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He remembered it like this—
Alex sat beside the window, drumming his fingers restlessly against the polished wood. His chipped and cracked nails repeated rhythm after rhythm in no discernible order; a lullaby joined together with rock, the blues following a warble of a songbird nestled in the trees. The coolness in his eyes receded when he turned his profile, the warm sunlight settling heavy between his shoulders like a cross.
After Darwin and Angel he said, “I have a brother. His name is Scott.”
This was not the way it happened.
“...I need you to let me in.”
There was a table between them, an effective barrier as a wall made of titanium alloy. As though inside a confessional booth, they could touch but not cross and the professor laced their fingers together, quietly, intimately as the beat in his knees died down. The table came to a standstill, its scratched and melted surface giving it character absent in the other furniture around the room. At his request, they had convened in the Spartan chambers but looking at the scorched walls, a broken clock hanging sadly on top of the blinds, a desk, a chair and minimal comforts (an exact replica to his army jail cell, down to the neatly made bed he could bounce a quarter off of), he began to reconsider the idea altogether.
“Why now?”
His head spun wildly with thoughts that bordered dangerously on doubt—what if the professor refused? What if he couldn’t find him? What if Scott was dead? What if the professor read his mind?
The airs on his back rose, ringing danger, danger, danger down his vertebrate. The professor swore he wouldn’t invade another’s mind but Alex had seen how easily he had skimmed off thoughts from McCoy’s head, how easily their trust could be abused.
He was an idiot for doing this but he held his gaze as the professor searched his eyes, blue like his own but not for it was of a clearer shade, like staring into a bottomless pond. “Look, you told us that our... abilities show up when we hit puberty right? Scott’s seven years younger than me, probably a baby. I just want to make sure... maybe he is. I don’t know.”
“After all this time?”
“I didn’t have a choice!” He snapped before jerking back, more out of habit than actual fear, folding up on himself like a giant pill bug as though expecting to be struck. Instead, the professor squeezed his proffered hand and nodded in encouragement, a tick around his eye giving away his use of telepathy.
His fear was irrational; the professor would never hurt him. But static laced his spine the way it did whenever someone loomed. Sparks crackled from under his nail beds but the professor did not back away, unaware perhaps of the storm brewing inside of him. Impossible—he could feel the ever present eye at the back of his mind, soft impressions imploring, soothing, begging to be let inside.
“When it first happened,” He said, his voice barely recognizable, tremulous like the heartbeat of a very young animal. “I’m lucky I didn’t kill him. That’s why I let them take him away—away from the mutant menace. But I’m better now. Bozo’s been working on me. I can be normal.” An unkind description of McCoy maybe but he didn’t know how to speak any other way. These people forgot, the professor, the others, everyone. It didn’t matter if they were all mutants, if Xavier could smother him with a thought, if Erik could deflect bullets, or Sean shatter glass; he was still the most dangerous one of them all.
And as though to refute him, the professor stressed “Alex, you are normal.”
He laughed, paranoid and bitter, the first lesson he had learned in prison.
“Normal kids don’t blow up their foster parents. They either call the cops or run away.”
He rocked back and forth in his chair, withdrawing his arm. Though he was not meant to, Alex could not help but observe the way Xavier’s fingers closed together as though trying to recapture the currents trapped in the whorls. He saw how the man snuck quick looks at him, eyes flitting past his face, across his chest and down his legs. The intensity of the stare unnerved him and he repeated, “I just want to see him. I promised his mother.” Not his, never would be. “I promised her I’d look after him and I need to know. I need to know that wherever he is, that he’s safe and he’s okay. That’s all I need to know.”
The professor shook his head. “I can try but that’s it. We don’t have Cerebro but people often form mental ties to those they are emotionally attached to. I am sorry my friend, but if your brother has yet to manifest his abilities, it will be difficult...”
“Do it.” He said fiercely, reclaiming his hand with the single-mindedness of a soldier on a mission. His breath stuttered in his lungs when electricity leapt between their skins, knuckle to knuckle, vein against vein, the plasma bleeding from his palms to imbue heat into his clammy hands. Warning bells tolled ominously in his head. Alex let go in mortification though the professor held on, concerned. “I need to know—” He stammered. “Please.”
Xavier leaned close, peering into the ashen starburst at the center of his eyes. Carefully, he pressed the pads of his fingers against his face, the thumb coming to a rest just beneath his right eye. Alex sighed, an inexorable fatigue coursing through him. His eyelashes wavered like pale cornsilk on the wind, his spine curving as he slouched in his seat, his guards down.
“Picture him in your mind. The clearest image you can think of.”
He obeyed.
Once upon a time, there was a boy with dark hair and eyes the color of spun glass. He was thin, though exquisitely made, dressed in rags and earning his keep through regular beatings and painted on smiles. His name was Scott. He was there one moment then gone the next, dashed against a wall in a heap of memory, disappeared through heat and sudden blindness with sirens glowing emptily through the night.
He blinked.
“You two don’t look alike.” The professor allowed, seemingly embarrassed when they found that sometime during his reading, his fingers had slipped, coming to a rest at the corners of his mouth. Alex dismissed it with a sluggish wave but the man blushed still, rubbing at the pads of his fingers with the tenacity of jewel polishers lined up in factories. “We’re half-brothers.” He explained with a degree of wariness. “The trip to Alaska, we were going to be family together. The four of us.”
His breath stuttered when the professor wrapped a firm hand around his wrist.
Due to his mutation, Alex was infinitely warmer than his contemporaries, like an overcharged battery or a leather-bound book left out too long in the sun. The older mutant felt like a block of ice on his skin and he fought hard not to shrink away, his skin literally crawling as a nail cut through his inner wrist. He tried to relax, thought of third grade and the multiplication tables he learned by heart. When it got to be too much, he gritted out “aren’t you supposed to be good at this?” shuddering bodily at the noticeable intrusion into his psyche.
“You have shields.” The professor exclaimed in surprise. “Very groovy if I do say so myself.”
Alex stilled and said in a dangerous voice, “Someone’s been messin’ with my head?”
“Oh no, no.” The man assured him, almost as an afterthought. “They’re natural, quite effective. See here.”
Instantly, Alex was transported in front of a maze made of stained glass. Once he realized what it was, the professor leaned into its unyielding surface and stepped through, disregarding the walls and the laws of physics as one might fliers passed out on the streets. He murmured apologies when Alex winced with each collapse, his mind whirling in alarm as it sought to throw the man out, the lone port in the storm, threatening to claim it with each swell.
But the image dissipated and quietness reigned. Alex found himself in a garden, the sunlight beating down on his head. He didn’t know what the professor was doing but for now, that was unimportant. He felt energized, peaceful even, barely twitching as Xavier opened up his memories like presents out of a box on Christmas, sorting through them with the peeved indecision of his mother before a donation drive.
He fell boneless into the embrace of a giant tree, its sprawling branches unfurling to catch him and set him down in its tangled roots. A thick cord knotted around his wrist, silver tarnished black with age, the opposite end melting into ether. There, he could see everything the professor did and didn’t, how he ignored the memories of before and focused on what came after.
That was wrong.
A red leaf danced between his eyes and he tweaked it a little, watching how his mind closed around him like a protective cocoon, impenetrable from all outside influences, truly a wonderful gift. It was beautiful and he let out a laughter of irrational delight, spreading his hands to watch how the branches grew to match the five points of his fingers. The professor was watching and Alex turned, waving at him from the inside.
He turned away.
They didn’t find Scott.
The professor explained that Alex was a psy-nul. Most energy converters were. Alex fed off the sun and sometimes other things too. Yesterday, he had drained a car battery. The day before, he had struck his fist through a fire and came out unharmed. His hand had been fine, overwarm but unblistered. His jacket was not. Erik was starting to look at him in something of a proud dismay, the second coming of Sebastian Shaw.
He remembered the night Darwin died, a firebomb lit with his own power. That’s why he wanted control; so that the next time he went up against the bastard, he would die in the attempt at absorbing his powers. All things had their limits but Alex had yet to find his.
Then the professor asked about his parents, his fighter pilot and a mother who thought him dead. Had they been mutants or?
When he was young, he lived with his mother in Arizona.
She was not a mutant.
But when tracing his paternal lineage, strange articles cropped up between the stacks of yellowed newspaper. The professor hypothesized that Christopher Summers probably descended from a long line of mutants, all carefully hidden, concealed beneath a mask of everyday human beings. However, his father had been an aberration, a hiccup in a genetic poker game. Alex felt a surge of sudden anger at the thought which the professor soothed immediately, pulling up examples of uncles he didn’t know he had, one a successful surgeon and the other in charge of an agricultural operation in Montana. But whatever powers the brothers held had skipped his father and he had been born a power converter, the first of his kind.
They engaged his mind over and over again for clues but the professor could not find Scott and increasingly, Alex found that he did not want him to. Sometimes he could feel a spot of pressure he was only beginning to realize, as though someone pressed a thumb to the base of his skull and held it there.
The professor often made disquieting remarks about the tranquility of being inside Alex’s mind, his mental shields terribly efficient at filtering out background noise. With visible joy, the older mutant informed him that his head was the quietest his mind had been since his powers manifested at an extraordinarily young age.
And he always asked for permission. Asked him if he could work while he was asleep, reassuring him repeatedly that he would not pursue his dreams. How could Alex possibly refuse? Too many years of solitary confinement had ground down his social skills to that of a badger caught in a snare. He craved human contact and at the same time, repelled it.
Raven rolled her eyes and called him a drama queen. She wasn’t wrong. He slept poorly and was reacting badly to sunlight. Overcharged—Hank concluded. When Alex first came to the mansion, he was a creature of iron bars and concrete walls. He also had a modicum of control. Now free from the small room and the tiny square of a window not enough to spill even floodlights across his shoulders, his powers had grown off the charts.
Hank was forever going around, scribbling down the various reaction Alex displayed to energy sources including proximity to other people. He could no longer focus his blasts, his aim leaving his immediate surroundings scorched black. And perhaps that was the reason why he allowed Charles inside his head.
But he slept better when the professor monitored his sleep. Erik threw him a confused look when he, for the umpteenth time, finished his task without a hint of surliness. Sleep did wonders for his body it seemed. No longer did red plasma flare in wide arcs like the rings of Saturn. The modified chest plate allowed him to fire off excess energy in a steady stream of light. Not the most maneuverable of devices but it vastly improved the safety of everything surrounding him.
Ecstatic, he had genuinely praised Hank for once, earning a soft blush out of the normally reticent scientist. Despite the heavy ribbing and catcalls he received from Raven and Sean, he grinned as he blew apart a mannequin. They held a party that night, both adults turning a blind eye towards the liberal amount of liquor poured in the communal fruit punch. He went to bed completely plastered, but he could feel the one eye the professor kept on his back.
The sun was just setting across the horizon when he arrived, all but thirteen. Alex was sitting at the docks, younger, blonder, fiddling with a lure and cursing when a hook went straight through his thumb. Xavier took his hand and blew gently across the injury, kissing the soft whorls as though to comfort him. His attention already far away, Alex pressed him a stunted smile.
He would not remember this when he woke, only that the hurt inside of him had assuaged a little, pushed in deep through the suggestions of another mind.
Just before the flaming wreckage hit the water Charles said, “It wasn’t your fault.”
Alex, his skin pulsing red, replied “I know.”
He dreamed more and remembered less.
It was the only thing he was sure of.
Alex was used to waking up with a pale scream folded under his tongue, never sure what it was that he had been looking at before everything was swallowed up in a glorious shade of red. But he often dreamed of other places, different times, worlds where his mother cared, and his father never died, Katherine Summers living to be the ripe age of ninety-three. Where he grew up happy surrounded by people who loved him, a universe with a brother destined to be apart, somewhere he had a son, a second brother, where he was never born.
And at times during viewing, some of the other Alexs joined him with a shoulder check and an impish smile, telling him that he would understand then angry because the professor was there, watching, flipping through the memories and the half-forgotten with gross impunity.
He never remembered this. Then maybe this was all his fault.
It all started innocently enough, a girl, nondescript, pressing butterfly kisses down the curve of his throat. It could have been Raven, the many shades of her, blue or otherwise, Angel, Moira, any of the girls he saw, never did, made up during his long captivity at an army jail cell with nothing but a magazine and his fist for company.
But the girl of Alex’s dreams had hair like a river, ample breasts and soft skin. She was both older and younger simultaneously, lips like the bite of a poisoned apple, the glare of her green eyes strikingly familiar. Naked but for a pattern of leaves scattered across her back, she snarled in warning at his intrusion before dissolving into the air. Alex reached for her, his hand passing harmlessly through a cluster of atoms and becoming electrically charged. Charles grabbed for him, his expression stormy as he knelt between his knees. “Allow me.”
He didn’t remember this either.
In the morning, Alex felt uncharacteristically cheerful causing Sean into walk into a wall and for Raven to give him the hairy eyeball as she sought out the holy caffeine grail. Even Erik, once he returned from his morning jog, looked at him with great consternation and asked casually “good sleep?” before grabbing a piece of toast. The tip of Alex’s finger reddened slightly as he grinned “the best”.
When he was sixteen, one of the inmates finally grew bold enough to make a move on the freak who had blown off his foster father’s head. The few times they had met out of quarantine had always ended in a confrontation with the man backing up only when his guards showed huffing and out of breath. It had only been a matter of time until they stopped coming down entirely. Alex had known it then. He knew that the men knew as well.
If the man had a real name, Alex didn’t remember. He didn’t want to.
The inmate cornered him one day at the end of the yard where shifting bodies made it hard to see what was happening. Even if they had, Alex doubted that anyone cared. Mutants were the next great evil, ranking with the lawyers and cockroaches in society.
He heard the warning shouts too late, the stamping of feet like the throw of an inflated tube after the victim drowned. The man pushed him against the wall, hissing into his ears about the sick fantasies he’d had since he first set foot inside at the age of fourteen. Alex snarled and fought, the man and the heat of his skin, because he knew that if he lost it there, they were all dead, the other convicts, the few kids, the guards (useless, the lot of them), everybody. So he reined it all with a shudder, like putting a lid on top of a boiling pot, remembered Scott and tried to breathe.
The man leered, sweeping a hand down the back of his skull as the fire retreated into his cells. Steam wafted from his skin, residual, harmless, impressive for the others who thought the inmate had the upper hand. Alex sank grudgingly to his knees, his non-regulation hair providing a perfect purchase for the meaty fingers as his jaw pried open, eyes tearing as he choked on another man’s cock.
The man’s eyes were blue. He remembered that, an enchanting shade almost like staring into a bottomless pond.
Alex knew those eyes.
The man jumped back screaming in agony as his skin blistered and shriveled away, fingertips falling like the soft end of a cigarette. Alex rolled away, gagging at the stench of overcooked meat, bile splashing down his chin and on the concrete where it ate through the rock like strong acid. Tears ran down his cheeks, scalding like boiling water though they did not burn when he caught them in the center of his palm. He burned red as the guards approached, the warden hurrying alongside them. He stood, hands outstretched. There was no going back.
Alex launched himself from his bed in a running start, landing on all fours on the scratchy carpet before throwing off his shirt, his pants and anything else remotely constricting as he ran down the stairs. At the back of his mind, he knew that it was insane. He was at the manor, he was safe. Safer than the doughboy idiots shirking their duty while men thrice his size ganged up on him for being young. But he couldn’t shake off the feeling that someone was watching, following, that someone had slipped two fingers down his waist band and kept it there.
His bare feet hit the grass and the transition was jarring enough to send him head over heels in the dark, only a scant sliver of the moon to witness his fall. Shivering as though fevered, he dragged himself across the grass, taking his fill of the starlight, surprisingly cool like the blue at the bottom of the—
It spilled out of him like mist rolling off a lake. Erik stood frozen; hands raised defensively as static washed over him in a warm gust of air. Alex stared up in a silent terror as a dagger melted and divided into a thousand points, ready to sink in if it were necessary. Strangely enough, he would have welcomed it, anything to dig the stranger out from his skin.
Rubbing the ends of his hair and finding a smear of ash, Erik choked out “Are you alright?”
Alex giggled hysterically, “Great. Just enjoying the fresh air...”
Erik’s face went through a series of contortions, finally settling on exasperation as he knelt down. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He shook his head. Raising a dubious eyebrow, Erik shrugged off his jacket and draped it across his shoulders. Alex sucked in a sharp breath, shuddering when their skins touched but briefly. Frowning at his reaction, the older mutant extended a hand as though to touch him. Alex threw himself back with a cry.
“Don’t” he said hoarsely, frightened of himself, of Erik, of everything. Hands trembling uselessly, he closed them into fists and hid them from view. “I’m fine.” He croaked. “Just don’t touch me.”
Erik shook his head. “I’m getting Charles.”
“No!”
“Alex, what on Earth?!”
Alex threw his arms around the man’s knees, wrestling him into the grass. He received a black eye for his efforts and a split lip, Erik pulling his punches at the very last minute. But Alex, rather shameless about his nudity, took advantage of the other mutant’s stunned surprise and straddled him, muffling his shouts with the jacket—Don’t tell him!
When his words failed him as they often did, usually a case of foot-in-mouth than anything else, he pressed their lips together through the battered leather, not at all sexual, closemouthed and the only exchange occurring through the moonlit panic in his eyes.
He hoped that the man understood, this was a hell of a thing to explain otherwise. Erik looked up at him searchingly, confusion creasing his eyebrows but otherwise still. A hand came up to cup his skull and Alex rolled off, a fine sheen breaking out over his skin.
“Erik? Alex?”
“Charles” Erik drawled, stark relief glazing his voice as he sat up. “Fine night for a stroll.”
The professor gaped at them, scandalized by his friend and his naked pupil rolling about in the grass. Unable to make a sound, he settled for “What are you all doing out here?”
His prayers were left unanswered as Erik replied, “Alex had a nightmare.”
And with that, Alex sank to the ground, drained like a hare cowering in the grass. He barely heard the words exchanged over his head, standing obligingly as concerned hands patted him down, lingering over his hips and his stomach, gentle fingers brushing off the green blades of grass. Nauseated, Alex threw up all over his feet.
There were ants boring through his veins.
He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He felt like that little boy once upon a time, sitting in class, trying to figure out if Jenny S. liked him or David better. He’d always been a light sleeper, even more than when he was back in his jail cell, at times drafted into wrangling the more dangerous inmates because he was untouchable, regardless of his age, ignoring the fact that he was scared out of his wits of his own power half the time. But now, it was getting ridiculous.
He couldn’t sleep. He was sure of it. His thoughts ran circles inside his head, like a pair of mice with their tails caught off; gnawing through the grey mass and whatever else that was there to be had in a human brain.
Alex woke when Charles tiptoed inside his room, assured by his steady breathing and Erik’s ceaseless brooding. The man locked the door behind him as Alex got up, energy crackling down his arms in circular waves. Had he been thinking straight, he would have simply jumped out the window and never return. But he had been poisoned, infected, sabotaged.
It took only a single look, a hand on his wrist and he was toppling back into bed, reclaimed by the gods of sleep. But he wasn’t asleep by any means, he felt perfectly conscious, lucid, like hitching a ride through another person’s body. That person’s name was Alex Summers. He was a mutant. This was the story of his life.
The professor permeated his thoughts, images overlapping and burnt black beneath his eyelids. Or maybe it was just the last of his mental defense, feebly trying to rationalize the rape of himself at the hands of somebody he had trusted. Somebody he did trust. His mind corrected smugly.
He sprawled on top of the sheets, a pillow bunched around his head and a shirt riding up his belly. The red plasma thrummed inside of him, useless when he wanted nothing more than to set it free. He was angry, angry more than fearful and betrayed because he knew better, he should have known better. There was a reason the government thought them little more than glorified weapons of war. And in his fury, he struggled and tried to make the world burn. Charles Xavier did not combust instantaneously but hesitated at the onslaught of his thoughts.
“Is that how you think of me?”
The man dragged a fingertip from his wrist to his elbow, the inside still warm and damp from the shower. He traced the lines of his face, his fluttering eyelashes and the glimpses of wild blue as Alex threatened to wake, terror flooding his body as plasma bled out from his pores. He howled internally when Charles’ mind closed around him, crushing the tree, its many branches falling in a leafy storm down on his head.
“Stop”
“No” Charles quieted him with a gentle kiss, casting a proprietary hand over his face. Alex subsided, tension seeping away from his body. Charles continued his casual exploration, spellbound, hips jerking against his stomach in search of friction and heat. There was a painful squeeze inside his mind as the man inserted himself alongside, two persons sharing one space, one threatening to devour the other. Unwittingly, his hand rose and settled across the older mutant’s lap. “This is for your own good.”
And something snapped inside of him that he hadn’t known was there before.
Alex awoke feeling weak and distant. His energy output was low and Hank recommended he sit outside in the sun with his breakfast.
He turned his nose up at the salty flavor of eggs and bacon and instead went down into the bunker where the sun was a distant glimmer of a dream. Alex charged slowly, but surely, the other Alexs reminding him that it wasn’t only the sun he drew his strength from. There were stars there in the pale blue sky, invisible and just out of reach. The earth itself vibrated with power, emitting short waves of sunlight stored eons upon eons before he was born.
When Sean found him two hours later, he found that he could look at the other mutant in the eyes without wanting to scream.
Eventually, Alex recovered and learned to shoot again. Sean couldn’t fly and Erik flirted with death on a regular basis. Time was running out, something told him, a bold clock face engraved in his mind. With Hank’s ingenuity and Erik’s heavy lifting, they built a second Cerebro out on the lawn behind the manor. When Charles told him that he could not see Scott, Alex almost cried.
Alex spent the rest of the day lost in a fog, a nervous wreck like an addict looking for his next fix. He barely reacted to Sean giving him shit over his game scores and Erik’s worried eyes. When Raven confronted him in the hallways, he was as bewildered as the rest of them. She stared at him probingly before taking a step back, startled and wearing her real skin, blue and scaled, a redhead like a proverbial stepchild.
Alex caught a reflection of himself against the glass, his eyes glowing red with the intensity of a newly born star. Alarmed, he almost put a fist through the image before thinking better of it. He sighed, normal color restored to his skin. But it was not enough to satisfy Raven who thrust her chin outwards demanding, “I want you to see Charles.”
“Char... the professor? Why?” Alex couldn’t explain the sudden fear that lodged in his heart at the command, shoulders hunched as though facing down a mannequin.
“Right” She said loftily, crossing her arms. “You go talk to him or I will make him go through your mind.”
Alex paled rapidly.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me”
He woke up with cum in his mouth. It had been a while since he sucked cock, but the flavor was unmistakable. He could have asked Hank, have him swab his mouth and then what? Stare at him for being a complete psychopath at the suggestion that someone in the mansion was screwing him when he was asleep? And that he'd slept through it?
Alex gripped the table hard and the plastic melted beneath his fingers, the acrid scent filling the entire room. This was real; he told himself, the pain of metal welded against his skin and the sting of burnt plastic in his nostrils, summoning everyone outside his door. The professor chastised him mildly when he saw the damage, asking Erik to air the room before taking him away for first aid. Alex followed helpless.
Deep down, he had already known. It would have been better for him had he been insane.
It started with simple touches, a pat here and there, praises, a hug. He grew bolder in his invasions, a shoulder rub and knuckles across the column of his neck, the sharp relief of his throat, the cut of his waist and belly, and the scars, layers of red-laced lightning. The first time Charles laid hands on him outside of a dream, he trembled, bile pushing at his throat, so sure that somebody would find them yet knowing that no one would. He would make sure of it.
Alex was not a doctor, didn’t know much more than slapping an obvious rainbow of band-aids down a scraped knee. Yet he found himself reciting the names of muscles and lymph nodes in time with Charles’ soft murmurs, the long fingers running over them with the familiarity of someone who had been watching him for a long time.
His breathing grew erratic when his mouth parted and was fed tongue. He groaned, struggling to pull away, trying to muster the ever present shimmer of plasma rolling beneath his skin. Charles tasted of citrus and tea. And maybe that was the worst part.
“Why?”
He groaned as Charles ground down on him, nails in his shoulders and their minds entwined as he mimed shallow thrusts, his body too loose for him to control, to apply any real strength. But he was hard and that was enough for the older mutant as he picked up the pace, the smell of jizz and sweat chasing away any lingering odor of burnt plastic or the very real fear.
His mouth opened up burst red like a ripened fruit, nerves singing as though someone tied a wick to its end and set it ablaze. Red plasma sparked harmlessly wherever they touched, beneath his palm and where they were joined, lighting up the room in a display of lurid fireworks more fitting in the C-grade porno Sean liked to watch.
Inside his head, Alex was running against an oncoming tide. The Alexs of the other universes, useless to him, extended a hand, wanting to help. But no one could help him when he had willingly let the professor inside and wreak havoc with his mind. He took his memories, of Lorna-never-born and Scott-don’t-come-back and hid them beneath the tree, buried them so deep that even Charles Xavier could not reach. Charles growled in frustration, his initial joy fading when Alex fought to untangle their minds, cutting off the crudely made anchors one by one.
“Because...” The tree trembled as his thoughts were rewritten on whim. He felt his orgasm building and in the body above him, dancing lights illuminating their bones like the map of a thunderstorm. They came in time, synchronized as though they were making love.
“I...” Charles kissed his cheeks, smearing blood into his skin.
Alex couldn’t look away.
In Vegas, there was a girl, a blonde Angel with smiles like bright sunbeams. Pretty and innocuous, no one suspected that she was anything more than a Vegas showgirl with a flair for lights and music. One moment, he was distracting her with a joke well-worn with the flavor of army prisons and the next, he was being slammed against the door of their hotel suite, a telltale clack of a lock turned and a chain sliding into its slot.
Alex cried out in a pitched keen as Charles invaded his mouth, biting back just as fierce when he bit down on his tongue. Blood frothed between them as his shirt tore, snagged on the doorknob when he pushed past him and onto the carpet, bruises blooming across the xylophone of his ribs as he scrabbled at the tables and chairs, all considerately bolted down on the floor. Plasma burst from his skin very much like blood. It scorched through the carpet and stripped him bare, subsiding just in time for Charles to touch his face.
“Are you done?”
He closed their mouths together before he could scream.
“Stop”
Alex put up a feeble defense as he was turned over, heat enveloping his fingers like he’d dipped them in hot water. But Charles filled his mind, inexorable as a flood, more amused than upset at his pitiful display. Outside of the mansion, the older mutant feared no interruptions and as though on cue, Alex let out a low moan, silently hating himself as his hips wilted beneath the strain, his hole puffy and open in the cool lighting.
Lovingly, Charles smeared cum across the back of his thighs, licking it out of him slow as Alex dug his nails into the mattress and clenched tight, a mental sigh glossing over his thoughts in a wave of pleasure. He shook, his cock straining in a wanted-unwanted arousal, he just wanted it over with.
Then, “Tell me you want this.”
His reply was automatic.
“I want this.”
“If only you could see yourself.” Charles chuckled darkly as he pushed into him, the wet slap of his balls distractingly loud.
Alex mewled, barely a passenger inside his own body.
He came to a pattern of scarlet leaves.
“Please”
Affection washed over him when Charles pulled out, chest heaving with exertion as he opened a bottle of water and offered him a sip. He felt his eyelashes flutter, crusted with sleep, as the sunlight filtered past the heavy blinds and laid stripes across his skin. Alex stared in detachment at his debauched state, his legs spread on either side of the other mutant and his pubes sticky with cum. He floated in a drugged state, a mouth full of cotton and brains fucked out. Slowly, he reached out and thumbed the fullness of his lips, smearing the residual slickness down his chin.
Charles licked the pad of his fingers, transferring some of the taste. He smiled, his pearly whites chasing him down into the dark.
“Who was it?”
“’scuse me?”
It was getting harder to breathe. Erik was standing too close. If he could just get him to back off a bit, he could breathe.
Plasma flickered up and down his skin, no longer channeled but like a suit of armor between himself and the world. His clothing began to smolder, catch on fire as he backed up against the wall, threatening to obliterate everything friends or no.
He didn’t know where his new-found desperation had sprung from nor did he care. His power was to convert cosmic radiations into heat and explosions much like Sebastian Shaw had been able to swallow plasma and spit it back out as a bomb. He saw no redemption in that, he should have been left to rot in solitary confinement like he wanted to after being separated from Scott. Though he didn’t know where his brother was, he swore to himself he would never try to find him again.
His eyes burned red, ashes floating down like handfuls of snow and settling in his hair. And still, Erik stepped closer as though it didn’t matter, like his sunburnt skin and scorched palms did not hurt. He stopped just before touching him, reading the panic in his eyes as he leaned away, expecting to be struck. In a low voice he growled, “I will kill him.”
“No!” Alex shouted, turning just in time to have one of his plasma rings go wide and carve a wall in two. Erik did not flinch at his outburst, jaws only tightening in anger as Alex sank to his knees with exhaustion, the heat rolling off his bare arms in visible waves. His shirt was a loss, 100% cotton fiber and burnt. His jeans were meant to last but no longer. Even the carpet seemed to curl away from him.
Smoke stung his eyes as Erik called his name over and over again, telling him that he was safe and it would be okay. Alex clutched at the ruins of his mind, the blackened rooms and the dying tree and wept as peace stole over him like an unwanted friend, piecing him back together like the pieces of a puzzle, wrong and wrong but right as the constructs of his mind resurrected itself into a bare caricature at Charles’ entrance.
He thought that he might have gone insane.
“What’s going on?”
One moment, he was on the floor. The next, he was at the door, a suitcase in hand and waiting as Charles stopped him with a single look. He could see through the corner of his eyes, the others, Sean, Hank and Raven, all watching from the banisters, Sean bewildered, Raven determined and Hank looking guilty like he could have prevented all this had he buried his nose deeper in books and Alex wanted to reach out and tell him it was okay, even if he wasn’t, that it was not his fault, that this was the real world and they in it.
He cringed at the persistent pressure at the back of his mind, wanting to throw up. He heaved as Erik shielded him from view behind his back, eyes stinging when he forced his powers back into his body shoving it deep inside his bones.
“I know Charles.”
“Erik”
The other mutant shook his head. “Charles. I know.”
Charles left him.
Alex began to cry, not knowing what was worse, having the professor inside his head or out. Erik turned around and held him like a lioness might a cub, all teeth and claws but gentle as he helped him cross the doorway out into the real world. The professor grabbed Erik’s shoulder, his face so painfully earnest that Alex could have honestly believed him even now when his mind was literally in ruins, so broken that he didn’t know where to start.
“You don’t understand, I’m helping him!”
“He is a child.” Erik shot back, shrugging off the other man. The professor’s face crumbled, “I love him.”
And Alex lurched because he wanted the words to be true, anything other than the present-knowledge that he’d been raped.
Erik shook his head.
“No Charles, you do not.”