their youth and adolescence spent trying to carve smaller spaces out of the enormous ones they'd been dumped into. Charles's parents weren't neglectful, exactly, so much as forgetful, distracted, and Charles has always known too much about everybody to ever be angry with anyone, and even when Raven had gotten angry, Charles had only ever gotten quiet, gotten apologetic. The breadth of what Charles knows is a blessing and a curse, and Raven thinks that if loneliness wrote on her skin — underneath her skin, where she can't change it — and stayed with her longer than her milk teeth, then she hates to think what it's like when Charles is afraid, when it's too quiet in the house.

"You guys should have some kids," she says, extemporaneous, because it's both true past time. "You prime child-bearing years are going to hit the twilight stages in the next half-decade or so."

"Ignoring the complete insanity of your statement, thank you for reminding me I need to make a phone call," Charles says to her primly, and heads off for the old fashioned wall phone, its long and curly cord a source of endless delight for her brother, and for no particular good reason.

When she turns back to the criminals at breakfast, they look plainly speculative. Erik, fine piece of goal-oriented German engineering that he is, appears to have completely ignored the detour and has his Crime Solving Frown on, the piles growing more and more complex, some shunted off to the side as they lose their immediate utility.

"If it was a secondary mutation, I'm pretty sure we would have known about it by now," Raven assures them. Alex looks slightly mollified, and Hank looks sort of disappointed, which explains why her brother's so head over heels for Hank, Raven guesses.

She'd pulled his file, too: kid genius, early screw-up, runaway from parents who had missed him, but who'd pretty effectively moved on. Hank's got two younger siblings he probably doesn't know about, and Raven figures if she tells him and makes him cry at breakfast, reflector or no, Alex Summers is going to set her on fire. Mutant files are, as a whole, getting slowly less and less sad, but it's a glacial pace — Raven knows she's lucky, that not everybody found Charles as a best friend and brother. It's selfish but she's glad. Learning to share him with Erik had been horrible enough, and she'd already been an adult by then.

"What, so we're absolutely sure the professor's not going get knocked up," Alex retorts, snotty.

"I mean, trust me, he and Erik have been trying," Raven tells him seriously.

"…Gross," Hank says delicately.

In the background, Charles is saying, "Good morning, Edie," and "I know, overslept — it's all been very exciting recently. I've met two brilliant young mutants in Erik's charge," because of course that is how he would describe a kid that they handwaved out of supermax in sympathy and his sketchy best friend, who has a semi-shady history of helping people set up meth labs for money. It's not like Raven doesn't understand; McCoy clearly doesn't have it in him to trick for a living.

"This is bad," Erik says suddenly, grim. "It means — "

"They probably already have enough to have some sort of Cerebro prototype, yes," Raven says, turning her attention back to Erik, who's face has gone stoney.
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Fill: Limited Release (53/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:03 (UTC)
Yesterday hadn't all been dramatics and feelings. While Charles had been playing with Cerebro and scaring the shit of Erik and fucking with Alex to see if he could be trained, Raven and Armando and Angel and Sean had background research going, returns coming in slowly at a snail's pace. Alex had talked about a couple of blow-shit-up and grabs he'd done with Shaw in the early days, and the crime profile, once fed into a computer, had spit out a couple of hundred similar cases. The winnowing had taken days, Sean complaining bitterly the entire time and humming at just the right pitch to give everybody in the office a headache until they'd all capitulated and joined in to help. They'd turned up two dozen cases, ultimately, seemingly random until you traced all the locations all the way back, scoured the contemporary building manifests. There were office parks and universities and coffee shops and banks, and all of it seemed like dry runs for terrorism until she'd started going through witness and office listings: names of people involved in the Cerebro projects, independent contractors. Little pieces here and there, a slow and painstaking accumulation of the building blocks of the machine that had begun with Alex's help and continued after his incarceration. Even the Tenleytown line explosion on the D.C. redline — Dr. Mark Asheburg, head electrical engineer on the project, who'd been authorized that night to take home a thin file on circuitry patterns. Asheburg and the briefcase were presumably killed in the subway fire, and among more than 100 casualties, nobody had ever considered that to be suspect.

Now Raven thinks everything's suspect.

"I called and screamed at everybody but nobody could give me a compelling reason how nobody drew the proper connections between the break ins," she goes on, low and tense, feeling Hank and Alex's eyes on her skin, anxious and curious. "And to be fair, these were scattered years apart, not necessarily at military installations or government targets, and, well." She shrugs. "I guess this gives us a bit of an idea how high Frost should rate on the OCP scale."

Erik says, "Let's hope it's lower than Charles."

"Everybody is lower than Charles," Raven replies, distracted.

"We need to — " Erik starts.

"Everybody is meeting at the office in two hours," Raven interrupts.

Erik asks, "And — ?"

"We're making progress on the metal interference front," she tells him, because there are only a handle of smelters with the technical ability to make psi-dampening metals, and even fewer with the level of skill to make anything capable of shutting out Charles. "Our contacts in Russia are making progress, too. We should have some possibilities for you, or at least original end-delivery locations by tonight."

Erik stares at her for a beat, and there's an uncomfortable knowing in his look.

Erik lives in painful proximity to Charles, the ugly aftermath of the shooting. He's given Charles baths and wiped his ass — literally — and they've had fucking terrible conversations about whether or not to hire a pro to intervene in their sex lives in this early days, when they (and the doctors) hadn't been sure about what would or wouldn't work again. They've had every possible conversation about Erik's guilt and grief and fury and helplessness because there's nowhere to hide from it, they breathe the same air and share the same psychic space. And as miserable and exposed and relentlessly exhausting as that is, Raven wonders if it isn't preferable to what she as — enough room to run.
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Fill: Limited Release (54/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:04 (UTC)
aven knows that Erik thinks she and Charles were spoiled. They were, by one another, by money, by things that money could buy, and if you erase the ugly beginnings of her life, and the ugly moral vacuum that brought her into the Xavier family, then ages ten and up were fucking charmed. They were stolen champagne giggle years, of Charles's awkward dance lessons and changing skins to fake out their nannies. They were soggy hot secrets during the depths of summer on Cape Cod and summers in Paris and Prague and waiting impatiently for Charles to finish up at the library. It was always knowing, the way you can only know this if you are very fortunate, that there is injustice in the world but that it can be righted, and that you are the person who can help.

None of her FBI training — and it had to be the FBI, because rumor had it the NSA was too interested in recruiting mutants, that the CIA was still fucking experimenting on them, and the FBI had a long history of affirmative mutant hires — had prepared her for that day at Columbia. It was Charles's closing keynote, and beautifully written for maximum effect. Raven had gone through and dutifully redlined anything boring, since reporters would be there that day, and Charles had been wearing a white shirt and slate-colored slacks, the suit jacket abandoned somewhere, and Raven had been idling on the left side of the stage, watching Charles in the spotlight with long-suffering affection with the first shot had gone through the air like a snap and the world had fractured in two.

She'd thought he was dying, under her hands, when she'd pressed her palms down onto his gut and screamed for someone else to do the same with the bullet wound on his thigh. All she'd been able to think was that it would nick an artery, that he would bleed out in her hands, blue eyes wide open with absolute dead psychic air between them for the first time ever: no fondness, no irritation, like a room with all the oxygen sucked out. And Raven had cried and cried and kneed in an ever-widening pool of Charles's blood that day until the paramedics had ripped him away from her and she'd looked down and realized everything below the chest on her was dark red, blood smeared and beginning to dry brown up her shaking arms.

Even though she'd stayed with Charles after the hospital, long enough to know he'd probably be okay, she'd also run as far and fast as she fucking could — to the relative safety of her own apartment, to the uncomplicated arms of being embarrassingly drunk, to the office, where she could pour it all out in the work. It was easier to look for clues, to try and find revenge, than it was to sit with Erik in tense and miserable silence while the physical therapist tortured her brother for an hour three times a week. This is what she does instead. This is what she's best at, and one day when they catch Shaw and he burns for all the people he's killed and Raven's ruined dress and Charles and Erik then all there's going to be is an awkward guilt, the lingering bruise of cowardice.

And of everybody in the world, Raven thinks Erik probably understands it best. That does her fuck all good, since of everybody in the world, Erik will absolve her the least.

"What now?" Erik asks, finally, after an eternity of shared silence.

Raven swallows hard. "Breakfast?" she asks.

"Phone," Charles corrects, and says into the receiver, "He's right here, Edie — ignore him if he's being a bear. He hasn't had any coffee yet."
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... - harborshore - Развернуть
Fill: Limited Release (55/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:05 (UTC)
So Raven watches the ritual handing off of the Sunday morning phone call, Erik making a pained I send my mother a daily e-mail to prove I am alive why must I call her as well? expression and Charles's reproachful Edie Lehnsherr is a lovely woman and she worries about you constantly, the least you can do is talk to her for ten minutes after I have already updated her on all the inane sundries you find so terrible to discuss look. Then there's an exchange of coffee and Erik perches on a counter, rearranging fridge magnets and saying, "Mmhmm," into the phone occasionally, while Charles eats three pieces of toast with butter, and today, in an interesting twist, does the crossword (badly) with Alex's help, since Hank has already made short, brutal work of the sudoku.

Hank's voice, when it comes, is a surprise. "Do you think we'll catch Shaw?"

Raven looks at Alex, who is arguing with Charles about how exactly to spell Milquetoast, and thinks about Scott and Alex and how she can't bear to watch anybody else's brother hurt. "We have to," she says.

***

TBC

@темы: fanfiction

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X-Men

Fill: Limited Release (46/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-07-24 21:51 (UTC)
"Did Charles teach Lehnsherr how to drive, too?" Alex mutters, mostly to himself, and covering his eyes as they veer past a silvery purple Ford Windstar. They're momentarily close enough that he can see the fascinated horror in the eyes of the three kids in the backseat, plastered up against the fingerprinted glass.

From the front seat, Raven says, "Charles and Erik are both great drivers."

"So it's like one of those evil feedback loops, basically," Angel clarifies.

The car swoops across another two lanes, heading toward the offramp at warp speed, and then Alex is too busy bracing himself against the centripetal force of the turn onto the local road to ask where the hell they're going until they're already there — a stark military compound in the shadows of massive satellite dishes, that CIA woman waiting for them at the gates.

"Armando," she says, and nods at Angel, too, and Raven.

"Is Charles okay?" Raven asks, locking the car doors and flashing her badge at some rapidly approaching dudes with a fuckton each of guns strapped around them. "When I left, he was still — "

"Erik has managed to convince him to get out of Cerebro," the CIA woman says, too diplomatic, which probably means that Lehnsherr probably broke whatever the hell Cerebro was into itty bitty pieces with his mutation while Xavier stared at him with bleak, pitiful blue eyes. "And — " the woman, McTaggert?, says this looking directly at Alex " — he wanted me to go ahead and tell you that your brother isn't hurt."

It's like all the muscles and bones in his body go on strike at once, and he's leaning heavily against Armando before he knows it, feeling his heart palpitate in his chest. It takes about ten seconds for him to push away, to get some distance, but when he does it he gives Armando an apologetic smile, because Munoz seems like good people — Alex just doesn't really trust himself right now.

"Good," he manages. "That's good. Do they know where he is?"

McTaggert's face grows sober. "That's where it gets more..."

"Unprecedented," is what Xavier says.

They had been forced to go through like six hours of security clearance, during which Alex becomes pretty well sexually acquainted with the guy who does his unnecessarily thorough body search. It's a sign of how sleep-deprived and crazy he is that he thinks, How much do you want to bet nobody tried that shit on Xavier, before he'd followed Moira up a creaking metal platform, flanked by Angel and Armando — both hesitating — to find Xavier, flat out, lying on someone's suit jacket, head in Lehnsherr's lap. Hank's sitting on the ground next to them, his face the color of Elmer's glue.

"Oh, come the fuck on, Charles," Raven says, long-suffering but not particularly alarmed.

Hank is saying, "I'm so sorry, professor — "

"Can I kill him?" Lehnsherr is asking Xavier, half-joking. Probably, and Alex hears himself say, "Hank, get over here," without any input from his higher brain functions. What the fuck.

"Alex would be terribly upset if you did," Charles says.

" — I had no idea," Hank finishes in a babble, and Xavier, from where he's prone on the ground, pats Hank on the knee — ugh — and says:

"It's quite all right, Hank, really," before turning to Alex and waving. "Alex! Did Moira — "

"Thanks," Alex interrupts, because he knows that Xavier is a creeper and a fucking weirdo and has jacked up designs on Hank's nubile genius, but he's grateful that the guy is on his side, that he is telling Alex the most salient point while everybody else keeps talking about catching terrorist ringleaders — as if Alex cares about that shit at all. He just wants his brother back. "Did you see where he is?"

The "so I can blast out of here and get him" part is unspoken, but he must be projecting that so hard that Hank hears it, because that asshole just narrows his eyes and gets up, lickety-split, darting over like he could stop Alex from doing something stupid. Alex is champion at doing stupid stuff, and it doesn't matter how much Hank stares at him, pleading, or if he let's himself bump shoulders with the guy, reassuring: what's gotta be done has got to be done.
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(Анонимно)
2011-07-24 21:53 (UTC)
"That was what is so unprecedented!" Xavier says, propping himself up on his elbows successfully for about 20 seconds before Lehnsherr drags him back prone again, holding Charles flat by his shoulders and scowling down at him in a way that would probably be scarier if Charles wasn't looking back up at him like he was the basking in the sun or some equally gross comparison.

"Charles," Lehnsherr warns.

Raven stomps over, too, and nudges her brother with one foot. "What did he do to himself?"

"It's irrelevant," Charles insists, and before anybody else can disagree, goes on to say, "What I was saying is that while I failed to ascertain Scott's exact location, I have much more information on Shaw's associates — specifically Ms. Frost."

Lehnsherr, because he's not so secretly a troll, reflexively turns to smirk at Alex, who can't help but think, BOOBS really loudly, which would be bad enough even if it didn't prompt Xavier to give him a quelling look, although he doesn't comment on it, thank fuck, before he goes on to add:

"She's not just a telepath, Alex, she's a terribly powerful one."

Raven is getting down on her knees now, leaning over her brother to brush his bangs out of his face, inspect his eyes with distracted ease, and Alex wonders if they're like how he and Scott were like. He's never been scared of Scott, of what Scott could do, but he's worried a lot, and he's kept a hand over Scott's eyes to reassure him when Scott had been scared he'd look by accident and blow something up — and the memory makes him sick. He wants Scott here and safe so badly it feels like a still-tearing gash in his chest, down the line of his sternum.

"Terribly powerful, more powerful than you?" Lehnsherr asks, helping Raven slaps Xavier's protesting hands away when she starts to take his pulse.

"You two are absolutely maddening," Xaiver accuses, but submits when they both glare at him at the same time. He settles for clearing his throat to say, "I hate to speculate, but she is quite powerful."

Lehnsherr looks up to catch the CIA woman's eye. "That means 'no,' by the way."

"I've been sufficiently briefed on Charles-to-English, thanks," the woman retorts, disinterested, and says to Xavier, "What else?"

"She's not merely a telepath, either," Xavier says. "I had let myself in a few moments before she'd realized the intrusion and thoroughly kicked me out."

Hank, next to Alex, leans in to say, "And that was when the Professor yelled and Agent Lehnsherr ripped the helmet mechanism off of the machine."

Alex looks beyond the scene on the platform, at a huddle of forgotten scientists cooing over the giant fucker of a machine in the background. As Hank has reported, there is some sort of metal colander hat with a medusa knot of wires spilling out of it abandoned on the ground.

"Which Erik can repair in very short order," Xavier insists. "Ms. Frost was fascinating. She seems to have a secondary mutation that turns her…well, I suppose the best word is crystalline — " and not breaking breath but turning to pout at Lehnsherr, he says " — and would it be a terrible imposition if you and Raven find some way to return me to to an upright position? My dignity is feeling extremely bruised."

Lehnsherr, as charming as ever, mutters, "Fuck your dignity," but he calls the wheelchair over, floating it soundlessly over the platform, and with practiced cooperation with Raven, they help Xavier into the chair, their hands easy and reflexive and Alex guesses they've done this a lot before, that this is one of those shitty things you get used to the way you get used to a lot of things. "Is that okay?" Raven asks, and Xavier says, "Yes, it's fine," like it's something he never wants to talk about, and nobody says thank you or you're welcome — the whole thing smoothed away like a wrinkled bedsheet. It makes Alex hate Lehnsherr maybe 2 percent less than before.

The CIA woman, who seems to be ignoring almost anything that isn't mission critical going on around her, asks:

"So what does that mean for us? Did you manage to get any insight into Shaw's plans?"

"A little," Xavier murmurs. "Enough to worry me."
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(Анонимно)
2011-07-24 21:54 (UTC)
'Enough to worry me' from Charles-to-English turns out to mean that Sebastian Shaw wants himself a mutant army. But the thing is most people aren't angry enough or hurt enough to batshit enough to want that. They have families and mortgages and some bullshit paperwork deadline at work, a vacation scheduled next week; it's easiest to hate in broad strokes. It's when you get to individuals it's almost impossible. So the plan involves aggressive recruitment, possibly with the help of Cerebro.

"He's aware that any war between mutants and humans would be disastrous," Xavier says, grim. "But Shaw seems to fancy himself a builder, and he's looking forward to the challenge."

Lehnsherr looks heartsick, absolutely fucked up, like he's just aged ten years in an instant, and Alex thinks it must be fucking awful if he lets Xavier take his hand like that, lace their fingers together in public.

"Why would he want Scott?" Hank asks, gray-faced. "He's just a kid."

Xavier answers Hank's question by looking at Alex, solemn. "He was impressed by your mutation, and — "

It's weird to watch Lehnsherr and Xavier having a conversation in a crowded room in absolute silence. Xavier slants his eyes over, and Lehnsherr doesn't turn to meet his gaze, just tips his chin down, and then they both sit there like they're murmuring at each other through a closed door while everybody feels awkward as fuck. At least that's what Alex has gotten out of the experience so far, except when he looks around to find someone else feeling weirded out the only person who meets his gaze is Hank, who's biting his lip so hard he's bleeding, looking strung-out and tiny in a shirt that's way too big on him: a kid playing mad scientist. Alex can his own wordless conversation, too, because he hears Hank's I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, what can I do, what can I do? loud and clear, even though that's not it for either of them. Even though neither of them are lucky enough to have an easy or easily hidden mutation at all.

" — and he thinks Scott's good leverage, anyway," Lehnsherr finishes for Xavier, choosing his words carefully and turning back to Alex. "He thinks if he has Scott, you'll go fight for him."

He would. Alex would do it in a heartbeat. He's going to go right now, except that Hank's nearness has turned into Hank's fist in Alex's shirt, gripping him close, crazy-eyed and whispering in a hush, "Alex, no. You wouldn't."

"He would," Lehnsherr cuts in, mild and unworried, and Alex wonders what he's missing here. "I would."

"You would not," Xavier and Raven contradict, simultaneous.

"To borrow a phrase from you, Charles, it's irrelevant now," Lehnsherr points out, changing the subject.

Xavier is too busy giving Lehnsherr a dirty look to say much, but Raven says, "It wouldn't mean anything, Alex. Even if we let you go, what makes you think he'd actually let Scott free? You'd die for sure, when this all goes down."

"Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?" Alex shouts, because what the fuck is he supposed to do? That's his brother. That's his dumb kid brother who cried the first time he watched Beauty and the Beast and has an unnatural relationship with his Legos and who's already lost his parents, who's already had to take sink baths in public toilets and live in shitty mutant foster care and been turned out by adoptive parents because of something he didn't have any control of. And Alex hadn't been able to protect him from any of that, so what the fuck is he suppose to do now? Why did they even tell him that shit if they didn't want him to go? What did they think he would do? There's no right thing here — there's nothing he can — and Alex can feel it welling up behind his eyes, red and furious and 200 degrees Celcius, making all his skin hot with panicked fury, and if they don't say something soon he's going to blast through this entire facility.

"You fight, but not with him," Xavier cuts in, hard, all the soft, professorial edges gone. "You fight against him. It's the only way you'll have Scott back on your own terms."
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2011-07-24 21:55 (UTC)
Alex can either talk, or he can keep himself from blowing up the entire facility. He can still feel Hank near enough to burn though, so he just shouts inside his own head, tamping down on the blast that's boiling up in his throat, because what the fuck does Xavier know? What the hell could Lehnsherr ever know about this? Xavier lives in a God damn New York mansion with an elevator, and Lehnsherr's never been anybody's bitch. It's so easy to tell people to do the right thing when it's easy for you, when you're not the one with skin in the game, when you're not the person who's going to have to live with yourself if everything goes wrong, and —

Alex, Xavier's voice cuts in, crystal clear and loud and entirely inside Alex's head, I understand you're frightened and worried right now — but even if you don't believe that I have made any difficult decisions in regards to Shaw, believe this: no one can know your hatred of Shaw so well as Erik.

"Oh, God," Hank says. "He looks like he's losing it."

"What happens when Alex loses it?" Raven asks, alarmed.

Lehnsherr says, "Something explodes," and adds, "Charles, could you…?"

I'm very sorry about this, Xavier says, suddenly changed, back to tweed and guilelessness now. But we'll talk about this when you wake up. But briefly. You clearly need training.

Alex only has enough time to ask, "What the fuck are you — ?" before he's out, knees giving out, the room gone dark around him.

***

The part that Charles and Erik don't tell Alex is this:

Shaw knows Charles would come looking, that Cerebro would be involved. He knows mutants are outnumbered, and that while he'll recruit, and abuse Emma Frosts's telepathy to do it — there are already a small handful of the unwillingly converted in his tow, and Charles feels sick thinking about it — he knows that the easiest way to incite war is to let the human start it, to let it brew like poison in a water system. Shaw is nothing if not patient, and his theories of engagement are coy. He has a plan to gain access to Cerebro and the means to do it; it's a matter of time before he chooses his sacrificial mutants, those who are going to go berserker for the greater cause. It will be an ugly but necessary war, and it's a shame about little Scott Summers, too, but he's too useful a foot soldier in this — both for his marvelously dangerous powers and for his brother and his marvelously dangerous powers, too, Shaw had conveyed via Emma. If Charles dies, it will be a tragedy, but also a window for minor revolution, and one day, even Charles may come to appreciate this.

The part that Charles doesn't tell Erik is this:

If it is another mutant who kills Charles, someone unstable and obviously dangerous already, who Charles has taken a chance on and kept close, then it will be the only story anybody reads above the fold of every major newspaper in the world for weeks. The blue laws on mutants will become black ones, and that bill stalled in committee is going to be fast tracked. And as the pressure grows and people get more persecuted, it'll be easier and easier for his cause to take hold. The nonmutants will write their own doom with their inevitable backlash, Shaw thinks, and had conveyed with all due civility. The best part, of course, Shaw had noted, is that of course you will arrogantly keep this element of your discovery to yourself, thinking you can avert catastrophe. That Alex is as good as you, and knowing that if you were to tell your precious Erik, it would all come apart.

Charles has stringent rules for himself. No one else could ever set them for him. He knows that Erik and Raven think he's cheerfully amoral with his telepathy, using it to get out of parking tickets and eavesdrop, collect all the most ravishing gossip from his graduate students — but all of that is nothing on the grand scale of transgressions.
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2011-07-24 21:56 (UTC)
If he could, Charles would let his voice wither. It's so much easier to talk to someone else directly, and much clearer, with less margin for misunderstanding. He hates voicemail most of all, it being fourteen degrees removed from meaningful communication. If Charles could, he would simply sway everybody to his side, easy as pie, a simple tick and it's done. If Charles could have, he would have made Erik love him from the first, to the last, and unwavering, without any of the conflict and the doubt that roils them still, to scrape away the bittersweet ache of devotion until nothing lies between them but the drowsy perfection of Sunday morning love, tangled together in a bed they've made together. It would be so easy — no one would ever know, and everyone would be happier.

And he could, but he doesn't, and he won't even though it feels like ignoring the obvious solution. Like watching someone foolishly miss the easiest answer, to putter around in the half-dark knocking into furniture and overturning glasses when the light switch is just there on the wall. Charles will always handicap himself because he may be a mutant, but he is human, first, and he can't bear it, to engage in philosophical arguments about the reality of a thing. Is it real if he's placed it there? If he's the one that made it real? Would someone have truly changed their mind about mutant acceptance? Would Erik genuinely love him? Would it even matter if they felt they had, if Erik thinks he does?

But in ways Charles can't precisely articulate, it would, and the only reprieve would be forgetting. Charles's mutation is useless on himself.

So he can only do the ordinary things, the everyday human things, when it comes to influencing detractors, when it comes to convincing Erik of the right and just things to do, when it comes to appeasing Raven's upset and worry.

Raven helps Hank get Alex squared away, dragging his dead weight somewhere he won't be in the way and cuffing him to a railing for extra good measure while Armando interviews Dr. Lang and Angel is taking a bird's eye view of the compound, looking for obvious security weaknesses, her jacket left behind.

"Is there anything you're not telling me?" Erik asks, low and just for Charles's ears. They keep so many secrets between them it's second nature. Just because it's national security doesn't mean it's the FBI or CIA's to know.

Charles thinks, thankfully, lying is a perfectly normal human thing to do, and says, "Nothing important."

Erik just watches him calmly. "Are you sure about that?"

"I'm sure that you knowing the rest will only upset you," Charles replies delicately. "And I'm sure that it won't assist in your search for Shaw at all, either."

"I don't like it when you lie to me, Charles," Erik growls, and Charles is painfully honest when he says:

"I don't like it when I lie to you, either."

TBC

(A/N: THIS STORY IS NEVER GOING TO END. JESUS CHRIST.)
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2011-08-05 23:51 (UTC)
They do two more sessions with Cerebro with Erik scowling the entire time after Charles and Dr. Lang berate him into reconnecting the helmet mechanism, but Emma Frost has taken to being less accommodating, and Charles has never been able to track Shaw for some reason. It's not the blur that comes with a low level telepath's shielding, or even the solid brick of someone higher up the OCP scale — it's just sheer absence. Charles has spent hours in Cerebro searching but never found a trace of Shaw, and the blanks in between active minds are too frequent and vast to use the process of elimination in unfamiliar places, not like the house or the office or the 23rd floor where Charles knows the shapes and sizes of blank spaces, the afterimages of people walking around, distracted and harried and happy and sad, leaving trails.

Every time Charles zeroes in on Scott, there's a quicksilver flicker of amusement and very good, Mr. Xavier before he's jolted out, rudely shown the door with a knife-edged hand, and before he can even regroup ,Scott's presence and Emma's sheer crystalline defenses are vanishing again, jolted away, leaving no trace, and Charles has to start all over — until it's dizzying, until he's dizzy, and Erik says:

"That's it — McCoy, off."

This time, there's no protesting it, and Charles concedes Erik's concern may not be baseless. His arms feel weak, his head feels heavy on his neck, and there's a quietly threatening throb of pain down his shoulder blades, stretching like the scrape of a knife down the line of Charles's spine. Although Charles hasn't been properly afraid of knives in years, now, he thinks with hazy amusement — Erik's fault, the unspoken promises of him laced in so much of Charles's recklessness.

It takes Angel, Armando, and Raven to get Alex into the car, still cloaked in artificial sleep, and Hank hovers the entire time, staring at him worriedly in the backseat while everybody else breaks off to head home or the office, Erik issuing last orders before their caravan of black SUVs heads for the highways. In the back, as dusk takes the city, Hank — ever so quietly — shifts Alex so his head is pillowed in Hank's lap, stroking the hair out of his face with clumsy-soft fingers, and under the surface of Hank's immediate concern and the chasm of his own self-loathing and fearfulness is something so sweetly aching it makes Charles feel 17 again, that end-of-the-world kind of in love he'd felt for Tony Stark at one conference or another, when that guilelessly end-of-the-world kind of love had been within his capacity.

Charles thinks it's just lucky that Raven had elected to head straight home; he would never be so crass as to make fun of him and Erik prefers to pretend he doesn't recognize human feelings, but Hank never would have survived the teasing if Charles's sister had been here.

"Why did you make us bring him?" Erik asks, after Hank has gone from fretful to sleepy to unconscious, his hand soft over Alex's eyes, slanting orange light skating through the interior of the car as they whizz through the Holland Tunnel. "All it did was upset him."

"It also proved Alex has far more control already than he thinks," Charles returns, murmuring. He's always been a student of teach by doing, although usually the process isn't quite so traumatic to his students. "He's scared of his own mutation."

Charles can feel the metal in the car shift into Erik's resonance as he clutches at the steering wheel. It's a moment of strangeness Charles hadn't been able to identify the first time he'd gotten into a car with Erik, under the blazing winter white sun of New York City, when Erik was still Agent Lehnsherr and a fantastic mystery.

"He should be scared, he has a dangerous mutation," Erik argues.

"Only if it's out of control," Charles contradicts. "It's no more dangerous than yours."

Erik frowns, and around them, outside the car, it feels like the Holland Tunnel is lengthening and lengthening, extending forever, so there's a strange hum to play background to their words. "My mutation — "
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2011-08-05 23:53 (UTC)
"Is enough to bring down skyscrapers," Charles finishes gently. "To rip airplanes out of the sky and send the Rose Planetarium rolling down 5th Avenue."

Grinning, unrepentant, Erik retorts, "Actually, I was going to say that my mutation is nothing compared to yours."

Charles has a dozen responses to that, but he's used them all already, more than once, for the dozens of iterations of this discussion — in shades of philosophical, curious, frightened, furious, and aroused — that they've had over the years. Erik isn't concerned or making a point, he's just saying it because it's true.

Hank, probably as a benefit of his mutation, turns out to be surprisingly strong, and carries Alex off to the annex without any assistance and just an incongruously shy, "Thank you, Professor Xavier, Agent Lehnsherr," that Erik thankfully doesn't ruin by saying anything purposefully vulgar about how Alex is slung over Hank's shoulder.

"We'll talk more in the morning," Charles promises Hank. "I have a plan. Alex and Scott will be fine."

"Good," Hank stammers, going red all the way down his neck, vanishing into the collar of his shirt. "Good night."

At which point Erik snatches up Charles by the wheelchair, and sends him halfway up the stairs toward their bedroom, calling over his shoulder, "Good night, Hank," and saying, "Charles, bed."

In another life, nights like these, Erik would be resentful and tied up too tight, all of his stress and anxiety and barely-banked revenge fantasies toward Shaw lashed together like a wall between them. And Charles remembers how easy it was to scale it, to bring it down by sliding up close, drawing near, pressing a kiss to the knob of Erik's spine or throwing a leg over Erik's hips and laying worshipful kisses on his face, open-mouthed ones down the line of his chest.

It's always with the sharp ache of loss that Charles thinks breathlessly tumbling into bed, how lucky and stupid and spoiled he'd been, to be able to press Erik down among sheets of or into backseats of cars, alleyways behind restaurants, along soft grass in Central Park, barefoot in the shade. Of all the things Charles hates about the wheelchair, of all the host of indignities and embarrassments Shaw's volley of bullets had visited on him, this is what he misses the most, the thing that makes him the most angry: losing the fizzy, effortless sweetness of love — the uncomplicated simplicity of saying I'm sorry or I love you or Be okay, please be okay and I would do anything for you with his skin and his hands and the way they cleaved themselves together.

He'll never surprise Erik with a mid-afternoon fuck again, slicked up like a five-diamond pro, furtive and hot and dangerous somewhere unwise. There won't ever be lazy handjobs in a shared morning shower again, and Charles is never going to be able to drop to his knees in the foyer of the house, slam Erik against the front door and suck him off, proud and joyful and abjectly hungry after a shitty chicken dinner on the FBI tab, Erik gleaming with his commendations.

It had been crushing, to wake up in the hospital for the fourteenth time and listen to the machine beeps and to realize he'd never known anything difficult before, to suddenly plunge headlong into the awkward negotiations that would dictate the rest of his life. The doctors hadn't known the true extent of the damage, although there was general agreement that Charles would be paralyzed with minimal to vanishing chances of any recovery of movement for his legs. He'd still been in the liminal stages of spinal shock, and the landscape of his paralysis was changing daily. Some days he'd believed he could move his toes so much he imagined he could feel it, that his telepathy engendered a secondary mutation for spontaneous healing. But most days, he'd laid in bed and shut himself in his own head because his choices of general oppressive pity, Raven's debilitating grief, Erik's frenetic guilt, or the nurses' bloodlessly efficient caring were all equally unwelcome.
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2011-08-05 23:54 (UTC)

Everybody was annoyingly helpful: they wanted to help him learn how to build up upper body strength; they wanted to teach him how to use a wheelchair; they wanted to help him cope with his grief; they wanted to show him how to use a toilet again.

Charles had wanted to wipe the memory of himself and Erik, trapped in a blandly comfortable hospital counseling room, stuck with a handful of generic pamphlets about sexual intimacy and relationships after traumatic injury, to erase the way Erik had spent the entire time casting Charles side-eyed glances, the air around his body buzzing with something that bridged the gap between revulsion and hurt.

And that was all still in the hospital, before he'd been released on his own recognizance and the promise of three times a week physical therapy and Erik's constant watchfulness, to go back to his house and — do what? What the hell was there left to do? The elevator his grandmother had installed in Xavier House was a gorgeous example of art deco ornamentation, but had been nonfunctional since Charles was six and Charles's father had been in a tinkering phase. The wooden floors had indeterminate elevation and there was a gorgeous mosaic that would have to ripped up for something more even, and Raven and Erik threw themselves into the house like renovation would keep them from the reality of their situation. Charles watched them argue with contractors and each other and waited, lying awake at night listening to Erik typing or shuffling through files on the other side of their endlessly huge bed.

Erik is stubborn like a blood stain, has his claws and teeth dug in for the duration, and before the shooting the depth of Erik's loyalty, once won, had been like absinthe: maddeningly good. After, it had felt like an anchor around Charles's neck. Erik would never leave, no one halfway decent would, but definitely not Erik, and by the time Charles swam out of his immediate self-pity long enough to shift into grim practicalities, Erik had moved himself into Xavier House: clothes and shoes and work files and books drifting from Erik's sunny one bedroom in Astoria to mingle with Charles's clothes and shoes and work files and books. Who knew that after a year of unsubtle hints it would only take violent injury and paralysis to win additional commitment? Sometimes Charles had wondered if everybody in the Lehnsherr family had a constitutional attraction to only doubling down when something was hopeless or if it was a trait unique to Erik.

Raven, when he'd told her about it, had yelled at Charles that he was the world's dumbest psychic.

"Are you seriously serious?" she'd demanded. "This is Erik. He loves you. He's not going to break up with you because you — " and she'd stumbled on the words, her heart going cold in her chest " — because of this! Erik is better than that, remember how you insisted?"

"Of course not going to break up with me," Charles had agreed, resigned. That was part of the problem, really. "That's why I'm going to have to do it for him, the minute he's ready."

"I can't talk to you about this," Raven had said, and stormed off, which was fine, because Charles had had physical therapy scheduled in 15 minutes.

Raven hadn't, and doesn't, and probably won't ever understand exactly the way Charles feels about Erik. Raven's a romantic but a pragmatic one, and Charles can't explain how it had felt to land at JFK and step out to see Erik for the first time, the closed-down, forbidding face and hemmed-in scowl that had translated itself into a rush of pure happiness in Charles's chest, heart rattling with sudden greedy recognition. He's a reasonably intelligent man and his academic work had intersected a great deal with biology, so he knows theories about love as a chemical signal in the brain, triggered by pheromones, and research on the human anthropological drive to form packs. There's nothing in all of the science and wonders that Charles has known that has ever come close to explaining how he feels about Erik: like he's turning eternally toward the sun. Erik is mean to strangers and bad-tempered and genuinely hates cats, but he is kind in every way that actually matters and long-suffering about Charles and loves to the ends of the Earth.
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2011-08-05 23:57 (UTC)
Charles knows he is selfish, that he'd keep Erik forever if he could, but it would be wrong and unfair. Erik hadn't even wanted to live with Charles before the shooting — it would be ludicrous to think he wanted to stay out of anything other than the tattered guilt of remaindered love, the slow-building resentment of devotion, after the shooting, to be stuck with someone who can't keep up with him and won't ever walk and hasn't had a fucking erection in six months, who'll never be able to have a normal sex life again.

So the minute he'd felt Erik thinking, this is too fucking hard, just a stray and deeply hidden misery, he'd thought, okay, now, and thought Erik would be grateful to be off the hook, finally, to never have to drag Charles out of a bathtub or call ahead everywhere to ask about accessibility again.

The fight lasted four days.

"Stop thinking about it," Erik says, trying to unbutton the cuffs of his shirt in the shadows of their bedroom now, and Charles blinks and it's been years, years since that night he'd started yelling and hadn't stopped for days.

Charles makes a tsking noise and Erik surrenders his wrists automatically, letting Charles fret with the cufflinks as he murmurs, "I normally don't."

"So what prompted that terrible stroll down memory lane?" Erik asks, reasonable, and starts on the buttons of his shirt, watching Charles with oh-so-familiar and curious blue eyes.

Charles grins, ragged. "Mostly, I was thinking how once upon a time, if you were in this mood, I'd just fuck it out of you."

The laugh that startles out of Erik is wonderful, harsh and impolite and just for Charles, and Erik reaches over to press his thumb to the corner of Charles's mouth, considering, as he says, "You still could."

"Not quite the same," Charles demurs, because as forthright and brutally honest as his injury has forced him to become, sex is still an awkward subject in purely clinical terms. Nothing sucks the heat out of a moment like having to stop and figure out if his body would actually like to join in the festivities initiated by his brain. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; Charles had always thought sex could be funny on top of being fun, but he had never really anticipated being over thirty and snapping a cock ring into Erik's eye by accident.

Erik laughs again and replaces his thumb with his mouth, cupping Charles's face between his hands, and Charles laughs into the kiss, too, because how is he so lucky? How is he so lucky after all that after everything, it could be easy again — easy in a different way — and that Erik can keep smiling into his mouth and tipping Charles into their bed, to lace their fingers together and still want him.

"Didn't I say to stop thinking?" Erik asks, warm in Charles's ear. "I thought I was getting lucky here."

Charles huffs laughing, trying to mask the giggle trying to make its way up his throat, and says, "I never, Mr. Lehnsherr — who told you I was that kind of boy?"

"The entire student population of Oxford University, you slut," Erik says fondly, and before Charles can argue that he can hardly be held accountable for being sex positive on a college campus, Erik is kissing him silent, sliding a hand down Charles's shirt to hook into the waistline of his trousers, nails scratching underneath, exploring, and Charles reaches for Erik, too, for zippers and buttons and searching for skin.

Charles whispers, "I suppose it wouldn't do to have you feeling left out," and by now they know this dance, how to make this work perfectly like the inner workings of a clock fitting together.

Charles has always loved Erik's hands, their capability and warmth, and he loves the way the gun callouses catch on his skin as Erik strokes him roughly, thumb catching just under the head as Erik murmurs, "But that was then, wasn't it? I'm the only one who can have you now," and bites at Charles's mouth, possessing.
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2011-08-05 23:58 (UTC)
Behavior like that obviously needs to be rewarded, and Charles curls a fist around Erik, sighs into his mouth, and loops his other arm over Erik's shoulders, dragging him down until Erik is a breathless weight against Charles, pinning him to the bed.

"I only want you," Charles gasps, grinding them together as much as he could with them curled toward one another on their sides, the light of the digital clock and the street lamps the only illumination in the room. "I've only ever wanted you."

"Such a fucking liar," Erik accuses, but he's still laughing, voice shaking. He wraps his hands around both of them, jerks them off together so roughly it almost hurts, but that intensity — where it balances on that knife edge between sharp and too-sensitive pain and lavish pleasure — sparks behind Charles's eyes, going off like fireworks along his brain where it's hooked into Erik's building orgasm, too, tangling together.

And Charles says, "But I want it to be true," because he means it, he wishes sometimes that he could dissolve himself into Erik and live there forever. He feels overcome, rapturous, all the Harlequin bingo words strung up like carnival lights inside his head, and Charles gasps it all into Erik's mouth, the heady rush of gratitude and affection and how it hurts like a constantly deepening wound to love someone the way he loves Erik: with pathetic desperation, without regard for dignity, needful and begging.

"God," Erik swears, and it sounds like it's getting scraped out of him, ripped out of the marrow, "I fucking love you," and that's it, that's all Charles needed. He makes a sobbing noise as Erik jerks it out of him, chanting, "Yeah, yeah — just like that, let me see it, Charles, let me have it, open up, just like that," and when Charles comes, it feels like it blazes out of him, Erik's hands and his mouth and the weight of his body keeping him grounded, keeping him from flying away completely.

***

TBC

@темы: fanfiction

---

X-Men

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2011-07-09 22:38 (UTC)
Now, across town, Charles can feel Erik and Raven's nervous worry, that underlying fearfulness that's always lived just beneath the surface, ever since he swam back into consciousness after the shooting. He's been tempted, more than once, to mute it, to simply slice it away, peel it back from their minds, but he promised Raven he wouldn't read hers and Charles loves Erik's too well to alter it in any way.

Most telepaths are limited to thoughts, some pull in sensation, others still — the more powerful ones — have both, and the ability to apply some measure of control to their subjects as well. Charles has never understood the demarcations of telepathy: he's always been able to know what people are thinking, how they are thinking it, and where, what they feel, what they see, the taste of wine on their tongue, the ever-expanding history of their lives — all in a casual glance. With effort, he can know everything, anyone in complete. Charles reads people like a particularly winding map, unfolded on the hood of a sun-hot car, fingers tracking across the highways and rivers, knowing all the while he could so easily rearrange the cartography, the landscape and sky and water. It's why he's so cautious, always, navigating an invisible minefield, over-careful not to push too hard, pull too much, not to tap someone's thinking one way or the next, to tick it three degrees toward his end goals. He'd done it as a child for years before he'd realized, before he'd felt the cognizant dissonance of someone doing what he wanted versus what they would, and he'd retreated back into the safe prison of his own head, terrified at what he could do.

And now, Charles thinks ruefully, I am terrified at what I may have already done.

"Come along, Hank," Charles tells him, wheeling around the boy on the floor on the study and toward the door, motioning for the papers. "Bring those — you'll need them."

Hank scrambles for the blueprints, the red marker. "What? Where are we going?"

"To the front door," Charles says. He can feel an SUV drawing up toward the house, Moira at the wheel and Erik furious in the passenger seat, Raven in the back. Alex is still back at the FBI headquarters, in the safe room, and Charles can hardly imagine that exposing poor Alex to additional stress while his brother is missing would be helpful, so perhaps it's for the best. "Our ride is almost here."

"Ri — are we going to Cerebro?" Hank asks, going immediately from nerves to rapture, and Charles reflects that Hank's lucky to have met Alex when he did. Boys who are rapturous over overfunded government science projects rarely do well in Central Park after dark.

"That would be my guess," Charles answers, and heads for the front door, which opens just as he reaches it to a well-loved if glowering face. "Ah, Erik. We're ready."

"You let them give you migraines for months," Erik retorts.

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Charles says, "Hank, please go ahead and get in the car," which Hank does, edging around Erik in the doorway and breaking into a run as soon as there's no chance of contact.

"I gave myself migraines for years expanding my skills," Charles points out. His telepathy hasn't come cheaply; he's pushed since he was a boy, has grown used to a constant ache in the base of his neck, at the root of his brain, in his right temple.

"You let them experiment on you," Erik growls.

"I helped them experiment, period," Charles replies, even, because right now Erik is projecting his childhood panic so loudly he adds, it's not the same as that, Erik, I wasn't a boy, and no one was forcing me, no one can ever force me to do anything.

They hurt you, Erik tells him, in a blurry hush of regret, anger in the last syllable, and Charles doesn't know how to make this better for him. Knowing exactly what everyone is thinking is surprisingly useless when it comes to resolving interpersonal disputes.

I'm sorry you found out this way, Charles says finally, for lack of anything better, and because he's an optimist to the last, adds, But at least you know now why I was late for our first date — and why I fell over the sidewalk and threw up on myself.
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2011-07-09 22:41 (UTC)
Charles snatches Erik's hand, lacing their fingers together. "Is it working?" he asks, feeling puckish.

"No," Erik lies, and tugs at Charles, their palms warm together, the beginnings of forgiveness in the interstitials. "Let go of me and get in the car."

Charles does, at which point he gets to make a series of very similar apologies to Raven, who at least is more intrigued by the potential mystery of it than being angry with Charles for a project he became involved in more than a decade ago.

"So the question remains, why would Shaw want Cerebro?" Raven asks, breaking the awkward silence that's been cultivating in the car, interrupted only by Hank's occasional, frantic bursts of scribbling, paper rattling in the furthest back seat.

I love you, you're a wonderful sister, Charles lets her known sincerely.

Shut up, you're still in big trouble, mister, Raven retorts. "I mean, if you want to know who the mutants are, or to recruit them, wouldn't it be easier to try and access the registry than to find a barely-known CIA project?"

"And one that requires a specialist to operate at that," Erik rejoins.

"Alex says that Emma Frost is a telepath," Moira reminds him, and Erik catches Charles's eyes in the rear view mirror to say:

"Lots of people are telepaths. The type of telepath it takes to operate that machine is another entirely."

Raven clears her throat before they can get into it again, probably because she has said before that watching Erik and Charles fight is more traumatic than watching their mother be married to Kurt Marko. "So what else, beyond finding mutants? What can Cerebro do?"

Charles frowns. "To date, we've only ever used it for identification," he admits. "Problematically, it's difficult to tell whether it's user error or design flaw when our findings don't match up with government data on the mutant population in any given place."

"What about projection instead of receiving?" Hank pipes up, and everybody in the car except for Moira turns around to stare at him all at once. He's goes totally white and says, "Uh."

"Projection," Erik murmurs.

"Oh, that would be…" Raven says, trailing off.

Charles thinks of all the things a telepath in Shaw's orbit could project, what feelings and thoughts an amplifier as powerful as Cerebro could push outward into the world. Or a step beyond, and even more frightening, if it wasn't just a suggestion but a directive, the mental draft, people falling into line out of their own control. Shaw has always wanted an excuse for war — Cerebro could give him soldiers.

"That would be disastrous," Charles says grimly, for all of them. "That would be a catastrophe."

***

The CIA radio telescope antenna array is situated juts out the side of a valley in Westchester, New York with a half-dozen monstrous-sized dishes perched peering up at the sky at various angles. There're a half-dozen shacks scattered around their bases and only one ugly concrete bunker hulked near a barbed-wire fence that runs the perimeter, signs marked MILITARY TRAINING EXERCISE AREA in fast-fading red letters.

Erik glances over at McTaggert. "Really?"

"I didn't design the compound, Erik," she says, a smile tugging at her mouth. Behind her, their escort is flashing a series of increasingly arcane credentials at the door to an unsmiling man fairly dripping with automatic weapons. "Take it up with the decorator."

"For what it's worth," comes Charles's voice, suddenly. "It used to just say, GET OUT."

Erik, because it's going to be another solid two hours before he stops being furious about this, decides to be his most petty and direct his comments to McCoy, who looks pale and awkward and on the verge of jazzing his pants, staring at the swoops of satellite curves in the near distance.

"Remind me why you're here again?"

Flinching, Hank says, "Um. The professor said — "

"Hank had some fascinating design ideas for the machine," Charles explains, turning to McTaggert and smiling wryly. "I thought it might be prudent to have him take a look at Cerebro."
Fill: Limited Release (42/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-07-09 22:42 (UTC)
McTaggert, to her credit and despite her obvious crush, doesn't capitulate even under Charles's bluest of sincere blue eyes. "You thought — Charles, he's like 15."

"I'm 19," McCoy clarifies.

Feeling a lunatic tug of empathy, Erik claps him on the shoulder. "That doesn't make it better, McCoy."

"See?" Charles says. "He's 19, and terribly clever. Besides he had some fantastically smart ideas about how to solve some of Cerebro's power flux issues that I'm sure Dr. Lang would be thrilled to hear."

Lang, when everybody is cleared to enter the facility and they are introduced, is too young to be balding as severely as he is, and underneath a coffee and mustard-stained he's wearing a tie covered in tiny Dalek's, on which Charles unironically compliments him until the man flushes bright pink with startled pleasure. Charles has a continuous, unrelenting charm offensive that he cranks onto high whenever he's feeling someone who's supposed to be besotted with him is angry with him instead — he's a slut for new experiences and a fucking vampire for affection.

"Professor, it's always a pleasure to see you," Lang says, finally, collecting himself while McTaggert flashes Erik a long-suffering look. He's seriously tempted to hold out a fist of solidarity to her. "And of course, if you believe Mr. McCoy has ideas that would improve the project, then by all means I would love to see them — "

McCoy, in a stunning display of how emotionally 15 he still is, squeaks.

" — but I'm sorry to say that the azimuth bearing on the Cerebro dish needs replacing and as you know that's a multi-day process that — "

Charles murmurs, Will I be being terribly presumptuous if I…? still looking for all intents and purposes as if he's listening to Lang's overly detailed explanation in the background. Erik knows that face. That's the same face Charles has on every time Erik tries to teach him non-profane Yiddish or argue for the virtues of vacationing in the great outdoors, to which Charles has always claimed to be allergic: it's thoughtful and understanding and 100 percent disengaged. There are no circumstances under which Charles will be able to reproduce a single scrap of what Lang's telling him so earnestly now.

When are you not terribly presumptuous, I wonder, Erik retorts, but he doesn't mean it cruelly. Charles has never been able to disguise this part of himself, and moreover has never thought it was anything to disguise, which Erik finds in turn wonderful and unbearable. Like most of Charles's worst flaws, they are evident, completely open, and not a source of worry to Charles, who thinks his worst flaw is his tendency to develop tunnel vision when faced with an interesting project.

But would you be able to? Charles asks, curious now, a bright spark in Erik's mind. It's 230 tons, you know.

"Never know unless I try," Erik says, knowing that his smile is showing all his teeth.

"It's indecent, the way you like a challenge," Charles says, rudely cutting into Lang's ongoing chatter, and in the abrupt silence that follows, McTaggert recovers first to say:

"I wouldn't worry about being insulted by it — they do this all the time."

Charles gives her a dirty look. "Dr. Lang, as to your azimuth bearing issue, may I offer a potential solution?"

TBC
Fill: Limited Release (43/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-07-16 21:27 (UTC)
The azimuth bearing has an inner and outer ring, with rollers and spacers that fit between about eight long, two inches thick. None of that really matters except to say that a broken azimuth bearing renders the dish inoperable, and requires about 15 people and a week to fix — or, alternately, one mutant capable of manipulating magnetic fields and 15 open-minded scientists who are having their panic held at bay by Charles, who is far more goal-oriented than he's ever been ethical about his telepathy.

Erik almost drops the satellite dish twice, lifting it away from the base with great, metallic protests of steel scraping steel, the Earth pushing back at him, fighting Erik, gravity trying to drag 230 tons back into the ground. But the hardest part, like the hardest part of moving a car or crumpling the infrastructure of a train or the first time he'd lifted up Charles's wheelchair — the first time he'd seen Charles look wondering, happy, since the shooting — is grabbing hold of the right magnetic fields in play. Afterward, sustaining the control is easy, which Charles knows, and is why he smilingly accuses Erik of almost dropping the satellite dish the second time just to torture the scientists.

As well as to see how terrifyingly controlled you have them, Erik retorts cheeky. Given that none of them lunged at the thing in a suicide run, I'd say you have their balls in your fist.

Given your jealous tendencies, they really would be making a suicide run if I had their balls in my fist, Charles tells him primly, but doesn't deny it.

Erik has seen Charles use his mutation in casual, flagrantly unethical ways for as long as he's known Charles, and in the beginning it had been infuriating, disquieting, and he'd wanted as little to do with Charles Xavier as possible. Erik had suffered at the hands of someone who had control over him before, and he'd never intended to associate with anyone who had power — real power — over him again.

Somewhere in the middle, the tenor of discussion had changed. If you think it's wrong for people with mutations to be segregated, to endure additional scrutiny, to have their powers curtailed, how is it that you hold me to a different standard? Charles had said. If all of your mutations, and what they can do, are part of you, and not a part you should be ashamed of, then why are telepaths different? Charles had asked, so reasonable it had made Erik's teeth hurt.

Charles has spent most of their acquaintance accusing Erik of seeing only black and white, that there is the right and wrong thing to do, leaving little room for compromise. Erik thinks that in most things, there is an obvious right and wrong choice — for Charles's mutation, there's no such thing.

To have such astonishing telepathic ability that you could control someone and never let them know it, to be able to tip everyone in a room's sentiments toward your own, to be able to freeze people still at great distances, take over their consciousness and use their bodies is terrible. It's power no one should have, and to allow a person with this ability to roam free is dangerous, it's bad, the stakes are too high and the temptation for misuse extreme. But Erik can too-clearly imagine a world without Charles in it, and he hates it, and anyway, Charles was born with it, just as he was born with brown hair and a vexingly red mouth and smiling blue eyes, annoying curiosity and a relentlessly good nature. It's a part of him, and Erik struggles with this, the demarcations of good and bad, when he uses his powers carelessly to move electrical equipment or stir his coffee and thinks, oh.

"Erik," Charles says, this time out loud, and Erik blinks, everything pulling into hyperclarity for a beat before he realizes that the satellite dish is hovering dangerously close to the rafters of the aircraft hanger.

Erik grins at the scientists, each pale-faced. "Sorry," he says, and settles it into the metal support structure with a whisper of sound.

"Next time, Erik, a little less showing off, please," Charles says, wry. "Their collective psychic distress was giving me a headache."
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2011-07-16 21:29 (UTC)
Lang, clearly made of sterner stuff than his colleagues — who are all in various states of heart failure, it looks like — just claps his hands together, apple-cheeked and obviously delighted as he says, "Fantastic! Really fantastic stuff, Agent Lehnsherr!" and starts hustling gap-jawed engineers.

All the metal in the room has aligned itself to the magnetic pole of Erik by the time they're done. The wrenches and stray nuts and bolts tilting and sliding until they're in longitudinal lines arcing outward from wherever he walks — shifting and shifting endlessly — and so it's easy, two hours later, when everything is in such perfect resonance with him already, to tilt his chin and lift Charles up to Cerebro, to follow on the stairs, when Charles arches one brow and asks, "Erik, if you wouldn't mind."

"So aside from giving you migraines and making you behave in undignified ways, what are you intending on doing with this monstrous creation today?" Erik asks, curling his hands into fists in his pockets, watching Hank and Dr. Lang confer in the background, closing up the metal plate hiding the tangled guts of the beast.

"Well, I'm thinking that today, I may use it to try and locate our poor indisposed friend, Scott Summers," Charles tells him, locking the wheels of his chair.

"As Scott will probably be with Shaw," Erik says, continuing the thought.

"Exactly," Charles replies, cheerful, and calls over his shoulder, "Hank? Dr. Lang? Any luck amplifying the power?"

Erik tenses. "Amplifying?"

"Yep," Hank says, voice flowing up over a number of worrying clatters and bangs. "We're closing it up now."

"Amplifying?" Erik asks again.

Charles smiles at him, pulling some sort of helmet on. "Don't worry, Erik, the chances I'll be electrocuted are extremely slim."

***

Alex has lost track of how long he's been lying on the floor of this stupid room, and how many times he's counted all the ceiling tiles, and how many awful fucking scenarios have run through his head involving Sebastian Shaw and Scott.

It's like that awful day, exactly seven after their parents had died, when all the numbness had snapped out of him all at once and it had felt like being plunged into ice water: shaking and staring at the ceiling of their family house freaking the fuck out. Alex had been thinking about dicking around for a year or two after having barely scraped out of high school. He had about $300 in his checking account, linked to his parents, a Visa that fed off of their line of credit, a driver's license, a 2004 Toyota Corolla and fuck-all idea of what to do with himself and his little brother.

So he'd tried, he'd tried so fucking hard. He'd taken three different jobs, the opening shift at a Starbucks, the mid-afternoon to dinner run at the Hardees across the street from there, and the shitty closing hours at the Whole Foods in the same strip mall, soullessly stuffing organic purple kale into reusable hemp bags. He'd visited Scott every single time he could in the group house they'd stuffed him into, promising that he was going to get custody, that he was working on it, and he spent any other free time begging their social worker — some butterface redhead named Susan who obviously came from old money and was working off her white girl guilt in the system, and oh, how it showed — to just give him Scott, to take him out of the group home. Scott was skinny and shy and quiet and there were a half-dozen assholes in that group home who liked to dunk his shoes in toilet water or shove him into walls, and every time Alex visited Scott managed bravery for about an hour before he started begging to go home with his brother. It hurt. It hurt worse than anything Alex had ever thought hurt before, and it ached in an unrelenting crush on his chest every time he got kicked out for the day and had to leave Scott behind. Alex didn't understand how Susan didn't understand that Scott wouldn't have cared about living off of leftover pastry from Starbucks and stolen burgers from Hardees and only seeing his brother an hour a day in a roach-infested studio because at least they would be together. Because Alex hadn't been that great an older brother but he was Scott's family, he loved the kid, he would salt and burn the Earth for the kid.
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2011-07-16 21:32 (UTC)
"I know you're trying, Alex," Susan had said to him, turning down his third appeal. "But the thing is, you're just a kid yourself. And you're working really hard now, I know, but it's only going to get harder from here, for you and Scott. We're just trying to find the safest, most stable place for him to be."

"Fuck you, lady," Alex had told her, gotten hellishly drunk and sat in the bathtub in the apartment they wouldn't let Scott live in with him and cried until dawn.

Then having legitimate jobs seemed kind of pointless, and he'd done other shit instead — nothing really bad, just the occasional stereo in the occasional poorly secured parking garage. If you parked your Bentley in the cheapest lot available, you were basically asking for it as far as Alex was concerned. And who cared, anyway? He'd spent a lot of time being pissed, this generally resulted in shit getting blown up. His parents used to give him crap about blasting stuff in the woods behind their house, but then they'd fucked off and died in a God damn plane crash and Scott was stuck in the foster system and Alex was too much of a useless waste to save him so whatever.

Maybe that would have been it, maybe he would have just kept visiting Scott in foster care and when those foster parents decided they liked Scott so much they would adopt him, except then Scott had turned 13 and that entire thing about you being more genetically similar to your siblings than your parents had kicked in with vengeance.

Scott had run away twice before he managed to make it stick, and by then it was too late, the foster family had figured out that Scott wasn't just burning stuff because they weren't loving him enough, but by opening his eyes — because he was a freak, just like Alex.

"I can't go back there," Scott had begged. "They're going to send me back. They're going to send me to mutant foster care and I can't go back there. I can't, Alex, don't make me, please."

Alex had thought, Jesus fucking Christ and thanks a fucking lot, Mom, Dad, and dragged his brother in for a hug, holding his hand over Scott's shut-tight eyes, over his cheeks, slicked with tears, and said, "Hey, chill out, kiddo. You're not going anywhere, okay? You and me, we're going to stick together from now on out."

After that, they'd had no choice but to run, and when Florick had found him and known things and said, "How about you run with my crowd for a while?" Alex has thought of the new sneakers Scott needed, that they were running out of milk and toilet paper and said, "Yeah, sure, why not."

And now all he can think is of Scott, who's all but self-imposed blind now, whose mutation goes off the rails when he panics, alone and shit-scared and fucked over all over again all because of —

"Hey," Raven says, suddenly in the room and suddenly standing directly overhead, her face dark in the shadows of her hair.

"Did you find him?" Alex asks, because of course they haven't.

Raven squats down to put a hand on Alex's shoulder, like she's not afraid of him, like he couldn't blow her up if he slipped up just the littlest bit.

"Yeah, Alex," she says, but she looks so sad and solemn that he doesn't jump up, just stays on the floor so that the fear doesn't kick his knees out from underneath him. He's too scared to ask, so he's glad when she smiles at him, tight, and murmurs, "He's fine — but we need to talk."

He ends up in the backseat of the SUV, stuck in between Angel and Armando with Raven breaking every known traffic law in the driver's seat.

The third time they skate across three lanes, the atonal shrieks of terrified drivers they've barely missed accompanying the move, Alex braces his foot against the back of the console and yelps, "Jesus fucking Christ! Who taught you how to drive?"

"Charles," Angel, Armando, and Raven say together.

TBC

@темы: fanfiction

---

X-Men

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(Анонимно)
2011-06-23 16:57 (UTC)
The stated goal of the FBI's Mutant Specialist Task Force is to leverage specialized knowledge and skills to best address victims of crimes involving mutation as well as help victimized mutants. In reality, it breaks down to four distinct tiers:

(1) The ones where Raven likes to tell people they're the FBI's version of the Butterball Turkey Helpline, which is uncomfortably true on some days, when local PDs and offices of the bureau call to ask questions about best practices and how to keep some poor kid from hurting himself long enough so mutant medical specialists can get in and help.

(2) The ones where the victim is a mutant, and it creates unique challenges, like the one girl who had reacted to a mugging in an alley the way some deep ocean fish do, and filled the entire fucking space with noxious slime to protect herself, and trapping the mugger like a giant cockroach. Otherwise known as Cassidy's first case, it's still on the Top 10 WTF Moments board in the office and began their unit's long and fruitful relationship with the NYU chemistry department.

(3) The ones where the perpetrator is a mutant, and it creates unique fucking challenges to their apprehension. Alex Summers had been one of these, and local law enforcement had been happy as a pig in mud to walk away from it when the FBI had stepped in, because dick measuring and jurisdiction is one thing, dick measuring and jurisdiction when your assailant can blow shit up like an evil Care Bear is another entirely. Sometimes the mutations are more clever and funny than bad, although people are using them for bad things -- like walking through walls and bank vaults -- and sometimes, like cases with telepaths, they're truly terrible. If Armando never has to register another person into a psychiatric facility on the dim hope that they can be unscrambled by professionals again, it'll still be too soon.

And then there're the ones about Shaw.

"The only part of this that isn't terrible is that this isn't a 4 a.m. call," Angel tells the oily surface of her coffee. It's one of those blue cups with the Greek key around the rim, which means she's snatched it from the shitty cart in front of the building, meaning she's already eaten three knishes and a dirty-water dog in anger -- it's not even 8 a.m.

Armando frowns at her. "Are you drinking cart coffee? Did you eat cart food?"

Her jacket's off, which means he can see it when one of her razor-sharp wings flicks threateningly. "So what if I did?"

"So you're like a gremlin," Armando retorts. "You go fucking nuts if we feed you that amount of sodium before noon."

"You don't know shit, Darwin," she retorts, but she narrows her eyes in a way that reminds Armando she can spit molten death at him with stunning accuracy.

"Hey guys, saw the boss's car headed for the lot when I was coming in," Cassidy says, suddenly appearing at Armando's shoulder as silently as a ginger cat. He looks like was dragged backward through a hedge after running through a wind tunnel, which doesn't merit as much comment as it would on Raven or Erik since Cassidy likes fulfilling all possible probie agent stereotypes and looking like a hot mess almost 100 percent of the time. "So I'm thinking ETA 5 minutes."

Erik bangs into the office. "Give me a fucking update here," he snarls.

"Or maybe he is right behind me," Cassidy revises.

"Scott Hathaway, aka, Scott Summers, before he was adopted and then ran away again like a champion," Angel says, holding Scott's file over her shoulder so that Erik can snatch it out of her hand as he stalks up the aisle toward his office. "Summers was too old for adoption by the time he got into the system, but Scott was cute and after a few bumps and a couple of runaway attempts early in the system, stuff seemed to be working out."

Erik glares up from the folder. "What happened?"

"My guess?" Armando cuts in, taking the coffee away from Angel. "Probably his powers started manifesting, adoptive parents freaked, he ran back to his brother."

Angel stole the coffee back, glowering. "Speaking of which, where's Summers?"
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(Анонимно)
2011-06-23 16:58 (UTC)
"With Raven, back at Scott's last known residence," Erik says. "Forensics is sending us their report but I wanted him to take another look -- see if there was anything we might have missed or he didn't notice last time."

"How's he taking it?" Cassidy asks, headed for the fax machine, whirring to life on key. Armando knows Erik's mutation doesn't extend his power to the whole of a machine that has metal parts, but sometimes, it feels like it does.

Erik rolls his eyes. "His little brother's been kidnapped by an internationally wanted mutant criminal for unknown reasons. I'm sure he's doing fantastic."

"I'd give you shit about having no soul but I know that deep down inside, you're upset about this, too," Angel allows kindly, and finishing the rest of her coffee in one chug, adds, "Okay, I'm going to distribute a nationwide BOLO."

"Make that an AMBER alert, he's still a minor," Erik cuts in. "Cassidy, I want you down with our forensics guys identifying the materials in that letter and picture. Make them nervous, impress upon them my wrath. They've had this for like 30 hours now."

"Got it," Cassidy says, and is out the door in a carroty-orange blur.

Erik turns to Armando. "Raven's going to be back with Summers in less than an hour."

Armando nods. He takes off his suit jacket, rolls up his sleeves. "I'll get the room ready."

***

Erik, before he was Erik, was just Lehnsherr, and when Armando joined his team three years ago, just after the task force was commissioned by the assistant director of the FBI. he'd had been about 86 kinds of crazy. For almost a year, Armando had thought the guy was one of those serial killers who worked among the cops to soak up the glory. He also thought that maybe Lehnsherr didn't have access to a washing machine, or really enjoyed slumming it at the Y. He'd looked perpetually nuts, spending two or three days in the same shirts and jackets with a fistful of ties in one of his desk drawers.


Raven had transferred abruptly onto the team, two months after Armando had, and after one too many 2 a.m. nights, when Angel made one too many defamatory comments about Lehnsherr, Raven had shoved her up against a wall and snarled:

"Shut your fucking mouth. You don't know shit."

But she hadn't said anything else, and the mystery of how Lehnsherr, who objectively treated Raven worse than almost everybody else on his team, defended his fucked up attitude so fiercely stayed a mystery for another eight months.

And then they'd caught a kidnapping involving a mutant child. The kid, just a toddler, was sending such ferociously loud psychic distress signals that telepaths across the eastern seaboard were helping track her by the intensity of their migraines, and Lehnsherr and the missing persons liaisons were similarly in a wrecked state, panicking that her abductor would realize what was happening and kill her without even waiting for the ransom demand to come through. On the 14th hour of their vigil in the parents' mansion, while Lehnsherr had been taking a leak, his phone had started going off.

Raven, fearless, had taken one look at the screen of the phone and answered it, "Hey, is everything okay?" There'd been mumbling over the line, and Raven had gone wide-eyed, moving from surprise to worry to anger so quickly Armando had read it across her face like a newsreel whipping too fast over a projector.

"You're kidding me," she'd said flatly to the phone, and through the speaker, Armando had heard a tinny voice saying, "No. I'm at the door. Please let me in," just before the doorbell to the residence had gone off.

That's how he'd met Charles Xavier for the first time, looking like eight miles of bad road, and so fucking bad at using a wheelchair it had been painful not helping the guy.

"Erik is going to rip your face off," Raven had told him, while Angel and Armando had still be staring, mute with shock, hanging back.
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2011-06-23 17:01 (UTC)
The last time any of them had seen Xavier it was in photos a half-dozen regional dailies had decline to publish, but that the Post had done gleefully, the New York Times had done online, and that circulated everywhere anyway. In the images, Xavier was down in a hail of bullets on a stage at Columbia, bleeding through his white shirt on a gurney, dragged down the corridors toward an ambulance, his face slack and pale and almost dead.

The AFP photos had been the most immediate, Frank Pietro on freelance near the base of Xavier's podium, the first shot a picture of the professor from below, haloed in the fierce glow of the stage lights, young and vital and smiling. Then a series of rapid shutter-snaps like the world's most terrible flipbook: the blank shock on Xavier's face, then his body crumpling, headed down, a half-dozen of him hitting the ground, blood soaking through his shirt already from three distinct bullet wounds. Doctors would eventually find five — two in the back as he'd gone down, one low along the spine, the near-killing blow. The AP photographer had a shot of a blonde woman trying to dive for the stage, behind held back by people in the crowd, and it took Armando almost a year of working with Raven every day before he had recognized the line of her back, the particular brass-blonde of her hair, from the photo. Getty has a shot of Xavier's fingers, bloody red and lax, peering out from the side of the podium, open against the cheap laminate from where he'd fallen.

Armando's read the file enough times to know that by the time Xavier had been loaded up by medical personnel, he'd already been in asystole, and that it took more than 10 minutes for someone to interrupt the upper-level mutant task force creation meeting Erik had been stuck in in D.C. to tell them about the attack.

There'd been almost 100 photographers and reporters at the event, and it had showed in their stand-ups in front of the university, their clothes torn up and blood-spattered, and how their hands had shook on the microphones. The coverage had been unrelenting.

"I'd welcome it at this point," Xavier had muttered, months later and in the doorway, still. "Poor Amelia has been sobbing in my head for 16 hours."

When Lehnsherr had come back from the toilet there'd been a brief, quietly hissing standoff, and then Raven had intervened to put a hand on Lehnsherr's arm and Xavier's shoulder, and the professor had cleared his throat to say, "Look — I just need permission from her parents to access her mind. If I can give you a good description of what she's seeing, will that help you guys get to her?"

"If we didn't live two blocks down the street from here, I would be so much more angry with you right now," Lehnsherr had told him, but apparently that was the extent of it, and Xavier had smiled at him, wan, and gone in to talk to the parents.

Amelia was three, which Charles later told Armando meant that she had fully developed cognition but very little frame of reference for it. She could recognize people and sounds and smells, but retaining or differentiating the importance of any of those things was an entirely separate affair. Even if she could see letters on a sign perfectly, she couldn't read them on her own. It wouldn't just be a matter of skimming the surface of her thoughts; he'd have to take over. While he recognized that stealing into anyone's mind on the level he was discussing with her parents was an invasion beyond consideration for almost any other situation — for Amelia, it might be their best hope.

So he'd done it, Raven on her knees next to his chair, gripping his hand, and Lehnsherr perched across the room next to a bank of telephones and a phalanx of curious-looking agents, Amelia's parents sobbing into their fists, watching him with wet-eyed intensity.

"They're in a Chuck E Cheese across the highway from a truckstop," Charles says, after a long minute or two of tense silence. "I can't see the sign very well, but i think it's off I-40, near the Virginia border. And…I think you guys have about half an hour to get there. The pizza just arrived."
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2011-06-23 17:02 (UTC)
Later, after the Feds had dispatched local agents and local agents called local law enforcement and a swarm of people had descended on the strip mall off I-40, across the street from a truckstop near the Virginia border, when Amelia's captor and her had been on their last slice of pizza, Lehnsherr had said, "Right — guys, I'm going home," and taken Xavier with him.

"So, Xavier," Armando had asked.

"Is my brother," Raven had filled in, smilingly tightly.

Armando had raised an eyebrow. "And Lehnsherr?"

"Was stalked lovingly into submission by my brother," Raven had answered, and yawning, checked her watch. "Split you the paperwork?"

"Yeah, sure, okay," Armando had said, and they'd split up the paperwork. Halfway through the mega mountain of it, Angel had showed up, looking guilty and upset, and she'd nudged Raven on the shoulder, and Raven had nudged her back in the hip, and they'd looked at one another in the way women do sometimes.

"Don't be a moron," Raven had said, and pulled Angel down to an empty chair by her desk in the bullpen, handing over a stack of forms. "Just fill this shit out."

"Just because I feel bad that you're related to our boss doesn't mean your roots are showing any less," Angel had informed her, and Armando had been fully braced for some sort of nuclear meltdown, but Raven had just laughed and Angel had just laughed and Armando had wished longingly that he was gay and he didn't have to figure out women if he ever wanted to have a family.

***
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(Анонимно)
2011-06-29 17:51 (UTC)
The room is a 15x15 lead-lined chamber, adamantium woven throughout, with a solid shell of adamantium in between the three-deep concrete blocks that make up the walls. There're electromagnets imbedded in the four corners, the center of the ceiling and the middle of the floor. The glass is triple-layer bullet and shatter proof. They've detonated C4 in the room and released colored gases; nothing's knocked it open or leaked out yet. They've had half a dozen FBI telepaths try it, and even with their best efforts — they range from 3 to 6 on the OCP scale — only the faintest traces of thoughts or sensations pass through. Charles, very diplomatically, said it was quite damping. The furniture is made of shatterproof, non-reactive original-formula pyrex: the preferred mix of meth dealers and the FBI alike.

"It's the closest thing we have to a foolproof mutant containment chamber," Erik tells Alex, when Raven settles him onto the chair, squeezing him on the shoulder before she darts out of the room.

Alex stares through the table, at his hands folded together underneath, metal rings on both wrists and ankles. He looks around the room, at Erik standing in a corner, and his eyes are bleary and red.

"So, what? This is to keep me from hurting anybody if I freak the fuck out?" he asks.

"Actually, a lot of times, it's a comfort to know that you can't hurt anyone if you freak the fuck out," Erik says, easy, and pushes away from the wall.

He can feel it come away with him, just a bit -- a flex in the metal reaching out to follow the line of his back -- and has to settle it away before he walks any closer to Alex. Charles thinks Erik's mutation is marvelous, and Erik agrees it is is a source of endless delight, the infinite possibility engendered in the manipulation of metal, but it's also been a source of terror over the years: when he's been angry, when he'd been frightened, in absentminded moments where he realizes the street lights and newspaper stands are leaning in toward him, or stretching out into absurdist shapes. When he sits inside cathedral confessionals and listens to the church plate rattle, but safe at least inside the stone walls and surrounded by mostly-wooden pews, forty minutes away from Charles's hospital because he was so fucked up he couldn't trust himself around all of the metal keeping Charles alive.

Alex grits his teeth so hard Erik can feel it in the kid's cheap fillings. "I'm not worried about hurting people — "

"Bullshit," Erik returns, perfectly flat. "Twenty."

Alex stares. "What?"

"That's how many freight rail cars I derailed on my way from D.C. to New York after Charles got shot," Erik says.

He always thinks it's going to be easier or that he'll be more numb to this and he's always wrong. He doesn't remember anything that happened after Deputy Director Skinner's assistant had burst into the meeting, but he remembers feeling all of it, rattling the table to pieces, all their guns to bits, the way he'd had to wait — going crazy — for almost two hours until he was calm enough to get onto a plane safely. He'd taken out the trains, anyway, driving from the airport to the hospital, white-knuckled on the wheel, and he'd heard them derail and had to stop the car, drag them back safe on the tracks, heart shredding in his chest, before he'd gotten back inside his mostly-plastic Toyota and driven like his ass was on fire, hoping no one had been hurt.

(That's a lie. Erik hadn't given a fuck then. He could have taken down skyscrapers, ripped the infrastructure out of high-rise apartments.)

"Jesus Christ," Alex says.
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2011-06-29 17:54 (UTC)
The "feel free to fucking lose it" is implied, Erik thinks. Alex can't hurt him here; Erik has control of the metal bands on Alex's hands and legs, nobody's going to get caught in the crossfire. For probably one of the only times in his life, Alex can be as upset as he wants to be.

"Do you understand?" Erik asks.

Alex scrapes his hands through his hair, scrubbing at his face, rubbing at his head, hunched over the table looking younger than his years.

"Yeah," Alex croaks, his voice a desert at high noon -- parched. "Yeah, I get it."

"Okay," Erik says after a beat, because the reason he keeps Charles around it to be emotionally intuitive and know the right things to say, and the reason Charles keeps Erik around are baffling to the extreme. "Tell me about Florick -- about Shaw."

***

(An except from "(R)evolutionary Violence: Sebastian Shaw and the Radical Mutant Uprising," first published in Foreign Policy, March 2006.)

Policy experts and conspiracy theorists have rival theories as to whether or not the assassination attempt on Xavier -- as it stood -- was ultimately a success or failure to Shaw and his faction. The prevailing theory on Shaw is that his acts of terrorism are classically terrorist: designed to incite discord and fearfulness. In this case, not between Sunni and Shite or to dismantle the encroaching immorality of the west, but to agitate the uncertain peace humans and mutants have negotiated in the past three decades. The ideal conclusion to Shaw's work would be a human-mutant war, say some high-level sources.

"The assumption being that mutants would win," says one military official, who requested anonymity because he's not authorized to speak to media -- or indeed anyone -- about the international effort to apprehend Shaw. "It's not necessarily a bad assumption to make -- all we have are guns, who the fuck knows what's in their arsenal."

Before Shaw was ever a household name for a series of bombings that ranged from mutant integration centers to the D.C. Metro's Tenleytown line, he worked for the government's Mutant Integration Bureau. MIB -- which the government will humorlessly assure you has nothing to do with aliens, Will Smith, or Tommy Lee Jones with the annoyed frustration of people who have answered the same question many times before -- was launched in the 1970s, shortly after the Stockton-Geary mutant registry bill was passed by a hair in the mostly Democrat House and a landslide in the primarily Republican Senate. Shaw graduated with good, but undistinguished grades from the University of Michigan, took the usual period to graduate medical school from University of Wisconsin, Madison before working two years in an Oklahoma hospital and segueing into the government sector.

Shaw became one of hundreds of physicians trained to work with recently emergent mutants. His job, like his colleagues, was to identify, document and monitor. Eventually, MIB doctors began changing their job descriptions independent of government intervention, applying the same needs-must standards favored by emergency room nurses and warzone doctors alike.

Identifying, documenting and monitoring fell very short of the needs of the burgeoning and increasing mutant population, mostly terrified adolescents and young adults, and they began creating ad hoc manuals on how to help mutants manage their powers as well. What began as notebooks turned into typeset volumes that spanned five books and was ever-expanding. Dr. Derrick Matherly, who left private practice to work for the government in 1978, became the official keeper of the The Book, as MIB doctors called it, and from his tiny two-room office in Eugene, Ore., he fielded sometimes hundreds of calls a day from inquiring doctors in between seeing to mutants of his own.
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2011-06-29 17:59 (UTC)
(Matherly, who is a self-admitted "old cuss," still uses the term "metahumans," which fell out of favor in the mid-90s for the more genetically accurate "mutant." When asked if he believes there are political considerations in the semantics, he tells me to go get him a lemonade and stop bothering him.)

By the 1980s, with the advent of computers in MIB offices, the mission had more or less officially changed and the books -- once hoarded and traded like comics or science fiction zines -- were digitized and printed, with an overseeing editorial panel attended by luminaries from the Center of Disease Control, the National Institute for Health, and representatives from the top 30 medical research institutes in the country. The sentimental tide, at least at ground level, was changing rapidly, and mutant segregation -- which had been discussed with seriousness horrifying to consider with the benefit of hindsight and working historical knowledge -- went from a subject of genuine possibility to something endorsed by crackpots and bigots. It was the 1980s. There were better, more interesting things to consider: stagflation, oil prices and the poignant, preemptive rebuke on separation that was the downfall of the Berlin wall.

In the context of this, Shaw's actions during the 1970s and 1980s is all the more awful.

Shaw, by this point, was heading up a medium-sized MIB office in Detroit. Considered benign by colleagues, competent by managers, and forgettable by almost everybody else in the community, the extent of his crimes during his formative years is gruesome. Mutants that were gerrymandered into Shaw's harmless-looking beige offices during his active years would meet, behind closed doors, a massively charismatic sociopath.

Records show that more than 60 percent of Shaw's patients were under the age of majority during the period he worked at the Detroit-Metro MIB clinic, which goes a long way toward explaining how the experiments he conducted remained unknown until his 1997 attack on the mutant registration administrative headquarters. Because of the young age of most of Shaw's victims, there is little information on the bulk of his actions, and indeed investigators privately believe they've only ever identified a fraction of the mutants who were abused.

Shaw had been an unremarkable generalist in school turned obsessive mutant researcher after he was inducted among the ranks of MIB doctors. The patients who have come forward have born literal scars from Shaw's attempts to speed full manifestation of their mutations. A typical visit began with an intake, several benign follow-ups, and then the shift from harmless doctor to mad scientist happened when Shaw would invite a mutant into a quiet chamber, made with specialized materials financial records show he commissioned with his own money to some considerable expense. In the wild west days, when acceptance of the mutant community in government was more wink-wink-nod-nod and under the table than anything, victims strapped to tables and tortured with electroshock, mutants nearly drowned to test the extent of their abilities, burned or cut or beaten to experiment on healing abilities, were silenced easily by the fear of something worse than even Shaw. Suspicious parents transferred their children away, but as far as most investigators can tell, a majority of the victims held their tongues.

"Shaw had this one-way mirror installed in the waiting room," says Ron Harper, a former NSA agent who helped the CIA compile the first definitive psychological profile on Shaw a year after the man had gone to ground. "He'd sit the kids in his office -- which was through this triple-layer concrete wall with insulation to kill any sound, by the way -- and he'd tell them if they said anything to anyone, he'd kill their parents. And then they'd have to go into mutant foster care. I don't know what mutant foster care is like now, but back then it was basically juvie for kids who hadn't ever done anything wrong."
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2011-06-29 18:02 (UTC)
By the late 1980s, Shaw had made a sea change, a philosophical shift. Individual discoveries weren't enough. Mutants had capitulated where they should have risen above humans, who were inferior evolutionary ancestors at that point. He left his job with the MIB -- still well-regarded -- and moved to Seattle, to San Francisco, briefly to Prague and then Germany, before heading for Oxford.

"He was recruiting," Harper says. "We know that now."

There are no reliable sources for how large Shaw's inner circle is, but one notable failed recruit is Charles Xavier.

In 1994, Xavier was just 19, freshly minted a Doctor of Science and also a Master of Arts. His splashy, upsetting entry into Oxford five years earlier was a painful combination of his dazzling academic history, his family's old -- "One could almost say medieval," says one source -- money and his revelation, shortly after matriculating, he was a telepath. If everyone around him became nervous and Xavier suffered a sudden want for friends, then Xavier didn't notice, say sources who attended Oxford alongside him. When he submitted himself for testing at 17 and became the world's most powerful known telepath, it didn't improve matters, but the prevailing opinion at Oxford was that while all of this was highly irregular, annoyingly gauche and deeply discomfiting, the prospect of the world's most powerful telepath being at Cambridge instead was far more irregular, annoyingly gauche and deeply discomfiting.

So Xavier stayed and flourished, churning out papers about Utopian possibilities, and how a sympathetic race could buck the eons of genetic tradition and embrace integration with dignity and empathy. He also wrote unreadable tomes about pioneering genetic research that are unsurprisingly less widely read and commented upon.

Shaw arrived in Oxford via train the night before Xavier's 20th birthday, which he'd already begun celebrating at a local pub with his sister, and multiple reports indicate the two spoke later that evening in the same bar. The interview was short, lasting no more than five minutes, before Xavier apparently excused himself and his sister, and made himself scarce. Local police and Scotland Yard records indicate Xavier attempted to contact law enforcement in the days following the meeting. Esther Hackett, a spokeswoman for the FBI, says the bureau doesn't release information about informants, and Tom Jackson for the CIA says the agency doesn't comment on open cases.

"Sebastian Shaw is a deeply misguided soul with a capacity for shocking cruelty," Xavier told the New York Times, in an interview three days before he was shot five times on a stage at Columbia University. "His vision of the future is apocalyptic, and anybody who finds themselves even the slightest bit seduced by his message should remember that -- there is a reason humans are anthropologically disposed toward group work, we function best in cooperation. Shaw would function best incarcerated."

***

Their summary knowledge of Shaw's known associates has tripled by the time Alex finally asks for water, three hours after the beginning of Erik's interview. There're three burn marks on the floor and a few of the tiles in the room are bent out of shape, but it's less damage than Erik was braced for, and when he says, "That's fine, Alex, that's enough, let's start with this," he means it.

Alex just keeps staring through the table, staring at his hands. "Do you think Scott's okay?"

Scott doesn't look okay in the photo, now blown up and attached to a wall in the bullpen, marked up by Angel and Raven looking for clues in the background. In the photo, Scott looks scared and too skinny, and when Erik had looked closer, beyond the tear-wet cheeks and Scott's ugly, blindfolded expression, he saw a scrape on the chin, the telltale purpling of a bruise on his cheek, the beginnings of a red abrasion on Scott's wrists, just visible over one narrow, denim-covered hip. But that's just the physical evidence.

TBC
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2011-07-02 20:23 (UTC)
It's been as many as eight and at least six days since Scott came into Shaw's possession, and Erik knows it will do Alex no good at all to know that's sufficient time for Shaw to have visited an endless number of horrors upon Scott.

Shaw's third session with Erik, he'd walked out with a searing burn from a hot kettle; he still has the scar: a pale brown mark on the inside of his thigh that he'd hidden when it was a fiercely painful wound, and dressed it awkwardly with stolen gauze from the gym teacher's office and Ace bandages he'd bought at the local pharmacy and Neosporin. The fourth session, Erik had lay on an examination table and let Shaw scrape a scalpel too close to his spine, a long, precise cut that had scarred from Shaw's neat stitches, after, when the man had been effusive with discovery once Erik had ripped the knife out of his hands and sent it flying toward the wall, imbedded into the cheap plaster over the concrete. Erik never left the two dozen visits he'd endured with Shaw without some sort of injury: a cut, a hidden bruise, something patched underneath his clothes, and his mother assumed his sudden horror of nudity and bathroom disclosure meant he was entering puberty, which had invited the unintended but equally traumatic business of Erik's father giving him an unending and excruciating talk cloaked heavily in metaphor about girls. Extra meaningless, ultimately, since Erik had been forced to find out about boys on his own anyway. That's all just in the flesh though. Erik likes his body, all the things it does for him, the strength in his arms and legs that lets him run and fight and carry Charles, sometimes, when he will allow himself to be helped. The part that lingers on in shattering dreams that come, still, is the memory of his mother — her pale face and her nervous expression — in the waiting room of that fucking office, the way Shaw's voice had stroked over him like fingers of broken glass.

"You know, Erik, you have quite one of the most interesting mutations I've ever seen, so it's good you're cooperating with me," Shaw had said to him. That time, he'd been seeing if Erik could stop the advent of a hammer before it broke his toe. Erik had managed — on the third time. "It would be such a terrible shame if I had to report her to the government for something. Maybe she has a mutation, too — of course she must. She's your mother after all. There're dozens like me, Erik, who would love to experiment with her skills, get to know her better."

Erik tells Alex, "I don't know if Scott's okay," and, "But I know we're doing everything we can to find him," because it's true and he's a shitty liar and it's better than, with someone like Shaw, Scott would be better off dead.

"It's my fault," Alex says. "If I hadn't gotten mixed up with that guy, he wouldn't even know about Scott."

The "probably, yeah," is on the tip of Erik's tongue, but even if it's true it's a meaningless truth. What does it matter how this happened? It's happened, and preoccupation with the etymology of the disaster isn't going to solve it any faster or at all.

But he doesn't know how to say that to Alex, either, and they're cultivating a miserable silence when the door opens and Raven peeks in, saying, "Erik — we need you out here."

Erik nods at her before turning back to Alex. "I'm going to leave you in here, okay?"

"I could help," Alex says, but his heart's not in it. He doesn't move.

"You already have," Erik tells him, honest. "If you want to get out, or you feel ready to get out, just press the call button, all right? I'll have Cassidy nearby in case you need anybody."

Alex doesn't say anything for a long time, and Erik's about to ask if he understands when he says, finally, "What do I do? If Scott's — what do I do?"

Erik just squeezes him on the shoulder, because there's nothing to say to that. He can't offer Alex any reassurances or make any promises, and he might be nearing twice Alex's ages but Erik hasn't found any better ways to cope with the fallout of the worst-case scenario, either.
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2011-07-02 20:26 (UTC)
It took three years for him to stop lying awake at night reworking the series of events that led up to the shooting at Columbia, staring at the ceiling and compiling vastly intricate reimaginings of how the three days before he'd headed to D.C. on the Acela might have gone differently. And he'd wake up in the morning after 20 minutes of sleep to see Charles looking sad and thin and still fucking paralyzed, voice hoarse from Erik's dreamlessness, asking, "Do you feel better? After you've done that?" and all Erik could ever say was, "No. I don't." It's not zen bullshit, like he'd thought for forever, to move on, to get on with it, to work around it; it's the only thing you can do. There are no options. Otherwise you live at the foot of a mountain of your own making, you've surrendered everything to the higher power of your own regret, and Erik can't do that — not twice in one lifetime.

"Call if you need us, all right?" Erik says again, and goes, out the door, past Cassidy leaning against a wall, and dives into the barely restrained chaos of the bullpen.

Raven had been given the unsavory task of contacting their NSA and Homeland Security liaisons with the new information from Alex, and the 23rd floor offices are filled to capacity now with people in off-the-rack suits and green expressions on their faces. The situation room is overflowing, and Erik barely manages to catch Angel's eyes through the crowd, and gets waved into conference one, where all of the walls have already been sacrificed to evidence and its nominally quieter, the round table staffed with McTaggert and Armando, heads bent together over sheaf after sheaf of papers. There are pictures of the two known associates they've managed to identify based on Alex's information so far: Emma Frost ("Let's not lie, boss, you wouldn't remember shit about her other than how hot she was, either," Sean had said) and Janos Quested (on Interpol's wanted list for a decade, now, for unspecified acts of terrorism). Armando's written up in white board marker next to EMMA FROST, TELEPATH OCP UNKNOWN and JANOS QUESTED, CONTROLS WIND, AZAZEL? DESCRIBED AS "COMIC BOOK DEVIL." NOT SURE WHAT TO DO WITH THAT. ALSO HE TELEPORTS, APPARENTLY. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

"Tell me what's happening, and please don't tell me I have to go tell Summers his kid brother is dead," Erik says, shutting the glass door when Angel scoots in after him.

McTaggert is the first one to answer. "Shaw's probably keeping Scott alive, we think."

"What leads us to think this?" Erik asks, striding over to an empty seat and slumping into it. From somewhere across the city, Charles is asking, polite and unobtrusive, if Alex is all right? and Erik doesn't bother to form an answer with words, just sighs into his exhaustion.

Raven passes over a file, which Erik pointedly doesn't read.

Rolling her eyes, she says, "Because from what we can piece together from Scott's school records and files with New York child services, his mutation was a dangerously destructive one. He had to be kept in an integration center for over a week right after first emergence until he learned to contain it better, and even after that the fire department got called to his adoptive parents' house twice in two months."

"So it runs in the family," Erik says, and says to Charles, Alex will keep. Are you leading Hank on? "What exactly…?"

"He shoots lasers out of his eyes," Armando says.

McTaggert, not looking up from her files, murmurs, "So if Shaw is keeping to his boringly awful MO, then Scott's life isn't in immediate danger — " her phone starts ringing, and she reaches for her pocket " — as long as he cooperates — hello?"

"He'll cooperate," Armando says, to nobody and everybody. "He's a kid, he'll be scared. He'll be smart and play along."

"He's related to Summers," Erik points out, unconvinced.

"I had Sean look into what the timing might mean," Angel reports, arms crossed over her chest. She does it to keep herself from biting her nails, but it's always a bad sign. "Shaw's been quiet for so long it's kind of difficult to figure out the particulars, but there're a couple of major potential targets — the Clinton Global Initiative's 2011 challenge involves mutation."

Erik opens his mouth.
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2011-07-02 20:27 (UTC)
"They've already been put on alert," Angel steamrolls onward. "There's also a fairly controversial bill floating around D.C. about mutant incarceration, but it's still in subcommittees and it seems like a long shot. Either way, the Secret Service has been alerted, too, and obviously, we know already." She shrugs. "Then there's usual: mutant registration administration headquarters, the Metahuman Institute in Chicago."

"Charles," Raven says pointedly.

In the background, McTaggert is starting to stare at Erik, frowning, cell phone still pressed to her face like its magnetized. McTaggert staring at Erik has always been bad fucking news: terrorist attack, sympathy, affection, considering how to off Erik so she can comfort Charles with her body, etcetera etcetera.

I don't know why letting Hank know I find him to be a startlingly interesting young man would be leading him on at all, it is only the truth, Charles chooses to answer, at that exact moment, and Erik has a momentary blank-out, trying to reconcile his two conversations, before he says:

"McTaggert, what?"

"Shut up, they're deciding," she tells him, like that makes sense, and Erik and the rest of his team share a "fucking CIA" look in the silence that follows, McTaggert still frowning at Erik, still. "Okay," she says into her phone. "I have clearance up to — ? Okay. Got it."

"Fuck, I knew this was CIA shit," Raven mutters.

McTaggert hangs up her phone. "We're fairly certain we know Shaw's most-likely target."

Angel raises an eyebrow. "Are we allowed to know?"

"Frankly," McTaggert says, her frown deepening at Erik, "I'm surprised Lehnsherr doesn't already know."

"I knew this was about Charles," Raven says, quietly tense, and Erik feels every metal object in the room vibrating in synchrony like a tuning fork — waiting.

McTaggert actually smiles. "Yes, but not as much as you would think," she admits, and tips her head to one side. "Charles really never mentioned anything about Cerebro?"

From inside his head, Erik hears, In my defense, I was told if I said anything it was treason.

Fuck treason, I'm never leaving you alone with McTaggert again, Erik retorts, and even though he doesn't want to know at all, asks, "All right — what the fuck is Cerebro?"

***

Cerebro is fascinating.

Professor Xavier — who had gone distinctly distracted while he'd been discussing the best foundation books for a solid background in genetics — had said that since he assumed he was released from his vow of secrecy regarding the project, he saw no reason not to share it with Hank.

Telepathic amplification is hardly new, and on small scale it's been experimented with by law enforcement telepath squads, for apprehension and discovery, but the civil rights implications of its use were always too murky and most efforts that Hank knows of were abandoned in infancy. It's hard to balance the potential benefits of apprehending a suspect with the possibility of accidental self-incrimination — if you have a constitutional right against it, where exactly does information gathered by the police force by someone who can read your mind without your consent fall along the axis of confession? Moreover, most telepaths are low-level, requiring skin-contact or proximity — average maximum distance is several hundred yards — to get a reliable reading, and amplification technology has only ever managed to extend that several hundred yards to a few dozen miles.

Of course, that was average telepaths and average technology. Cerebro is the CIA and Charles Xavier.

"Aren't you worried?" Hank asks, staring at the blueprints, spread out across the lush carpet on the floor of Professor Xavier's library. "I mean, if this thing can do what they say it can do — weren't you worried what the government is going to do with it?"

The professor looks thoughtful for a beat. "Yes and no," he says. "Yes, I'm concerned that they've taken the initiative to create a mutant identification system. At the same time, there must only be a handful of telepaths in the world strong enough for it to be useful — as I'm the only one known to them, I was less concerned about its misuse."
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2011-07-02 20:29 (UTC)
Was being the active verb, Hank thinks.

"At least if I was helping them, I had some say in what they did at all," the professor concludes.

Hank nods, distracted, going back to the plans. "So they think this is what Shaw wants?"

"It might be," Professor Xavier answers, careful picking his words the way Hank's parents had been careful picking their words about how he should always wear shoes, an entire lifetime ago. "If he has a powerful telepath working with him, it could be useful to him."

Hank frowns. "For what? Finding mutants? Building an army?"

"Perhaps, but I doubt most mutants would join up with Shaw," the professor says.

"And there is the registry, already," Hank remembers. "So — why Cerebro?"

Professor Xavier has a look on his face Hank recognizes from a lifetime of people older than him knowing an uncomfortable answer and wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible, and he thinks about pushing, about asking, but he's too shy to, ultimately, and probably, the professor can hear all of this right now, so this situation is weird as hell anyway, and Hank goes back to staring at the blueprints.

The engineering on the machine is a mess, Hank thinks, disapproving. It's a tangle of ad hoc fixes, no elegant solution, the obvious product of warring developers and weak management, and he's mentally sketching in a series of corrections when Professor Xavier passes him a red Sharpie.

"Go ahead," the professor says, smiling fondly.

Hank sometimes marvels at the human body's ability to keep going when all of the blood it needs to live has gone straight to his face to make him look as pathetic and embarrassing as possible. He manages to mumble, "Thanks," and takes the pen, because if Professor Charles Xavier gives you a pen, you take it, and he puts his head down and starts drawing in a few alternate power grid structures.

Alex doesn't like anybody or anything and his major emotional attachment is to being annoyed with everything, so Hank hasn't bothered to try and explain what it means that he's sitting in this room with Professor Xavier, that he gets to talk to the guy or how it feels to have the professor listening to him, asking questions, handing him Sharpies and telling him, "go ahead."

Hank's mutation had been evident at birth, no way to hide it, and so it's not really that weird that he became best friends with books instead of running around through the sprinklers like all the neighborhood kids. His mom said if he kept his shoes on, she didn't see why he couldn't make some friends; Hank knew even at four you can't keep your shoes on forever and sat in his room with two pairs of socks on during sweltering summer days and read books instead.

He read Professor Xavier's books instead. And when he'd exhausted the two the professor had written, he'd looked up the professor's articles. And when he'd burned through all of those — driving the local librarians crazy requesting newspapers from England and Australia and translations of Japanese editorials — then he tried to read all the professor's medical research. Those afternoons, after school and sitting on his bed with a photocopied paper out of the Journal of Medical Genetics in one hand and a dictionary balanced in his lap, Hank felt a little closer to normal. Like maybe in the world Professor Xavier wrote about where people have an MC1R mutation instead of red hair, then Hank having thumbs on his feet was pretty much ordinary, too.
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2011-07-02 20:32 (UTC)
Growing up, some of the kids in his integration center had awesome mutations: there were twin telepath girls, a boy who could fly, one who could do something complicated and sort of inexplicable with the molecular structure of water — which basically meant he could walk across swimming pools like a tiny, redheaded Jesus. Hank's mutation is pointless and ugly and inconvenient. He's never walked barefoot on a beach and skipped every pool party and even at home, he never walked around barefoot, and most of his life he's been scared about the possibility of it getting more extreme. Some mutations do, amplifying with puberty. More than 40 percent of mutants report that there's a second kick of development at some point in their lives, and Hank has nightmares about what his will be if he has one. He worries he'll turn into a monster. He worries he won't be able to blend in at all. He worries that this half-life he's carved out will fall apart completely. He thinks about where he'll hide if that happens, if Alex will still talk to him, if Scott will be scared of him, if he'll have to live in a sewer.

"You can always stay with me, Hank," the professor interrupts here, gently. "The annex is your home for however long you want it."

Hank starts, and stares up at him.

The professor smiles. "I'd had to be deprived of such a bright young mind just after I've finally discovered him, and it would be difficult to visit you in a sewer," he goes on, still soft, and nods down at the wheelchair. "They're not exactly built to be wheelchair accessible, you know."

The inside of Hank's mouth is arid and his throat hurts when he asks, "What if I turn into a monster?"

"I don't even know what a monster is," Professor Xavier says, raising his eyebrows. "You'll just be Hank, whatever you look like, however you change."

Hank feels a spike of fury at that, helpless anger. "That's easy for you to say — your mutation is — "

Hidden? the professor asks, cutting him off mid-sentence. I could pass as normal?

"If you wanted," Hank insists, because if he could hide his mutation from everybody and live like an ordinary person, he would. He would never think about mutation again. He be an electrical engineer and go to the beach everyday and walk around his house barefoot all the time and never feel like a freak again.

"You can't ignore who you are, Hank," Professor Xavier intervenes again. "No more than I could ever pass as normal."

"But you look normal," Hank protests.

"And I've been answering half your questions without your asking them out loud," the professor rejoins. "Strangely, people find that off-putting."

"You could…stop reading people's minds?" Hank suggests, feeling like a jerk all of a sudden.

The professor doesn't look mad or offended, though, he only looks mildly amused like he always does, shuffling some papers in his lap. "Yes," he says, "that is an option, isn't it?"

Hank swallows hard. "But not really?" he ventures.

"No more than amputating your second set of thumbs would be," the professor says, neat and not-unkindly, but Hank can't shake it, the knee-jerk hiss of imagined pain, the sustained ache, the way his balance would be off, how he'd look normal, but he'd look at the scars, too, for the rest of his life.

"Oh," Hank says, faint, because what else is there to say to that?

Professor Xavier just smiles at him, serene and a touch sad, and leans forward to look at the blueprints, marked up now with red lines all over. He asks, "Now — what's this you're proposing for the machine?"

***

TBC

(Plus, future outtake!:

"So you've already made allowances for my telling Erik things that are supposedly secret?" Charles says.

"If by allowances, you mean 'am resigned to,' then yes, I was," McTaggert retorts.

"Wonderful!" Charles cries, and wheels around to say, "Then Erik, you should know that all of those faintly possessive tendencies you harbor toward me regarding Moira are completely for naught, since whenever she's staring at you intently it's you she's — "

"Charles," McTaggert snarls.

"Oh, shit, seriously?" Raven asks.

"Can we talk about terrorists?" Erik asks. "Please?")
Fill: Limited Release (39/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-07-09 22:36 (UTC)
Charles's relationship with national security agencies is diplomatic if cold. Homeland Security thinks his out-front campaigning for mutant rights only riles public resentment and incites chaos. The NSA has been resentful for years that Charles sent every agent dispatched to persuade him into engaging in espionage back to the office with low-level nausea that taunts them for weeks. The CIA is particularly troubling because it's a combination of math nerds with guns and Moira McTaggert, who is startlingly smart, oblivious to otherness, intimidatingly beautiful, and has an unfortunate crush on Erik that Charles would dearly — if not for his own set of ethics — like to grind out of her memory.

More annoyingly, the CIA had begun work on the MDS049 project in the early 1960s, cobbling it out of Cold War technology and building on it in successive iterations with the help of in-house telepaths. The MDS049 system was only ever barely functional, haunted by power allotment problems, a tendency to short out at the third transformer, and forever plagued by a lack of telepaths powerful enough to either engage with the machines or powerful enough to handle the raw data feedback that successful link-up generated.

By 1999, the project was a footnote, an afterthought, but one that had lingered with Agent Declan Platt, who'd showed up at the house in Manhattan three days after Charles had moved in, boxes stacked sky high, and asked if Charles wouldn't like to be part of a project that had been trying to be groundbreaking since the sixties.

The first three times Charles had encountered the machine — which everybody at the facility had nicknamed Cerebro and finally explained the extremely suspicious satellites that marred the view from the mansion in Westchester — he'd gotten nothing, then a nosebleed, and finally a migraine so intense he'd blacked out. When he'd come to, it was to Moira McTaggert driving him back home, the sky already going soft black overhead by the time they'd reached his street and seen Erik, furious and stood-up, standing at the doorstep to Xavier House as it was beginning to rain.

"Oh, God," Charles had said, and promptly fell out of the back of Moira's car trying to apologize and preemptively grovel for a second chance — which would have worked better if he hadn't been having residual black spots and nausea, managed to trip on the curb, and add a scrape on his chin to his black eye from when he'd (apparently) wiped out at the facility.

The time Charles had woken up after that one, he'd been relocated to the living room couch and he was surrounded by the steady sense of Erik's deep reluctance to develop feelings for him. It had been discouraging but understandable, given that Charles was sort of covered in vomit, an hour late for the date he'd spent a year wearing Erik down to agree to, and had fallen out of a woman's car looking like he'd lost three rounds straight in a boxing ring.

"I truly have a very noble and impressive reason for missing our date," Charles remembers saying, looking up at Erik's too-tight expression and Moira's worried face, "but mostly I hope that you won't be so mad at me you won't give me another chance because I've been practicing with Raven and I can talk about normal things not including genetics and I was planning on being incredibly charming and sexually permissive."

Erik had looked at Moira. "Is he trying to tell us something?"

"I think it's Spanish," Moira had guessed.

"I'm going to die alone," Charles had told them both, and passed out.

It took him another three months to convince Erik to go out with him again, and another six months after that for Cerebro to do anything but function seemingly by accident and at random intervals, but at least there were no further splitting headaches or incidents involving vomiting. And in the occasional functional snatches, now and then, Charles had felt the borders of his mind extend outward from the watery edges of Main and forests of Pennsylvania until he'd felt like he'd swallowed the Earth and everybody inside on it — suddenly overfull with everything everyone was thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing all at once.
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@темы: fanfiction

---

X-Men

Fill: Limited Release (12/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-13 19:05 (UTC)
"Hank's happy enough for both of us," Alex mutters, and Hank punches him in the arm for it, which hurts like a motherfucker, not that Alex is going to admit that. And because Alex, for better or worse, believes in the devil he knows, he asks, "How come you didn't consult me at all? What if I don't want to help you guys? What if I want to stay in prison?"

Lehnsherr looks unmoved, as usual. Asshole. "Then I guess you don't want my help finding your brother, either."

Alex grits his teeth, and he can feel Hank's hands on his shoulder, trying to hold him back. Scott's case isn't really a case, Alex knows. He's a street kid, and they've both busted out of mutant foster care -- basically kiddie prison, anyway, so Alex should have seen this latest development in his life coming -- so much the system would be happier to see them gone, Alex bets. But Scott's powers are even more fucked up than Alex's, and they'd barely had them under control when Alex had gone into real jail. Who knows where he is now, how they are now, if someone's trying to hurt him or use him.

Hank is whispering, "Alex, come on, just -- "

"We can make this work for both of us, Summers," Lehnsherr interrupts, and Alex thinks that this is the first time he's really felt like the dumb kid Lehnsherr clearly thinks he is, in all the time they've known each other. "You just have to learn how to work for me."
"Alex, come on," Hank hisses. "This is the best way, okay?"

Hank's right, but that doesn't quiet the part of Alex that wants to yell that fucking feebs who wear collar shirts and ties and get to hide behind their badges don't know anything about his life. That maybe Lehnsherr is a mutant, but he's clearly got his shit under control, and fuck, the government loves him, puts him on TV all the time to talk about helping prevent terrorism and how his task force is "uniquely able" to handle mutant threats. He wants to yell that there's no fucking way Lehnsherr knows how useless and angry and scared Alex feels all the time -- Lehnsherr probably doesn't have any family he gives a fuck about. Lehnsherr's probably never had a feeling.

But Alex has a brother, and if someone forced him to admit it, he has some feelings about that, and so he grits his teeth and says:

"Fine -- fine, we'll do it your way."

***

Getting Alex to do something rational, taking the route of least resistance, is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences, so Hank feels pretty justified about being ebullient with triumph all the way during the long drive from the prison to 26 Federal Plaza.

Agent Lehnsherr's a weird mix of law-abiding and control-freak risk-taker as a driver, shredding across three lanes at one point and then scrupulously sticking to within 10 miles of the speed limit in his big black hulk of a government-issued SUV. Hank wonders if the guy is nuts, because he can't imagine anybody else taking Alex Summers -- ex-supermax inmate and all-around terrifying-seeming mutant criminal -- out of jail without so much as another agent for backup, but Lehnsherr seems pretty unconcerned.

Of course, if what Alex says about Lehnsherr's mutation is true, then he could throw both Hank and Alex into traffic and orchestrate a 40-car pile up on their faces if they so much as put a toe out of place, so maybe it's not weird at all.

"My team's arranged housing for you," Lehnsherr says, out of nowhere. "It's not much to look at, but it's on the same budget as the state was spending on you per month in jail, so try to keep an open mind."

Hank blurts out, "How much was that?" since Alex seems determined to ignore everything going on in the in favor of sulking in the backseat.

Lehnsherr grins, half-apologetic. "About $800 a month."

"In Manhattan?" Hank gasps.

"Like I said: not much to look at," Lehnsherr says, the car slowing to a crawl now, finally, down beyond the long avenues and into the warrens of tiny, interlocking, knotted streets of Chinatown, Canal stretching angular and crammed with thousands of people, English vanishing from the signs along the street.

Frowning, Hank asks, "Can he stay somewhere else?"

"Is it within his 2 mile radius?" Lehnsherr asks, looking amused.
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Fill: Limited Release (13/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-13 19:06 (UTC)
Hank thinks about the warehouse in Brooklyn and tries to do the math in his head. "Maybe?"

"We'd also have to clear whoever he'd be staying with," Lehnsherr goes on, hanging a left, and Federal Plaza looms hideous and unyielding up ahead, sounding entirely too cheerful for someone giving this any genuine consideration. "Deep background check and all that."

Hank feels queasy at the thought, and he's trying to figure out how to backtrack on this when Alex -- ever gentlemanly -- elbows him viciously and mutters, "Forget it, Hank."

"Ah," Lehnsherr says, pulling up to a parking gate, "young love."

Bleak, Hank says, "Agent Lehnsherr," and Alex just rolls his eyes.

"Don't worry, I think it's cute," Erik assures him, eyes crinkling meanly in the rear-view mirror, which is sufficiently mortifying to make Hank subside into embarrassed silence until they're done parking and Agent Lehnsherr pulls open the door of the backseat and hustles them out into the underground lot like a particularly unfriendly camp counselor. That's pretty much par for the course the rest of the way up to the 23rd floor offices.

The elevator ride is endless, with Alex sulking in mute fury in the back corner and Agent Lehnsherr frowning at his BlackBerry, scrolling back and forth for something.

Hank knows that if there are good guys, then Agent Lehnsherr is as close to is as it's possible for them to find. Hank knows that Alex doesn't trust the feds, that his automatic reaction is to lie and cut and run, that distrust had been pounded into Alex, an indelible mark on top of bad circumstances. Alex hadn't had the parents to drive him to manifestation management classes or pay for nice ones, or even the luxury of being able to skip work to go to the (shitty) free ones offered by the government. Being in this building -- being around people in general, much less Feds -- makes Alex nervous, makes his skin crawl.

Hank's different. His parents had been nice, he'd had a pretty benign upbringing, and Harvard was really nice about letting a 13 year-old mutant take classes, there. They were less nice when they realized what he was doing in his off hours in the chemistry lab -- desperately trying to find a way to pass, completely, as ordinary. It wasn't really anything they could keep quiet, and Hank will always remember the tired, heartbreaking look on Dr. Matchmark's face when she'd told him she had to report him, that he'd probably have to do some time, because if it was one thing nobody was lenient about, it was mutants playing with mutant DNA.

"I'm going to go into my office," she'd told him, looking hundreds of years older than she was. "I'm going to go into my office and pick up the phone and dial it. I'm going to call the mutant juvenile line specifically, so it'll probably take a while before I can find the number -- am I being clear?"

"Yes," Hank had whispered, and he'd run.

So Alex had the bad life, and made the best of it, and Hank had a good thing going and screwed it up, and the only person who'd been nice to him after he'd spent a month sleeping in parks and scared as hell and passing into and out of shelters and too scared to take a shower in case someone see his feet was Alex. Hank didn't care if Alex was mad at him for caring, Hank was always going to care. Even if Alex was a dick.

"Look," Agent Lehnsherr finally says, when the numbers on the elevator tick past 15, 16, "I know you're nervous, but this is really going to be a nothing day. We'll do a debriefing, my team will have you look at some photos, we'll do a couple of interviews -- easy."

Then the elevator doors open into total chaos on the 23rd floor.

***

Fill: Limited Release (14/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-14 19:23 (UTC)
Charles had considered not telling Erik about the note on his office door, the shivery-cold impression of Sebastian Shaw left behind on a message taped to his name plate, but then he'd opened the letter — he can already hear Erik's explosive fury on that subject — and found the folded-up photograph and went ahead and canceled all of his classes for the day.

"I don't really see why I can't go now," Charles says reasonably. "I've brought you the note."

"You're kidding me, right?" Raven demands. "He was at your office."

"So were three pedophiles and a wheelchair fetishist, yesterday," Charles argues. He keeps up a low-level scan whenever he's at his desk because he promised Erik he would.

Raven stares at him. "Did any of those three pedophiles or that wheelchair fetishist shoot you five times?"

"No," Charles says shortly, and decides not to tell her that said wheelchair fetishist also has an extensive collection of possibly-fake-hope-it's-fake snuff films. The level of access Charles has always had to everybody's thoughts means that generally speaking it takes a lot to rile him, though his friends and family by no means have the same tolerance. "But I hardly see what my sitting in your office so everybody can trip over me is going to do."

Armando, who in Erik's absence gets to take over as World's Worst Boss, is yelling at everybody in the background, a phone clutched between his ear and his shoulder, waving a folder and directing human traffic left and right. Charles had barely passed Armando the note in question — which he'd opened carefully, using a handkerchief he kept in his jacket pocket — before phones had started ringing off the hook. Everybody is thinking extremely loudly, that this is the first indication of Shaw they've had in more than a year, that someone needs to set up protective detail for various and sundry former targets, that Columbia officials and campus security need to be alerted and read in on the situation, that Charles Xavier is a poor bastard, stuck in his chair, that oh shit, I hope he didn't hear that.

Raven, who can't hear any of it, just sticks the toe of her sensible heels through one of the spokes spokes of one Charles's wheelchair and glowers.

"You sitting here in the office so everybody can trip over you is going to keep you from getting killed, you moron," she tells him, fierce, and Charles can feel the worry radiating off of her in tsunami waves. They both know it's irrational, that to panic now is too late already, given that Shaw has apparently been strolling around Charles's office leaving him affectionate notes to say hello, don't worry, I still intend to make a martyr out of you.

Charles thinks that if Shaw was planning on killing him today, then he'd probably be dead already, but he's known Raven since he was 12 and she was 10 and he swears every time he makes her cry that he's never going to make her cry again.

He pastes a smile on his face. "Raven, I am sure there are no more capable hands than yours in case someone needs to be shot violently in the face."

She looks genuinely touched. "Shut up, Charles," she mumbles.

"Frankly, I'm more concerned about the boy in the photo," Charles returns, and they settle into an uncomfortable silence at the thought of him: blindfolded and obviously terrified, face wet with tears. There's no psychic impression on the photo — something snapped bloodlessly and without any interest, it's drenched in the same icy determination as the note Shaw had left on his door like an unwanted calling card. The child looks maybe 16, a little too thin, knobby-kneed, and he's curled into himself in the corner of a bland-colored room: not a single obvious detail in the photo other than a tremendous amount of fearfulness.

Raven puts her hands on his knees, and he can feel her proximity, but not her touch, not the weight of her hands or the warmth of them, and even though his injury is old, the tiny losses, the never-ending sense of absence, is eternally new.

"We'll find him," she reassures him. "We have our best people on it."
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Fill: Limited Release (15/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-14 19:29 (UTC)
(A/N: UGHHHH let's just all pretend I didn't briefly anonfail...)

Charles nods. Angel is already in the field, he can feel the whispery, feathery sensation of her in the distance, through the glass and steel and successive layers of concrete, up past Harlem and Jackie Robinson Park, ordering around forensics and caucusing with Homeland Security liaisons in the hallway outside of Charles's office. The psychic shielding around the division's offices is trembling with the volume and mass of everybody's thoughts, overfull, and Charles spreads his awareness out further, for some indication of Shaw.

Instead, he gets Erik: amused, light, BlackBerry outage, fucking RIM, fucking AT&T, has no clue what's going on, talking with two people Charles doesn't know. Wait, Charles thinks, frowning, yes I do. Or at least he knows one of them second-hand, the impression of a ghost in a photograph.

Either way.

When he opens his eyes again — he never means to let them drift closed when he does this, it must be reflexive — Raven is staring at him curiously.

"Did you find anything? Anyone?" she asks.

"Not Shaw," Charles says. "Either he's long gone, or heavily shielded."

Raven looks skeptical. "From you?"

"There are more things in heaven and Earth, Raven," Charles says, and folds his hands in his lap. "Either way, I suggest you brace for impact."

Tensing, Raven asks, "What? Impact?"

Charles tips his head toward the glass doors to the elevator bank, saying, "Erik," and all the color drains out of Raven's face as they hear the elevator bell indicator. "Boom."

***

As soon as the elevator doors open, three things happen in rapid succession:

(1) Erik's BlackBerry finally springs to life, showing 15 missed calls, 5 voice mails, 2 text messages, and an embarrassment of work e-mail, most of them with the subject line: SHAW or RE: RE: RE: SHAW, URGENT

(2) The elevator next to theirs pings open, and McTaggert, their CIA liaison pops out.

(3) Hank sucks in a teenaged-girl gasp for oxygen and asks, high-pitched in a hush, "Oh my God, is that Professor Charles Xavier?"

The only reason Erik doesn't overreact when he sees Charles, finally, a singular oasis of wary calm in the midst of utter bedlam, is because McTaggert interrupts him with an arched brow, saying, "Erik," and casting a curious look over Alex and Hank, huddled behind Erik and gawping at the office.

"Moira," Erik says through gritted teeth. "I assume that as per usual, your presence here indicates the shitshow has hit 11."

She smiles at him, nicer than he deserves for his tone. "Not yet. And if we play this right, maybe not at all — now, if you'll excuse me," she demurs, and calls out across the room, "Raven? We're ready for that read-in."

Across the room, Raven's familiar blond head pops up from where she's been camped out next to Charles, obviously babysitting, and Erik spares her an acknowledging nod before he turns to her brother.

The very first thing Charles does when their eyes meet is to project the thoughts, I'm fine, no harm done, and Several of those missed calls of yours are from me.

That doesn't make the argument they're about to have any less imminent, though, so Erik snags Sean by the back of his suit jacket, ignoring his strangled gulp, and spins him around.
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Fill: Limited Release (16/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-14 19:33 (UTC)
"Cassidy, this is Summers and McCoy," Erik says, pointing at Summers and McCoy and ignoring the way Raven is rolling her eyes dramatically at him as she and McTaggert brush past, heels tapping dully against the carpet, and each of the metal pins inside feels like a little stab in the back of Erik's eyeballs.

Sean waves, sounding vaguely choked. "Hey," he manages.

"Summers, McCoy, this is Agent Sean Cassidy," Erik clarifies. Hank waves back, but he's still staring over Erik's shoulder at Charles, gap-jawed. "Cassidy, I want you to sit on these guys until I'm done with Charles and resist — " Erik holds up an arresting hand at Sean's smirk " — the urge to say the first thing that comes to your mind at that."

Throwing off a sloppy salute, Cassidy says, "Aye aye, sir," and wriggles out of Erik's grasp, slapping a hand on Hank's shoulder and wisely leaving Summers alone entirely, saying, "Hey guys, hey, welcome to hell."

"Seriously," Hank says as they're led off, "is that Charles Xavier?"

Erik's already walking off when he hears Sean say, "Oh, man, you have no idea, do you?"

Armando barely looks up from his computer or lean away from the phone when Erik walks past, just turning to glance at him long enough to say, "Sit-rep in 15 minutes in the main conference room, Angel's on site at Columbia working with Homeland Security and forensics, and before you yell at us, the Professor was the one who decided to drive the note here himself."

Long-suffering, Charles says, "Carrytale."

"I'm giving him a raise," Erik says. "My office. Now."

Smiling sweetly, Charles says, "Really, I'd rather do this here."

Looking pained, Armando murmurs, "Please, don't," and Charles talks over him, saying, "Really, Erik, I can tell already that you're going to overreact — this isn't as big — "

The rest of the familiar litany gets lost when Erik's patience snaps entirely and he skids Charles's wheelchair down the long aisle and through the door of his office, ignoring the way he can feel everybody's eyes on him in favor of staring down Charles's murderous expression instead.

"Was that," Charles grinds out, once the door to Erik's office is shut, "necessary?"

"Why didn't you call the police immediately?" Erik snaps, instead of answering.

"Because I don't think you're fully cognizant of how humiliating it is when you do things like that," Charles goes on, pitch rising.

"Did you forget that you're his number one target?" Erik talks over him. He knows Charles hates it when he does that almost as much as he hates it any time Erik brings attention to the wheelchair, but everything in his head a rattling cacophony of terror and he's no good at hiding it around Charles. "Did that somehow slip your giant fucking mind?"

Funny enough, back when Charles had the option of walking away, he never would. He'd follow Erik room from room and through locked doors and into angry car rides, talking into Erik's head, never willing to let it go, also resulting in a couple of hilariously awkward moving violations for Erik. Charles is uniquely capable of knowing when people need space, he's just too much of an arrogant shit to give it to them. Now that leaving's a production — between the awkwardly placed chair that had been pushed aside where Erik had stormed in after Charles, the door that's going to prove an annoying angle for the chair, the people in the way between Erik's office and the elevators that Charles can't just weave between with furious speed anymore — walking away is the only thing Charles looks like he wants to do.

"Strangely," Charles says, his vowels absolutely flat and icy, knuckles white on the arms of the chair, "it has not slipped my mind."

Which is enough to deflate Erik's swelling fury all at once.

Fighting with Charles is second nature to Erik; being mad at him is far more foreign. Mostly when they argue it's over philosophical differences, or about whether or not Charles is violating Erik's right to not incriminate himself when he pokes around Erik's head and discovers he may or may not have passed on wearing kevlar on one more more occasion. Erik is used to be angry about Charles, being angry for Charles, but being angry at him is hard.
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Fill: Limited Release (17/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-14 19:35 (UTC)
Charles is wrapped up inside layers and layers of privilege, oblivious to the uglier complications engendered in the lives of people who aren't backed by vulgar trust funds who live like kings off of the interest. He's always known exactly what everybody is thinking and what they want, if they want him, and when Erik had first met Charles, years ago, fresh off the fucking boat from England and embarrassingly sweet, he'd never truly been hurt, either. Erik hadn't wanted to be the first; he doesn't want to be the next, the continuing, the ever-present ache.

But Charles also knows every terrible thing, seen it, done it, lived through it, wanted it and hated it and been victimized by it, lived inside of it. Erik's confident of his own limits and limitations, but he never really knows Charles's — there's no way to tell because Charles is rarely changed by it, still the volubly witty and charmingly dry professor, eternally interested in everything and everybody — nothing a hopeless case. What the hell is Erik supposed to do with that, he wonders every fucking day.

He puts his hands on his face. "Why didn't you just call the cops, Charles?"

"There was no rush, he was gone, I could tell," Charles says, quiet now and tired-sounding. "And I just saved your team the trouble of driving me down here — they would have been forced to anyway."

"You can't know he was gone for sure," Erik protests, but it's hollow at the core and Charles knows that, too. "What was in the letter?"

Charles raises his eyebrows, face clearing. "I'd prefer not to say while I'm still nearby and easy for you to yell at, if it's all the same." Don't worry, I'll yell at you when I get home, anyway, Erik thinks, sullen, and Charles ignores it entirely to ask, "What do you think it means?"

"That Shaw's re-emerged?" Erik asks. "I don't know. Probably he's planning something."

"Or he's been planning something, and now he's about to act," Charles muses.

Resisting the urge to tug at his hair, Erik agrees, "Yes, or that."

Charles makes a humming noise, simultaneously meditative and dismissive.

"Who was with you? Coming up in the elevator?" he asks.

Erik looks out the glass walls of his office, down the open floor and the bustling desks, at where Sean is talking about Alex, who's ignoring him in favor of staring at his shoes, and Hank, who is ignoring him in favor of staring directly into Erik's office, gazing at Charles with something close to abject infatuation.

"That is Summers and his pre-pubescent 'lawyer,'" Erik mutters.

Charles turns to stare back at Hank, grinning crookedly and waving a little, at which Hank goes totally red and then completely white and then pasteboard green before managing a feeble wave back. "Alex is a mutant — Hank's one, too?"

Erik turns, eyes narrowed at Hank. "McCoy is a mutant?"

"I have got to stop accidentally outing people," Charles sighs to himself, and tipping his head to one side, he goes back to staring at Alex and Hank through the window, thoughtful. "Where will they go? Now that Alex is out?"

The other trouble with telepaths is that when Erik thinks, hah, he's going to hate this, and flashes to the image of the shitty by-the-week flop they'd lined up for Summers.

Charles's expression is obviously appalled. "Erik, no."

"I have to play by the rules," Erik protests. "Same money it takes to put him up in jail."

Raven comes up and knocks on the door, peering in and asking, "Are you guys done fighting? The meeting is starting next door."

"We're done fighting," Charles assures her, and looks around her, back to Alex and Hank — who is back to staring at him with the bleak sort of adolescent longing Charles is pretty used to by now from enduring long-term exposure to college students. "If you guys are going to the meeting, can I talk with Alex and Hank?"

Erik says, "No," the same time Raven says, "Why not?"

Charles is already beaming, waving at Hank and Alex some more and ignoring Erik's, "Charles, no, no," as he heads for the office door, saying, "Oh, come on, it's not like you're going to let me go home unsupervised, anyway, I may as well keep myself entertained while I wait," and makes a beeline for the kids.

***

TBC

Fill: Limited Release (18/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-17 20:32 (UTC)
***
Absolutely nothing about this fucking donkey show has indicated that this thing isn't bullshit yet, so Alex is fully prepared to scowl his way through whatever Lehnsherr has planned and to make himself as irritating as possible until someone finds his little brother. He doesn't particularly give two craps if they ever find Shaw, but sitting here while everybody is freaking the fuck out about the guy is starting to make him feel like he missed something giant in the transaction when he was running with Florick's crew. Alex had known better back then than to ask dumb questions when he was being hired to blow stuff up, but now he wishes he'd paid a little more attention at least — if for nothing else, as leverage.

Next to him, Hank starts making a choking noise, and digs his man-claws into Alex's forearm.

"Oh my God," Hank hisses. "Oh my God, Alex!"

Because that hurts like a motherfucker, Alex is mostly focused on digging Hank's fucking nails out of his flesh, when he says, "Jesus God damn Christ, Hank, what the hell is wrong with you?"

"He's just a touch excited," someone says, and Alex jerks his head up in time to see some guy in a wheelchair smiling at them. He has brown hair and blue eyes and looks like every fucking first-year social worker Alex has ever had the misfortune of encountering. "And — oh, my goodness, Hank, I'm flattered, but that's hardly true."

Alex frowns, and next to him, Hank makes that wheezing noise again.

In one high-pitched exhalation, Hank squeaks, "Oh my God, you're reading my mind."

Smiling with only the barest touch of obviously fake apology, the guy says, "Well, yes, but you are thinking terribly, terribly loudly, Hank — I can stop, if you'd prefer?" Pausing, he glances at Alex, the grin on his face stretching into something more genuine. "Alex Summers, it's excellent to finally meet you, and what a marvelous mutation you have."

Alex yells, "What did you just say to me?" the same time Hank simpers, "No, no, it's just such an honor. You're amazing."

The man just laughs, saying, "My apologies, chaps, I should have introduced myself first — "

"I mean, obviously, we know who you are," Hank interrupts, blushing like some a teenaged girl.

What the fuck, Alex thinks, and snaps, "Uh, not obviously. I don't know who the fuck this guy is."

While Hank is looking like Alex just punched Mother Teresa in front of a school full of orphaned kittens, the man's smile goes crooked, and he says, "Charmingly said, Alex — I'm Charles Xavier, pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Whatever," Alex snaps. "How do you know about my — my shit?"

Hank has transferred his clawing from Alex's arm to his own face by this point, so thank God for that.

"I'd say it's refreshing to meet someone without any preconceived notions of me, but that would be inaccurate," the man ripostes, still cheerful. "I'm a telepath — I know about everyone's 'shit,' as you say."

A hundred thousand things things blow through Alex's mind all at once, and every single one of them he'd rather saw off his arm with a rusty knife than admit to anybody, which leaves him feeling vaguely sick and hoping that Xavier didn't catch all of it — hell, any of it.

"So, what?" Alex asks, flustered. "Are you the FBI's pet psychic or something?"

"God, no, I'd be bored to tears," Xavier answers, easy. "No, I'm the object of the investigation today."

Alex must look skeptical, or maybe he's just thinking, fucking yeah right really loudly or something — this is the first time he's ever met a telepath and he already hates telepaths, great — because Xavier just tips his head back toward the huddle in the conference room, saying, "I brought them a note Shaw was kind enough to leave me today. It's caused a bit of excitement."

"God," Hank says, voice shaky. "I mean, are you okay?"

"It's very sweet of you to worry, Hank, but I'm fine," Xavier assures him, and while Hank is nurturing a starry-eyed expression like God just shot off in his face or something, Xavier directs his attention back to Alex. "Tell me, Alex, did anyone ever help you work on your powers? Learn how to control it?"

Alex stares at him for a little while. "Dude, are you for fucking real?"
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Fill: Limited Release (19/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-17 20:34 (UTC)
"Stop," Hank begs, actually putting his hands on Alex's face. "For the love of God, stop."

Ignoring both those things, Xavier says, "I think with time, patience, and effort, you could gain complete mastery over your powers."

"I also hear there is no try, there is only do or do not," Alex retorts.

"I hate you," Hank tells him feelingly. "You're just — this is my hero, stop being a dick."

That tiny wrench in Alex's stomach definitely isn't guilt, but he says, "What? I don't even know who this guy is and he's reading my mind? Come on!" anyway, because Hank's expression of pained distress is so fucking annoying. It's always been like this, ever since Alex found him on that corner in Central Park like he was just dying to get raped under a bridge, and then when Hank wouldn't go away, just hung around quietly — like he was worried Alex was going to hit him — and fixed everything in that shitty little flop he and Scott were sharing at that point, rewiring stuff, magicking the plumbing, stealing them cable.

"You'll be pleased to know that I stopped," Xavier reports cheerfully, and like a switch has been flicked, he tilts his head two degrees to the left, and Alex has a clear and total understanding that he's been dismissed — just like that. Now, Xavier's turning that smile up to a billion watts, directed completely at Hank, who looks like he might just expire from an excess of awesome under its power. "So, Hank, where are you guys going to be staying?"

Every hair on Alex's body stands straight up at that tone. Xavier sounds totally fucking harmless and completely painfully sweet, which is exactly the sort of voice every single con man cultivates if he's at all good at what he does.

"Agent Lehnsherr says they have a place lined up for Alex," Hank admits, but he sounds skeeved out just saying it. It's probably a shithole overrun with rats, because that's just the sort of dick thing that dick Lehnsherr would do. He might be one of the less douchey Feds, but he's still a Fed.

Xavier smiles. It's a total snake-charmer smile. Alex looks over at the meeting room, where Lehnsherr's on his feet now pointing at something complicated-looking on a white board, totally unconcerned about the more or less deserted bullpen and Alex and Hank. What the fuck. Either Lehnsherr's so badass he's completely convinced Alex isn't going to try anything or he's secretly the worst FBI agent ever.

"I wasn't worried about Alex," Xavier says, giving Alex a brief, amused glance. "I'm sure Alex is more than capable of taking care of himself — I was more concerned about you."

Momentarily, Hank looks trapped. "I uh, I have a place. In Brooklyn."

"Brooklyn," Xavier says delicately, but he makes it sound like a cesspool. Which, since Hank's "place" is off of the Graham Avenue stop on the L, down past the fucking BQE and behind a Mexican butcher's, is frankly pretty accurate.

"It's fine," Hank rushes to assure Xavier. Yeah, okay, Alex thinks with painful resignation, Hank's about ready to throw up a gospel hand and pledge his life savings to the Church of Oh, Professor Xavier already. Typical. "Really, I mean, it has nice windows."

Xavier just shakes his head, reaching over to put a hand on — to put a hand on Hank's wrist. "Now, you're such a nice, young man," he says.

"Wait, what is happening," Alex asks, because holy shit.

Ignoring him, Xavier says, "And I have this gorgeous annex you can stay in, very inexpensive."

Hank looks like he's mentally already moved in and hung up all his ugly ass posters. Out loud, he says, "I couldn't possibly, Professor, that would be just — "

"Please," Xavier interrupts, "call me Charles."

Hank is probably going to look underaged until he has some underaged kids of his own, Alex is aware, and in the past this has been awesome for getting half-price movie tickets and old ladies to feel bad for them when they need stuff, but this entire situation has now taken a turn for the seriously God damn creepy. Because he is sort of Hank's friend, and Hank has always managed to get him HBO, Alex graciously slaps Xavier's creepy hands off of Hank's wrist, growling, "No thanks, asshole, he's not buying what you're selling."
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Fill: Limited Release (20/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-17 20:36 (UTC)
Xavier just gives Hank a self-deprecating look. "Of course, I understand. A young man with vigor such as yourself would surely have better things to do than help an old fart like me with my research."

Hank makes that noise again, like a hamster being sucked in a pool drain, and before Alex knows what's happening, he's saying, "Yes. Yes, I would love to. That would be just. I've read all of your papers. Are you sure I can stay with you? I can commute. The L train usually runs okay," and Xavier's putting an affectionate hand on Hank's knee — seriously what the fuck — and saying stuff like, "Hank, I would worry myself sick if you stayed in that horrible place. And don't lie about it, I can read your mind you know. It's too brilliant a mind to waste! And we have your own fantastic mutations to investigate as well, have we not?"

"I am actually about to throw up in my own mouth," Alex tells them both.

Then Lehnsherr appears out of nowhere, popping up behind Xavier looking like someone shat in his coffee.

"Are you mouthing off, Summers?" he asks.

"Damn right I am," Alex reports.

Xavier just tips his head back, smiling in an entirely different way than he'd been smiling before. "We're just having a spirited discussion, Erik. These young people are wonderful."

Looking like maybe he'd discovered the shit in his coffee by chugging it, Lehnsherr says to Xavier, "You are, if even, like 13 years older than them. Please stop thinking you are everybody's kindly grandfather," and turns back up to Hank, asking, "Is he harassing you?"

Mortified, Hank murmurs, "No, Professor Xavier is amazing."

"Jesus, now I'm going to throw up in my mouth," Lehnsherr sighs, genuinely revolted. "All right, Summers, I'm going to have Cassidy drive you to your place and get settled in. Hank need a ride?"

For all Hank's dumb about people and really stupid when it comes to Alex, he's too smart to ever let a Fed follow him home. Alex doesn't say anything, and Hank doesn't say anything, and eventually some smoking hot woman everybody's calling McTaggert says, "Erik, we've got NSA on the phone," and Lehnsherr disappears back into the conference room.

"Can I go home if I take an agent with me?" Xavier calls at Lehnsherr's back.

"Yeah, but only if you take an agent with you," Lehnsherr lobs back, looking over his shoulder to say, "Otherwise, you sit your ass here and wait for me, got it? No funny business, Charles."

"Me?" Xavier asks, all innocence, "never."

Sean Cassidy, who'd already told Alex and Hank his entire life story, and then spent 15 minutes complaining about his lot in life as the designated indentured servant of the FBI's mutant task force, is easily collected from an enormous pile of photocopies he's tending by Xavier saying, "Sean? May we borrow you for a moment?" After some negotiations, Sean goes to get keys for a bureau car, and then they're all hanging around the elevator together, watching the numbers tick town, Hank and Xavier having some kind of incomprehensible conversation about alleles that makes Alex feel more and more like they should retract his GED just listening to it.

Once they're in the car, driving up the island, out of the gnarled mess of traffic below the grid, Xavier — who'd neatly got himself into the passenger's seat, and folded his wheelchair up to tuck away in the backseat with Hank's effusive help — says to Cassidy:

"Actually, if you don't mind, let's just drop off Alex first, Hank and I are both going back to the house."

Alex says, "What, seriously?"

Cassidy smirks. "Does Erik know about this?"

"Why does Erik need to know that I'm keeping a lovely young man in the annex?" Xavier asks. Next to Alex, Hank blushes a Baskin Robbins 41 flavors of fucking pink, and Alex is suddenly bombarded with horrible, graphic images of Hank and Xavier, making sweet morally wrong love over a thousand chemistry textbooks and wants to die, immediately.
Fill: Limited Release (21/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-17 20:37 (UTC)
"No way," Alex hisses at Hank. "You are not going over there."

"You said yourself the warehouse should be condemned," Hank argued.

"First off, the warehouse is condemned," Alex snaps. "But that doesn't mean you can just — sign yourself over to the nerd love of your life, okay? He's ancient! He's like 40!"

Hank clears his throat. "Don't worry, Professor, I'm definitely coming. I know the Library of Congress system. I could totally redo your library."

"That's spectacular, Hank," Xavier says. "Really, Alex. You don't need to be so concerned. Hank is clearly a very sweet young man, I'll be nothing but solicitous with him."

In the driver's seat, Cassidy looks like he's choking. Alex doesn't blame him.

"You know what, fuck this," Alex snarls. "Where Hank goes, I go."

There's always that moment where the enormity of what a giant dumbass Alex is sometimes becomes completely clear. It's that bit from boy scouts where he'd learned how to tie the knot that you can pull taut with a single tug, and Alex feels a little like he just stepped in it — big time — when Xavier grins at him in the rearview mirror, all teeth and Cheshire Cat satisfied blue eyes, and says:

"Oh, only because you insist, Alex."

"Uh," Alex says. "I do. Okay?"

Xavier's annex isn't filled with muscle mag pics of exploited 18-year-old boys or anything. Firstly, it is situated in the east wing of Xavier's giant house, which Alex has seen before in his years tooling around the Upper West Side, but he'd always just assumed it was a museum, or the headquarters for some sort of global supervillain syndicate. He feels too poor even to be in the zip code, and Xavier leads them through the entryway and a marble-paved foyer, into a dark-wood corridor and then into a goddamn elevator. Alex wants to believe Xavier had it installed because of the wheelchair, but he has a really shitty feeling that Xavier has just always had a fucking elevator in his house.

The annex itself was overflowing with books and oddly furnished: an old black-top lab table, bookshelves creaking with volumes caked over with dust, an double bed with a brass frame, a couple of battered sofas, a kitchen table with mismatching chairs. It looks like the extras, the leftover stuff, and Alex is still busy puzzling over a shelf full of police procedure books when he hears Xaiver saying, "I'll speak with the housekeeper, she'll bring up some fresh things for you boys — see you in the morning?"

Hank offers to sleep on one of the sofas, and then the floor, and then the rug, and then an armchair, at which point Alex just drags him down on the bed, and they lie there, arms pressed together, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling.

"I'm glad you came here," Hank whispers. Old habit, even though nobody's listening in on them now, and even if they didn't talk, Xavier was probably eavesdropping on them like a creepy pervert anyway.

"Like I was going to leave you alone with that guy," Alex mutters.

"Professor Xavier is the world's most prominent and widely respected mutant rights activist," Hank lectures him, sounding tired and dreamy already. "This is like if Nelson Mandela and Gandhi had a baby that could shoot lasers with his eyes and we were staying in his house, okay?"

And that, suddenly, is the funniest fucking thing Alex has ever heard, and he laughs and laughs, muffling himself in the pillows, until something hitches in his throat and all he can think is, Scott, Scott, so loud Xavier can hear it for sure, and Hank has to run a hand up and down Alex's back for hours until he shuffles off to sleep, miserable, wrung out.

***

TBC
Fill: Limited Release (22/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-18 23:00 (UTC)
***

Erik spent most of the rest of the night either going through tactical scenarios with various intelligence agencies, or reaching out across the black-blue stretches of New York, lit up, and asking, Are you okay? Is everything okay? at Charles until Charles finally got fed up and said back, If you don't leave me alone and save America from terrorists, I'm going to start watching a documentary about brain chemistry and broadcast it at you in high definition.

It must be pretty obvious when Charles shuts him down, because Raven alternately smirks at him and babies him with coffees, and Erik goes over and over the note until he's sick from reading it, and over and over the photograph until he's sick from looking at it, and calls it quits for the night.

Manhattan after 11 p.m. is still wide awake, but the streets he drives are a little emptier and less chaotic, and once he gets up the long avenues, things go liquid and charcoal gray and blue, orange from streetlights. He listens to the scanner as he goes — couple of stolen cars, a mugging, some money stolen out of a bodega — all in all its a quiet night. He parks and locks up and he's everything is quiet and dark and soft in the house, too, even his footsteps feel muted, and Charles is blanketing everything in the mansion with an earnest, familiar comfort, like the weight of his hand on the back of Erik's neck.

He checks the mail, trips over a stack of books one of Charles's TAs must have left in the study, sets the house alarm for the night, and peeks in Mrs. Hendry, who's also asleep, tucked away safely in her room and breathing deeply.

It's ten past midnight by the time he finally gets up the two flights of stairs and into the bedroom, stripping out of his slacks and shirt and the ugly, tired skin of being tense and terrified all day. In the bed, a familiar lump, Charles is sleeping on his side, huffing short, rabbit-breaths into the pillow because every night is another opportunity for him to smother himself to death by sleeping face down.

"Hi," Erik whispers, into Charles's shoulder when he slides under the covers, already warm from contact heat, and tugs Charles over, a languid spill of arms, his hair soft and messy in his face, cheeks pink. "Hey, come here."

Charles makes a murmuring noise, letting Erik rearrange him. Years ago, they used to sleep on opposite sides of the bed, since just because Erik was trained by the government to take a beating if he had to do it for national security didn't mean he wanted to take one every night when Charles biked the fucking Tour de France in his sleep. It seems like one of those cruel, strangely sweet trade-offs, after the shooting, that now Charles can press himself along Erik's chest, face in his shoulder, no worries, his legs dead weights in their bed.

"I felt you get home," Charles mumbles, still 90 percent asleep. "I'm glad you're home."

Erik just presses his face into Charles's hair, because Charles always forgets that between them, Erik's just another government hump, that Shaw probably doesn't remember little Erik Lehnsherr anymore than he remembers his dozens of other victims, a string of scared shitless kids and desperate parents who'd let him get away with literal torture for ages. It's Charles Xavier that should really be scared, his name's on everything, advocating integration and unity and understanding and the great beacon of hope for mutant and humankind to work together that Shaw would just love to see ripped to pieces.

"You really scared the shit out of me today," Erik mutters, into Charles's temple, because even though Charles can hear it — especially now, when they're sleepy and every wall is down, and Erik's thoughts are swimming rich with Charles's sleepy murmurs — he needs to say some things out loud.

Charles just sighs, presses a kiss wherever he can reach — Erik's chest, his collarbone, the joint where his arm meets his torso — and says, "I know. I'm sorry."

He doesn't say he won't do it again, which Erik has to at least respect for honesty.

"Go to sleep," Charles says instead, fingers knotting a fist into Erik's t-shirt. "I love you. Go to sleep."

"Okay," Erik agrees, and does.
Fill: Limited Release (23/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-18 23:01 (UTC)
He wakes up to the sound of rain slapping against the windows, the covers light on him where Charles has left already, and Erik stares at the ceiling for a few minutes, blinking awake, before he rolls out of bed and into the shower. There're wet towels all over the God damn bathroom, which means that Charles is probably already destroying the kitchen downstairs, and he reaches down through the walls and the pipes and gooses the boiler a little so that the water goes from steaming to nuclear.

Since Charles has pretty much been on the top of everybody's shit list since four days after he was born — probably already spouting obnoxious opinions — Erik had suffered the great misfortune of meeting the guy, literally, at the airport, as part of the protection detail the Feds had sicced on Charles when he'd come into town for a conference. Given the delicate state of mutant-human relations at that point, the U.S. government had wisely decided that to have the emerging luminary of the mutant equal rights movement harmed in any way during his first American lecture tour would be awkward. Using the same principals that have non-Asians asking Koreans about Chinese characters and people assuming all black women over 40 were sassy, Erik, because he was also a mutant, had been put on the case.

He'd been resentful for about five minutes, and mostly for show. Having spent the balance of his life post-Shaw consuming every piece of research he could find about mutation, he'd read Dr. C. F. Xavier's work before. It was painfully idealistic, and too certain of its correctness, but it had been remarkable to read in a time when almost all the rhetoric was about whether or not mutants were to be feared or contained, to see Xavier arguing that in a generation almost everybody would be mutated, integration already an afterthought as far as he was concerned. Anyway, the point is, all of that academic drivel had of course led to his obviously inaccurate assessment Xavier had to be a doddering 90 year-old in tweed with a respirator in tow, because nobody under the age of almost-dead was that earnestly nerdy.

Except of course Charles had been younger than Erik and annoyingly adorable and, if possible, more enthusiastic back then, in navy and gray old man sweater vests with bangs that were forever in his blue eyes. As if that wasn't bad enough, after they were first introduced, Charles was constantly fucking smiling at him, touching Erik's wrist, leaning into his space. If nothing else, Erik had figured the world's most powerful telepath would be beyond blushing, but no, of course not, because why would anything that made Erik want to fuck this guy in the back of multiple government vehicles less actually happen?

So that had been an awkward as fuck and erect two weeks. He figured he was off the hook when Charles went back to England, except then the letters and e-mails had started, under the guise of, "By the way, my sister, Raven, has just entered Quantico herself." Erik had spent an entire four months masturbating sulkily over Charles's cunning turns of phrase and charmingly rambling penmanship, convinced Xavier had a sister like Jim Carnegie from three apartments down had had a fucking girlfriend in Canada until the latest recruits had been taken for a tour of the offices, at which point he'd been forced to admit he might be going nuts.

"I've heard lots about you, Agent Lehnsherr," Raven told him, impish and blonde and terribly pretty, and obviously just as spoilt as Charles was.

"Funny, I've heard nothing about you," Erik said.

"That's a lie," Raven chirped, and pressing a hand into the crook of his elbow, leaned in close to whisper, "You should just give in — Charles always gets what he wants."

Erik should have known back then Charles was always going to break his God damn heart.
Fill: Limited Release (24/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-18 23:02 (UTC)
It's still pouring when he gets out of the shower, the entire house feeling a little haunted and over-large, and he's in the process of scratching his balls and pouring himself some coffee — Charles, strangely, nowhere to be found in the kitchen — when Alex fucking Summers wanders in, yawning and scraping his nails over his belly, hair making a crazy bid for space, tufted on his head.

Fifteen seconds later, the entire contents of the knife drawer has Summers pinned to the wall by his boxers and his t-shirt, and the kid looks like he's about to shit himself when Hank McCoy wanders in, too, and freezes by the cupboards, saying, "Oh, no."

"What the fuck," Erik asks reasonably.

Oh, did I forget to mention? Charles pipes up, unperturbed, echoing through Erik's head with casual amusement. I asked Alex and Hank to stay with us. They're in the annex. We weren't using it anyway.

Hank looks like he's reaching for one of the knives in the wall, which immediately relocates itself to pin McCoy to the same wall by the leg of his pajama pants and puts an end to that bullshit while Erik yells:

"Charles, get your ass down here. Now."

***

Charles makes Erik return the knives to the drawer, which he does with extreme reluctance and a great show of making them dance dangerously through the air, first. Alex, at least, has the good grace to look freaked out, Hank just keeps staring in between Charles and Erik looking betrayed. By what, Jesus Christ, Erik thinks, annoyed.

"Have they been here all night?" Erik asks.

"Ob — " Alex starts, and the knife drawer pops open again, all the sankostu blades hovering in the air, just waiting for an excuse. "Right, Jesus, I'm shutting up."

Charles sighs, long-suffering, and wheels over to collect all the knives out of the air and stick them back in the drawer, saying, "Yes, what about it?"

"You let them stay the night?" Erik feels like he's having a migraine, pain creeping up at his temples. He can feel Charles trying to pluck it away from him, which is sweet, normally, but Erik wants to feel pissed today, flicks Charles away, which of course explains Charles's tone when he says:

"I was hardly going to let Alex stay in that flea-infested brothel you'd lined up for him."

He says it like this is obvious and naturally he would bring home some pet mutant criminals so they can stare at Erik scratching his junk first thing in the morning, which is at once completely infuriating and triggers a sort of resignation Erik remembers from years of succumbing to Charles's bullshit.

"And there's no way Hank is going back to that festering pit he calls home," Charles went on, and turns to Hank, looking chiding as he says, "And don't give me that look, young man, you have an army of rats living in your walls."

Alex glares at Hank. "I fucking knew it."

"I was going to get a cat," Hank mutters.

"I think we're missing the salient point in that they can't stay here," Erik interrupts.

Whenever Charles decides something is a personal challenge, he doesn't clench his jaw or fist his hands or anything. He just raises his eyebrows, opens his mouth in a pink, wet challenge, and with the flattest, most obnoxiously posh English vowels he has says something that makes Erik what to rip all the copper wiring out of the house walls. Like:

"It's my home; I can have a guest."

"Well, Summers isn't a guest, he's a criminal, which means he's mine," Erik retorts. "He goes where I say."

Summers, because apparently he picks up social cues to back the fuck off as well as Hank does, pipes up to say, "I don't care where we stay, but I'm not leaving Hank alone with this guy," and glower at Charles.

Don't worry, Charles interjects here reassuringly. I may have convinced him I'm a sexual predator. Alex appears actually to have some commendable protective instincts.

I don't even want to know, Erik thinks back. Out loud, he says, "Look, I appreciate you're concerned, Charles, but not only is this none of your business, it's probably against some ethical code to have them here."
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Fill: Limited Release (25/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-18 23:04 (UTC)
"I checked, it's not, although obviously as their landlord I will have to be certified," Charles says, steely, although more of his personality is leaking into his tone, so it's possible he's already decided he's winning. Worse, when Charles says, "I checked," what he probably means is, "While you were asleep last night I rifled through your head to see if I could get away with it, and somewhere hidden in the darkest recesses of your unspoken fears, it turns out I can."

Erik narrows his eyes. "How is this not against any ethical code? I'm his handler," he says, and regrets it as soon as it's out of his mouth, because he doesn't need telepathy to know what Charles's response is going to be, and it's fucking terrible.

"Well, it's not like we're married," Charles returns, icy. "I can keep whoever I want."

Erik points at him. "That. That right there is the reason Summers thinks you're a dirty old man."

"Oh, God," Summers interrupts here, sounding sick and staring at Erik. "You two — you live together?"

Usefully, that derails the entire argument in progress when Charles, Hank, and Erik are all forced to stare at Summers. It's always humbling to realize that you've cashed in a lot of political capital at work on a kid who's apparently a giant idiot, Erik reflects morosely. If this bullshit doesn't catch a terrorist, he's going to be furious.

"How did you survive in prison?" Hank asks Summers.

"He was in solitary," Erik mutters. "And no, Summers, I just break into Charles's house and steal breakfast every morning in my underwear."

"God," Summers says, covering his face, "this is worse than when I walked in on my parents fucking."

And then there's that click of heels again, neat, on the floor, and Raven saying, "You have my sympathies, Summers. I lived with them for a while and almost got diabetes in the process."

Now it's Charles's turn to cover his face. "Yes, thank you for that, Raven."

"Does she live here, too?" Summers demands, glaring at Erik as Raven makes her away across the kitchen, helping herself to coffee and a kiss on the cheek from Charles, who closes her hand with his — easy and affectionate — and it helps Erik not to think about why she'd lived with them for almost a year. Trading off looking after Charles with Erik and maintaining a relentlessly upbeat tenor no matter how hard Charles fought her or threatened to get the locks changed.

"She's my sister," Charles explains, and grins up at her, pressing the back of her hand to his temple affectionately before turning back to Summers and McCoy. "You two should get used to having her around."

"No, they shouldn't, because they're not staying," Erik insists.

Ignoring him entirely, Charles tells Raven, "They're going to be living in the annex."

"I'm not getting in the middle of this. You're my brother, he's my boss, this can only end in fucking awkward holidays," she tells him wisely, extracting herself and turning to Erik. "Actually, I'm here about work."

Frowning, Erik asks, "Yeah?"

"We got a hit on the photo," Raven says, going to her hardbag and pulling out a sheaf of papers, a color photocopy of the picture Shaw had left stapled to the first page. "Sort of, anyway. It's a missing person's report — about four years out of date, but the description more or less matches if you account for age."

Erik takes the pages, and he's flipping through the notes — boy, 12, 4'6", brown hair, visual problems, multiple entries into the foster system — when he hears a strangled noise from Hank.

"I — Agent Lehnsherr, can we see the photo? More closely?" Hank asks, voice wobbly.

Next to him on the kitchen bench, Alex Summers is wide-eyed and frozen, all the color drained out of his face like he's seen a ghost, every muscle in his body tensed to snap. Raven glances over at Erik, who shrugs and glances over at Charles, who ignores it when Erik passes Hank the photograph to stay focused on Alex's face, watching his eyes dart over to the papers now in Hank's shaking hands.

"Oh, Alex, I'm so sorry," Charles murmurs, before anybody else says anything, and Hank follows up with:

"That's — this is Scott. This is Alex's brother."

***

TBC

@темы: fanfiction

---

X-Men

(A/N: Tweaked from the original prompt, although I hope it fits the bil for someone!)

Alex isn't really surprised when Agent Lehnsherr finds him in the old squat. There's nothing left here, really, just a pin-neat bed with clean, worn linens, a couple of books lined up along the wall, a lamp, a chair and a table — evidence Scott had been here and tried to make a home here before he'd had to take off. Alex doesn't know what he was thinking, busting out of prison four weeks shy of liberty, but he's always known that not going after his little brother was never an option. They're alone, they've got nobody, but they've always been alone together.

He hears Lehnsherr before he actually sees him, just his voice calling out, "You armed?"

Alex snorts. "Have I ever needed to be?" he asks.

Lehnsherr peers out from around a corner, smiling a little. "No," he admits, and adds, "Although it'd be pretty pointless against me, anyway."

Alex glares. "Whatever, just — take me back or whatever," he says, and goes back to staring at his hands, the torn skin of his knuckles, and feels himself shaking. Scott's out there somewhere alone, and Alex might never see him again. He's been such a fucking terrible brother, Alex keeps thinking, something balling up in his throat. He's been such a fucking wreck that the only person he's ever needed to take care of he's let down and now he's who the hell knows where, and Scott is just a kid — just a stupid kid —

"You should have waited a month, Summers," Lehnsherr says from overhead, and his voice sounds almost soft. Alex figures that Lehnsherr probably punches old ladies for breakfast, but there are snatches sometimes, accidental revelations of a person underneath that is actually creepier to know than not; he knows Lehnsherr has come to each of his parol hearings, argued for good behavior. Alex heard Lehnsherr say, "He's a good kid who hasn't made the best of a bad situation," once. "They're going to throw the key away on you for this."

Alex claws at his hair. "It's my brother — you don't just walk away from —" and cuts himself off.

Lehnsherr drops a hand to Alex's shoulder. "I know," he tells him, and clearing his throat, says into his walkie talkie, "Guys, I have him. He's unarmed and cooperating."

***

Hank visits him in jail, dressed up like every bad stereotype of a lawyer out of every bad episode of Night Court.

"Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you doing?" Alex asks, because Hank has that fresh-faced, sweet-mouthed look that would get him eaten alive in here, and he feels antsy just thinking about him walking into this shithole with those eyes and that earnestness and that pleather briefcase.

Frowning, Hank says, "You're an idiot. You should have just called me. I would have gone for him."

Alex glares at the table in the visitors room. "I didn't want to get you involved, you bozo."

"Oh look, this is me, not involved," Hank snaps, because even though he looks like the fold-out of every edition of Emotionally Fragile Twinks R Us bozo lab nerd edition, he's actually the meanest little fuck in the world. "Look, I have a plan to get you out of here."

Swallowing hard, Alex says, "I'm not breaking out of here again."

He'd cashed in all his chips for good behavior on that one. They have him in full ankle and wrist chains now, a reflector suit on so if he tries to sling a laser it'll just blow back at him and slice his spine in half. He's gone back into solitary, but he's glad for it, weirdly, because at least in solitary the inferno of frustration he feels isn't going to hurt anybody when it blows.

"No, but we can cut you a deal," Hank insists.

"I got nothing anybody wants," Alex says flatly.
2.
Fill: Limited Release (2/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-11 16:29 (UTC)
Ignoring the folder, Alex asks, "So?"

"So, that's an alias," Hank goes on, pulls out another folder, goes through the business of getting another nod.

In another life, if Hank hadn't been kicked out of Harvard when he'd been 16 and Alex hadn't been picking pockets and then fallen victim to crying kids on park benches in fucking Central Park, they wouldn't know each other, and Hank would be a doctor or a scientist and Alex could stop feeling bad about dragging Hank down, too.

"For who?" Alex asks, because he can't think of any reason Lehnsherr would cut him any fucking break for information about fucking Arthur Florick. It doesn't make any sense.

Hank looks grim, and opens the folder, slides it — spread out — across the space between them.

"For Sebastian Shaw," he says, quiet.

***

Columbia Professor in Critical Condition Following Attack at Genetics Conference
BY JEFFERY ELKIN and COLEEN MARLEY, 7:18 P.M.

Columbia University Professor Charles Xavier is in critical condition following gunfire that broke out during his keynote at a genetics conference being held at the school.

The attack, which NYPD has described as "obviously targeted," was carried out during Mr. Xavier's closing presentation at the Kaiser Permanente Pew Foundation Genetics and Mutation Symposium, also led to the deaths of Donald Lufkin and Troy Hernandez of Columbia's campus police and teaching assistant Maria Bellows. Two dozen others reported minor injuries and are being treated at Columbia University Medical Center.

Police have detained two persons of interest related to the team that orchestrated the attack, and they are being held for questioning; no arrests have been made, but the NYPD has asked for anyone who may have information on the attackers to come forward.

"This was not a random act," said Commissioner Gale Renwick earlier this evening. "Opponents of Dr. Xavier and his work generate hundreds of threats each year around this time, and we are taking care to follow every possible lead. We have our best officers on this."

FBI has also been invited to consult on the case, which was called an act of domestic terrorism by Carla Feist, White House press secretary, in the afternoon briefing. The university campus has closed since the shooting and students in residence are being kept in lockdown at their dormitories. School officials have asked that concerned families wanting to take their children home reach out to the school through a hotline.

The Xavier Conference, as it's known throughout the scientific community, has always been a magnet for controversy for its advocacy of mutant rights and its call to arms for equal rights and integration from both mutants and nonmutants alike.

Atomic Ark, a radical mutant separatist group, lists Xavier as No. 1 on a so-called "Hit List" prominently displayed on its website, although police say leaders of the organization have been questioned and there is no evidence of their involvement in the attack. Anti-mutant groups Human Race and Double Helix organize annual protests, some which have grown so intense they've nearly barred entrance for conference participants.
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2011-06-11 16:30 (UTC)
"We are horrified by the actions of Professor Xavier's attackers and categorically condemn this behavior," Human Race said in a statement shortly after the shooting. "A philosophical disagreement was never solved with something as base as violence."

Mr. Xavier, described as brilliant by colleagues at Oxford University before he moved to New York to begin teaching at Columbia in 1998, has been a touchstone among the mutant community ever since he came out as one himself in the 1990. Submitting himself for testing by a joint U.K.-U.S. intelligence survey, Xavier was discovered to be the most powerful telepath ever recorded, measuring nearly 10 on the Ox-Carlyle Psi scale; average telepaths range anywhere from 2 to 4, with anything 5 or above being considered extraordinary. There are only six known telepaths with scores above 5 on the OCP scale: five measure at 6, and one at 7.

The discovery led to doubt about Xavier's previous scientific work in genetics research, with some arguing the data and conclusions could never be considered valid considering a telepath as powerful as Mr. Xavier could easily sway any ethics panel. Mr. Xavier has publicly spoken out against these claims, calling them "total nonsense" and saying that to use his powers in such a way would be flagrant abuse — something against which he champions.

"The symposium, since it Dr. Xavier first launched it half a decade ago, has always drawn threats and controversy from the public," said University Chancellor Nell Richardson in written comments distributed to the media before a press conference scheduled for this evening. "Dr. Xavier's passion and courage championing mutant human rights, from arguing for affirmative enrollment to speaking before senate and congressional panels for inclusion and openness has won him many admirers and many enemies. We are devastated by this act of ignorant violence, and all of our thoughts and prayers are with Dr. Xavier and his family for his speedy recovery."

***

TBC
Fill: Limited Release (2/?) REPOST FOR MISSING LINE AT TOP

(Анонимно)
2011-06-11 16:35 (UTC)
(A/N: ARGH. Sorry.)

"You've got information," Hank returns, and he glances at one trio of guards camped around them at a semi-respectful distance, shows them a folder, before he gets the nod and slides it over to Alex. "Do you — do you remember that crew you used to run with?"

Alex frowns, because it's not exactly like he ever worked with a gang. "Crew," he repeats.

"I mean, you pulled a couple of jobs with them, with this guy — Arthur Florick?" Hank asks.

Florick had been Alex's first venture outside of simple smash and grab, because Florick had insisted it was wasteful for someone of Alex's talents to ignore them and repress them so fiercely. And the money had sounded good, the whole thing had been easy: create a distraction while Florick's team did the intricate work, infiltrated banks and stole who the fuck knows what out of security boxes and office towers and fucking whatever. Set a fire or create a car accident or hell, even a bomb and people are trained for it — you blow through the first floor of the neighboring block and everybody, fucking everybody is going to come running.

Ignoring the folder, Alex asks, "So?"

"So, that's an alias," Hank goes on, pulls out another folder, goes through the business of getting another nod.

In another life, if Hank hadn't been kicked out of Harvard when he'd been 16 and Alex hadn't been picking pockets and then fallen victim to crying kids on park benches in fucking Central Park, they wouldn't know each other, and Hank would be a doctor or a scientist and Alex could stop feeling bad about dragging Hank down, too.

"For who?" Alex asks, because he can't think of any reason Lehnsherr would cut him any fucking break for information about fucking Arthur Florick. It doesn't make any sense.

Hank looks grim, and opens the folder, slides it — spread out — across the space between them.

"For Sebastian Shaw," he says, quiet.

***

Columbia Professor in Critical Condition Following Attack at Genetics Conference
BY JEFFERY ELKIN and COLEEN MARLEY, 7:18 P.M.

Columbia University Professor Charles Xavier is in critical condition following gunfire that broke out during his keynote at a genetics conference being held at the school.

The attack, which NYPD has described as "obviously targeted," was carried out during Mr. Xavier's closing presentation at the Kaiser Permanente Pew Foundation Genetics and Mutation Symposium, also led to the deaths of Donald Lufkin and Troy Hernandez of Columbia's campus police and teaching assistant Maria Bellows. Two dozen others reported minor injuries and are being treated at Columbia University Medical Center.

Police have detained two persons of interest related to the team that orchestrated the attack, and they are being held for questioning; no arrests have been made, but the NYPD has asked for anyone who may have information on the attackers to come forward.

"This was not a random act," said Commissioner Gale Renwick earlier this evening. "Opponents of Dr. Xavier and his work generate hundreds of threats each year around this time, and we are taking care to follow every possible lead. We have our best officers on this."

FBI has also been invited to consult on the case, which was called an act of domestic terrorism by Carla Feist, White House press secretary, in the afternoon briefing. The university campus has closed since the shooting and students in residence are being kept in lockdown at their dormitories. School officials have asked that concerned families wanting to take their children home reach out to the school through a hotline.

The Xavier Conference, as it's known throughout the scientific community, has always been a magnet for controversy for its advocacy of mutant rights and its call to arms for equal rights and integration from both mutants and nonmutants alike.

Atomic Ark, a radical mutant separatist group, lists Xavier as No. 1 on a so-called "Hit List" prominently displayed on its website, although police say leaders of the organization have been questioned and there is no evidence of their involvement in the attack. Anti-mutant groups Human Race and Double Helix organize annual protests, some which have grown so intense they've nearly barred entrance for conference participants.
Fill: Limited Release (3/?) REPOST FOR READING CONTINUITY

(Анонимно)
2011-06-11 22:33 (UTC)
"We are horrified by the actions of Professor Xavier's attackers and categorically condemn this behavior," Human Race said in a statement shortly after the shooting. "A philosophical disagreement was never solved with something as base as violence."

Mr. Xavier, described as brilliant by colleagues at Oxford University before he moved to New York to begin teaching at Columbia in 1998, has been a touchstone among the mutant community ever since he came out as one himself in the 1990. Submitting himself for testing by a joint U.K.-U.S. intelligence survey, Xavier was discovered to be the most powerful telepath ever recorded, measuring nearly 10 on the Ox-Carlyle Psi scale; average telepaths range anywhere from 2 to 4, with anything 5 or above being considered extraordinary. There are only six known telepaths with scores above 5 on the OCP scale: five measure at 6, and one at 7.

The discovery led to doubt about Xavier's previous scientific work in genetics research, with some arguing the data and conclusions could never be considered valid considering a telepath as powerful as Mr. Xavier could easily sway any ethics panel. Mr. Xavier has publicly spoken out against these claims, calling them "total nonsense" and saying that to use his powers in such a way would be flagrant abuse — something against which he champions.

"The symposium, since Dr. Xavier first launched it half a decade ago, has always drawn threats and controversy from the public," said University Chancellor Nell Richardson in written comments distributed to the media before a press conference scheduled for this evening. "Dr. Xavier's passion and courage championing mutant human rights, from arguing for affirmative enrollment to speaking before senate and congressional panels for inclusion and openness has won him many admirers and many enemies. We are devastated by this act of ignorant violence, and all of our thoughts and prayers are with Dr. Xavier and his family for his speedy recovery."

***

TBC
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Fill: Limited Release (4/?)

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2011-06-11 22:57 (UTC)
***

Alex Summers' known associates list is about five people long, and all of those awful, terrible, incredibly embarrassing aliases dead end in one Hank McCoy, 19, given to twitching, pleading eyes, and sitting in Erik's office looking pathetic and clutching a briefcase he'd clearly purchased at the K-Mart in Astor Place.

"Seriously?" Erik asks, standing in the doorway of his office, and turns over his shoulder. "Who the hell let this kid in here?"

Angel points at Armando who points at Sean who points at Raven, who shrugs, unabashed. Erik scowls.

"You can't fire us," Raven reminds him. "Charles would be so upset."

"Charles thinks I can do no wrong and would tearfully understand if I were forced to throw all of you out," Erik lies, and turns back to Hank, who is looking — if possible — even more scared and waifish, perched on the uncomfortable seats in front of Erik's desk. "All right, out with it, McCoy, what do you want?"

Hank sucks in a steadying breath here, obviously shooting for bravery. "I want to make a deal."

Erik settles into his desk chair and favors Hank with a flat, unimpressed stare.

"Help Alex get out of prison — "

"Not happening," Erik says.

" — And Alex will help you get Shaw," Hank finishes in a rush, hands fumbling with his briefcase, digging out papers he spills all over Erik's meticulously neat desk, jarring his WORLD'S MEANEST BOSS mug (from Raven) and the revoltingly twee silver frame photo of Charles, hair in wild disarray, in three-days-old clothes, balls deep in his dissertation and half-crazy, staring stunned at the camera.

Erik rights the picture reflexively, nudging it back into place, and as an afterthought he reaches out to touch the corner of it in automatic reassurance. In the back of his head he can feel Charles, beavering away at something hideously nerdy across the city, perfectly fine and completely distracted, not paying attention except where Charles is always paying attention — his unconscious telepathy strong enough even unfocused to blanket most of the state.

"Shaw," Erik says, voice very even.

"Sebastian Shaw," Hank clarifies, as if there could be another, and points at this paper and that document all over Erik's desk now. "Alex, when he was just starting out — for a while he worked with Arthur Florick's team."

The paperclips on Erik's desk start fisting into tiny knots. "And Florick is?"

"Is Shaw," Hank babbles, dragging out photographs. "I swear it. I knew about Shaw — I mean obviously everybody knows about Shaw, but I didn't know what he looked like until I got the FBI file on him and made the link."

"Setting aside the fact that you're not supposed to have access to the FBI file on Shaw," Erik starts, and ignores Hank's perfectly adolescent eye-roll at that, "so say I believe you — Alex worked with Shaw. So what?"

"He worked with Shaw years ago," Hank says, overeager, cuffs dragging papers around. "Before he got polished. He said all sorts of stuff — too much stuff — "

"What sorts of stuff?" Erik asks, tense.
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Fill: Limited Release (5/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-11 22:58 (UTC)
Hank shrugs. "Names. Personal details. People he runs with," he spouts off.

"How do I know this is legitimate?" Erik asks reasonably, because he can either veer off into one of his fugue states, where he terrifies his agents and makes probes cry and gets reprimanded by his immediate managers for reckless disregard and commended by his manager's manager for bravery and has to go home and sleep in one of the 15 guest rooms because Charles is furious at him and projecting his misery like a fucking foghorn.

There's a telling moment of hesitation here, a beat where Hank's obviously deciding whether not to do whatever he's probably about to do. He's got tells: the way he dips his gaze somewhere away from Erik's face, tugging at the wrist of his left sleeve, the way he rubs his thumb along the sharp edge of a page — skin too thick with callouses to be be worried about a papercut.

"Back then," Hank starts, faltering, "Shaw wasn't so polished. He bragged a lot."

The balls of paperclip liquefy now, pooling with the heat in Erik's stomach in their ceramic dish. "Oh?"

"Alex said — Alex said Florick, I mean, Shaw. That Shaw said he'd made your powers manifest," Hank finishes awkwardly. "That you'd be nobody without him."

Erik thinks that there's more to Hank McCoy than an obvious target for bullying after all.

"Well played," he says mildly, because it's been long enough that his immediate burst of fury at the memory of how Shaw had helped Erik manifest his powers has calcified in its intensity. Erik's unyielding on this point, but he's not reactive anymore, either. "Something not in any records, unknown to most, so verifying — and at once utterly useless in terms of current information on Shaw's whereabouts in order to maximize your leverage."

Hank doesn't look triumphant. He's too baby-faced and blue-eyed for that, but he does tip his glasses further up his nose with shaking fingers and say, "You get Alex out, we'll help you out."

Aside from being the most dangerous man in the world, having tastes that lean toward the unforgivably flamboyant, hideous fucking sideburns, and having arranged for Charles to be assassinated, Erik can now add "spreading lies about me" to the list of reasons that he's going to murder Shaw with extreme prejudice. Erik had needed Shaw to know about his powers like he'd needed another hole in the head, but the difference between being able to win coin tosses every time and coax open every jar and ripping holes into the sides of buildings was apparently Sebastian Shaw threatening to shoot Erik's mother at the mutant integration center, just to see if he couldn't push Erik a little bit harder. Marvelous, Shaw had called Erik's skill back then, and Erik wishes he'd taken Shaw out like all of the light fixtures in the outside hallway — he'd been a minor, a few years in juvie and a purged record at 18 seemed like an easy trade off for preemptively erasing Sebastian Shaw from the face of the earth: started off as a specialist in mutant discovery and integration, turned mutant supremacist and mass murderer. Powers and magnitude of power unknown, highly dangerous, top of every domestic and international terrorist watch list.

"Let me make some calls," Erik says finally, thinking about Alex rotting in a cell and Charles gritting his teeth through PT three times a week to keep up the muscles in the legs he can't feel anymore. "I'll see what our options are."

And Hank just stares at him, grateful in a way that's embarrassing, and breathes, "Thank you."

"Christ," Erik says, and shouts out the door of his office, "Hey, Cassidy — get this kid out of the building!"

***

TBC
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Fill: Limited Release (6/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-12 15:50 (UTC)
***

Scott Summers visits like clockwork every week on Thursday for the allotted one hour with Alex in supermax, chattering through the bullet and shatter-proof glass. Prison mail says that Scott also sends a weekly package. Nothing worth currency or effort in prison, just stuff he thinks is funny or that he thinks Alex would like: a couple of comic books, a car mag or two, weirdly, maps, with Post-It notes stuck all over them with defamatory asides about the various locations. All of this, and everything else in Alex's cell — stripped clean now, in punishment — is delivered to Erik that afternoon, and he sifts through all of the soundless footage of Alex and Scott's last visit looking for something that would have triggered this.

"Walk me through it," Erik says.

Angel leans back in her seat, suit jacket bunching up around her shoulders. He wishes she wouldn't wear it around the office — it must be nervewracking to think that if she ever needed to get away, she wouldn't be able to easily unfurl her wings, but she'd said something about wearing backless shirts at the work as unprofessional and then distracted him by asking when Erik was going to man up and make Charles an honest man.

"Alex and Scott Summers, orphaned when Alex was 18 and Scott was 10," Angel says, flipping through Alex's file. "Tried to make ends meet working a couple of different jobs for a while, but they didn't have much of a chance."

The mutant registry had passed in the 1970s, before even Charles was old enough or savvy enough of the world to protest against it, and although subsequent blessings and generations had seen fit to keep it more or less quiet save for medical reason and for law enforcement, people were still suspicious. Nobody paid much attention to laws saying you couldn't discriminate against hiring mutant humans, and Erik had no doubt Alex had lost dozens of jobs before he'd said, "fuck it" and turned to something easier for him, harder to swallow, and far, far more dangerous.

"No, I'm sure they didn't," Erik murmurs.

In the monitor, Alex is laughing, eyes crinkled and young, and Scott is leaning forward, hands pressed against the glass, animated and happy. Nothing bad happened that day. Something bad must have happened after.

"Rap sheet starts when Alex was about 19, mostly petty stuff, theft, car theft," Angel says, distracted. "No drugs, good for him, and nothing violent — sometime after he turn 21 he falls off the police radar for a bit." She holds up another file — Scott's. "This is when Scott starts showing up in school records, but the reasons are redacted."

Probably him manifesting, Erik thinks, because puberty didn't suck hard enough on its own without the advent of your mutation, too, for a lot of kids these days. Erik had figured his out during nursery school, when he'd terrified all the nice German fraus by entertaining himself by deconstructing his crib and playpen for escape, his mother liked to remind him. Charles hadn't even known telepathy wasn't normal until he'd turned four and no other children at some society party his parents were holding were able to hear him when he'd reached out to them in his head.

"When was it for you?" Erik asks, non-sequitur, but Angel just looks thoughtful.

"I was lucky — 20? Something like that? Old enough to know what was happening," she answers, and turns back to the monitors. "Anyway, off the grid for about three years, and then he shows up again: same low-level stuff, etcetera etcetera, and then there comes the accidental car-jacking."

Erik sighs. "Dumbass," he mutters.

Of course Alex Summers would have the luck of trying to steal a car with someone still inside of it, pulled over onto a side street to catch a nap before he drove into oncoming traffic.

"They would have gone a lot easier on him if he hadn't panicked when that guy pulled out his taser," Angel says philosophically. "Although at least he only sliced the car in half, and not the owner."

"Did Scott ever come back?" Erik asks, still watching the monitor, for the way Alex stared after Scott as the guards hustled him away. "After this visit here?"
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(Анонимно)
2011-06-12 15:53 (UTC)
"Last one," Angel says, checking the record. "The guard on Alex's block said Alex went nuts afterward, spent all his free time trying to call his brother over and over again, and asked if they could send someone to check on the kid, that sort of thing."

Erik twirls the pen hovering over his palm, sending it spinning round and round in thought.

"So he wasn't expecting it, whatever kept Scott away," Erik mumbles. "Whoever is keeping Scott away."

Angel closes her files, stopping the video, now showing some other people now having an argument through the shatterproof glass. "So?" she asks. "He's a nonviolent offender — and he may have some real info on Shaw."

Armando chooses this moment to stick his head into the room. "Plus he only broke out for his little brother," he says, too casually, which means that Sean's perch near the glass doors, texting, was a lookout after all. Sometimes Erik hates his fucking team. "You can't really fault a man for caring about family."

Probably because she can't help himself, Raven yells through the glass of his office walls:

"Come on, do it, Boss — if you don't, Hank's just going to sit in your office and cry some more."

Glaring at Angel, Erik says, "You guys planned this, didn't you?"

"It wasn't a formal tactical discussion or anything," she admits, smiling and gathering up the papers. "But we figured if we couldn't prevail upon your good nature, we could always call Charles."

Erik points at the door. "Go away."

"Yes, Boss," Angel laughs. "Right away, Boss."

***

Ordinarily, the process of certifying a CI is arduous enough, with paperwork thick enough to murder entire Amazonian rainforests and vast troves of undiscovered species. When the CI in question is a mutant, multiply it by five. But Erik likes this done in orderly ways, "Sorted," as Charles likes to say, and so he calls Charles's assistant at the university to say he'll be late home tonight, and powers through all of the forms in one five-hour sitting, swearing at himself for being a pushover every step of the way.

But Alex, for all that he's over 21, is just a dumb kid who ever had a chance, and he's lived his whole life probably scared out of his mind his powers would hurt somebody. If Erik's not going to look out for him, nobody is, and the thought of Alex rotting in supermax, wasting his whole life there because he'd loved his brother too much just to give up on him when he'd gone missing and there'd been no one to help isn't one he can swallow.

By the time he's done, the office is more or less deserted, just Raven still puttering around on a couple of old cold cases that have a Shaw connection and lying about it. Erik's tried to reason with her about it, but she doesn't have an outlet for her obsession the way Erik does, she just goes home and lies in her bed, unpeels herself from her preferred skin of blond hair and round cheeks and stare the ceiling with her cat-yellow eyes. She'd slept at the mansion for a solid two months during Charles's recovery, after he'd come home from the hospital and his seven separate surgeries, and fought with him for hours when all Charles wanted to do was fight with someone.

"Want to come over for late dinner?" Erik asks, because Charles would be glad to see her.

She shakes her head. "No, I just wanted to put together some stuff for Alex to look at, when he gets here."

"That confident the request will go through?" Erik asks, amused. Raven claims that she and Charles are completely different, that she finds his endless optimism annoying, that Charles's relentless determination to see the good in everybody is nauseating, but Erik thinks Raven likes to ignore the ways they've rubbed off one another.

Shrugging, she says, "Don't see why not. Shaw's bigger fish than Alex, and there's no other task force that would be capable of handling his powers."

"Raven, Alex isn't even capable of handling his powers," Erik says, and drops a brief hand to her shoulder good night as he heads for the elevator bank.

It's dark outside, the city throbbing with steamy summer heat, everything gleaming from a brief and violent rainshower they had in the afternoon, and now neon slick like a coat of sweat. He leaves his car in the garage and goes for the subway, taking the 6 up 3rd Avenue.
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2011-06-12 15:54 (UTC)
Erik would have loved the monstrosity of Xavier House as a kid. It's five stories; there's an art deco elevator. Most of the first floor is paved in actual fucking marble. That's aside from the glorious scrolling staircases, the masses of corridors and endless warrens of rooms inside of rooms and hidden passageways that Erik's pretty sure means that the Xavier's made their first fortunes bootlegging during Prohibition. Games of hide and seek at Xavier House would have been epic scale, and Erik sometimes tries to imagine Charles — always alone — trying to keep himself and his wandering and overly powerful mind entertained here with just nannies and maids and the butler to distract him before Raven had appeared in his life. Bored, a grown up Charles is terrifying and restless; bored, a tiny Charles just seems hypothetically sad.

And sadly bored is what Charles is when Erik finds him, languishing in the second floor study.

Erik pauses at the door. "Are you — ?"

"I'm trying to see if I can tell what they're thinking just by having a visual fix," Charles says, unmoving from his slouch in the chair, situated in front of the shitty Best Buy bargain bin TV that's balanced precariously on top of a heap of old term papers in one corner. "I think I might be able to."

Charles is watching re-runs of America's Next Top Model, so Erik thinks it's entirely fair to ask, "Even if you did lock in on their thoughts, how could you tell they were thoughts at all?"

Twisting around to grin at him, Charles says, "Cruel — potentially accurate, but cruel."

For reasons Erik prefers not to explore and that Charles knows but pretends not to, he's not given to casual touches, but Charles always says hello not with skin but a sudden sensation of affection, like someone whispering: welcome back, welcome back, I've missed you, welcome back right into the cavities of his heart, bypassing all the unnecessary roadblocks in between.

"How was your day?" Charles asks, wheeling around to face him, and Erik takes the low seat by the window, lets his posture fray completely, melt into the chair. "What happened?" You look tired, gets the direct line.

Erik thinks about Alex's crushed expression, that defeated slump of his shoulders, his own, reflexive ache for the kid. "Alex Summers broke out of prison."

"Alex?" Charles asks, frowning. "He doesn't seem the type."

"He went after his brother," Erik says, because that explains everything, and Charles agrees, from the look on his face.

"Alex didn't find him," Charles says, matter-of-factly.

Erik reaches over and appropriates one of Charles's hands for his own, running his thumb over the lines of Charles's palm and wonders were Scott might be, hopes that he's well and that he's not frightened, but he knows that neither of these are likely. "No, he didn't."

"You think you're about to do something stupid," Charles says suddenly, curious. Erik frowns. "And before you accuse me of reading your mind, your apprehension is so intense it's fairly drowning me through the skin — no additional effort required on my part."

Sighing, Erik folds their palms together. Go on, he thinks. Read me. I'm too tired to talk.
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2011-06-12 15:55 (UTC)
Charles can steal into peoples's heads on cat's feet, silent and undetected, or he can blast in violently, overtaking. With Erik, Charles comes in politely, with the mental equivalent of a knock on the door before he peers inside, easy and familiar in this terrain, sorting fretfully through the ordinary frustrations of Erik's day — paperwork, Cassidy, the forever-long wait for the train in the morning — and rifling through the afternoon and evening, long into night. Erik always visualizes Charles shuffling through the papers on Erik's desk at work whenever Charles does this.

"Oh," Charles says, after a moment, eyes going from sleepy to wide and aware. "A CI? Really?"

Erik shrugs. "He may know something about Shaw," he says.

Charles arches an eyebrow. "Sure," he says, which sounds like, Of course he does, in Erik's head. "And I'm sure your fondness for him plays no part in this."

"You're the one that's spoiling my entire team," Erik accuses, because even if Charles wasn't the world's most powerful telepath, it would be pretty pointless to try lying to him about this.

Grinning, unrepentant, Charles says, "But they're so splendid, all of them."

"If only you'd been properly bullied during your childhood," Erik sighs, and gives Charles's hand a squeeze. "Is there anything to eat?"

"We can order a pizza," Charles decides, and nods toward the television. "They're showing a marathon of this tonight."

Fucked at the office, fucked at home, Erik thinks, resigned, watching Charles reach for his phone.

He ends up asleep on Charles's shoulder after two slices, listening to Tyra ranting about smizing in the background, and Charles has to shake him conscious before he drowsily staggers up one of the many, many steps in the house, hand steady as he floats Charles's chair up alongside him and toward the bedroom.

***

TBC
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Fill: Limited Release (10/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-13 19:00 (UTC)
***

It's a confusing 72 hours.

Breaking out of prison had sucked out loud, in part because he actually did like the guards — they were nice guys, and hadn't deserved to get knocked out by concrete when Alex had blown up a wall — and in part because he'd known even as he'd been jacking someone's car in the lot, hearing all the alarms go haywire in the background that he was going to get caught and then he'd be really fucked.

But Alex has done a lot dumber stuff for Scott before, and it wasn't like today was going to be any different, so then he'd hit the gas and figured he had like four hours before Agent Lehnsherr tracked him down again like a giant, magnetic bloodhound who kept calling him "kid." That guy was such a dick.

He hadn't really thought he'd find Scott, but he'd hoped, panic-hoped, and it was one thing to know in his head that when he got to the squat that Scott would probably be gone and another entirely to see it empty and stripped of most of Scott's stuff. Alex didn't have a phone number; they didn't have family other than each other, and if Scott had friends to run to, Alex didn't know who they fucking were, and the hole in his chest felt like it was bottomless whenever he thought about his baby brother alone out there.

And then, just a day after he'd been re-arrested, Hank had gotten in pretending to be his lawyer and floating some crazy-ass scheme, there was Agent Lehnsherr again, leaning against a barred window and looking at Alex with narrowed, thoughtful eyes.

Alex puts up with it for maybe two minutes before he bursts out with, "Dude, what?"

"What did Shaw want with you?" Lehnsherr asks, abrupt and to-the-point.

"Oh Jesus Christ," Alex mutters, scrubbing at his face, chains rattling. "Did Hank come at you with that shit?"

"He made an interesting proposition," Lehnsherr allows, and moves to sit opposite Alex at the table. "Well? Shaw — or Florick, when you knew him. What did he want with you?"

Alex has a flash of fury at Hank, for sticking his nose where it doesn't belong, for never getting out whenever Alex has tried to get him out. Hank's smart and clean-looking and he doesn't have that obvious look of criminal desperation on him, and if Hank wanted to, he could get a real job somewhere. Except Hank's pathetically loyal and keeps coming back for Alex, keeps reading every science and law book in the New York Public Library and not walking away.


"What does that guy ever want with anybody?" Alex bites out, because he might as well tell. He's here for the long haul. Maybe Lehnsherr can get him moved out of some of his more restrictive bindings; they're not going to move him into general population, anyway, but maybe he could stop wearing the fucking chains 24-7. "How the fuck would I know? He just had some blonde chick who said she saw something in me and asked if I'd work for him."

Lehnsherr raises an eyebrow. "What did you do for him?"

"Distract you guys," Alex retorts.

"For what? Robberies?" Lehnsherr asks, leaning forward.

Alex shrugs. "I guess. I mean, I thought they were," he says. "I never asked."

Okay, Alex decides his least favorite thing isn't the way Lehnsherr calls him "kid" after all, because the way he laughs, disbelieving, and then says, "Summers, you're a real piece of work, you know that?" is much, much more annoying. "Do you remember anything else? About the blond woman?"

"Hot," Alex says, knee-jerk. "Like, smoking, smoking FHM, Maxim hot."
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Fill: Limited Release (11/?)

(Анонимно)
2011-06-13 19:03 (UTC)
"Name?" Lehnsherr prompts.

Alex frowns. "Emily? Emma? I think?"

Amused, Lensherr asks, "Bra size?"

"She was a 32D, easy," Alex reports, and it takes him half a beat before he turns completely red at the smirk on Lehnsherr's face. "I have eyes, asshole."

"More importantly," Lehnsherr asks, still smirking, "would you recognize her if you saw her again? I'm assuming you would definitely recognize her breasts."

Alex wishes his ankles weren't shackled together. Probably he'd get some sort of even worse punishment for kicking a federal agent in the shin, but it'd be worth it.

"Sure, yes," he snaps. "I'd recognize most of his crew." They'd thought of Alex as a stupid kid, too.

Lehnserr's amusement fades here, goes serious, and he makes a long, considering noise.

Glowering, Alex says, "Can I go back to my cell now? Isn't this shit considered cruel and unusual torture?"

Lehnsherr grins. "Oh, kid — get used to it."

"What?" Alex says, because that doesn't make sense, and it keeps on not making sense while Lehnsherr's letting himself out, and all through the night as Alex stares at the ceiling and walls in solitary, and for the next 24 hours or so, until there's a knock on the door of his cell and the prison warden's furious bitchface as he says:

"All right, Summers. I don't know how you did it, but your deal came through."

***

The next 72 hours don't look like they're going to be much better, Alex thinks glumly. Hank, in the same crummy suit with the same crummy briefcase, is waiting for him when he gets shuffled through release procedures, and looks like he's repressing all sorts of feelings extra hard. Next to him is Lehnsherr, looking impassive, and Alex would ask one of them, either of them, what the hell is going on, except there's this guy tying something to his ankle.

"The monitor will run 24 hours a day, and will have a geolocation on you to within 5 feet," the man is saying, sounding bored about everything. "It's a combined portable reflector pack and a tracker. You try anything stupid, your handler will flip it back on you. You try to run, it'll ping us when you hit your 2 mile radius."

Alex says, "Uh."

"Unless your handler calls it in," the guy clarifies. "If you guys are out of state or whatever, call it to central switchboard, and we'll just make sure he's tracking within reasonable distance — we clear?"

Alex stares for a while.

"Yes, that's clear," Hank jumps in, practically vibrating out of his skin he's so excited.

"Clear as day," Lehnsherr agrees, and glances at Alex. "Understood, kid?"

"First off, stop fucking calling me that, I'm 24," Alex barks. "And secondly, who is my handler?"

Because having been sent to jail, broken out of jail because his brother's gone missing, gotten re-sent to jail, having Hank McCoy as a best friend, and the fucking FBI all over his dick isn't bad enough, this is when Alex learns that he's now Lehnsherr's pet mutant CI.

"Surprise," Lehnsherr says, dry as tinder. "I can tell you're thrilled."

@темы: fanfiction

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Roswell/Dawson's Creek

m.fanfiction.net/s/9856/1/ - Оля забраковала.
m.fanfiction.net/s/449171/1/

@темы: Ссылки, fanfiction

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Джордж Мартин. Книшке.

http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/martin_dzhordzh/

@темы: Книги, Ссылки

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Тебе нравится социология!

UPD: автомат на 5!
Тебе нравится социология! Тебе нравится социология! Ты вообще молодец и умничка и все ты сдашь просто прекрасно. Не надо волноваться и ты не лоханешся как на экономике. Сейчас ты все повторишь и будешь помнить. Вон и Анфиска пришла тебя поддержать. Все будет хорошо. Главное не волнуйся!

запись создана: 22.01.2012 в 20:44

@темы: Мороз крепчал(с.), Я

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Калеба ...

... На стол поставила во множественном количестве. Я тебя люблю.

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Merlin

Любовь Артура к Гвен таким абсурдом кажется, особенно с такой ужасной актрисой. На их телячьи нежности невозможно смотреть. Хотя глаза выколи.

@темы: Сериальное

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Черт возьми, этот автор просто клад, у нее даже про не нравящихся мне персонажей интересно читать.

@темы: fanfiction