With thanks to thousandsmiles, Voodoo, and whylime for reviewing!

After Scott left, Charles sat for a moment, quietly thinking through what had just happened. He waited until he heard the familiar thud of a football hitting the wall of the building. Then he headed for the lab.

"What's the project for today?"

Hank shrugged. "The usual."

It was his code for 'I'd as soon not discuss it', so Charles changed the subject. He respected that an idea sometimes had an incubation period and had not, in all honesty, come here to ask about Hank's work. "How many people, besides you and me, would we need for a school?"

Hank paused, his head tilted in thought. It was something Charles appreciated about Hank: he never gave an answer until he thought he had one. Oh, he engaged in speculation, but he never pretended to know when he really had no idea.

"Someone to teach English and History, I guess," Hank replied. "Other kids. I'd assumed you would look at it the other way."

"The other way?" Charles prompted. There was another way? But then, if anyone could speak on unconventional education it was Hank. By the end he was more than half a decade ahead of his peers. Hank was different, though. They couldn't count on other students being like him.

Apparently Hank had something else in mind. "I thought you would find others and see where they fit in. You can't bring in people who aren't mutants."

Hank tried to say this like it was a simple fact, but Charles heard the falter in his voice. He understood. Other mutants were one thing. Although months had passed, Hank was not ready to be seen by people who were not, in their own way, freaks. Charles was scarcely one to comment given that he barely left the house anymore.

"I suppose that's true. And of course students…"

"Well, yeah, they'd have to be mutants."

Of course they would, in a school for mutants, though Charles had been thinking of something else. "Hank, I'm going to have to talk to students—at least to their parents—in person."

A phone call might be enough for an adult mutant to visit and see what the school was about, but not for parents to trust a stranger with their children.

Hank nodded, but the look on his face answered Charles's unasked question. Charles couldn't drive. Hank was supportive, but not willing to help with that.

Just one more obstacle.

"Nothing is more important to me than helping people like us, protecting them, but I'm beginning to question whether I'm the right person for the job."

"There's no one better," Hank replied. "There's no one else at all, really, but no one could be more suited to it."

"Thank you. They are challenging, though, aren't they? Young people."

"Even you were a teenager once, Charles."

He had to laugh at that. What else could he do? Hank was surprisingly perceptive for someone who knocked over his own beakers when he had to speak to a girl. "Yes, I suppose I was," Charles agreed.

"And now you're old."

"Thank you, Hank."

"I mean really old."

Hank was enjoying this far too much.

"Yes, I—"

"You're going gray."

"Oh, for goodness' sake!"

But it was impossible to be angry with Hank, because he was laughing and there was too much solemnity in this house.

"This is what the two of you get up to, isn't it?" Charles asked. "Jokes about the elderly for those of us old enough to vote." He was not the sort to roll his eyes, but there were rolled eyes in his tone.

"Do you vote?" Hank asked, surprised. "I thought you were English."

"I am English. I became an American citizen as a child, but I lived in England so long it seemed silly not to have my citizenship status reinstated." Bureaucracies were so much easier to handle with a telepathic nudge, anyway!

"Ah. Well, anyway, it makes up for you cheating in Scrabble."

"I do not cheat in Scrabble."

The protest fell on deaf ears. No one played Scrabble with Charles. Apparently they thought telepathy too big a temptation to resist. Charles didn't mind, largely because in the past months he had noticed that the more Scott read, the more his vocabulary matured.

Well, he had pride enough to avoid losing a board game to someone half his age!

"Do you ever find him somewhat infuriating?" Charles wondered.

"Alex?"

"Scott."

"Not really. Why?"

Charles sighed. "Because I may be losing my patience with him."

Generally, he kept his temper in check with everyone, but especially around Scott. Today that hadn't worked because it hadn't mattered that Charles wasn't angry. He wasn't sure which bothered him more, his seeming inability to communicate or the fact that he had sent Scott out of the room rather than deal with him.

Of the two, Scott and Hank were much more peacefully compatible. Had Hank and Alex ever held a conversation? That was just the trouble, though. Scott was sensitive for someone at his age. It made him a wonderful friend to Hank, but far too easily wounded.

Feeling the need to explain himself, Charles continued, "He was just waiting for me to hit him. I've never been looked at that way in my life before meeting Scott, and I don't care for it."

"It's nothing to do with you, it's to do with—"

"Omaha," Charles said. "I know, though I still find it strange he sees me as more threatening than you."

"Well I may have superior strength, but you have authority."

"When the school opens and other students begin to arrive, he won't be able to cope. I won't make him leave, you know I won't, but I'm not prepared for this sort of situation."

"You told him that, didn't you?" Hank asked.

"He took it badly."

There was an almost derisive humor in his voice as Hank agreed, "Of course. For what it's worth, I'm not too worried."

"He thought I was calling him stupid."

"That's why I'm not worried."

Charles was now thoroughly lost. "I'm sorry—would you explain that?"

Hank shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. "It's not the word I would use," he said, fiddling with his glasses, "but compared to you and me, Scott's…"

Scott was a fairly bright kid, but he was largely uneducated. Compared with someone who had earned a doctorate at Oxford and someone who at his age had graduated Harvard, maybe Scott was stupid.

Or rather, "Normal." What a strange word! "He's normal."

Charles laughed at the thought, because it was too painful to bear, otherwise. Something he had shunned, something Raven had longed for, that was precisely Scott's torment, wasn't it? He was just a normal teenage boy. He thought about sports, listened to rock and roll, and often couldn't sit still for ten minutes.

If he couldn't blow up buildings by looking at them and hadn't been raised in an orphanage by a twisted scientist, Scott might be all but indistinguishable from others his own age.

"Hank, nothing worries you, does it?"

Hank considered before giving his answer. "Well," he decided, "I never expect situations to turn out as I'd like them to, outside the lab."

Charles nearly objected. He did not expect all situations would turn out as he liked! When they faced off against Shaw, he had never expected to end up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. When Moira called him all those months ago saying she needed him, he had never expected to end up responsible for a fifteen-year-old.

All those years ago, following a strange sound in the house, he had never expected to find another mutant.

No, plenty of things did not go according to plan.

"So when did you lose your temper?" Hank asked.

"When I realized he didn't hear a word I said."

It was the truest answer Charles could give. He lost his temper, nearly, because Scott just wouldn't listen.

"Just a bad day, I suppose," he said, no longer so keen on discussing this with Hank. With anyone, for that matter. It had happened, it was over. He wouldn't let it happen again.

To be continued!

Regarding voting age – until 1971, the voting age was 21. Charles is still using it as a well-intentioned joke at Hank's expense, but less as much as if he said so ten years later.