Title: Immolated
Fandom: X-men: Days of Future Past
Character: Charles Xavier
Rating: T
Length: ~300
Content notes: Character death, dark!Charles



It took Charles, always precocious and suddenly telepathic, agonizing months to wrest his own thoughts out of the world’s torrent so that he no longer felt he would burst like a balloon left in the sun. Master in his own head at last, he made a game of examining other minds, cataloguing the ways they were not him. Fanciful, lurid, banal, their thoughts were not his thoughts, and he took comfort in the clear separation between Charles and the rest of humanity. Encountering Erik only increased his delight in the vast differences between minds, in their structure as in their content and tenor.

But Erik is dead, for which Charles blames only himself, and a tormented, inconsolable telepath with no one else to tear apart is not comforted by difference or entertained by observation. He finds distraction only in activity, and the mind is where he can act with the most devastating, satisfying effect.

Though not his own. He discovers that at once, and in incandescent fury pours his sorrow outward, unfocused, not caring who is in his thoughts’ path. Instantly the horrifying results rebound upon him. He didn’t know his guilt could be even more overwhelming, but it is, clouding his thoughts as he tries, desperately, through of fog of pain and only partially successfully, to reverse the damage.

Once such failure would have warned him off, held him back, made him reconsider, but it’s too late for that. Consumed by self-hatred, there is nothing left to burn and he turns cold and devious. Minds become puzzles for his experiments. Knowing he can do infinite damage, he begins to work in little, to see what it takes to achieve a given result. A twist here and bit of pressure there creates anything he wants. Except Erik.