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Xmen fic: You'll Never Meet the President (Charles, Erik, WIP)
Title: You'll Never Meet the President (2/6)
Fandom: X-men: First Class
Characters: Erik, Charles, ensemble
Warnings: None, except movie spoilers.
Notes: This used to be out of 13, but that got reorganized.
PART ONE
Summary:
“Don’t you ever use it?” Angel asked. As far as Raven could tell, she’d dressed neither up nor down to come to the CIA, wearing minimal black as she stopped for a moment to bounce on each couch.
Raven, who was at that moment working on her personal goal of stacking all the apples in the fruit dish, could hardly judge her for a lack of professionalism. They would be sharing a room. Raven was cautiously excited, having grown up with three rooms of her own in a mansion twice the size of the White House. As of 10 minutes ago, there were already clothes on the floor.
She shared a baffled look with Armando, but he only shrugged his thin shoulders. He seemed at ease but quiet, neatly dressed in starched collar and shined shoes. Maybe Raven would find him less intimidating if she could convince herself it was an act. A packed suitcase sat by the door, scuffed but clean.
“Sorry, what?” Raven said. Adopted or not, she had been raised by the well-bred, and she couldn’t help her careful pose on the stool, one leg folded primly over the other--and a wobbly, three-apple tower at her elbow.
“You. The taller one--Lenshra?--said you could look like anyone. Is it hard to do?”
“Oh,” Raven said. “No, not really.”
“Your brother, the mutant detector, I guess he had a pretty boring life before the CIA hired him, but yours seems cool. Don’t you use it?”
“Charles? Well, he--and I... we were a lot more stupid when we were underage, but it usually ended with somebody passed out in the bath tub. Mostly I just use it for--this.”
Armando looked up where he’d been inspecting the drawers of the kitchenette. “Wait, you don’t–”
“—really look like a nine foot tall viking princess?” Angel eyed Raven up and down.
Raven thought immediately: how should I deflect? before the realization came over her like a slow, cool breeze. She said recklessly, “Maybe I’ll show you sometime,” as a little tingle of exhilaration rolled down her spine.
Armando accepted this without note. It was Angel who understood, who came over from the couch and put her warm hand over Raven’s on the kitchen island. “Yeah,” she said, “that’d be neat.”
Raven gave her a startled look. It seem so forward, Angel’s hand on hers, but when Raven smiled, there was a lump in her throat she hadn’t known about. Belatedly Armando noticed, going still, and Raven knew, she just knew that this was going to end with her crying all over everybody.
Angel squeezed her hand and said loudly, “If I were you, I would be using it a hell of a lot more.”
“Yeah?” Raven said weakly.
“I’d have enough to cash to get out of my parents house, for one.”
“You were stripping and living in your parents house?” Armando asked incredulously. And there, his polite distance was shot to hell after that.
**
Moira could see Richardson’s bulk outside the narrow window in the office door, his thin arms swinging as he paced. Behind the desk, Agent Scaglia flipped to the second page on her clipboard. Rumor put her as a former femme fatale undercover in the USSR. She had a stocky, matronly look these days to suit her close-cropped gray hair, and she limped even on flat ground; but Moira had to admit her Russian was flawless.
“Your favorite ice cream flavor?” Scaglia asked, bored. These interviews were always conducted in monotone. Moira thought it must be written down somewhere in a set of official instructions because Scaglia never sounded like this at other reviews.
“Blueberry,” Moira said, and watched Scaglia write it down. Everything would be written down.
“Where do you find that flavor?”
“It’s homemade custard, in Wisconsin,” Moira said. More scribbling. The questions came one after another, slow but steady. Scaglia only paused to record Moira’s answers.
“Do you have a preferred route home?”
“I take Woodman to 295,” Moira said.
“Is that the route you took yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Do you plan to take it today?”
“Yes.”
“Please briefly state your position on the president’s foreign policy.”
“I think he could be more decisive, but I agree that avoiding armed conflict is a priority,” Moira recited.
“Your favorite actress?” Scaglia asked without any reaction.
“Kim Novak in Vertigo.”
“Which day passed most quickly for you last week?”
Moira stared at her. “Saturday. There’s never enough of Saturday. Look, I don’t mean to interrupt, and I’m not in anyway objecting, but I think I could be more helpful if I understood the philosophy behind this questioning.”
Scaglia sighed. “McTaggert, there are only two philosophies behind this interview. One, that it’s routine. You have nothing to worry about. The second philosophy is that there is nothing to explain. It’s dull; let’s not make it mysterious, hmm?” She looked back at her clipboard: “Please describe the arrangment of your living room.”
“ Oh, sure,” Moira said.
The questions never came in the same order, but many of them reappeared week after week, though Moira had so far only given the interview twice, always off site. She had heard, however, that they were a standard fixture for anyone assigned to Richardson’s facility. It was a little like getting a psych evaluation from a schizoid robot.
In total, the interview continued for half an hour more, during which Moira had to describe her position on the 21st amendment using ten words exactly, create a hypothetical scenario in which she would forgive a man for murder, and list her past addresses in correct order (no word limit). Scaglia tugged the papers from the clipboard, fastened them together with a steel clip, and laid them in a thin file on top of the transcripts of Moira’s two previous interviews.
“How’d it go?” Richardson asked in an undertone, looming over her as she shut the door. “Same old, same old?”
“As same old as you can get,” Moira said. “Is this part of your research?”
“No, this is an oversight thing. Out of my loop – well, as much as I’m allowed to say, but still, very out of my loop.”
“I hope it’s research. It’s so unpolished.”
“At least you didn’t get flagged. I got flagged. I don’t even know what that means. Now I’m marked as a person with changing preferences in pie?” He stroked one hand down the right breast of his black suit and added evenly: “I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention I know that.”
“Of course not,” Moira said. He stared at the closed door. “Good luck,” she offered.
“Thanks,” Richardson said sincerely.
**
Erik was waiting in Cerebro’s dome when Hank arrived early to start the machine. The cheery overhead lights brought out the red in Erik’s smooth hair as he sipped calmly from a coffee mug, a second steaming on the console next to him. He’d brought cream and sugar, and he smiled as Hank came up the stairs, intense but disarming. Hank froze.
The illusion was nearly perfect; it was only that Erik tended to main eye contact a moment too long, a touch too interested, and so lifelong prey animal Hank McCoy was instinctually uneasy, even if he didn’t know why.
“Oh jeez,” Hank said. “Um—is that for me?”
“Of course,” Erik said. “It seemed only fair to offer compensation when I hope to monopolize at least a little of your time.”
“Right,” Hank said, clutching the mug. It was wonderfully warm on a cool autumn morning. He tried to stay focused. Lensherr had so many teeth.
“Raven said you designed the whole apparatus. Marvelous.”
“Oh, definitely not,” McCoy said. “Most of the instrumentation already existed in radar and EM detection technology – I was involved in experimental aircraft before joining this facility. Heavily involved,” he added, as if they hadn’t met outside of an industrial-sized wind tunnel in the middle of his lab space. “The trick was to isolate signals that originate from the brain. Actually, the original scope of the project was to create telepathy-like abilities in humans with normal brain activity.”
“But?”
“It didn’t work.”
“The CIA collected those notes?” Erik asked.
“No –well, yes--the monthly reports.”
“They’re very interested in telepathy.”
Hank shrugged, relaxing further into his cup with each sip. “We’re a government-funded facility studying the paranormal. EM-derived brainwave broadcasts flies a lot better with funding reviews than the ghost lab in the basement.”
“They catch anything?”
“No, but we had to reschedule last year’s Christmas party because after the last review, most of the field agents think the second floor cafeteria is haunted.”
Erik felt his lips twitch without permission. He recovered himself and laughed appropriately. McCoy sat down in the small rolling chair, shoulders finally unclenching. Remembering his manners suddenly, he picked up a dusty little dish stashed on top of the console and offered it to Erik. “Mint?” he said, even as he popped one into his mouth and followed it with a swig of black coffee.
Erik stared at them for a moment. He hated sweets. “Of course,” he said and took two.
**
The facility had originally been built as a specialized training center in 1957 before becoming a research facility in 1960 as part of a funding shuffle at the end of Eisenhower’s second term. Most of the six dormitories had been re-purposed into laboratories, their kitchens counters converted to lab benches, but Dorm B had survived the reorganization and even earned a remodeling. It slept 34 people in total, which said a lot either about Charles’ ambitions or about the agency’s desire to isolate the new recruits. Of the available private rooms, Erik had taken one and Raven—with Angel—another; the rest stood empty. The boys had claimed one fourteen-person bunk room all to themselves with Charles slumming it on the top bunk by the door in some grand gesture of solidarity. He liked those.
There was a new guy today, as tall as Raven with blonde hair short enough to stand up on its own. He’d wedged his small bag between his body and the wall on the farthest bottom bunk and he sat there, not speaking. Raven figured if he’d known there were empty rooms with locking doors, he wouldn’t even have walked in. Raven called over from Charles’ bunk, legs dangling over the side of his carefully made bed; just “Hi.” It generally worked for her.
Alex didn’t even make eye contact.
Armando had his elbow propped by her thigh, the back of his fingers against his lips, watching Alex sit with his hands clasped between his knees. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly. More loudly: “We’re headed to the common room, if you feel like joining us.”
“Why would he come, if he doesn’t want to be here?” she whispered back, picking at Charles’ clothes where they were folded atop the dark green blanket. He must move them out of the way each night before bed, she thought, and that was comforting, the tangible evidence of Charles being Charles, adding five extra steps to everything he did. “Charles wouldn’t force him.”
“Would he, if the CIA told him to?”
“No,” Raven said. “You don’t understand—no one’s ever told Charles to do anything. Never in his whole life. He wouldn’t even realize it was an order.”
Armando shook his head, disbelieving. “He should be careful.”
“If the CIA started telling him to do that sort of thing, I wouldn’t care if we got in trouble. Besides, he’s the whole reason we’re here at all. Agent McTaggert recruited him for his thesis, but nobody believed a word of it until Charles started talking about pie and jupiter missiles he couldn’t know anything about.” She grinned. “I had to turn blue.”
Blue, Armando mouthed, his expression friendly. But even as he smiled, he said again, “He should be more careful. If he keeps showing off, sooner or later they’re going to wonder if he could do the same to them.”
“He’s helping them. What could they do anyway? Charles is the safest person in the world from other people.”
Armando gave her a skeptical look. “I don’t think either of you get how crazy it is, what he can do.”
“What can he do then?” Alex said abruptly, and there he was standing at the foot of the bed, one hand resting lightly on the edge of the mattress. Raven blinked at him dumbly.
“He’s a mind-reader,” Armando said wryly, “and a mind-talker and a mind-changer.”
Alex’s fingers curled into the bedsheet. “He isn’t gonna mess with us, right?”
“What am I, his ambassador?” Raven said. “No, of course he isn’t. It doesn’t—you can’t just go messing with people. Thoughts are complicated. It changes things.”
“You’re his sister? Can you do the same thing?” Alex looked warily up at her from the vicinity of her knee caps.
“No, I can do something else, but I won’t use it on you either.”
“Yeah? You also turn down free money?”
“I was raised not to take advantage.”
“I should have figured,” Alex muttered, “from those boots.”
Raven put one of those knee-high boots on his chest where it peeled down to peach skin and a black stiletto heel pressed over his heart with a soft hiss like falling rain. “This isn’t a good place to make assumptions, bub.”
“Shit,” Alex said, the first open expression she’d seen on his face. And maybe he had been through some bad times because he didn’t jerk or jump or make a single wrong move. He just waited, both hands up and still.
“Raven,” Armando said, dead serious. “You and your brother are good people, believe me, but everytime I see Charles use his gift, I’m glad that neither of you ever had to use your power to survive. Erik Lensherr is scary enough already. I don’t want to think what’d he’d have been like with telepathy.”
Raven didn’t say anything to this because she had used her power to survive, and it chilled her suddenly to hear Armando speculate on her life if Charles hadn’t taken her in, as though she would have grown up corrupted.
“Lensherr--that’s the boss?” Alex asked.
“No,” Raven said at the same time Armando said, “Yes.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, “I got the feeling they didn’t know either.”
Fandom: X-men: First Class
Characters: Erik, Charles, ensemble
Warnings: None, except movie spoilers.
Notes: This used to be out of 13, but that got reorganized.
PART ONE
Summary:
“Don’t you ever use it?” Angel asked. As far as Raven could tell, she’d dressed neither up nor down to come to the CIA, wearing minimal black as she stopped for a moment to bounce on each couch.
Raven, who was at that moment working on her personal goal of stacking all the apples in the fruit dish, could hardly judge her for a lack of professionalism. They would be sharing a room. Raven was cautiously excited, having grown up with three rooms of her own in a mansion twice the size of the White House. As of 10 minutes ago, there were already clothes on the floor.
She shared a baffled look with Armando, but he only shrugged his thin shoulders. He seemed at ease but quiet, neatly dressed in starched collar and shined shoes. Maybe Raven would find him less intimidating if she could convince herself it was an act. A packed suitcase sat by the door, scuffed but clean.
“Sorry, what?” Raven said. Adopted or not, she had been raised by the well-bred, and she couldn’t help her careful pose on the stool, one leg folded primly over the other--and a wobbly, three-apple tower at her elbow.
“You. The taller one--Lenshra?--said you could look like anyone. Is it hard to do?”
“Oh,” Raven said. “No, not really.”
“Your brother, the mutant detector, I guess he had a pretty boring life before the CIA hired him, but yours seems cool. Don’t you use it?”
“Charles? Well, he--and I... we were a lot more stupid when we were underage, but it usually ended with somebody passed out in the bath tub. Mostly I just use it for--this.”
Armando looked up where he’d been inspecting the drawers of the kitchenette. “Wait, you don’t–”
“—really look like a nine foot tall viking princess?” Angel eyed Raven up and down.
Raven thought immediately: how should I deflect? before the realization came over her like a slow, cool breeze. She said recklessly, “Maybe I’ll show you sometime,” as a little tingle of exhilaration rolled down her spine.
Armando accepted this without note. It was Angel who understood, who came over from the couch and put her warm hand over Raven’s on the kitchen island. “Yeah,” she said, “that’d be neat.”
Raven gave her a startled look. It seem so forward, Angel’s hand on hers, but when Raven smiled, there was a lump in her throat she hadn’t known about. Belatedly Armando noticed, going still, and Raven knew, she just knew that this was going to end with her crying all over everybody.
Angel squeezed her hand and said loudly, “If I were you, I would be using it a hell of a lot more.”
“Yeah?” Raven said weakly.
“I’d have enough to cash to get out of my parents house, for one.”
“You were stripping and living in your parents house?” Armando asked incredulously. And there, his polite distance was shot to hell after that.
**
Moira could see Richardson’s bulk outside the narrow window in the office door, his thin arms swinging as he paced. Behind the desk, Agent Scaglia flipped to the second page on her clipboard. Rumor put her as a former femme fatale undercover in the USSR. She had a stocky, matronly look these days to suit her close-cropped gray hair, and she limped even on flat ground; but Moira had to admit her Russian was flawless.
“Your favorite ice cream flavor?” Scaglia asked, bored. These interviews were always conducted in monotone. Moira thought it must be written down somewhere in a set of official instructions because Scaglia never sounded like this at other reviews.
“Blueberry,” Moira said, and watched Scaglia write it down. Everything would be written down.
“Where do you find that flavor?”
“It’s homemade custard, in Wisconsin,” Moira said. More scribbling. The questions came one after another, slow but steady. Scaglia only paused to record Moira’s answers.
“Do you have a preferred route home?”
“I take Woodman to 295,” Moira said.
“Is that the route you took yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Do you plan to take it today?”
“Yes.”
“Please briefly state your position on the president’s foreign policy.”
“I think he could be more decisive, but I agree that avoiding armed conflict is a priority,” Moira recited.
“Your favorite actress?” Scaglia asked without any reaction.
“Kim Novak in Vertigo.”
“Which day passed most quickly for you last week?”
Moira stared at her. “Saturday. There’s never enough of Saturday. Look, I don’t mean to interrupt, and I’m not in anyway objecting, but I think I could be more helpful if I understood the philosophy behind this questioning.”
Scaglia sighed. “McTaggert, there are only two philosophies behind this interview. One, that it’s routine. You have nothing to worry about. The second philosophy is that there is nothing to explain. It’s dull; let’s not make it mysterious, hmm?” She looked back at her clipboard: “Please describe the arrangment of your living room.”
“ Oh, sure,” Moira said.
The questions never came in the same order, but many of them reappeared week after week, though Moira had so far only given the interview twice, always off site. She had heard, however, that they were a standard fixture for anyone assigned to Richardson’s facility. It was a little like getting a psych evaluation from a schizoid robot.
In total, the interview continued for half an hour more, during which Moira had to describe her position on the 21st amendment using ten words exactly, create a hypothetical scenario in which she would forgive a man for murder, and list her past addresses in correct order (no word limit). Scaglia tugged the papers from the clipboard, fastened them together with a steel clip, and laid them in a thin file on top of the transcripts of Moira’s two previous interviews.
“How’d it go?” Richardson asked in an undertone, looming over her as she shut the door. “Same old, same old?”
“As same old as you can get,” Moira said. “Is this part of your research?”
“No, this is an oversight thing. Out of my loop – well, as much as I’m allowed to say, but still, very out of my loop.”
“I hope it’s research. It’s so unpolished.”
“At least you didn’t get flagged. I got flagged. I don’t even know what that means. Now I’m marked as a person with changing preferences in pie?” He stroked one hand down the right breast of his black suit and added evenly: “I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention I know that.”
“Of course not,” Moira said. He stared at the closed door. “Good luck,” she offered.
“Thanks,” Richardson said sincerely.
**
Erik was waiting in Cerebro’s dome when Hank arrived early to start the machine. The cheery overhead lights brought out the red in Erik’s smooth hair as he sipped calmly from a coffee mug, a second steaming on the console next to him. He’d brought cream and sugar, and he smiled as Hank came up the stairs, intense but disarming. Hank froze.
The illusion was nearly perfect; it was only that Erik tended to main eye contact a moment too long, a touch too interested, and so lifelong prey animal Hank McCoy was instinctually uneasy, even if he didn’t know why.
“Oh jeez,” Hank said. “Um—is that for me?”
“Of course,” Erik said. “It seemed only fair to offer compensation when I hope to monopolize at least a little of your time.”
“Right,” Hank said, clutching the mug. It was wonderfully warm on a cool autumn morning. He tried to stay focused. Lensherr had so many teeth.
“Raven said you designed the whole apparatus. Marvelous.”
“Oh, definitely not,” McCoy said. “Most of the instrumentation already existed in radar and EM detection technology – I was involved in experimental aircraft before joining this facility. Heavily involved,” he added, as if they hadn’t met outside of an industrial-sized wind tunnel in the middle of his lab space. “The trick was to isolate signals that originate from the brain. Actually, the original scope of the project was to create telepathy-like abilities in humans with normal brain activity.”
“But?”
“It didn’t work.”
“The CIA collected those notes?” Erik asked.
“No –well, yes--the monthly reports.”
“They’re very interested in telepathy.”
Hank shrugged, relaxing further into his cup with each sip. “We’re a government-funded facility studying the paranormal. EM-derived brainwave broadcasts flies a lot better with funding reviews than the ghost lab in the basement.”
“They catch anything?”
“No, but we had to reschedule last year’s Christmas party because after the last review, most of the field agents think the second floor cafeteria is haunted.”
Erik felt his lips twitch without permission. He recovered himself and laughed appropriately. McCoy sat down in the small rolling chair, shoulders finally unclenching. Remembering his manners suddenly, he picked up a dusty little dish stashed on top of the console and offered it to Erik. “Mint?” he said, even as he popped one into his mouth and followed it with a swig of black coffee.
Erik stared at them for a moment. He hated sweets. “Of course,” he said and took two.
**
The facility had originally been built as a specialized training center in 1957 before becoming a research facility in 1960 as part of a funding shuffle at the end of Eisenhower’s second term. Most of the six dormitories had been re-purposed into laboratories, their kitchens counters converted to lab benches, but Dorm B had survived the reorganization and even earned a remodeling. It slept 34 people in total, which said a lot either about Charles’ ambitions or about the agency’s desire to isolate the new recruits. Of the available private rooms, Erik had taken one and Raven—with Angel—another; the rest stood empty. The boys had claimed one fourteen-person bunk room all to themselves with Charles slumming it on the top bunk by the door in some grand gesture of solidarity. He liked those.
There was a new guy today, as tall as Raven with blonde hair short enough to stand up on its own. He’d wedged his small bag between his body and the wall on the farthest bottom bunk and he sat there, not speaking. Raven figured if he’d known there were empty rooms with locking doors, he wouldn’t even have walked in. Raven called over from Charles’ bunk, legs dangling over the side of his carefully made bed; just “Hi.” It generally worked for her.
Alex didn’t even make eye contact.
Armando had his elbow propped by her thigh, the back of his fingers against his lips, watching Alex sit with his hands clasped between his knees. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly. More loudly: “We’re headed to the common room, if you feel like joining us.”
“Why would he come, if he doesn’t want to be here?” she whispered back, picking at Charles’ clothes where they were folded atop the dark green blanket. He must move them out of the way each night before bed, she thought, and that was comforting, the tangible evidence of Charles being Charles, adding five extra steps to everything he did. “Charles wouldn’t force him.”
“Would he, if the CIA told him to?”
“No,” Raven said. “You don’t understand—no one’s ever told Charles to do anything. Never in his whole life. He wouldn’t even realize it was an order.”
Armando shook his head, disbelieving. “He should be careful.”
“If the CIA started telling him to do that sort of thing, I wouldn’t care if we got in trouble. Besides, he’s the whole reason we’re here at all. Agent McTaggert recruited him for his thesis, but nobody believed a word of it until Charles started talking about pie and jupiter missiles he couldn’t know anything about.” She grinned. “I had to turn blue.”
Blue, Armando mouthed, his expression friendly. But even as he smiled, he said again, “He should be more careful. If he keeps showing off, sooner or later they’re going to wonder if he could do the same to them.”
“He’s helping them. What could they do anyway? Charles is the safest person in the world from other people.”
Armando gave her a skeptical look. “I don’t think either of you get how crazy it is, what he can do.”
“What can he do then?” Alex said abruptly, and there he was standing at the foot of the bed, one hand resting lightly on the edge of the mattress. Raven blinked at him dumbly.
“He’s a mind-reader,” Armando said wryly, “and a mind-talker and a mind-changer.”
Alex’s fingers curled into the bedsheet. “He isn’t gonna mess with us, right?”
“What am I, his ambassador?” Raven said. “No, of course he isn’t. It doesn’t—you can’t just go messing with people. Thoughts are complicated. It changes things.”
“You’re his sister? Can you do the same thing?” Alex looked warily up at her from the vicinity of her knee caps.
“No, I can do something else, but I won’t use it on you either.”
“Yeah? You also turn down free money?”
“I was raised not to take advantage.”
“I should have figured,” Alex muttered, “from those boots.”
Raven put one of those knee-high boots on his chest where it peeled down to peach skin and a black stiletto heel pressed over his heart with a soft hiss like falling rain. “This isn’t a good place to make assumptions, bub.”
“Shit,” Alex said, the first open expression she’d seen on his face. And maybe he had been through some bad times because he didn’t jerk or jump or make a single wrong move. He just waited, both hands up and still.
“Raven,” Armando said, dead serious. “You and your brother are good people, believe me, but everytime I see Charles use his gift, I’m glad that neither of you ever had to use your power to survive. Erik Lensherr is scary enough already. I don’t want to think what’d he’d have been like with telepathy.”
Raven didn’t say anything to this because she had used her power to survive, and it chilled her suddenly to hear Armando speculate on her life if Charles hadn’t taken her in, as though she would have grown up corrupted.
“Lensherr--that’s the boss?” Alex asked.
“No,” Raven said at the same time Armando said, “Yes.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, “I got the feeling they didn’t know either.”
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(no subject)