X-Men: The Gifted Ones

38. CHARLES' OFFICE, XAVIER MANSION, WEST CHESTER, NY

He was ready. Jason was ready. It was time.

Charles positioned his wheelchair near the end of the couch in his office. "Jason, lie down here, and rest your head on this pillow," he instructed.

Jason looked at Hank. "I'll pull up a chair so you can hold my hand," Hank reassured him.

"Will it hurt?" the boy asked.

"I will be bringing up a lot of old memories, ones that will upset you," Charles explained. "Your body may remember things that hurt it before, but nothing will be happening to you that would hurt you."

"And I can stop any time?"

"Yes," he reassured him. "I'm going to place my hands on the sides of your head. It will only be a light touch. May I show you?" Jason nodded and Charles showed him. "Then I will try and access your memories, and they will play for the two of us, it will be like a dream and a movie. It won't be easy. Some things you will have buried quite deep, meaning to forget them."

"Will you help me forget them?"

"Only if you want to."

"How can you do that? Do you erase them?"

"No," he replied. "It's...not entirely effective, and could cause harm down the line." He thought about the one time he did erase memories. Surely, in the interest of national security and mutant safety, that was acceptable? He hated thinking he could affect someone's brain like that, but his mutants were his priority. "I can, however, put up psychic barriers. They will keep the worst memories away. I still think it's best you learn to deal with them and control them, otherwise, they can control you, especially if caged."

"What will the barriers do?"

"It is difficult to say, really," he admitted. "They will hold the memories back, but they will still be there, and any trauma may trigger them to break free."

"I'm ready, Professor," Jason said, managing a smile. He eased his head back on the pillow and Charles applied his hands to his temples and focused.

The boy's memories played before him like a movie from Hell.

He saw Jason's father, Bill Stryker, screaming at the boy for being different, for being small. He saw, and felt, whipping after whipping.

He saw the pitiful illusions the boy had cast in his father's mind, trying to be the perfect son.

He saw the boy growing angry in school, planting illusions that never worked, illusions that would hide the bruises, but would fade by the day's end.

He saw Bill Stryker cursing at the boy for being different, ordering the boy's mother to stay away from him, for fear she may make the boy a sissy for her coddling.

Charles saw years of abuse he wished he'd never seen. Charles saw the boy fight back with illusions that even brought his overbearing father to his knees.

Charles was the screaming boy abandoned at Forest Haven Asylum, lead into a place that had a clean façade that held filthy horrors within its walls.

He was in the padded rooms, no food or water, for days. He was in the dark room, with no human contact, except for a plate of food slid in a slot for a week. He was the boy growing wide-eyed, hollow-cheeked, and physically weak. The trauma was making his mutations stronger. Charles was the shivering boy left naked in the bathtub; the boy restrained to a bed, lying in his body's own filth; the boy staring wide-eyed at the child in the next bed silently drowning in his own vomit; the boy watching the pretty young nurse have her way with the older male patients; the so-called doctors who didn't care for the gender of the child and threatened silence with a scalpel. Charles was the boy having large quantities of blood drawn, but no explanation for why. Charles was bruised, beaten, and one day, Charles was the boy who fought back by murdering a man pretending to be a doctor who was about to commit unspeakable horrors to him. Even Charles couldn't see the man's death as a murder. The boy never laid a hand on him, the man only believed he was being strangled. Charles felt his body shake with rage for the child in front of him, for the children still there.

Charles lived two years of horrors through the boy's memories.

Charles saw the boy surviving through illusions because he had no choice. Illusions were how he obtained food, how his thin, wasting body was left alone. His illusions caused him to escape, running cold in not much more than his hospital pajamas, to his grandparents' doorstep only to find his grandmother had died and his father had left for war. He found no peace with his mother or grandfather. Grandfather was just as bad as his father.

But not quite. Grandfather sent him with a blue man who seemed scary at first, but ended up being very nice, but he still felt very scared of the place he was going to. He felt if the blue man was there, it would be safe. He noticed no one bothered the blue man.

Jason woke up before Charles could find out what he truly thought of him, of Jane, and anyone at the school.

Jason looked over at the Professor and found him choking with emotions.

"You," the Professor told him, struggling to find his voice, "are the bravest boy I've ever known."

Charles had to leave the room. He was about to lose his mind. He asked Hank to find Jane and send her to his sitting room. He was going to need all of her strength to cope with what he had seen, with what this boy had survived.

Jane met him in the sitting room and was alarmed with how pale and trembling he was. She rushed to him and knelt by his side.

"It's worse than any of us could imagine," he said, his shoulders shaking with sobs. Jane pulled him close and he pulled her closer. "Take me to our room, please, and stay with me."

She said nothing as she nodded and wheeled him to their bedroom. He normally preferred to move himself, and she knew he must be hurting if he asked her to take care of him. "You're lying down to rest for the remainder of the day," she said quietly as she helped change him out of his clothes. "You will say nothing, and let me take care of you."

Charles imagined how many times she must have done something similar in Vietnam. She was such a skilled nurse, lifting him into the bed, making sure he was comfortable. He hated feeling helpless, but he knew Jane would never see him as helpless in this moment. He almost felt selfish for taking her away from there. She had told him before, her year was up, and she was going to be reassigned anyway, and this was as good a place as any to go.

"Can you not be a nurse for one moment, and just be my wife?" he asked her as she had tried to go into their bathroom to change into her pajamas so she could sit with him. "There's no need to leave the room, I have seen it all before, and wouldn't mind seeing it right now, truth be told."

Jane managed a weak smile, "I didn't think it was right to do."

"I think it is now more than ever," he told her. "Just to feel... human... again. Feel like me again. Just change and... hold me? Please?"

Jane did as he asked and changed her clothes in front of him. It didn't seem to ease his mind, but it did make him smile. She climbed into the bed next to him and let him rest in her arms. He liked how she felt close to him. She stroked his hair as he tried to sleep. He could feel her body taking on some of his cares and worries, and her strength seeping into his. When the nightmares came, and he relived Jason's memories, Jane's gentle hands were there to stroke his brow and make them go away, easing him back into sleep.

"Make love to me," he had begged her in the middle of the night. He was desperate to feel like himself again, feel like a desired husband, break himself of the images of the unwanted child, if only for a little while. Their lovemaking had evolved since their wedding night, Charles finding the psychic connection of it all deeper and richer than what any other couple could possess and his self-consciousness slipping away. What he lacked in the physical, he more than made up for in the emotional and mental capacity. Jane kissed him and he removed her top to feel her skin on his. She removed his shirt and pulled him close to her.

"Look in my eyes," he asked. That was the part he wanted most, that connection with her mind, with her soul. She looked in his eyes and he let the psychic energy build up, run through her and into him. He held her close, not wanting to let go of her, thankful for this one remnant of humanity left to him, that she reminded him he was capable of an intimacy beyond the physical, that he was enough for her, would always be enough for her. He was certain no husband could touch his wife the way he could touch his own.

He remembered his final thought that night beinghow right she was that he allow himself to fall in love. The world around himbe damned, as long as she was in his life, he could face anything.