In retrospect it was humiliating how long it took her to notice that Charles wanted her. She should have seen the signs, the looks that were a little too warm, the hands that lingered a second too long, but she couldn't let herself believe that Charles, of all people, would be like that. Charles was the one to speak calm into her mind as the waves closed over their heads. Charles was the one who played chess with her and when they had their long rambling conversations about the fate of mutantkind, he always listened to her before coming up with a counterargument. Charles was the one to ask her to stay, to offer friendship, he was the one who knew and did not ask. She almost hoped that she could have a chance at a friendship with this strange infuriating man, that finally there would be someone who was her equal, her brother, that she wouldn't have to be alone.
And then she had to see this. Charles, after he failed to recruit a young man with heat control powers, stumbling back out of the bar in an unseemly state of inebriation, his thoughts reaching out all around him in a distracting uncomfortable hum. She grabbed his arm, trying to get him off the street and back to the motel before he managed to further embarrass himself, and felt that hot surge of unmistakable want run through him, run through her. She jerked away from him, and he murmured a vague apology, but the damage was done. The impression she had was vague and fleeting, but it was enough – he wanted her.
Why would he even do that? She wasn't exactly feminine, she made sure she was not. Femininity was a switch she could flip on and off, and she only flipped it on when her only chance to stay beneath suspicion was to put on red lipstick and bat her eyelashes. Otherwise she wore clothes that did nothing to hide her mannish angular sharpness, kept her smiles rare and pulled her hair back so it would not fall into her eyes. There was nothing soft, nothing desirable about the way she looked and acted these days, nothing whatsoever. So how come Charles wanted him? The only possibility was that he had seen her past – he did say that he saw it – that he saw everything – and he knew what she did, what was done to her – and now he saw her as something he could have. He thought he could have her and he wanted to have her, so now all she had to decide how to deal with that.
Men who wanted her could be divided into two categories – men who had power over her and men who had none. The second category was simple, all she had to do was threaten violence, or to actually commit violence, depending on their level of intellect, and they would leave her alone. The first category happened less and less often – in fact, there hadn't been one since she had learned to use firearms properly. Unfortunately Charles fell into the first category. She did not know the limits of his telepathic power, and she had to admit that she wasn't sure she wanted to find out. She wasn't ignorant of the things in her mind that could be used against her, and she didn't doubt that he would use them, given sufficient provocation. Maybe she could take him out while he was asleep, or just run and continue the search for Shaw alone – but the thought seemed abhorrent. Despite the revelation that Charles wanted to have her, she found that she still craved his company, his laughter, his easy naïve arguments.
This only left her one choice. To let him. To allow him to have her. After all it would hurt less if it happened on her terms than if it did on his. Not that she feared pain, she had not feared bodily hurt for the longest time, it's only that she didn't ever want to see Charles's face contorted in disgusted hatred of what she was. She would just lay down and pretend that it wasn't happening, and hope that the next day he would still treat her as his friend, not as the usable body she was.
She wanted to get it over with, to get rid of that dull ache in her chest, to prove to herself that anticipatory fear was worse than the real thing, so the next evening when Charles arrived back from the bar, she waited on his bed in her underwear. Her underthings weren't particularly attractive, they were chosen for comfort and to fit well underneath her masculine turtlenecks, but they did send the obvious message.
'Else, why are you – where are your - what the hell are you doing?' he sputtered when he saw her.
'I thought that should be obvious.' she said, and it came out more scathing than flirtatious.
'Well, you are sitting on my bed without wearing much in the way of clothes.' declared Charles, not looking any less baffled.
'And the logical conclusion is…' drawled Else.
'I haven't the slightest idea.' said Charles, 'I mean normally it would mean that you are trying to get me into bed, but since you obviously don't want that –'
'What do you mean I don't want it?'
'Come on, Else.' he laughed, 'It doesn't take a telepath to tell that you would rather be anywhere else than in my bed.'
This was confusing. She didn't expect questions, she expected it to be over quick, especially since Charles seemed, if not drunk, at least slightly tipsy.
'But you want me.' she stated, just to get back to certainties.
'Well…' he said, ruffling his own hair in embarrassment. 'I'm not going to lie to you, I do find you pretty lovely, but that doesn't mean I would – do that.'
'Why not?' she asked, standing up and drawing closer to him. 'I know about all those girls you had, how am I different?'
'Because you don't want me!' he cried, frustrated. 'I don't know what sort of man do you think I am, but I never used my powers to get someone. I may have used it to find out which girls have already taken a bit of a liking to me, but to force someone…' he shuddered.
'You could make me want it.' she stated, reasonably enough.
'No I couldn't.' he answered tiredly, 'Even if I did convince you it was true, I couldn't convince myself, and I would feel the lie in both our minds. But even if I could, no. I'm not going to do that. You've had enough of that happen to you already.'
'So it's pity, isn't it?'
'No. It's just – I wasn't trying to pry – but what happened to you –'
She couldn't blame him for not being able to come up with words. But it was just another type of punishment Shaw used on her. Never himself, of course – he wouldn't sully himself that way. He ordered a different guard to do it every time. After a while she learned to go away inside herself and not be there when it was happening, and Shaw realised it wasn't an efficient method of discipline anymore. So it stopped, and electrocution took its place. And then there were a few men after Shaw, in the years after she escaped and before she had sufficient control of her powers to fight off any man who laid a hand on her. Charles knew some of that, maybe all of it, and he was confused because he wanted her, just like those men did, but he didn't want to be like those men. She was almost sorry for him for having to go through such a dilemma.
'I cannot know what you went through.' he said, slowly, 'But I can know it a little better than people who never suffered it. It didn't happen to me, but I – I saw it. When I was little, I wasn't exactly sure why I knew things, or how to stop knowing them. When I was four, I knew that Bessy, one of the maids in our house was hurt, that a driver touched in a way that was bad, I didn't know what it meant but I saw how it happened and how it gave her pain when it happened and also every time when she remembered it, and I didn't know what to do about the things I saw so I didn't tell anyone. And seeing it was very wrong, so it happening must be worse than I can imagine.'
Else nodded – now that she understood that his pity outweighed his desire, she drew the bedsheets around her shoulder and tentatively sat back down on the bed. Charles settled down on the chair opposite her, unconsciously mirroring her posture.
'I am just surprised that you thought of me that way.' she confessed, 'I was a little girl when those things happened, and I did my very best to grow into something that is not like a woman. I would understand you looking at me if I was someone else, someone made to be wanted, or liked even. But I was made for different purposes. One doesn't expect Frankenstein's monster to have gentlemen callers.'
'Actually, the original story never referred to it as a monster.' he argued, 'It was a creature, at worst, a creature filled with love and kindness that quoted Milton by heart and expressed its complex sentiments on the subject of its identity by – ' he paused, his face flushing slightly over the realisation that he slipped into his old habit of academic rambling.
Despite him ruining her metaphor, Else couldn't help but smile at his embarrassment – he wasn't even trying to demonstrate intellectual superiority, he just seemed to have an uncontrollable impulse to share all information in his possession. It was a harmless quirk, and quite endearing. But she couldn't just sit there smiling at the gaffes of an Englishman with too much education and too little tact.
'Thank you for that.' she offered, 'But if it is no trouble to you, I'd like to know what I did to give you the wrong impression.'
'What wrong impression?' he said, flustered, 'In case I forgot to tell you, I am a telepath. I am literally incapable of getting the wrong impression.'
'But you wanted me.' she clarified, 'Even if you won't follow up on it, you did want me, and I want to know what I did that made me seem weak.'
'Nothing. I wanted you – I wanted you because you were strong.'
'Oh. Of course. Overpowering someone you see as strong is more of a challenge.'
'That's not' – he sputtered, 'Why would you think I would want to overpower you?'
She didn't answer, but she thought it so loud she was sure that he couldn't help but hear – her on her back, pushed down held down restrained the way they did it the way they always do it, see the weak small scared in her and try to bring it out but she won't let them maybe Charles could make her let him.
'No.' he said, 'I admit to wanting you, but's that not how.'
She raised her eyebrows at him, curious.
'Else, we fight for the same cause, and what's more, you are a friend to me, a friend who has my back and beats me soundly at chess.'
'But?' she prompted, 'If you consider me your friend, do tell me why you looked at me.'
'Well, you are very' he started, and raised his fingers to his temple, seemingly unconsciously.
'No.' she snapped, 'Use your words.'
'You look – the way you move.' He started, surprisingly shy, 'It is efficient and sharp and deadly. And your thoughts, they move just like your body does, with the same stark elegance. And I've seen you use your mutation, it is simply magnificent, there is no better word for it, there is power in you, and power in your body, and power in your strong hands and long fingers, I am sure you could break me if you wanted to. But you wouldn't do that, not if you wanted me back.'
'So you do want me.' she concluded.
He nodded, wistfully. He did.
'But you won't make me.'
He shook his head. He wouldn't.
She didn't know what to make of that. Her instincts told her he was sincere, but her experience told her to doubt.
'You wouldn't, ever?' she asked again, desperate to have certainty in this man, this man who may yet be her friend.
'I told you I would stay out of your head.' he snapped. Then he leaned back in his chair, and seemed to think about it, to think about her.
'I would never make you do something for my own reasons.' he said, thoughtfully.' But I – I don't know what's going to happen, and if I saw no other way out of a situation, or if you endangered Raven, or me, or yourself, I would probably break my promise. I never had to find out who I would become if I was frightened enough, or in enough pain, and I can't promise I'd stay who I'd like to be.'
He was not looking at her, and he sounded strange, a little lost. Like he was forced out of his own homely thoughts, and into her world of miserable distrust. Else looked at the man sitting hunched in that chair opposite her, and marvelled at his clumsy cautious wisdom, the way his insistent honesty battered against his idealism, his easy acceptance that he didn't understand. He was dangerous, of course he was dangerous. The minute she forgot that the danger she was as good as dead. He was dangerous, but maybe, just maybe, for the time being, it was a controlled danger, a calculated risk. She looked at him again, and tried to see him without the clinging awareness of the threat he meant, to look at him just as he was, this soft, small man with his rumpled cardigan and ridiculous floppy hair, to see that he was soft but definitely not weak, to see his soft scholar's hands folded across his knees, and he was a scholar, and maybe she could believe he only wanted to know and not to have, his hands looked soft and his lips looked soft too. Not unappealing.
So she leaned forward, pulled the blanket around herself with her left hand and laid the right one on his cheek. Then she kissed him. It didn't feel the way she expected it to feel, the memory of kisses forced or patiently endured, it felt like none of the kisses in her life. She suddenly remembered something, sudden and snapshot-like, a boy, this little boy with goldenblond hair she knew, the little boy she used to play marbles with when she was five, running around the cobblestoned streets all day, and she remembered the feeling bright and warm, the surprised delight of holding each other's clammy little hands in an innocent world before everything went so, so wrong. She didn't remember his name, she didn't know if he was still alive – he was Aryan, but then again the fiery bombs of the British fell of Jew and goy alike. The memory faded but the feeling remained, and she pulled away from the kiss with a reeling head.
He leaned forward to kiss her back, but then froze, and deliberately reined himself in, lowered his hands that seemed so intent on touching her a bare second ago. He folded his arms as if he was cold, and then cleared his throat.
'So…' he said, a little sadly but with audible affection. 'This was a test, wasn't it?'
She looked him in the eyes, forced herself to recall his mutation and the threat it meant, but at the same time she felt every single metal item in the room, which allowed for six easy ways to kill him in under a second. He had no power over her, but he wanted none. She had no power over him, and maybe she could let herself believe she needed none. She felt no anger, no hatred, no fear, not even that numbness she was used to feeling in situations where she knew she should feel fear. Only a fond sort of curiosity. The facts were that it was a kiss, that it was good and that she liked it.
She couldn't help smiling this time, even though she knew that most men found her smile unattractive or downright terrifying. Still, Charles didn't seem to mind, as he gave a little smile in answer.
'Yes, it was a test.' she said finally, tentatively resting her hand on his forearm. 'But I passed.'
THE END