This popped in my head a while back and I thought it had the potential to be really funny. But as I typed out this first chapter I had even more ideas and I just kind of rolled with it; so it also has action, adventure, some angst, and, of course, romance.
"Professor Xavier, you're new patient is ready to meet you now."
A young blonde stood at his door, dressed in a sleek black turtleneck and grey pencil skirt with high-heeled boots traveling all the way up to her knee. It was so breaking the dress code of the establishment that it wasn't even funny, but being the sister of the owner of said establishment came with certain… perks.
"Yes, thank you Raven. And please, don't call me that. I'm Charles to you everywhere else, I'm Charles to you here," the brunette man in the expensive-looking suit rubbed the bridge of his nose tiredly.
Raven smirked and muttered a brief, "Yessir," before she playfully darted out the door again.
"Raven! Is it really so hard to muster up some respect?" he yelled after her, half-exasperated and half-amused.
But she didn't hear him, she had already run off to collect his patient. The waiting room was a while off, all the way down the hallway. Slightly inconvenient, but it wasn't often that a patient needed to come to his room. Only the truly hopeless cases ever entered his office, unless he requested them specifically. Which was more frequent than imagined, since Xavier truly loved to help people, much to the scoffing of Raven. Unfortunately, this case was not the latter.
As he waited for his new patient, Charles Xavier shuffled around his room, organizing papers, straightening his name plate on his desk, anything to make the room look more presentable. He sighed, wondering what kind of disarray the mind that he was about to meet would be in. The last patient he had was utterly convinced he was a vampire, thanks to that damn Twilight fan base, and at one point had actually attacked Charles to attempt to suck his blood. One patient believed he was the Messiah, and claimed he was sent to earth to slaughter the Devil once and for all-which he later decided was Charles. One of his favorite stories to tell was about a woman with an irrational fear of bananas, and there was another who was having an illicit love affair with her pet dog. (That one he didn't like to get into too much.) Yes, Charles met the strangest array of people at his job.
He expected this one wouldn't be any different. Of course, he understood all his patients. It wasn't like he could help it. He had an uncanny way of deciphering people's feelings and always being able to relate to them, no matter how bizarre their situations were. Some people called it a gift, some people called it witchcraft. But whatever it was, it was what had made him such a prodigious therapist.
So when his new patient finally did arrive, kicking and screaming, demanding to be left alone and claiming he was fine, with Raven struggling to hold him down along with all the assistants she could recruit-Sean, Hank, and Alex of all people-tugging him along, pleading with him to calm down and everything was going to be all right, he was not surprised in the slightest.
"Erik, I believe?" Charles asked patiently and that seemed to calm the patient down a bit, who stilled slightly at sound of his name.
"How did you know my name?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.
Paranoia, Charles noted.
He waved his clipboard in the air so that his patient could get a brief glimpse of it. "It's this wonderful new invention that is capable of storing and receiving information readily. Quite remarkable, really. And it also tells me your last name is Lehnsherr. A German name, am I correct? Are you familiar with the language? I've always found it quite beautiful and enticing."
"Fick dich."
"Nice try, but I caught that. I happen to speak it a bit of it myself. Fragments, really, hardly much at all. But next time you plan on saying something vulgar, please, I'd advise you say it to one of my co-workers here who barely even speak the English language."
There was a slight protest of, "Hey!" from the party of four that was currently holding Erik captive, and that small moment of weakness was all the time he needed to elbow the redhead with the blank expression in the nose and tear his arms away from the other three as they reached for the unfortunate victim, who tumbled into the coffee table. He dashed to the door at full speed, but someone had already shut the door and effectively locked it from the outside, and he swore loudly, in German again, and banged on it viciously but the hands were already on him again, dragging him back in, and he elbowed in all different directions, but they were expecting it this time and they threatened to put him in a straight jacket if he kept this up so he sat down, half compliantly.
"Good, now that we're settled, may we begin?" Charles asked in a clash of friendly and icy.
And now that the adrenaline rush was over, the labor group collapsed in their spots onto the floor, a medley of , "I don't get paid enough for this," and, "That's it, I'm sending in my two weeks' notice…" and the redhead, Sean, clutched his now-bleeding nose and exclaimed, "Why is it always me?"
Charles was not in the mood for beating around the bush today, and evidently neither was Erik. Charles did not coddle his patients, as many therapists did. He was often blunt and to-the-point, alarmingly so, and although his methods were extremely unorthodox, they seemed to produce results. He had single-handedly cured more people of mental illness than every mental doctor in the entire state of New York collectively. So whatever he did, he was left to it without question and all the other therapists in the country could just cry themselves to sleep.
These unorthodox methods often proved to bring out the worst before they brought forth any results. And by "bringing out the worst," it meant, "driving his patients absolutely berserk and bat-shit insane." Where other therapists would cower in fear at some of the reactions Charles got from his patients, he hardly ever even flinched. It was almost as if he just knew they weren't going to hurt him.
Erik glared at him menacingly, not saying a word, and Charles circled around him in fascination. He just nodded and made "Hmm," noises and jotted notes down on that goddamn clipboard and didn't say anything for a good 5 minutes: just staring and evaluating. Erik began to squirm, his knuckles turning white as he clutched his knees.
"Excuse me?"
"Hmm?" Charles asked distractedly.
"Aren't we supposed to be… talking about our feelings or something?"
Charles head shot up from the clipboard, smiling brightly.
"Do you want to?"
"No."
"Then why did you even ask?"
Erik glared at him, "Isn't that what normal shrinks do?"
Charles threw his head back and laughed, and Erik wondered what he said that was so damn funny.
"Oh, my Erik," he wiped a hypothetical tear from his eyes and Erik felt his rage burn up inside him at being called 'My Erik.' "Don't think of me as a shrink. Think of me as a… lifestyle instructor."
Erik rolled his eyes exaggeratedly.
"And to answer your question," Charles continued. "I suppose that is what normal therapists do. But, lucky for you, I'm no ordinary therapist."
Erik wasn't following. And Charles didn't appear to be willing to take him by the hand and explain it to him step-by-step, either. Instead, he opted to walk back to his comfortable-looking chair and place his clipboard neatly on his desk. And by neatly, Erik noted that it was actually impeccably neat; he took at least five minutes to align it perfectly with his other stacks of paper that were organized alphabetically around his desk.
OCD freak, Erik scoffed silently. And I'm the one who needs a shrink?
Charles coughed irately and maybe it was just his imagination, but while Charles began to talk again, he seemed to almost purposefully knock it slightly out of place as he stood up to pace the room.
"So, Erik, according to my files, you've been admitted into this mental institution by the criminal justice system. It says here that you, 'attempted the life of a certain Sebastian Shaw, who he claims to have been the perpetrator of a series of crimes committed eighteen years ago, which includes but is not limited to the murder of his mother, by the name of Edi Lehnsherr, and his kidnapping, of four years…'"
"It was him," Erik stated grimly, not taking his eyes off of the off-centered clipboard on the desk.
Charles sighed, "Erik, it also says the real criminal was caught 10 years ago, and sent to prison. It was a young woman by the name of Emma Frost. She is still being held there today."
"So?"
"It says here that you confirmed it was her with your own eyes."
"I was tricked!" Erik exclaimed.
"Erik, even if what you're saying makes any sense, which it doesn't to me at the moment, why didn't you just tell the system they had the wrong person? Or even more baffling, why would you wait eight years until you made your move?"
"I wouldn't expect you to understand," Erik spat.
"I don't expect you to like me," Charles corrected, equally acidic. "But I do expect you to trust me, that I won't ever tell anyone anything you say, and that I will understand you wherever you're coming from. I've had worse patients before, I can handle anything you tell me."
Erik twitched reflexively, as if he was fighting against the urge to take Charles' advice… fighting against the natural human tendency to trust.
But Charles could see straight through his exterior enough to know that he really wanted to believe what he was saying.
And if he delved a little deeper, read into those cold eyes carefully, he could still see a hint of well-disguised fear that had been drilled into him by years of torment, the torment presumably inflicted upon him by the death of his mother and his subsequent kidnapping. He could sense the loss of innocence, the maturing at far too young an age, and the absolute desperation he felt. He felt helpless, useless, vulnerable. And at the same time he felt dangerous, lethal, terrifying. He thought he was a monster. Erik's surroundings practically flickered with images of his past, old shadows of his memories, haunting him at every step, mocking him, driving him slowly insane…
"Hello?"
And Erik brought him back to reality, staring at him pointedly, waiting for him to respond.
"Ah, yes, well then…" Charles inhaled sharply, the rush of adrenaline running through his veins at the possible difficulty of this new task he'd been given. He would welcome it with open arms; he did always love a good challenge.
"I will help you, Erik. We can get through this together, but only if you're willing. I can help you," he accentuated the 'help,' and even raised his eyebrows, tilting his head towards the other man, dearly hoping he would get the hint. "I can help you."
It wouldn't be easy, and that's what made it alluring. Charles loved to help people in whatever way possible, and if this is what Erik's recovery entailed, then so be it.
No, Charles was no ordinary therapist at all, and Erik was about to find that out. He was far from ordinary-and he supposed he had genetics and years of exposure to radiation to thank for that.
He was, in fact, a telepathic therapist, and that made him better than the best. That actually made him quite capable of doing whatever the hell he wanted, and what he wanted the most was to help mutants such as himself find a place to belong and to be happy. That's precisely why about ninety-nine percent of his staff were mutants, that's exactly why over eighty percent of his patients were mutants, and that's definitely why Charles one-hundred percent believed that the best path towards complete recovery was never black-and-white, never the same old routine ordinary therapists used on all of their patients. That's why Charles Xavier, founder of Charles Xavier's Institution for Troubled Individuals, was the most successful therapist of all times, and also the most unorthodox. But exactly how unorthodox he actually was, the other therapists didn't need to know about that.
Erik glared at him for a while, but then raised his eyebrows in disbelief as realization started to dawn on him.
"What do you…?"
"Erik, you are not alone."
The characters' personalities might be a little different in this universe because I figured different circumstances/different time period = different outcomes. But don't worry, they won't be too terribly different that they don't even seem like themselves anymore. They just might make a few decisions here and there that are contrary to what their Movie-verse characters might make, and so on...
