A Game of Chess

1962-1963

"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

"I never know what you are thinking. Think."

I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

"What is that noise?"

The wind under the door.

"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"

Nothing again nothing.

"Do

"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

"Nothing?"

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, II. A Game of Chess

Charles Xavier knew he was fucked from the second he looked up from the sand. When he opened his eyes he did it suddenly and several times, as if he'd never opened his eyes before. Above his head, a bullet whooshed as if it were very close to his skull. Gooseflesh mounted him suddenly. He blinked his eyes again as the pain came. A searing explosion caused by the bullet that had lodged itself in his lower back. Everything felt so...hot. A sultry mix of confusion and unease. His body stricken with forceful electric shocks until suddenly the all sensation, save for maybe agony, disappeared at hips.

It was then he realized he was on the ground. Time had vanished and he couldn't see straight. He couldn't assimilate what had happened with what was. He coughed and his body exploded with pain again. He knew he was crying but had forgotten what it was about, he had momentarily lost himself in the incredible lack of sensation and total presence of pain. Suddenly he heard what could only be the explosions of the missiles dropping into the ocean.

Oh, he thought, that's right. He suddenly remembered that gun and the bullets and the scorching Cuban sand.

Charles screamed and everything came rushing back.

Their plan had been horribly and ostentatiously flawed. Charles had made a good actor, a good teacher, a good friend, a better lover, but he'd made an awful rebel. Change comes at such a cost.

So, that Monday afternoon, Oct. 22nd 1962, the air was pregnant and heavy. Over the hot Cuban sands nobody moved. Moira had dropped her heavy metal gun and Erik didn't stop her. She was covering her face with her gloved hands, already accepting full responsibility for what had so suddenly happened to Charles. Erik only stared. Suddenly there was an eruption of noise as Hank McCoy's enormous, cobalt form could be seen sprinting across the beach to where Charles lay.

There was a gentle breeze and from the ground and Charles felt it barely move across his skull, it teased his mousey hair slightly. But it did nothing to quell the heat of his body as adrenaline rattled his bones. A large blood stain had spread by the time Hank reached him. Taking Charles' body up in his arms he carefully turned him over.

Charles screamed and gripped Hank's taunt shoulder, "Fuck Hank! Fuck!"

Charles couldn't see as Erik grabbed both Raven and Angel and with Azazel's help ricocheted through an open path in spacetime.

"Erik, that piece of shit." Hank growled, knowing what Charles didn't. Erik had left them all there. Charles very easily could die now.

"No matter, Raven," Charles whispered deliriously, busily bleeding out," mom says you can stay." Then he began to moan in pain. His breath coming fast.

Moria beat Hank to it and said, "We need to get the bullet out."

Charles was screaming, lying wrapped up inside of his own mind. Just outside the bondage of time, he waited and every once in awhile he tried to move his legs. He found himself thinking about the lack of time and how much may have passed. He found himself obscurely petrified, fearing that soon he should cease to be anything at all and would become something raging without a body. Suddenly, while he had been youthfully unaware of them, he had found time, and pain, and God.

What brought him back, of course, was Hank pulling the bullet from his spine inside of the body of their destroyed jet. He awoke to his own crying out in pain and to Sean's arm across his chest. He heard Moira asking when rescue would arrive. Charles Xavier woke in a pool of his own blood.

"You've done good, Chap," Charles muttered gently as Hank passed him, his fur matted in blood.

Hank started to see the Professor awake. Charles' face screwed up into a grimace of pain, Cuban light streaming in through the ruined glass windows.

"Professor," he knelt so that Charles could better see him, "I've managed to stop the bleeding, but-"

Charles could hear Moira pacing. The grind of her boots on shattered glass. His head hurt too badly to read Hank's mind, although he could sense Hank's agitation.

"But what?" Charles asked, beginning to shift but crying out in pain.

"First of all, don't move. Havoc?" Hank looked over, outside of Charles' line of sight, "Come here please, and help me turn the Professor onto his side, I want to clean the blood up."

Charles coughed, wondering how much blood he had lost. He swallowed as Havoc moved passed him. His form muscled and tall, stooping under caved sections of metal.

"Hank, please." Charles demanded, watching as Havoc maneuvered his lower body, his feet awkward looking and crooked. Charles tried to help him with the weight but found he couldn't.

Oh that's right, how could I forget…?

"Are you not supposed to move someone with a spinal cord injury?" Asked Charles slowly, the grinding pain returning to his lower back. The intensity so much that his vision began to swim, he was guided quickly back into a tense unconsciousness.

Voices drifted in and out of the metal. The sun was falling. They would have to stay the night. The tension was too high for the American's to reach the beach. International affairs were problematic. On the thin foam seats they'd tried their best to make Charles comfortable but the pain was unbearable, so numb he swore his body was slowly drifting away. Waves of thick, wasted neurons shook his spine.

"uhghhg..." Charles mumbled slowly.

Everything in the universe had become a tasteless and dilatory soup.

"What is it?" Hank turned on his heels. He'd been staring distantly out at the sand.

Charles let his hand slip from his chest, he reached for Hank's arm, "I can't feel my legs."

"I know." Was all Hank said.

"So the bullet…it...?"

"Yes. Very likely."

Charles' hands roved along his torso now and they stopped at his hips, feeling the thick bandage there, damp in some spots. It felt as though he were touching someone else's body.

"mmmhughhhh…" He intoned again before absconding into an exhausted sleep.