charles xavier. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
forgodssake) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ataraxionlogs2016-02-02 11:11 pm
forgodssake) wrote in ataraxionlogs2016-02-02 11:11 pm
Entry tags:
o18. closed.
CHARACTERS: Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr
LOCATION: Treehaus
WARNINGS: Extreme mutant, proceed with caution.
SUMMARY: The sleepless hours and the conversation that fills them.
Waking up in pain is not the cheeriest way to begin a moment, but it's a familiar one.
He isn't someone who often gets nightmares, anyway. Perhaps Charles Xavier is not wired that way, but sleep is often a black retreat save for when space demon-gods dictate otherwise, or more ordinary folkcreature dreamwalkers seeded in the forms of sassy Chinese men. Otherwise, dreams are unremembered fragments, memories made glossier and blurrier, and when he wakes up now, he doesn't wake up afraid.
But he does shudder, an immediate ache coming up like a wave from his still healing hand and the tingle of absent parts. He keeps it bandaged, still, the healing process arduous but faster than it would be otherwise if not for nano-technology. Chances are, he may keep it wrapped when it's done. This time, it's not so bad as to turn his stomach, but it has sunk a knife in the ability to fall back asleep.
Awake, he reaches, finding his comms device. Checks for messages, the dim blue-white temporarily lighting up the boarded wooden walls of what he is beginning to grudgingly think of as home.
LOCATION: Treehaus
WARNINGS: Extreme mutant, proceed with caution.
SUMMARY: The sleepless hours and the conversation that fills them.
Waking up in pain is not the cheeriest way to begin a moment, but it's a familiar one.
He isn't someone who often gets nightmares, anyway. Perhaps Charles Xavier is not wired that way, but sleep is often a black retreat save for when space demon-gods dictate otherwise, or more ordinary folkcreature dreamwalkers seeded in the forms of sassy Chinese men. Otherwise, dreams are unremembered fragments, memories made glossier and blurrier, and when he wakes up now, he doesn't wake up afraid.
But he does shudder, an immediate ache coming up like a wave from his still healing hand and the tingle of absent parts. He keeps it bandaged, still, the healing process arduous but faster than it would be otherwise if not for nano-technology. Chances are, he may keep it wrapped when it's done. This time, it's not so bad as to turn his stomach, but it has sunk a knife in the ability to fall back asleep.
Awake, he reaches, finding his comms device. Checks for messages, the dim blue-white temporarily lighting up the boarded wooden walls of what he is beginning to grudgingly think of as home.
no subject
He hasn’t been awake for long.
The weight of the hour hasn’t been enough to take him under again after the initial shock of escape -- lingering unease made real in the pit of his gut and the simmer at his nerves. Better to keep conscious long enough to ensure he doesn’t dip back into it, half-seated, pillow folded behind his head. As routines go, this one is some thirty years familiar. Powerlessness, failure, the taste of metal in his mouth.
Sometimes the terrors are more abstract -- gods and monsters.
He looks late in aside after the glowing screen of the comm device, and later still to Charles, once he’s certain the text is too small and far away for him to read. Between empathy and expression, he pries enough to get the gist.
no subject
For a moment, Charles lies there in the dark, eyes shut. Determines it's not happening.
He wanders his whole hand backward, acknowledging Erik's presence with a touch more tactile than the gentle psychic sorting through of fractured dream-memory, both points of contact withdrawing again once established.
Hi.
no subject
He got very good at it in prison, before having his mind pulled apart in four or five dimensions.
Lately it’s been much harder to meditate.
There’s a roach on the metal of the ridiculous headboard behind him; he reaches back to offer it out in the moment after Charles' hand has withdrawn, already anticipating a no thank you.
no subject
But you can go ahead.
Slowly, gently, the sound of the trees rustling outside their shuttered windows seems to overtake the last echoes of whatever it is Erik had left behind in his mind. Insects squeaking inside cracks of bark. The vague sense of weather patterns churning in the sky above them. The kinds of ambient noise that had been so obvious in their absence when they were on the Tranquility, that maybe they're all beginning to take for granted once more.
Charles isn't discreet about his pushing of some of Erik's own senses over others, as gentle as a physical nudge to turn someone's trajectory. They've tried to talk about it before, sometimes when Erik was ready to, other times when he wasn't.
"What happened?" he asks, eventually.
no subject
Erik isn’t any more interested than Charles -- he puts it back without consideration, fingertips careful in the dark. Disappointment leeches dim into the silence that follows. He’s restless for lack of alternatives to offer, conscious of pain with no ability to affect it.
Manipulation goes unnoticed, at first. It’s easier to focus on the present with Charles awake next to him, relief in passing company as the night fills in around him. He feels a little stupid, when he realizes, resignation swept out in a deeper breath, and a flat look leveled sideways after. He never quite achieves resentment, anymore.
The scruff of his beard is some two or three weeks overdue for a trim.
"A bad trip."
no subject
In the darkness, Charles allows for a crooked smile, understated. He shifts a little enough to see better, folding injured hand to his chest. The other hand lies on his own thigh.
"I've had bad trips," he says, a verbal nudge. "I doubt it."
no subject
It doesn’t long for him to relent. They share a bed on an isolated jungle planet -- snoring and farting and occasionally stifling grunts into reclaimed gurney pads. Some soft parts are guaranteed to be exposed by default. He’s never inspired trust in the passenger population.
There isn’t much to lose in being honest, anymore.
“I passed between worlds with the drive. Through Hell.”
Through the dimension where the beast in the ship was from.
He speaks without much emotion, or inflection, words chosen on autopilot in line with supporting thought. If he’d anticipated where this conversation was headed, he might’ve lit up after all.
no subject
His expression only gives enough to way to connote comprehension, patient, quiet. This isn't an interrogation, and silence is his only prompt.
no subject
He isn’t given to stammer, but his throat is closing in thick as he thinks back, eye contact sinking south, for the covers. A moment or two passes before he speaks again.
“The captain tried to stop us. ‘Gallagher.’ He’d been transformed.”
But that doesn’t really matter either, in the scheme of things. Filler insanity.
“We’re going to die here if we don’t destroy it.” Or worse: go on forever.
The truth comes out, flat, without much spirit. He hasn’t done much, since they’ve been here, to stop it. The bare minimum. The animals, the masks. It’s already gaining a foothold.
Regaining eye contact after that is a struggle.
no subject
Even with Erik's gaze downcast, he can still make out the off, milky blindness of one eye. Any look that presses too deeply into his mind finds that well of missing time from entrapment in the corridors, the echo of kaleidoscope horrors from the final jump.
"We'll destroy it," he says, after a moment, quiet but certain. "Finish what we began. You did that. Gave us that chance."
no subject
Touch stops him circling back to infinity in the potential for self-deception. He considers allowing Charles to have feelings without breathing on the glass, but only briefly, comfortable enough in mutual warmth (and dread). His next thought is undeniably his own.
The strong may survive, but they have some three hundred clamoring, unwashed humans to maintain if they intend to establish a legacy that lasts longer than their huts.
He’s distinctly bitter -- old, oily anger radiating heat from beneath more rational obligation. So few are worth the effort. He turns his nose to Charles in the dark.
“I’ll destroy the ship if I have to.” How? With bombs? Tying it off to great foil balloons and floating it into a volcano? There’s a disconcerting disconnect between intent and the fantasies he has about the explosion, teeth flashed white under his eye. It doesn’t matter.
Determination.
no subject
"What do you remember after Gallagher?" he asks, as a gentle prompt back on course, and after allowing that promise to stand on its own in its disconnect from reality.
The idea itself, meanwhile, of destroying the ship, is set in uneasy aside. He imagines its destruction, and then he remembers the slackness behind Erik's eyes when Ieza had dragged him out of the jungle, and the ache when he'd explored the tether himself. The neural damage, the associated bleeds, the pain. He imagines, then, their collective minds liquefied as the tether slices through them.
no subject
What it does do is dispel Charles as the source.
His hackles smooth on their own, even if he is being reined (gently) around into a less immediately dangerous line of thought. He looks Charles’ hand over, with all five of its fingers, as he settles back onto his bones.
“Nothing.”
The touch at his wrist is well-timed.
He’s referring to a literal nothing -- memories that never clearly resolved, after he was caught up like a scruffed cat in Resnik’s grasp, too tired to fight. Frenchmen dying in the ether, sparks of life winding down into the event horizon, never quite quashed and dead all the same. The ship twisted, reality distorted in the heat, soul flayed and exposed at the mercy of Something alien nearly upon him.
All of this recall and no words. He’s holding his breath, heart squeezed through the pit of his stomach, rabbiting, weightless in his chest while he struggles to ford through to anything important.
“I landed in the jungle, away from the ship.” Anger flushes late through fear, stinging at his eyes, release akin to relief at tangible description. “I heard the crash.”
no subject
To varying degrees of success. Charles allows conversation to lapse, for a moment, remaining hands off (save for his literal, lingering touch) as he listens to Erik's thoughts and feelings transform and settle.
"Then it was blank, for a while." No one remembered anything. His first few weeks on the ground had been a blur of fear, an association that still shadows him. "It took far too long to remember enough to be glad you were alright. Or proud. Or how little I wanted to get into the grav couch, for the last time."
no subject
“Turnabout’s fair play.”
He’d been knocked out and dragged by Anderson and the Soldier two years ago, after Charles followed Petrelli into the bridge.
He smiles, slightly, when the blunt end of his nose comes back around.
“You can’t just lie awake.”
no subject
There are times when it's the days spent on that ship that throw themselves into sharper relief than much of his time spent on earth. He did used to take a lot more drugs, granted.
His focus sharpens again through the darkness at this point, and he sighs through his nose.
"Neither can you," he points out, voice sleep rough between them. His hand loosens off Erik's arm, finally, shifting to settle. The pain isn't as bad as it had been when he'd first been released from the medical tents, but it thrums dull beneath his pulse, along with the gnawing itch of healing. "I can help, if you like. Make it dreamless. And try to follow you in after."
no subject
He’s more awake now than he was when Charles first stirred next to him, eyes sharp and wet in the dark, hearing tuned acute to the shuffle and rake of the tree they’re in. Bed springs creak beneath the both of them when he leans away and down.
A grunt, a scuff, and he levers a shoddy wooden chest out enough to flip it open.
There are chess pieces inside, and a hinged board, all finely finished metal. The board levitates and the pieces assemble themselves while he fumbles with a lamp.
“My kingdom for a distillery.”
no subject
Acknowledgement is worn in the lines at his eyes, a semi-smile, and the flick downwards and away of eye contact as Erik is rolling over. Charles similarly eases onto his back, the hand at the centre of discomfort resting light on his stomach but doesn't have to simmer for long before the drag and creak of the wooden chest snags back his attention.
He watches the tap and click of metal pieces arranged by unseen forces, fondness sliding easy into the foreground as he gamely goes to sit back up with an answering shift and creak of bedsprings. With the fingers still attached to his hurting hand, he turns the board where it hovers in the air when the last few pawns rattle into place.
"Half expecting to turn around and find one installed under the floorboards, one of these days."
He'd never felt bad about living in a giant estate in the greener part of New York, and isn't going to start now about handsome tree houses.
Reaching, Charles retrieves a water canister he'd been keeping beside the bed, dried out currently, judging by the silence when he gives it a small shake. A second passes, and the same action nets the sound of liquid sloshing against metal, and the scent of rich alcohol is swift to wind through the ever-present smells of wood and water and jungle (and dog). "A little won't kill us," he assures, offering it over.
no subject
There’s no reason for him to lie about this to a telepath. The words trip out naturally as he works the lamp, and he pauses with his back turned, thumbs poised.
A moment later, resin takes a flame, and he sits back to set the lamp square on the headboard between them.
He doesn’t have any dangerous designs for what he’s kept buried nearby. Certainly nothing refined enough to qualify as a plan. He is assured very easily by himself while he sees to it that the lamp is secure. Any delay in his reaching for liquor on offer is minimal -- incidental, as he takes care for fire safety in a house made of wood.
One of his pawns advances on its own, and he sniffs over the canister's lip. His next breath is deeper before he drinks, confidence in Charles’ knowledge of alchemy hovering at around 60%. It smells right.
“Cheers.”
no subject
Charles takes it back, tipping it in answer of cheers.
Doesn't drink immediately, staring at the familiar configuration of squares, the shapes, the strategies. He's always been very considered and serious, even when their conversations derailed gameplay, whether from his (back then) mild pseudo-flirting or discussing the fate of mutant kind. But equally when they were quiet, too.
Pain is, sometimes, a little subjective. Three moves in (and three sips of imaginary alcohol in), it becomes less important.