Charles is my favourite character. He's always been, ever since the animated series, and I grimaced when I saw the First Class poster with a very much not-bald and too-hot McAvoy playing him, but boy did I change my mind! I loved this different Professor X, I loved his friendship with Erik, his soft romance with Moira… but what I loved the most was his relationship with Raven – which was the most un-canonical thing in the movie, but fuck it all, it was AMAZING and I loved it.

I used Logan's words in DOFP as time frame, though I still think there's no way that McAvoy can look 51 in XMA and I still wanna see how the hell the lazy and sloppy idiots that wrote the XMFC end credits passed elementary school.

This fic is unbetaed. English is not my first language, so I hope you'll forgive my mistakes for the sake of the story – if you point them out to me, I'll see to fix them right away.

Enjoy! :D

Charles had a skewed perception of his powers. For one, he didn't seem to realize how completely unnerving it was to know you had no privacy even in the sanctuary that was your own mind; and he didn't understand how creepy it was to have all your needs and desires anticipated before you even knew they existed.

Truth was it wasn't he who had a wrong idea of his powers: it was everybody else.

Being a telepath could be fascinating in theory, but it wasn't as much about reading other peoples' thoughts as it was about not to. It was about finding your own feeling and beliefs in the chaos of voices screaming their love and hate and rage and fear and happiness and sadness in your mind. It was about finding the you among the them.

Nine-years-old Charles didn't even realize what was happening when he started hearing voices in his head. It had been a low and constant buzz, at first; no words discernible, like radio statics; annoying, yes, but nothing more. It had rapidly gotten worse, though: the voices had started becoming louder, more demanding; sudden feelings of anger or joy or dread would assault him, and he would find himself spacing out without realizing, his eyes lost in the distance as his mind tried to process the too many inputs. By the time his tenth birthday rolled in, headaches and nosebleeds and sudden loss of consciousness had added to his already sorry state, and his too young brain had just retreated into itself, too confused, too overwhelmed by thousand of screaming voices to understand what he was.

He spent those dark days – months, years – alone in his room, unable to move, to function; his only human contact were the maids that made his bed and served him lunch, but they kept their eyes averted, their steps hurried so they could retreat to the safety of the rest of the mansion as soon as possible. Their whispers blended in with all the thoughts in his mind, their fears became his own, and he would stare in the distance seeing himself through their eyes – wrong, weird, freak. His mother avoided him, ashamed: already more and more distant since her beloved Brian's death, she'd found consolation for her son's disturbing condition at the bottom of a bottle – away from his vacant eyes, his mindlessly repeating words that didn't belong to him, her own inadequacy as a mother. She'd threatened to have him committed, at first, but then stopped caring at all; Charles hadn't understood her words among the chaos that filled his mind, but he'd felt her grief, her regrets, her hopelessness, her wish that he'd never been born as if they were his own – or were they? What was his? Who was he?

As time passed, he was left to his own devices for longer stretches of time – what purpose would it serve to daily dust the shelves and change the bed linens when the kid didn't ever leave the room and nobody visited him? Distance, though, made the voice in his head more bearable, the general apathy of the other inhabitants of the huge mansion easily drowned by his own sense of solitude, and one day he finally managed to wake up and see his room through his own eyes – because he had eyes to see the world, and ears to hear sounds, and hands to touch things, and feet to carry him where he wanted. He sat up in his bed, eyes scanning the space around him; the low buzz in his head spoke of a Sunday morning when all the inhabitants of the mansion had probably gone to the church or wherever, leaving him behind – forgotten – and the world beyond the gates was too far away to bother him.

He tentatively got up, the whispers easy to ignore as Charles approached the mirror and looked at the twelve-year-old boy that he'd turned into. The paleness of his skin was new, but his freckles, his blue eyes were the same he remembered since before – and how long ago had it been? It felt like a lifetime, his memory more similar to a dream than reality. He touched his fingertips in the mirror, mesmerized by the knowledge that he did in fact exist, and had thoughts and feelings separated from those that had crowded his mind for so long. He closed his eyes, focusing his attention on the whispers in his head, trying to give them a name, and then opened them again, startled. And he smiled a relieved and sad smile, because he wasn't crazy. He wasn't crazy.

After that, he started building shields around his mind, around the thoughts and feelings he now recognized as his – his pain, his loneliness, his sadness – savouring them, cherishing the knowledge that he too existed, among all the other minds. It took time: with nobody to tell him what was happening to him and why and how to control it, nobody to hold him and help him and fill him with love, it was only through trial and error that he managed to separate his mind from the thousand others.

The first day he left his room to venture into the rest of his own home, he was greeted by shock and distrust, to which he replied with a gracious smile. With time, the wariness that had accompanied his return to the world slowly thawed into polite distance: the young master was saluted with bowed heads and respectful questions, and if the minds around him were still on edge every time he entered a room, Charles could finally pretend he didn't notice.

It was too late to win his mother back, though; after all, she'd been lost to him long before his powers had appeared. After his seemingly miraculous recovery, their relationship followed much the same path as that with the servants: she politely nodded to him, ordered the maid to buy him new toys or books or clothes when he needed, occasionally asked him about his day. Charles convinced himself it was enough; he knew she would have loved him, had their lives been different.

She wasn't a bad person, it was just that she didn't understand.

(XXX)

Of course, nobody has any idea what being a telepath is really like. My biggest pet peeve, though, is that there's no set canon about Charles' powers, and every author (both in canon and fanon) seems to have their own vision of them – so, well, I decided to add myself to the mix. I'm pretty sure this version too has some roots in canon somewhere, but with Marvel "canon" is such a meaningless word lol

This fic (which I see as more of a collection than a story) is three chapters long and I've already written them all. I will post the second chapter in a couple of days.