The Puppeteer - X-Men

Ten

Charles was right when he said Lily would be asleep for at least six hours. Turns out, her body had needed sleep for so long, she didn't wake up until the following morning, an entire twenty-five hours since she had fallen asleep. Charles had gotten worried around the twelve hour mark, since that was the usual time for sleep, and had checked up on the girl every hour since, sometimes sending Alex or Hank to if he was otherwise preoccupied.

Lily walked downstairs at a rather brisk pace, in serious need of food, and saw the clock on the wall, realising it was 11:00 am. So, she made herself a sandwich and sat down, eating it as slowly as possible. She felt Charles enter her mind and smiled, welcoming him warmly.

'You're awake!' Charles exclaimed and Lily laughed. 'Yes Charles, I am awake' Lily nodded and not even a minute later, Charles came into the kitchen. "Good lord, I thought I had put you in a comatose state" Charles sighed, leaning against the table.

"I'm fine, I feel great. No headache, nothing" Lily smiled. "Well, I'm glad" he scoffed out a laugh, kissing her on the top of the head before sitting down next to her, a serious look on his face. "What is it?" she asked softly. "While you were asleep, something happened" he said and her face dropped.

"Who did I hurt? I swear, I can't control it when I'm asleep-" she started panicking. "Lily, you didn't hurt anyone. Everyone's fine" Charles quickly reassured her, placing his hand over hers. "You projected" he said and she frowned. "What does that mean?" she asked.

"Sometimes, when telepaths sleep, they project their dreams to other telepaths or other mutants. You projected your dream to me last night" Charles explained and Lily closed her eyes. "I don't remember my dream" she said. "That's probably for the best" Charles admitted and Lily sighed.

"But you saw it. What was it?" Lily looked up at him. "I'm fairly certain it was more a memory than a dream, but either way, it was enough to wake me up" Charles said. "I don't genuinely feel comfortable discussing it, and I'm almost certain you wouldn't either but all I'll say is: they did more than just experiment on you at the lab, didn't they?" Charles said and Lily looked down, giving Charles the answer he didn't want.

"Yeah...they never did that, but yeah, I wasn't exactly the most cooperative experiment there" Lily sighed. "Why? Why not just let them do whatever they wanted?" Charles asked. "They worked backwards. You'd think, the more you cooperated, the more they would experiment, right?" Lily said and Charles nodded.

"It was the opposite. The more you fought them, the more they experimented on you. I fought them so much that sometimes, I would be the only one they experimented on for weeks, even months" Lily explained. "You were protecting the others" Charles realised and she nodded.

"There was little boy there. We shared a cage. They took him when he was three years old, his name was Luke. They were experimenting on him before he could even talk. When I got there, he was only four and I wanted to protect him, stop them from hurting him anymore. And I did. It took them five whole years to figure out what I was doing. And they retaliated by..." Lily trailed off, her voice catching in her throat.

Charles looked at her sadly, patiently waiting for her to continue. "They forced me to kill him. I was twelve, he was nine. I had to strangle him with my bare hands or they said they would kill everyone in the facility. So Luke made me do it. He could control people's hands so he made me" Lily admitted, wiping away a tear. "He was the first person I ever killed" Lily said and Charles placed a hand on her shoulder.

"I am so sorry, Lily" he breathed and she nodded. "After that, you either stopped dreaming or stopped projecting. It didn't happen again until a couple of hours ago, when I was making breakfast" Charles said.