Title: The Colour of Memory
Fandom: X-Men Days of Future Past
Rating: G
Length: 400
Content notes: Drug use, angst, spoilers for film
Summary: The drug doesn't take away Charles's memories, only his powers



The drug is the colour of her eyes when she changes. Of Hank's eyes, too, but it's Raven that Charles thinks about when he sees the serum glowing through the clear glass of the syringe, promising an end to the voices in his head that are never hers or Erik's. Voices clamouring, crying out in rage and pain and fear.

He can walk again, thanks to the drug, but he's still a prisoner in his own house, with only Hank and the whisky bottle for company. Drinking to forget the look in Erik's eyes when he left, the brush of Raven's hair across his face as she bent to say goodbye. Because the drug doesn't take away his memories, only his powers.

Her picture is on his bedside table, where his three heroes used to be: Darwin, Einstein and Hedy Lamarr. Looking at them used to give him courage, give him hope. He put their photographs away in a drawer when Raven came, as if having someone else to protect and care for was all he needed to believe in himself.

He wouldn't know how to look any of his heroes in the eye now; he avoids mirrors, because even his own gaze burns.

The photograph is Raven as she used to be: passing for human, before Erik took her and changed her. Made her more herself, his treacherous mind jeers, as his eyes flicker between her picture and the syringe's golden glow.

He winds the tourniquet around his arm and searches for a vein. It gets a little harder each time, the hit of the drug a little less powerful. But it comforts him, the only thing that does, makes him believe while it lasts that there will be an end to all this suffering.

At first he'd thought the man who claimed to be from the future was a dream, or a hallucination. The man who says that Raven's actions seal their fates, that her DNA becomes the means to wipe out all the mutants. But it's not a dream, and he's not going to wake up from it.

He's lost too much to care about the future any more, but he still cares about her. Somewhere in the distance he hears his own voice: a child's voice, making a promise to another child.

“All right,” he says to the wild man from the future. “I'll do it.”