She comes to him some nights, alone, padding through the dark. He sees her through the crook of his open door: Jean, in her threadbare pyjamas, a sock always in danger of slipping down one of her skinny ankles. Disheveled and bleary eyed. Eyes red not from fatigue — he doesn't need to read her mind for that, it's written on her face — eyes red from the tears she chokes back as she bites so hard into her pillow it tears at the seams.
The pain, the rage, the frustration, the sheer agony. Of powers unable to be sheathed. He knows it all with a suffocating familiarity. And he knows it is this kinship that brings her to him. She knows that he can feel the constant ebb and flow of her powers and emotions, of her pain. He calls out to all her rolling tides from the bridge between their consciousnesses, the shoreline of their meeting minds.
Jean, I understand.
Jean, don't slip away.
Jean, I'm here.
I'm here now.
And she is drawn closer to him. Farther from the demons inside her that she keeps at bay.
She finds comfort in him, and he realizes with a jolt, as he's gazing at her now limp figure curled up at the side of his bed, that it's in a way quite different from anyone else.
There's nothing like being scrutinized by another telepath. Charles is excruciatingly aware of the feeling, almost like being laid bare in front of another person. Naked and defenseless. The more powerful of the two has a little more protection to their name, a little more comfort on the higher ground — usually, that person is him.
But whenever he meets Jean's gaze, meets those piercing blue eyes, he is felled, stunned into submission. And still she seeks solace in the open book, the ruined, crumbling temple of knowledge that he is to her.
As he tucks stray tendrils of her copper hair behind her ear, glinting steely red in the moonlight, his fingers slowly descend and he absentmindedly strokes the nape of her neck, a plane of creamy alabaster. With dark, half-lidded eyes, he follows its path until it eventually disappears into her loose cotton shirt, now having slipped down around her shoulder, leaving it bare. Leaving him with a pang, a quiet roving hunger.
In her sleep, she shivers at the motion. He draws his hand back sharply as if burned.
Eyes wide, he too shivers.
He is more vulnerable now than he has ever been.