A/N: Contains spoilers for Logan. Like, the BIG kind.
This is a little drabble looking at Charles Xavier—the man, the myth, the legend, from childhood to old age. It was born from me watching Days of Future Past a few hours after watching Logan in theatres.
Xavier
Charles Xavier had always needed someone to protect.
At nine years old, he'd started hearing voices. He thought he was going mad, spent years in terror of his own mind, fearing everyone around him, that they'd see he was different, he was crazy, lock him up, give him shock therapy. He'd tried to be good, to be above reproach, so that no one would suspect anything. Oddly enough, it made the voices easier to bear. They were still present, but they were happier, calmer.
Eventually, he'd realized that the voices weren't in his head—they were in everybody else's. That made a lot of things make more sense—especially the part where they were happier when he behaved.
However, as his abilities got stronger and sharper, and as he grew older and matured, they inevitably shaped the way he related to others. When he was alone, far enough away that he couldn't hear anyone's minds, he'd feel more peaceful, certainly, but after only a few minutes, a great black emptiness would begin to take hold, deep within his mind. It was something between loneliness, hunger and blindness—it tore at him, smothered him, drowned him. Sometimes he even got that feeling when he was surrounded by people—at his father's business galas or at his grandmother's Christmas parties.
It was usually better when he was with friends, or people he loved—but the first time it really, really got better was when he met Raven. Raven was strong and clever and brave—he could see it in her, feel it radiating from her mind every moment he was with her. But she was hungry and desperate and alone; the two clashed like mixing black and white—while the white would lighten the black, it would always be overwhelmed.
But he could fix it—he could take away her hunger and pain and loneliness, leaving only the best of her, freeing her to be the best that she could be. He could protect her, and that was the best feeling he'd ever experienced in his life.
As he grew, he discovered that it wasn't only Raven—although she would always hold a large and important place in his heart. He derived immense satisfaction from helping others, so much so that when he had no one to protect, no one to tutor, no one to feed, the emptiness would begin to return, creeping in at the edges of his abnormally active mind. So when Moira approached him, told him the world was in danger, naturally he jumped to help.
When he met Erik, his pain and suffering took his breath away like a physical blow. It was the first time that his desire to save someone would truly hurt him. But he breathed in, steeled himself, then dived in, both literally and figuratively, pulling him from the depths of saltwater and despair. And even though it did hurt him, even though being by Erik's side and nurturing him cost Charles dearly, he found he never wanted to back down, never wanted to stop. He loved Erik as he loved Raven, and no one loved quite like Charles.
Losing Erik and Raven to rage and revenge wounded Charles more than the damage to his spine; he would have borne that wound a hundred times over, and gladly, if it would have kept them from choosing such a dark path.
But life carried on, and there were others—other people who needed him. The school was his balm, the X-Men his morphine. He shone a light into the darkness of ignorance, he gave a home to those who were shunned from theirs for what they were.
Until the war came, and took them from him.
With no one to look after, Charles found the emptiness in the forefront of his mind, waiting to swallow him up every time he closed his eyes. When he discovered that Hank's solution to treat his spine would block his powers, he began taking higher and higher doses, just wanting something to make the pain stop. The emptiness didn't go away, but it faded somewhat—the agony dulled, and settled into the background, always present, always tormenting him, but lessened enough that he thought perhaps he could bear it for a little while.
By the time the rude stranger appeared in his front room, making demands and outrageous claims, Charles had so thoroughly lost his way that he had become accustomed to the emptiness. The silence in his mind, his isolation from others; it was familiar, almost comforting—though, in the way that a shot of heroin is, temporarily, comforting to a dying addict. He didn't want to come out of the soothing darkness. He was afraid that the light would strip him of his defenses, and his soul would be laid bare for all the pain of every mind in the world to crash over him and rush through him, torture him until there was nothing left. He was afraid—afraid to help, afraid to live, afraid to care.
If Logan hadn't brought up Raven, described the fate that lay in store for her if they did not save her, then he probably wouldn't have gone. He would have huddled in his bedroom, shooting up in the increasingly vain hope of a good night's rest and a slightly more worthwhile day tomorrow. But Logan did bring up Raven, and the memory of his first friend, his sister, the first person he'd ever tried to protect, that moved him, even though he'd sworn to himself that he would never again be moved.
From the moment he set foot outside, on borrowed legs, powers numbed into uselessness, Charles felt like everything in the world was conspiring to drive him back in. He feared for Raven, a fear so powerful that it froze him inside. His anger at Erik, a blazing inferno in his soul. Then Erik's anger at him, his rising rage because he, too, had lost so many friends, but he had stood and fought, he would never abandon his own. Guilt, like the heaviness of the ocean pressing down on him, that he hadn't done more, that he had lost himself. Then fear again, when he entered Cerebro—both the fear of failure, and the fear of success, of having once again to hear all those minds, feel all of those people's suffering. This fear choked him, made him weak, made his mind feel like his failing legs.
But then suddenly, there he was—his own, older self, just on the other side of Logan's consciousness—whispering to him in a deep, strong voice that he could do this, that he was strong enough, and that pain wasn't something to be feared; that if he let it in, it could make him stronger.
And although the fear never really went away, he was right.
Then came more students, some pouring into his school on their own when he reopened it, others scared and trapped and alone, crying out in mental voices that only he could hear. He sealed Jean's power within her mind, giving her the freedom to pursue a nearly normal life with a home and people who loved her. He found Scott Summers, Ororo Munroe, countless others.
Then came Logan. Logan was different than Charles remembered—naturally; he was fifty-some years younger, with no memory of what had happened in 1973. No memory of anything, actually; although he could care for himself in body, he desperately needed protecting in spirit—a protection that Charles was more than happy to provide. Because Charles Xavier had always needed someone to protect. Logan was like the epitome of the X-Men in that regard—they could all protect themselves in some ways, and from the outside, one might reasonably scoff at the idea of someone needing to protect them. However, they all had demons, they all had something inside that they had to wrestle every day, whether it was something as simple as fearing how people would see them because of their mutated appearance, or shadowy figures in their past, haunting their dreams and stalking them in the corners of their eyes.
And that was what Charles lived on—Professor Xavier lived up to his name in every moment; he was the savior; the man who drove away the demons. He lived, and loved, and taught, and time passed him by pleasantly enough.
Then came the seizures.
At first, when he had one, everyone in the room would get dizzy or have a headache. It was inconvenient, but with the right medications, manageable. He began to make plans—reluctantly, and with a heavy heart, but he did it—to eventually remove himself from his beloved home; his last act of protection would be his absence.
He expected to have more time.
But expectations are the doorway to disappointment—wasn't that the maxim?
The tremors rocking his body were nothing compared to the extreme turmoil ripping into his mind. His vision went not black, but white—agonizingly bright, cutting into every part of him. He'd gone from "mild inconvenience" to "weapon of mass destruction" in the course of about three minutes. 600 people were hurt. Dozens pf people—his people, his X-Men—died. When he awoke and realized what he had done—when he saw the bodies scattered on the floor around him, bleeding out from their eyes, he wanted to gouge out his own to be rid of the sight.
The emptiness was so much worse this time—it was all-consuming, immeasurable, and completely unendurable. What he had done was so terribly, terribly against everything that he was; he could barely comprehend it. So his faltering mind did what it had to—he erased it, hid it deep down in his subconscious, hoping to burn it away with time.
But the emptiness wouldn't go away completely.
Neither would the seizures.
He still had Logan, but their positions were reversed; Logan was the protector, the caregiver, while all Charles could do was wheel himself around and quote Shakespeare with increasing difficulty. Logan must have known that Charles's hunger for nurturing others wouldn't go away, and that not sating it would torment him, but it wasn't safe for him to be near anyone—he might kill them by accident—so he kept bringing him potted plants to look after. It was a poor substitute, but in Charles's more lucid moments, he appreciated the gesture—and they did brighten up the otherwise intensely gloomy space to which he was confined.
Without Cerebro he could no longer cast his mind over the world, but as he fell apart, there were moments when he suddenly had manic strength; when that happened, he would see sometimes for hundreds of miles, scanning cities full of people, flitting in and out of daydreams and nightmares. Sometimes he was even strong enough to affect them—to soothe the ache or lead the lost. Logan would grumble about it later, of course, when the rumors of people having helpful visions would spread over and over, but it was with no real bite. It was difficult for the gruff man to deny his mentor what little comfort he could obtain through giving it himself.
Of course, they both knew how terribly dangerous it was.
When Charles first accessed the minds within the Transigen laboratory, he thought perhaps it was a hallucination—the children's minds, filled with rage and fear, yet so simple, so innocent. The nurses with their fluttering heartbeats and shallow breaths, anxiously looking after their violent charges—charges who couldn't be controlled, but that was because they were human; that was what made them human. The cold analysis of the researchers, choosing to ignore the reprehensible nature of their work, choosing to remain unbothered as children, children lived and died in cages for some ridiculous notion of progress. Charles strained himself as he hadn't done in years, desperate to find some hint of falsehood—the shimmer of a dream, or the taint of a lie.
But there was none to be found.
As Charles pushed himself, guiding the nurses as best he could, making suggestions to those brave, brave people who wanted so badly to help but didn't know how, the strain took a toll on him. His seizures came more frequently, and stronger. Caliban took the worst of it, and for that Charles was sorry, so terribly sorry, but there were people—his people, the first of their kind in decades—in danger, and he had to help them. He had to protect them. That was what he did. He couldn't quite remember when that had stopped…
Laura's arrival was like the first drips of water to the tongue of a man dying of thirst. She was hurt and afraid and oh, so angry—he rage scorched him like Erik's had nearly sixty years past—but she needed help, she needed him, even if she didn't want to. It was fitting that someone like her was created from Logan's genetic material; she was just like him.
Of course, things didn't exactly go smoothly—Logan was as grumpy and uncooperative as always, Laura was practically feral, there were killers chasing them, and he still couldn't stop the seizures. But it was good, all the same; they needed him, he needed them, and for a few moments, the lie that Logan told the Munsons was actually true. They were a family. He breathed easily for the first time in years.
He let his guard down.
And that was when the memories he'd suppressed for years rose back to the surface, dragging him under. He lay in bed, caught perilously in balance between the perfect peace of finding himself again at last and finding such darkness within him. When he heard Logan's approach, he couldn't bring himself to look straight at his friend, but knew he had to say something, had to get it out, or else the balance would tip and who could say what his broken mind would do? Confession poured from his lips as tears spilled from his eyes—and then in an instant there were claws buried in his sternum, and blood draining into his lungs.
By the time the real Logan got to him—sobbing that it hadn't been him, and begging him to hold on—Charles knew that he was dead. But the prospect didn't frighten him as much as he'd expected. He'd lived a long life, and he'd done so much good in the world. Now he was unstable, dangerous—perhaps it was right that he go now, as perhaps he ought to have done earlier; would have, if Logan hadn't moved heaven and earth to keep him alive. And even though he was surrounded by blood and fire and screaming, he felt that peace again, because he could see it in Logan's eyes—the burning, steely resolve that always preceded his old friend's greatest acts of heroism. Laura would be safe, because Logan would see to it, and Logan would be safe because he, too, was most alive when protecting others.
As far as last acts went, this one, Charles thought, was not so bad. And perhaps that was just what he told himself, to keep from being afraid as he stood on the edge of the greatest unknown, but that didn't make it any less true. With one last breath, he faded out, departing this world and leaving it in the capable hands of the next generation.
Charles Xavier had always needed someone to protect, from the beginning, right until the very end.
A/N: So, that started off being a cute little character study and then kind of turned into a eulogy… Oops! Feels happened—don't blame me!
I cried SO HARD throughout basically the whole second half of Logan. But can I just say, Sir Patrick Stewart's acting is God's gift to this undeserving world? Seriously, the man is so utterly beyond talented, I can't even express it in words. (I think I say that after every time I see him in something new—but Logan IN PARTICULAR was some truly spectacular work out of him.) Hugh Jackman, too, and Dafne Keen; all of the acting in this film was utterly brilliant. But especially Stewart.
Drop me a review—tell me if I made you cry! XD XD XD