Could Be Right...
A/N: It's been a long time since I wrote an X-men fic. This was just something that occurred to me after watching First Class. You can consider it to be set sometime after the movie, but actually it can fit into pretty much any X-men continuity...
A great many things bothered Charles Xavier in his sleep.
He dreamt about Moira and the turmoil he had caused in her life.
He dreamt about the 'school' he had just established, and about his new young pupils, many of them endowed with powers they could scarcely imagine, let alone control; and the realisation that had begun to dawn on him that his role as their self-appointed teacher and mentor wouldn't be an easy one.
He dreamt about Cerebro, and the countless mutants whose presence he had telepathically felt-innocent, unassuming men and women, boys and girls, many of them unaware of the extraordinary abilities that made them different from their fellow men...that if exposed could make them objects of fear, even hatred.
But what unsettled him in his sleep the most were his dreams of Eric...and the disturbing possibility that his old friend was right...
He dreamt of armies roaming the streets, tearing through doors, dragging people out of their homes...he dreamt of bureaucrats in their offices, compiling dossiers and lists even as men, women and children were herded into trucks...he dreamt of the death camps...the extermination chambers...of the dying cries of countless lost souls...
And he vividly dreamt of Eric lying bruised and beaten, more corpse than man, in the dirt...raising his bleeding face up to look at him and accusingly mumble with his last breath, "I warned you about this Charles...you were wrong...and I was...right..."
And it was then that he realised that he was dead already...a mere psychic illusion...
He would wake up of course after that, and break out into a sweat. He found himself incapable of sleep after one of these dreams.
Indeed, after months of watching the hysteria growing, months of watching the statements by evasive officials regarding the 'mutant problem', months of hearing of hundreds of incidents of violence and even lynching against 'freaks', months of listening to the spiteful and bigoted rhetoric spewed out in both public forums and nested in the privacy of people's minds...Charles Xavier was forced to confront his greatest fear, his greatest worry...his greatest nightmare...
The nagging possibility that Eric could, in fact, be right...