The first time Tom had met Charles, he had already known of him for months and months. Of all the boys at his preppy suburban high school, the one he most dreamed of seducing was Charles. It was undeniably because of how good he was. The fantasy of convincing the antagonistically heterosexual lacrosse captain to blow him was sub-par when compared to dragging Charles Xavier into homosexual deviance. If normal queer fear was exciting then terrifying Charles Xavier into a questioning of his sexuality was bound to be exhilarating.
For one, Xavier was beloved by everyone, not just the jocks, although they certainly adored him (probably because his mother had an extensive liquor cabinet with no lock on it). Turning Xavier gay would shock the whole school and even the adult society beyond it-it was his dream, his master plan. He never thought he'd get around to it, of course. Mostly this was because he still labored under the idea of pleasing who he assumed at that moment was his actual biological father. He didn't want Daddy to be mad at him, or, rather, any more mad at him than he already was for replacing the school's pool chlorine with n-BuLi, or exploding all the toilets in the languages wing, or gluing all the gym lockers shut. That was just good old-fashioned fun. Homosexuality was a bit beyond a simple prank.
The other reason he could never quite manage it was because he actually had an extremely large and unwieldy crush on Charles Xavier.
He'd rather not have, really. Charles was a sciences whiz whereas he himself thought mathematics was for illiterate heathens who would combust if they attempted to philosophize deeply into the human psyche. The boy was also extremely popular, which Tom detested on principle. Also, he partied with Chris' crew-a bunch of brawny heathens who desired to use alcohol to bring their brain cell count from two down to a lonely one.
The problem, of course, was that Charles was also extremely beautiful. He was slight and lithe like a bird, and seeing him multiple times a week in track together in those indecently short running shorts, more often than not completely shirtless, did extremely arousing things to Tom and his roiling teenage hormones.
Before he nearly fainted at a track meet and Chris had accidentally set them up in the pool, Tom had never once spoken a word to Charles, although he had accidentally listened into plenty of conversations the boy had with his friends.
The shock of actually knowing Charles surprised him directly into love. This was because the Charles he got to know was completely, 100% different than the one he had had every reason to expect to know.
In school he was golden and sunny and outgoing. Yet when Tom tried to surprise him with the sorts of sentences that could be lifted directly from a Smiths album, Charles was less shocked and more moved.
"I know how you feel," the boy murmured to him, close together in the shade by the pool while Chris was on the phone with his girlfriend (one of several at the time).
Tom had stared at him in confusion. He had been talking about not being understood, about feeling outside the fabric of the world, an outsider to the life he had been given. He couldn't help but scoff at Charles' paltry lie.
"Not all that glitters is gold," Charles smiled back to him mysteriously, and dove back into the water.
Tom was interested despite his suspicion, and followed.
They huddled together in the corner of the pool and Charles told him things he'd never told anyone else and Tom was hooked right then and there, like a fish on a line.
Charles didn't feel the need to hide even their courtship. He had already decided he was gay, which was more than Tom had figured out at sixteen, and he actually didn't care who knew it. He believed that being out and proud was a form of social awareness. Before he and Tom were even officially dating Charles had started up a school group devoted to tolerance of all kinds and promoting it wherever and however they could.
Tom had thought being out was social suicide, had considered it as a way to demolish Charles' social standing just the month before, but instead the school rallied around their golden boy, and the only thing that stopped Tom from hating Charles over it was the fact that his home life was less accepting.
His mother's unaffectioJason ambivalence, his step-father's vocal distaste, his step-brother's physical one, it all drove Charles into his arms sobbing and that was the only thing that kept Tom interested. He liked seeing the boy cry, or, rather, liked seeing that his life wasn't as perfect as everyone else thought. It was their own precious secret between the two of them and it made Tom feel closer to Charles than he had ever felt to anyone before in his life. They were both downtrodden by their disparate existences and Tom fell in love with their shared suffering, the drama and the excitement of it.
He never felt closer to Charles than when they were suffering. Tom getting bullied at school because society's acceptance of Charles' homosexuality didn't quite extend to Tom's, Charles sobbing over a fresh blow or cutting word from home, the sad poetry Tom tracked down for them to read together, the sadder songs he knew by heart and listened to together with his teenage love-it was the happiest saddest time of his life.
Even when Charles went to the hospital from something Cain had done to him-Tom didn't remember now, was it a broken arm? Or skull, it was something with his head maybe he thought he remembered-Tom had been ecstatic to visit him, had had to contain his beaming smile at doing something as grown up as visiting your wounded lover in the hospital after a domestic dispute.
When Charles had had to go live with his grandfather in England to stay away from his mother, Tom wasn't necessarily upset. The closeness he felt with Charles could be easily sustained through words-he actually felt closer to Charles when they spoke than when they made love. So Charles suffered at their physical parting but Tom felt he could have kept it up for years if it had been necessary. That should have been his first sign that Charles valued sex more than any emotional connection they had, but he had been too distracted by first love.
Charles convinced his grandfather to let him come back for school, insisting his studies were very important, and maybe they were for all Tom knew. All he cared about was that he got Charles again, more dramatic and tortured than ever as he lived with some steward rather than his own mother in the same county.
They were seventeen and in love and it was marvelous and for the whole year things were perfection itself. Charles' sister got in their way at times, but she went to a different school and so couldn't interrupt them always. Charles' friendships outside himself annoyed him but he was mostly capable of keeping them at bay, of keeping Charles alone to himself.
Then when Charles was nineteen and he was eighteen, everything went sour.
He found out he was adopted, that the life he'd been living was a lie, that the reason he always felt like he didn't belong was because he actually really didn't belong.
He decided he would run away and that Charles would come with him.
That was when the illusion came crashing down, when Charles couldn't keep up with his own sham enough to go through with it, when Tom realized the boy and his love and his adoration had been a lie along with all the rest. That was when he had decided that he would make Charles suffer for his betrayal.