A/N: You know when you watch a movie and you're intrigued by the actors and you watch it a few more times and then suddenly you've seen everything ever made ever that may have even potentially involved said actors and then you're lurking around tumblr all the time obsessing over a certain bromance and your mother is wondering why you don't talk to her anymore? No? Just me?
Anyways, this is a university AU with a plot and more than one chapter, which is a total first for me. I would appreciate any comments or advice since I have stepped out of my usual zone of comfiness. I have sort of an outline and everything, though it kind of builds up slowly. It will eventually be Erik/Charles and they will be slashed at some point, another first, so like I said, advice would be great! Thanks for reading and enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not own the X-Men universe or any of the characters therein. I'm just borrowing them. I also do not own any of William Cowper's poetry (which is pretty fly, if you ask me), though that may or may not be public domain at this point.
I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea,
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
Professor Charles Xavier concedes that these words are true enough. They had, after all, been penned by the infallible William Cowper, his great grandfather's favorite poet and namesake of the very campus around which he currently strolled. Even just brushing the minds of the many students who passed him by, Charles can feel the heady taste of independence flit across his conscious and ghost across his tongue, though a mere impression of his own days at university. Admittedly, it is marred by jittery freshman fretting over the location of their classrooms and upperclassmen ruing the fact that they have to take such and such class with so and so whom they had heard was simply awful(a fucking travesty, seemed to be the most popular phrasing this quarter, in fact, though Charles had refused to think in such rude terminology). And the few butterflies flitting about in each of their stomachs has already become an angry swarm of nausea in his own. He hopes to at least quell the urge to expel his upper GI tract by mid-afternoon.
Despite the discomfort, he has his mind about him yet to admire the words above, etched into the wall of the building looming at the northern edge of the campus over a century ago. They are fitting, he thinks. Granted, they apply to a man who had been marooned on an island for several years. Anything to cope with the isolation, Charles had surmised. But as he basks in the early morning sun, watching as the rays strike the dew, casting a charming incandescence across the lawn and towards the heart of the city, he finds himself willing to allow it to be taken out of context. Maybe it's a tad melodramatic – definitely melodramatic, he thinks wryly – but as much of a pragmatist as he can be, he thinks the university itself, skirting the boundary of the District of Columbia as it does, is rather like an island for the lot of them, sequestered in the surrounding neighborhood, obscured by the nearby presence of the nation's capital. The wooded areas beyond their ocean, perhaps, the many ongoing intellectual endeavors their makeshift spears and their sputtering campfires –
"Brooding again, Charles?" His bright blue eyes flare with amusement. Moira, he whispers softly into her mind. He had felt her approaching for a minute or two now, climbing down the stairs with a coffee in one hand and – he guesses, judging by the tag poking out of the safety lid and flittering in the breeze – an Earl Grey in the other. Apparently, Ms. MacTaggerte knows Charles well enough not to expect any essence of surprise in the curl of his lips. She simply hands him the cup and offers him a smile of her own in return.
"I've told you before," Charles answers, and pauses to take a sip. "I do not brood. I ponder. There is a profound difference, my dear."
Professor Xavier, Moira muses, may be the only man on the planet, aside from her father that is, who can use the phrase my dear, and not sound like a pedophile.
"Don't be ridiculous. It's perfectly common."
"Quit reading my thoughts," Moira says, though she doesn't mean it, and is still smiling as they amble towards the courtyard, her arm looped through the crook of his elbow. They pass a few students along the way, one of which waves an amiable, even enthusiastic hello at Charles (very bright young woman, Charles had intoned kindly, though Moira suspected he genuinely thought this of every student that crossed his path). They pass through the archway at the eastern end of the building when Moira looks up at him with worry written in the furrows of her brow.
"How are you doing, Charles?" It's only the first day of classes and you look wrecked, she thinks loudly, clearly intending for the thought to traverse the space between them.
Thank you for that, he thinks back. Aloud, he sighs, and reaches up to rub at his temple. "Oh, as good as is to be expected, I suppose."
"That bad, huh?"
He laughs and takes one of her hands between one of his own and squeezes gently. "Don't fret over me, Ms. President." She rolls her eyes at the title, nevermind that it's true. Charles calls her President the way she calls him Professor, teasing, even a little mocking at times. "This certainly isn't my very first rodeo, as you Americans put it. The beginning of every quarter is just the same, a transition period, some rougher than others."
"Some as in this one?" Moira says, and her tone is oddly accusatory.
Charles frowns and reaches out with his mind, his sixth sense, and brushes his own conscious delicately, purposefully, against hers, catching snippets of a none-too-antiquated conversation with his dear sister, Raven. Of course, just how dear she was to him was certainly going to be a topic of dispute if what he suspected was true. He had specifically told her not to tell any of the other professors (at least the ones that were aware of his mutation), and especially Moira, that the beginning of each year strained his telepathic barriers, though he supposed that was more an invitation to do exactly this than anything else.
He considers letting his suspicions go unaddressed, but can't resist the temptation to gather more fodder for over-the-dinner-table squabbling. That fickle turncoat, he thinks fondly as the distinction between his own memories and Moira's fades.
I guess we just lost track of the time, he can hear Raven speaking from within Moira's memory, the words reverberating with a hollow quality to which Charles has become well-accustomed. More than two or so weeks of isolation and Charles kind of tends to wig out when he's back in the city. It's kind of like reverse withdrawal…not that I'd know anything about that.
Reverse withdrawal…he would have to remember to ask Raven about that sometime soon, he thinks darkly. Either that or go rifling through her sock drawer, the way he sometimes ached to rifle through the contents of her mind.
And he most certainly does not 'wig out', whatever the devil that means.
" – heard you spent some time in Canada this summer. Lonesome, was it?" Moira is still chatting away good-naturedly, though if the twinkle in her eyes is anything to go by, she knows exactly what Charles is up to. After all, she had never expressly forbidden his fiddling, as she oft referred to it in public in rather miserable attempts at being furtive. Which, of course, has the majority of the student population believing that, not only are they a couple (Ew, Raven had said, and Dr. Hank McCoy, friend and colleague, also of the so-called dear category, had agreed, she's like your other sister or something), but that they also, by engaging in said fiddling in bars and bowling alleys and what have you, willingly offer themselves up to some sort of rampant voyeurism.
But that twinkle, he knows, belies her many concerns, most of which, as of late, have centered on the mutants who attend Cowper University. She certainly isn't selfish or heartless enough to dwell on her own reputation, though sometimes Charles wishes that she would. Instead she dallies about her office until all hours of the morning, working herself into a panic over the progress of the students, mutant and human alike, how abilities are affecting the classroom and oh Christ, what if someone starts rioting over this.
"Oh, Moira," Charles says, his tone suddenly grave, yet affectionate, coloring the scenery in shades and shadows that had not quite been there before. For just a moment, she wonders if he's deliberately tampering with her vision.
"No, actually, I'm not." Damn telepaths. He chuckles before taking hold of her arm, his long, pale fingers wrapped gently around the meeting of her elbow and forearm, and steering her towards the back entrance of the Central Administration Building – or CAB building, a title whose redundancy makes Charles laugh the way only someone like Charles can laugh at something like redundancy.
"Be careful not to worry yourself into an early grave, my dear," Charles says, emphasizing the trailing endearment just enough to make Moira wonder whether or not it had been intentional, while his lips, rosy and wet as he continues sipping away at his tea, stretch over his pearly white teeth. Then he leans in for a moment, brow quirked. "There are far worse fates to suffer. The shock of voices can be painful, yes, but I wouldn't be much worse had I spent the evening prior at the pubs."
Moira's own expression softens in sympathy. She knows he's lying. And Charles once more finds himself appreciative of this woman, this human, who so graciously adheres to his idealist sentiments, providing him with glorious imaginary fuel should he wake to discover one more attack on mutant-kind, one more whisper of the phrase Mutant Registration among the powers that be. It does him well to pretend that it's all a dream every now and again.
"Just be careful, alright? I'll be in my office if you need me." By if you need me, he can tell that she means, it's your turn to get coffee tomorrow, Charles, I'm not even kidding. "Meetings now. Meetings forever, I think," Moira says by way of goodbye, chuckling at her own description of her drab fate as she turns to make her way back up the stairs and out of sight. Charles takes one more sip of his tea, which has already been doing wonders for the bile that's been burning in his stomach since the sudden influx of students two days before. It has his cup runneth-ing over, as Raven so likes to put it. Speaking of Raven, Charles thinks to himself as the infernal contraption in his pocket buzzes against his thigh. He extricates it carefully from the folds of fabric, fearful as ever that it will vibrate its way out of his grasp and into a pile of chips and LCD's and whatnot on the sidewalk below. Have fun in class, lol, it reads. As Charles moves along, he catches himself wondering, as he always does, why everything that Raven has ever texted him throughout his lifetime is worthy of audible laughter, a point which has his head spinning whenever she tries to explain to him the finer points of popular culture. He just gives a dismissive shrug as he makes his way purposefully down the sidewalk and across the quad, turning up a metaphorical collar against the storm of papers and manic students and research and (potentially) drunken escapades that he knows is to come.
Turtlenecks for reviews (lol).