AN: This was written as a response to a prompt at 1stclass_kink. It deviates from the prompt quite a bit but it was inspired by it. Cross-posted at my LJ.
Prompt:
Anyone ever seen Wanted? If you have, this is my prompt:
Post-movie, Charles disappears. Months/years later, the remnants of his team are able to contact Raven/Erik and get access to Emma Frost's telepathic abilities to find Prof. X. Erik had absolutely NO IDEA that Charles was gone, and gathers up everyone to conduct a full-out search.
They find him after the events of Wanted, where Charles has been brainwashed and has the kill-before-you-get-killed mindset. Erik has to balance that out and make him see the error of his ways.
OR, YOU KNOW, JUST ROLE-REVERSAL IN GENERAL.
Please?
AN2: Pretend that Wanted happened a few decades earlier. Or just ignore the timeline altogether, okay? Also, disregard any information (character background or otherwise) that you know from comics or the other X-Men movies.
Disclaimer: Wanted is a 2008 action film, loosely based on the comic book miniseries of the same name by Mark Millar. The film is written by Chris Morgan, Michael Brandt, and Derek Haas, directed by Timur Bekmambetov. It was distributed by Universal Pictures.X-Men: First Class is a 2011 American superhero film directed by Matthew Vaughn. Based on the characters appearing in Marvel Comics, it is a prequel to the X-Men film series. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox. This is a work of fan fiction using characters and situations from both of these movies. I do not claim any ownership over them. This story is for entertainment only. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Account manager
.
First time he curves a bullet he feels...anger. It doesn't feel wrong. He knows that anger can be used to move metal.
He didn't use anger. He used speed and skill and that inherent ability passed on to him by his father.
But-
The water is cold around him and he hears and feels and is the anger and metal slows under the onslaught of rage.
Bullseye.
Fox breaths out a sigh of relief.
"He advances too fast." He thinks he hears Sloan say with a note of apprehension, but it can't be.
Sloan's lips are still.
Fox is dead, Sloan is on the run and Wesley's account is empty. He sits down, his back to the wall and holds his head in his hands. People pass him by.
The voices are getting louder. He wishes he had asked the others, before he killed them, how to keep them quiet and wonders why they never mentioned anything.
He wants his pills, wants his heart to slow down and his mind to still.
His fingers close around a bottle of pills in his pocket. He doesn't know what's stopping him.
Everything hurts, his back especially. He doesn't remember hurting it but is ultimately not surprised. He had other things on his mind when he was entering the headquarters of the assassins.
People to kill, left and right, front and back, up and down.
Rats rats rats
boom boom boom
bang bang bang
The noise in his head dies down afterwards, when they are all dead.
Lights out.
Something in him twists painfully at that but his heart is still beating too fast for him to notice anything else.
He dreams of a beach that night, of missiles in the air and of himself speaking of innocent men and orders and can't help but identify more with the man-
Erik, his mind whispers
-bending metal in the air than with the man he knows, in the dream, is him.
Then, there's a bullet in his spine, Erik is gone and he-
-wakes up and for one terrifying moment, he can't feel his legs.
Sloan is dead and Wesley finally has the time to properly look through his father's things. There are more pictures. One is of him as a child and a woman he doesn't recognize in front of a beautiful mansion he doesn't remember ever seeing. There are pictures of him and a little girl. He has a ridiculous thought that she should be blue.
He watches himself grow in the pictures. Sees himself in places he has never been to, in clothes he has never worn, with people he has never met. Until, in more recent pictures, he sees the man from his dreams.
Strangely, he thinks of candles and coins.
His records are false. Wesley Allan Gibson was born four years ago, when he stopped living with his mother and started working as an account service representative.
He went to the house of his childhood but there he found only an old lady who offered him cookies and her life story.
She has lived her entire life in that house.
There is always work for assassins. And he is good.
He is more than good.
His account is not empty anymore despite him spending heaps of money to find his past. His father was careful. There is nothing on the pictures he can use. Even the picture with the mansion is blurred in those parts not showing him and... his mother.
He does find out that the spine injury was real. There are records of a John Doe-
himself
-in one hospital. Records of a man in a wheelchair found dying, abandoned on a street, with no ID and no memory. A nurse who remembers-
it was her first night on the job
- the man who claimed him and whose description matches that of his father.
He guesses then, that those baths assassins use, are more effective than he had previously thought.
He walks. And thanks to his father's heritage, he can run faster than before.
Hank, the name unbidden, comes to his mind, and with it the feeling of wind on his face.
His target is in a prison. There's a feeling of familiarity as he walks the halls but he can' quite-
He's getting better at shielding his mind. It feels natural, like something he already knows how to do. He thinks sometimes that the reason Sloan and Fox and the others never said anything about telepathy was because they didn't know. It might not be part of the standard assassin package as he had previously thought.
He wakes up from a dream-
nightmare
-filled with rage. The images are still flashing in his mind. Those people, hurting him out of fear, out of jealousy, making him feel helpless. Passage o days, weeks, pain blending time, killing parts of him until, when the times comes, he feels just a twinge of sadness where once it would have been a staggering blow, as he reaches out, grabs, pulls and rips their minds apart. Empties their foolish, misguided minds of thoughts and wipes them clean. And not even the images he took of their sons and daughters and wives and husbands and siblings and painlovefearhopewant are enough to make him regret.
Killing does not bring him peace. He never says it but still, the words feel familiar on his tongue.
He doesn't know what happened to him after his father got him from the hospital. Who made him a new past and why. He doesn't think it was his father.
Among his father's things he finds the files on men from his nightmares. Not all of them were with him when he released the destructive power of his mind. He doesn't need to dig long to find out where they are.
Six feet under, with his father's bullets in them.
He remembers a girl with wings, himself on a bed next to someone else and feeling content, excited, playful and happy. On top of the world.
He doesn't cry when the memory recedes from his minds eye.
He often practices curving the bullets. Not because he needs the practice, he doesn't. It's not about firing a weapon and it's not about hitting the target. Seeing metal move the way it shouldn't comforts him.
Shh, it's not about metal, not really.
He reaches out often, with his mind, to the only person whose mental presence is clear in his memory, but he finds only void.
It hurts.
Someone screams and Charles looks up expecting to see-
a man, flying in the sky?
He feels like he's waking up.
One day, when he reaches out to that mind, someone is there, just for a second and then it's gone. And it's worse somehow. It's-
He's buying milk when he feels it, someone slithering at the back of his mind. It feels alien and wrong, and he doesn't waste time retaliating.
His attack has the shape of a coin.
Through the forehead it goes.
Someone is following him.
A red man appears in front of him in lines of red and black smoke. He extends a hand but the world around Wes-
Cha-
seems to slow down as his heart speeds up and his awareness increases. And before the red man's arm is fully extended there is a gun pointed between his eyes and a click of a pulled trigger.
In the last possible moment, the man leaves the same way he came. He doesn't come back.
He knows something is wrong the moment he enters his apartment. He fires almost before he thinks. Not quite, his mind is still-
always will be
-faster than his body.
His bullets stop midair
like missiles in the blue, blue Cuban sky
He switches the light on. There's a man there, palm raised towards the bullets, fingers splayed.
"Is that how you greet friends, Charles?"
".."
"Charles?"
"Erik?" And even he can hear uncertainty in his own voice. Something flickers in the man's eyes but it's impossible to tell what. It's as if he's a ghost, not really there. He wears a helmet and there is a void in a place where his mind should be.
The man slowly raises his hands towards his head and takes the helmet off.
His presence fills the world and Charles breathes.
The End
