Title: "Needed Reality"
Author: Kat Lee
Rating: R/M
Summary: He knows He'll be there for him the entire way.
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, names, codenames, places, items, fandoms, titles, and etc. are always © & TM their respective owners, not the author, and are used without permission. Any and all original characters and everything else is © & TM the author and may not be reproduced in any way without the author's express, written permission. The author makes absolutely no profit off of this work of fan fiction, and no copyright infringement is intended.
His dreams are the same every night and also different. He dreams not of the future but of the reasons why the future must come true, of the mutant children who so desperately need his plan for the future, of a world where homo sapien and homo superior can coexist peacefully together, to come true. The faces are different every night, but always the message is clear.
Always, he knows they need his dream to come true to solve their problems, erase their fears, and ease their pains. Always, he knows they need him, and he yearns to reach out and touch them. Yet, always, too, he awakes without a single name or location, and so though he wants desperately to find them, still, he can not.
Charles twists and turns, sweat breaking out all over his body. His legs do not entangle in his sheets only because he's already kicked them from his bed. His whole body writhes. His hands clench his mattress, and he calls out to the children he sees, though never hearing or knowing their names.
He sees a red-haired body with tears streaming down his long face. He watches in horror as the child twists his hands, hurting himself until fire springs from his fingertips. He hears his parents' cries as he sets fire to his own home and to them within it. They were bad people, horrible people. They hurt him so badly, and yet as he watches his mother's face smolder slowly into ashes, he hurts even more and weeps all the more loudly.
Charles screams, and the scene changes. He is now on the streets of Cairo. Ahead of him is a child of maybe four years of age. Her long, white hair should set her easily apart in any crowd, but yet she moves with ease this crowd of people too busy with their own problems to notice a starving orphan. He watches, calling to her but with his voice going unheard, as she directs the very wind itself into helping her slide billfolds, jewelry, and other riches right out of the people's pockets.
He shudders, sensing a great and familiar evil presence nearby, and again, his dreams shift. A boy whose back wears bloody marks hops around, catching flies with his tongue for his dinner. He does not particularly care for the taste of the insects, but he knows that they are the only meal he'll have all night.
Charles cries upon seeing the boy's ribs, and once more, the scene changes, bringing him, this time, to another lad having to hunt his dinner. The nightmare for this child, though, is far too painful. He's been beaten by his father like the amphibian boy. Worse has been done to him, too, and worst still is yet to come. Charles knows, with one look at the boy's body, that he is about to collapse from starvation, but at last, he catches the only food he's come to accept that he will have, the rabbit, which he'd thought so cute, that his father had thrown into the locked basement with him.
He can not bare the pain. He writhes so violently that he almost falls out of bed, but another vision catches his mind. This one is of a girl who is actually happy to know that she is a mutant. She stares at her reflection in her mirror as she brushes her long, green hair and turns to a news cast where the humans are speaking of the mutant terror. She grins, knowing that, very soon, the humans who have tormented her will know that terror first hand.
Another girl child screams, yanking Charles' mind halfway across the nation to Boston where she has just been abadoned by her parents and left in a straight jacket in an insane asylum. She is a child of beauty and of riches. She had thought she was a child who would be spoiled and loved for all eternity, but she has just found out, all too painfully, that that is far from the truth. She is a monster now, and her parents, rich, prestigious, and concerned with their reputations as they are, want nothing more to do with her.
An orphan who can see only red cries alone in Alaska for the parents and baby brother who have been forever lost to him. A familiar girl screams with yet another nightmare far closer by as she sees a friend die within her mind. A growing boy in Russia wonders what will happen when the terrified mutants come for him and rather or not he'll be able not to protect himself but rather to protect his loving parents and cherished sisters from the bigotted Americans' fearful hatred. An Irish lad screams as his wife is killed and he wonders if her murder had anything to do with his mutancy.
Lives flash before Charles, rushing pass him faster than a gushing wind in a tornado. He tries desperately to hold on to an image, to any one image so that he might be able to somehow reach through his telepathic dreams and help the child he sees, but he can hold to none of them. He screams with their pain. His heart hurts as theirs do. His limbs flail about in his desperate attempts to somehow protect and help them, and eventually he does fall from his bed.
This morning, however, as Charles returns to consciousness, one location finally remains clear in his mind: Anchorage, Alaska. He gets up immediately and starts to dress. He knows what he must do, but as he dons his cross, Charles pauses and looks at his own reflection in his own mirror. He thinks of the man who first bore the cross, of God's son who died so that all could be free from sin, and what He must think of the horrors visited upon Charles' kind.
Jesus did not die, Charles knows, so that more suffering could continue. He did not die so that babies could be beaten, teenagers forced to rip into living animals for food with their own mouths, and children have to fight just to live. He, too, cries for the children as Charles cries, and so as he humbly bows his head and prayers, "Father, help me," Charles knows that his prayer will be answered.
His dreams will become reality for God will take the down trodden and lift them up. He will protect the innocents and make their enemies their foot stools. He will make Kings and Queens, in their own rights, of every tormented child Charles has foreseen this past night.
Having finished his prayer, Charles picks up his phone, dials the airport, and orders a single ticket for the very next flight to Alaska. He knows what he must do. He knows at least one thing about the future. No, he thinks, smiling and correcting himself, there are two things certain about his future, about the future for all mutant kind. His dream of peaceful coexistence will become a reality, and the Father will be with him every step of the long journey ahead, carrying him when he can not carry himself and making the seeming impossible the reality they all need.
The End